Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me and Other Stories by Cyril Wong

Author:Cyril Wong
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814615099
Publisher: Epigram Books
Published: 2016-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

Cinema

NOSTALGIA HAS NO particular power over Keng Kiat. Change is an ever-shifting mist that swirls around him. Not that Keng sees himself in this way, of course. In the muted, orderly room of his own mind, he is too busy surviving to dwell on vicissitudes and their many contested meanings or implications. Having worked in this cineplex for almost twenty years, first as a cleaner, then a ticket-seller at the box office, then as a ticket-taker at the door, he has adapted to the fact that instead of a mere five screening halls, there are now eleven halls in total. He has barely registered that after a slew of rapid renovations, the lobby of the cineplex has moved its ticket-counters to another end of the room, or that the previously grey to black floors and walls are now the colour of ketchup, or that there is now a huge glass window overlooking the mall that glitters at night, reflecting the traffic passing silently below. He has only commented once to another staff member that the place has become colder—not in any figurative sense—and his colleague, a slightly younger Indian man who sometimes helps with the tearing of tickets at the door, agreed, even suggesting that this must be why their newly minted uniforms are made from thicker material, so as to help them withstand the air-conditioned chill.

If time can be said to be nothing but the fine and sometimes tedious calibration of change, Keng hardly registers its passing. He neither enjoys the long arc of the day nor does he lament its clockwork sequence of routines. Unlike the other staff members, whose remarks he often listens to, nodding noncommittally, regarding the slowness of the day, Keng disappears into every chore without complaint. When there is time to kill, many times after audiences have been seated inside their respective halls, he is perfectly willing to stare off into the distance while leaning discreetly against a wall, arms folded and presumably without a thought in his head, while waiting for potential latecomers to appear. If a thought does surface within him, it is usually concerned with the next movie timing or a lingering reminder of something he has forgotten to do at home, such as filling the empty kettle in the kitchen to boil water, or scrubbing the bathroom floor. After his parents died, his father in a road accident and his mother from a heart attack two years after, Keng has moved on quickly from mourning them; jumping from one odd job to the next in order to pay the bills and feed himself. If ever he wonders why he has never bothered with the possibilities of romance and starting a family, it is because he is convinced that he has been too busy taking care of himself.

Without self-pity, he would easily acknowledge that he possesses nothing that would interest a woman anyway. Having left school at an early age to work for his father as a server-assistant at a hawker stall in Serangoon, he soon left that too after his father retired.

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