As the eldest grandson of the deceased, Jonathan received a burlap patch that he pinned to his sleeve. White shirt, black pants: the appropriate outfit for mourning, or so he was told. He didn’t pause to consider the logic behind the words. He accepted without question the responsibilities he had to bear. For the rest of the day, he stood silently by the altar, enveloped in swirls of memory and incense, receiving those who had come to pay their last respects—bowing, and handing out joss sticks and pieces of red thread.
Many attended the wake. Some wept. Others wailed. Still others found it possible to joke and laugh. His family took turns keeping vigil throughout the night. Having missed the first night of the wake, Jonathan insisted on accompanying his grandmother for the next two nights. On the last evening, as the final rites were performed, he closed his eyes and followed the footsteps of his elders, while his cousins trailed behind him. As they circled around the casket, the monk’s sutra rang in his ears, reverberated through his being. He willed himself to suppress feeling from rising, refusing to let his heartbeat echo the rhythm of the gong. To drown out the prayers, Jonathan chanted to himself: “This isn’t true, this can’t be true.”
The next day at Mandai Crematorium, Jonathan’s grief prevented him from noticing the tremor in his grandfather’s hand as he picked out the first bone from his wife’s ashes, his cloudy eyes damp with memories of a shared lifetime, whispering, “All we are at the end is ash”, before setting it down softly in the stone urn. But that wasn’t the only thing Jonathan failed to notice. He hadn’t heard the gasping sobs of his mother as she called out to her own mother for the very last time, hadn’t seen the wooden coffin being swallowed by the fury of flames, hadn’t felt the flutter of wings from a large, brown moth that had landed on the back of his unblemished hand. In his desired version of reality, Jonathan would have chosen differently. Having grasped those numerals, he would instead have taken his grandparents on their first trip around Europe, beginning the harvest of their golden years.
FOR ONE MINUTE ON STAGE
THE DAY JIA Hao got his braces was a good one. It was Friday evening, and his mother had picked him up from school after Chinese Orchestra practice. Instead of heading home, she drove them to Bedok, where the dental clinic was located, five minutes away from his old primary school. During their last visit, his dentist had warned him of possible discomfort after getting his braces fixed, and recommended him to consume soft foods in the initial period to minimise the pain from chewing. To make up for his restricted diet in the days to follow, his mother suggested going to the nearby hawker centre for his favourite chicken rice.
He hummed to himself as he followed half a step behind his mother. It had been some time since they last patronised the chicken rice stall, for he had started secondary school several months ago and it was no longer as convenient to come by. Amid the crowd, his mother spotted an unoccupied table and hurried towards it. There was a red plate with remnants of rojak, yet to be cleared. She pushed it aside and gestured for Jia Hao to sit. He did as he was told.
Even from a distance, he could hear his mother place their usual orders, “White chicken breast, remove skin, remove bones. Two plates, thanks!” before returning to his side.
It was a humid day, and the thin fabric of his uniform pasted itself to his back. Still, when the drinks vendor came by, his mother ordered her usual teh-c siu dai. Seeing as she was in a good mood, Jia Hao asked for a Kickapoo. Their beverages arrived soon after the red plate of rojak was cleared away. He waited as his mother wiped the top of the can with a tissue before pulling the ring tab. It opened with a pop and a delicious hiss. Eagerly, he poured the golden liquid into a cup filled with ice cubes that had already begun to melt. As his mother stirred her steaming tea with a bent metal spoon, he took a deep draught of his citrusy, fizzy drink.
He closed his eyes for a few moments, savouring the sensation of the sweet, cool liquid flowing down his throat. Then he began to tell his mother about his day. He recounted how the Appreciation of Chinese Culture period had gone by in a blur. The teacher went on an unceasing monologue for the whole period, inundating the whiteboard with illegible Chinese characters, oblivious to the murmuring of students behind her. But Literature had been interesting; they discussed a new chapter of the book they were reading, Sing to the Dawn, in which the protagonist was facing a thorny conundrum with her father. As for Maths, the new concepts on algebraic expressions were tricky, but his weekly tuition classes with Mr Tan had helped him to grasp them quickly enough. Jia Hao added the last part to reassure his mother, who, as he had hoped, nodded and smiled approvingly at him.
A woman with a shock of white hair arrived with their food. He wasted no time in drenching his serving with syrupy dark soy sauce. As he spooned generous amounts of fragrant rice and chicken into his mouth, his mother drizzled chilli sauce over her helping. She took a few sips from the accompanying bowl of clear soup before she finally asked, “And how was CO practice?”
