The Claire Tham Collection by Claire Tham

Author:Claire Tham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814677592
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International

Driving Sideways

At last he could bear it no longer. “Look,” he said, “can we turn this thing off?”

This being the hotel inhouse pornographic movie which had been playing for the past half hour. Made in Taiwan, it had a kind of jolly slapstick crudity which he’d found mildly amusing in the beginning, but it was starting to get on his nerves. He didn’t understand how Jek and the girl could sit and conduct a conversation with various sexual acts being performed on TV, but apparently they could; Asian sexual prudery was a myth he’d discarded a long time ago. It was just another in a long series of cultural dislocations which he should have got used to by now after a year in Southeast Asia, but he hadn’t. Which was odd, because as a Chinese-American, switching between English in school and the Hong Kong Cantonese of his parents at home, he was used to feeling out-of-kilter, schizophrenic, an inhabitant of dual worlds that met only in his head. He’d thought that, by taking a year out from college to wander around Asia, he might resolve some of this irresolution, but he’d found only that he felt more American the further he strayed from upstate New York (and conscious, all the time, of a heretical, shame-faced, relieved thought: thank god my parents had the sense to leave their hometown/ province/ continent). And never had he felt more irredeemably foreign than here, in a sleazy hotel room in southern Thailand, in the company of Jek and the girl, both overseas Chinese like him, hut, unlike him, born and bred in Southeast Asia and at home in the accommodations and compromises which the culture of the region demanded and which he, with his straight-arrow American rectitude, found at best incomprehensible and at worst offensive. Or perhaps he was just using cultural differences as an excuse, and refusing to admit that the real cause of his irritability was the fact that he was certain—no, he knew—that Jek and the girl had once been lovers.

Jek and the girl looked at him. Jek reached out from the bed and turned off the TV, plunging the room—coffin-sized, claustrophobic with its drawn blinds—into a sudden silence in which the only sound was the asthmatic wheezing of the airconditioning. “Thank you,” he said, sounding, and intending to be, sarcastic.

There was a pause.

“So, Russell,” Jek said, “what’s your excuse?”

“My excuse?”

Jek leaned forward, giving Russell a good glimpse of how his Hakka genes had coalesced into a hateful, fortuitous combination of broad cheekbones and a wide, surprisingly delicate mouth. “Why are you here? Why aren’t you on Wall Street like the rest of your overachieving second generation Asian American peers?”

Jek had studied law for two years in London University before calling it quits. The Singapore government, which had awarded him a scholarship, had not been pleased. He was vague about what he’d done in the seven years since.

Russell said, lamely, “They’re all in Silicon Valley actually,” and heard the girl give a short laugh.

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