Jia Hao had been waiting for this moment all afternoon. With his mouth half-full, the words burst forth from him: he had been chosen to be the soloist for the annual Chinese Orchestra concert at the Esplanade next year. His mother’s eyes lit up. She dropped her spoon and pulled him tightly to her chest, impervious to the grease around his mouth and the sweat running down his back.
Later, while passing by the ice cream uncle with his pushcart as they walked to the dental clinic, his mother decided that he deserved a cool treat. They had fifteen minutes to spare before his appointment. Jia Hao picked the raspberry ripple flavour. He watched as the elderly vendor sliced off a marbled slab from a large cream block streaked with red, before sandwiching it between soft, pastel-hued bread for him. *
To describe as dreadful the first days after Jia Hao got his braces on was a gross understatement. The discomfort his dentist had cautioned him about turned out to be excruciating pain. He was constantly famished, but the bland, watery congee and foul-smelling soups prepared by his mother made him lose his appetite. He stopped talking to her, citing pain as pretext. Instead of spending time with his parents in the living room after dinner as he usually did, Jia Hao retreated to his room, brooding.
The hours of unmet cravings filled him with hunger and a bitterness stemming from his having been so easily persuaded by his mother to get braces. He hadn’t even wanted them in the first place. She was the one who claimed that the children of several of her friends had got them when they were around his age, and kept harping on about how useful braces had been in aligning their teeth and correcting their overbites. According to her, braces were very expensive, but his parents saw it as a worthy investment for him—one he would be sure to thank them for when he was older. “Imagine the dazzling, straight teeth you’ll have when it’s all done,” his mother had said to coax him, flashing a mouth full of uneven teeth.
On Sunday evening, Jia Hao trudged to the toilet and locked the door behind him. The procedure of brushing his teeth now demanded a full ten minutes. Slouching before the mirror, he bared his teeth once more. Fine, they were not perfectly straight. Some were misaligned. The most prominent were his two front teeth, which jutted out as a result of his bad habit of gnawing on chopsticks when he was younger. They had caused him to be the target of taunts back in primary school. “Bugs Bunny is here!” his classmates used to shout whenever he entered the classroom. But he hadn’t been overly concerned about them. Being able to immerse himself in his books and music made him happy. Everything else was secondary.
Jia Hao gargled the medicinal mouthwash, spit it out, then wrapped his lips over his armoured teeth. “Everything will get better soon,” he told his reflection. Without warning, the image of crispy chicken wings glistened in his mind, and for a moment, he felt a smile tug at the corners of his lips.
When Jia Hao returned to school on Monday, he discovered that his new orthodontic enhancement device held more far-reaching effects than he had initially anticipated. He could have ignored the persistent rumbling of his stomach, especially during recess. He could have ignored the pointed glances from his classmates whenever he opened his mouth to speak. But there was something he couldn’t ignore: his best friend’s reaction when he had to decline his offer of fruit gum.
Jia Hao had gone to Han Ming’s place after school as usual, and they had just finished their homework when his friend tossed him a small box with a single strawberry printed on it. It was something they enjoyed—blowing bubbles with the sugary balls of gum procured by Han Ming’s grandmother from across the border in Johor Bahru. There were four flavours in the pack—melon, strawberry, grape and orange—and strawberry was Jia Hao’s favourite. That chewing gum was banned in Singapore made the shared experience more gratifying, deliciously clandestine. An experience Jia Hao could no longer partake in, at least not for a while.
His gaze remained fixed on the pale pink bubble ballooning out from Han Ming’s lips. He couldn’t recall the last time he had blown one so large, so beautiful—before Jia Hao could finish the thought, his friend popped the bubble. In its place came a retort, “What’s the point of fixing your teeth if you can’t even enjoy the good things?”
The full weight of it landed on Jia Hao on Wednesday afternoon, in a lecture theatre packed with uniform-clad students. Orchestral practice was about to begin, and he was sitting with his wind section mates in the last, topmost row. He played the suona, a double-reed woodwind instrument known for its loud, strident tone. When his classmates first found out about it, they had laughed at him, gesticulating wildly with their arms to mimic the trunk of an elephant. Commonly associated with the shrill sounds it blasted at traditional Chinese weddings and funeral processions, the trumpet-like instrument hadn’t been his first choice.
Jia Hao glanced at the bottom right of the lecture theatre, where the strings section sat with their delicate instruments perched on their laps, chatting gaily among themselves. Of all the instruments played in the Chinese Orchestra, the erhu was the one he liked the most. It was a bowed, two-stringed vertical fiddle whose strings reverberated with a sweet, sonorous beauty capable of reaching his core—an instrument that reminded Jia Hao of the violin. But the choice hadn’t been his to make, for his seniors had decided, at first glance, that his heavily built frame would make for a competent suona player.
The double doors on the left swung open just then, and in strode the Conductor. The lecture theatre, which had moments before been brimming with activity, fell still. The Conductor was a man of short stature and rare smiles, but whatever he might lack in height and affability, he more than made up for in his demeanour and presence. When it came to music and discipline, he was known to be exacting to the point of being unsparing, a trait that commanded respect and fear in equal measure. The Conductor now took his place at the front of the lecture theatre, where the top of his head gleamed under the florescent light. Unlike other men his age who tried with limited degrees of success to conceal a bald spot with long, sparse strands of grey from the sides of their heads, the Conductor somehow managed to carry his receding hairline with an air of dignity.
From his vantage point, Jia Hao could see everyone straightening in their seats. He stiffened his back. The Conductor announced the piece with which he would like to begin. A shuffle of papers, a murmur of voices, the accidental pulling of strings. Within moments, everyone had the correct score on their music stands. The zhongyin sheng player blew the tuning note for the orchestra: A natural. Once the tuning was done, all eyes shifted to the Conductor, whose own were closed. He lifted his baton, ready to count them in.
Right on cue, the cellos began to sing. Their deep, soulful voices faithfully followed the rise and fall of the Conductor’s baton, which seemed to have come alive in his hand. Watching the cellists draw straight, smooth bows on their instruments, Jia Hao felt a sudden, intense desire to play his violin. He might have had one in his hands now, had he been allowed to choose the String Ensemble as his ECA—no, CCA, he corrected himself. He often had to remind himself that Extra-Curricular Activities had become Co-Curricular Activities. On CCA Orientation Day, Jia Hao had been drawn to the String Ensemble and the English Literary Club. But his mother was of a different opinion. According to her, his secondary school was known for its Chinese Orchestra, which had never failed to clinch the gold at the biennial Singapore Youth Festival competitions. If he were to join the acclaimed orchestra, it would increase his chances of securing a place at the best junior college four years later. Naturally, Jia Hao had deferred to her.
A nudge from his senior Wei Yue yanked him out of his thoughts. He looked up and realised that the dizis in front of them were now moving in harmony. Their part was coming in four bars. Tapping the beat with his right foot, Jia Hao lifted the suona to his lips and moistened the reed. The white baton swung in the air, charged with an electricity that seemed to emanate directly from the Conductor’s being, his shoulders soaring higher as his brows furrowed deeper. Jia Hao felt the surge of music, the swell of emotion. With his fingers in position and his eyes on the baton, he drew in a deep breath and joined the rest of the orchestra when the cue came.
But barely three bars in, the baton froze. Jia Hao winced. He felt the eyes of his seniors on him. He held his breath, humiliation filling his lungs. He had been warned about the potential pain from having braces, about its effect on his food consumption. But what he hadn’t known, much less imagined, was the impact on his capacity to play the suona. His mouth, like his face, was burning. He hadn’t expected that the tiny metal brackets on his teeth would so drastically affect the way his mouth wrapped around the reed of his instrument. Those notes that used to be effortless for him to play now required a shocking surfeit of effort. Even so, they had come out excruciatingly flat, horrendously out of tune. With quivering hands, he put down his instrument.
“Again,” the Conductor demanded.
The impatience in the man’s shoulders caused Jia Hao to shudder. Not daring to meet the Conductor’s eyes, he focused on the tip of the white baton, suspended in mid-air. Tentatively, he lifted the suona to his lips.
This time, when their turn came, Jia Hao inhaled and exhaled only through his nose. His fingers moved with practiced ease over the eight sound holes in the rosewood. His eyes travelled across the assortment of numbers on the score—some dotted, others underlined—a once unfamiliar musical notation that he could now decipher with greater fluency than the western one with its firm staves. But these numbers couldn’t help him now. He began swaying his upper body, raising the flared brass bell of his instrument to the melody—as if he were actually playing, as if the metal in his mouth had no effect on his embouchure.
When the suona section finally came to an end and the Conductor’s attention had turned to the pipas, Jia Hao let out a shaky breath. He ignored Wei Yue’s stare. It was the first practice session since he had got braces, he reassured himself. Things would surely improve in a week or two. He counted himself lucky that the Conductor hadn’t chosen to go through the piece for which he was soloist.
Jia Hao reached for his water bottle and took a gulp of water. Out of habit, he wiped his mouth on the left sleeve of his uniform. For the first time, it left a smear of blood on his pristine white shirt.
As the weeks passed, Jia Hao grew increasingly desperate. His braces no longer restricted his diet as they had done before, and he could consume more fried chicken wings than he could count by now, given the rate at which his mother was piling food on his plate. But his lack of appetite persisted. When his height and weight were measured for the second time that year, his PE teacher praised him for having lost four kilogrammes.
Ignoring his mother’s concerns, Jia Hao began to stay later and later at school—at first increasing the duration of each practice session, then their frequency. It mortified him to have to practice the suona there, where all his orchestral mates could hear him. He would have preferred to suffer privately at home, but on the first afternoon he tried to play his scales in his room, the neighbours had come rapping on the front door. Unlike the strings of the violin, the blare of the suona was not, understandably, pleasing to their ears.
Before long, Jia Hao was spending every afternoon after school practising the suona. His violin and books lay forgotten in his room. Each time Han Ming asked if he would like to go over to his place, the Conductor’s voice would resound in Jia Hao’s head: 台上一分钟，台下十年功—a minute on stage requires a decade of practice offstage. Jia Hao was no stranger to hard work and long hours of practice. How else could he have passed his Grade 8 Violin Exam with Distinction just the year before? This time, he recognised that things were different. The more he practised, the worse he became. On the days he forgot to bring his small blue box of orthodontic wax to school, the sharp pieces of steel would scrape his gums each time he tried to finish a song, causing them to smart and bleed. The left sleeve of his uniform soon bore a stubborn red stain—faint, yet indelible.
Despite his distress, Jia Hao confided in no one. He attempted to hide his deteriorating state of play from the rest of the orchestra. He might have been successful, had he played a different, quieter instrument, like the pipa or the erhu. One that didn’t demand attention to be drawn to itself. But he played the suona, as a soloist. Everyone noticed. At first, they tried to be encouraging. Not only his peers, but also his seniors, his section leader, his teachers. After all, they had seen something in him, something special enough to have chosen him to play the solo for their forthcoming concert—a privilege that had never before been accorded to a junior like himself. But Jia Hao soon realised that patience was a virtue that came with an expiry date. Within weeks, the pep talks gave way to lectures, and on one Wednesday evening, unequivocal reproach.
Gripped by the fear of letting everyone down, Jia Hao pushed himself harder than ever before.
Things came to a head two months later, when the Conductor requested to speak to him. On Friday afternoon, an hour before the biweekly orchestral practice was scheduled to take place, Jia Hao followed the covered drains leading to the Conductor’s office. It was his first time inside, but instead of glancing around the room, he quickly bowed and kept his head down. If the Conductor, seated behind his large imposing desk, had noticed Jia Hao’s hands shaking, he made no mention of it. Jia Hao obeyed the Conductor’s command and sat down. His hands gripped his kneecaps, bracing himself for the news. He listened quietly, his lips pressed together, concealing the metal in his mouth. When everything that was to be said had been said, Jia Hao bowed, thanked the Conductor and left.
Instead of heading back to the canteen where Han Ming was waiting with his schoolbag, Jia Hao turned and began walking in the opposite direction. It was not until he had made his way along the length of the parade square, down the line of classroom blocks and to the large rock by the quiet pond at the end of the school compound that he allowed himself to exhale. Logically, he understood where the Conductor was coming from. It was the best choice for everyone, himself included.
Despite the blistering heat, Jia Hao began to tremble. He crouched down by the rock and hugged his knees to his chest. The concert was coming up in weeks. Every member of the orchestra was practising as hard as they could, but they were not there yet. Far from it, he knew. He had listened to the recordings of the past decade of annual performances the orchestra had done. The problem lay with him: the supposed concert soloist. They had tried to be understanding, but couldn’t afford to take the gamble much longer. There were musical standards to be upheld, concert programme booklets to be printed. The Conductor had asked whose name was more deserving of being printed in the programme booklet as concert soloist—his or Wei Yue’s. It was a question Jia Hao and his senior would be given a fortnight to answer, by the end of which a review would be made and the decision, finalised.
The words of the Conductor began to slur, echoing in Jia Hao’s head. His arms burnt under the merciless sun. Leaning on the rock for support, he retched. A mixture of blood and vomit pooled at his feet, soiling his freshly bleached shoes.
