“Why are you doing this? What were you thinking?”
“I’m just curious about the mother, why she disappeared all of a sudden. The children are left alone most of the time.”
“But what you are doing is not right. You have no right to pry into their lives.”
“I’m not spying on them, if that’s what you’re saying. I just want to find out what happened to their mother.”
“But you’re going too far. You have to stop.”
“I know, I know.”
Even after Ai Ling stopped the visits, she still thought constantly about the boy and his mother. In her classes, the boy was still the same, behaving obediently, never drawing any attention to himself, yet alert to his surroundings, careful to stay out of trouble; he would relinquish any toy or game that the other kids wanted without a word. When the other children ignored him and excluded him from their games, he would retreat to a corner and read or play by himself. Ai Ling would often reward his good behaviour with sweets or packets of biscuits. Unwittingly, she had stepped into a role left vacant by the boy’s missing mother, a role she secretly relished. Of course, she knew being a mother was more than what she was doing, yet she enjoyed every moment of it, and drew a fair amount of satisfaction from performing every task that the role entailed.
When the boy did not turn up one morning at the childcare centre, Ai Ling did not think much of it, assuming he had fallen sick. She followed up with a phone call, but no one answered. When she finally reached the boy’s father, and found out that the boy had been out of the house since morning, she began to fret. The father, on the other hand, worked himself up into a rage at the thought of his son playing truant.
“That boy! He told me he would go to school on his own. And now this! He will get a good beating from me when he comes home.”
“Please calm down, sir. I’m sure he will return soon. Please call me once he does. I’ll leave you my number.”
When the father called her later in the evening and told her that his son had not come home yet, Ai Ling advised him to file a police report. The boy is only five, she reasoned, where could he possibly go? It was likely somewhere familiar, a place he knew well. Unable to sit still or keep herself calm after hearing the news, Ai Ling told Wei Xiang that she wanted to check around the boy’s neighbourhood. Though Wei Xiang offered to come along to help, Ai Ling assured him that she would be fine on her own, that she would be back soon. She could tell that Wei Xiang wanted to say more about the whole matter and her involvement, but he had held back his words, perhaps waiting for another opportunity to voice his concerns. Ai Ling was grateful for the delay of the confrontation she knew was inevitable, but which she did not have the means to deal with at the moment.
In the taxi, Ai Ling remembered an incident from her childhood, an episode which had been dislodged from the tangle of her memories. When she was nine, Ai Ling had run away from home, though her parents never knew about it. She waited for the right moment to make her escape, when the front door of the flat was left unlocked by her mother while watering the plants along the corridor. She had never been outside the flat without her parents, so the idea of venturing beyond her immediate world was a strange, bewildering experience. She took the staircase instead of the lift, and after reaching the void deck, she walked across the car park in a direction that would lead her to a nearby garden. Once there, she decided to go farther, to another part of the estate she had only seen from the school bus; she recalled seeing a playground with swings and a concrete slide. To her nine-year-old mind, it had seemed like a paradise, a place where she could have all her fun.
Even as Ai Ling tried to remember the reason for running away from home, she could not, for the life of her, recall exactly what had made her do it. She had never had any big issues with her parents when she was young, and she was not an unhappy child; what she had wanted was readily provided by her parents, and she was an undemanding child, simple in her needs. While she was curious, like any child would be at that age, Ai Ling could not see her curiosity as the main reason for her to stray out of the known perimeter of her world. Then what? And why? Ai Ling could not fathom her reasons now, across the span of over twenty years.
At the playground, she had sat on the swing, pushing herself outwards and upwards. There were other kids, but they were playing amongst themselves and left her alone. Sensing their wariness, she did not approach them, staying away from their noisy game of hide-and-seek. She did not know how long she stayed there, but soon she got tired and thirsty. Ai Ling had not brought any money, and the immediate reality of her situation began to dawn on her. She started to panic. She looked up and, as if for the first time, saw beyond the playground to the blocks of flats that stretched beyond her vision, the streets heavy with mid-morning traffic, the rows of tall imposing trees. Everything suddenly seemed ominous, full of potential danger. As the world grew out of proportion in her mind, looming like an ever-growing leviathan in her imagination, Ai Ling was also aware, however vaguely, that she was shrinking inwardly, reducing herself to something that was easy to manage, quick to take flight, like a bug burrowing itself into the earth, or a dragonfly taking flight. How small she felt then, how inconsequential, how easily she could lose who she was. Within minutes of this realisation, Ai Ling decided to retrace her footsteps, and in the end did manage to find her way home. When she knocked on the front door of the flat, her mother was surprised at her appearance. Her parents had assumed that she was in her room all this time, reading, and did not want to disturb her; her absence from the flat had been completely unnoticed. She quickly returned to her place in the only world she knew.
As the taxi stopped in the boy’s neighbourhood, Ai Ling’s thoughts returned to the task at hand. For the whole night, she searched the area, but with no success. She called out the boy’s name, whispered it into deserted alleyways, shouted it across dark empty fields; with each utterance, Ai Ling could sense the waning hold of his name, and she was gripped, again and again, by the premonition that something terrible had happened. The poor boy, her boy. She knew she mustn’t lose hope, yet hope was like an elusive bird, vanishing out of sight.
When the first light of the day started to seep up from the horizon, Ai Ling called the boy’s father; upon hearing his hoarse, sleepy voice, she could tell he had not fared any better.
“I’ve called her, but she denies knowing anything about this. That damn woman must have kidnapped him. What kind of a fucked-up mother is she? How can she even do this?” Yet his words lacked the heat of firm belief, carrying in them the dark hint of doubt. And Ai Ling suddenly pitied him.
“Maybe she didn’t do it.”
“You don’t know her, or what she is capable of. How could she just abandon her children and run off with another man? What kind of a mother does that, you tell me?”
Ai Ling could feel the weight of weariness finally descending on her, deadening her bones, and all she wanted to do was lie down where she was and never get up. She hung up the call and started her journey home, heartsick and wrecked.
The police never found the boy, and Ai Ling never saw the father again, except for the final time he came by the childcare centre to pay the outstanding school fees and collect the boy’s belongings. Ai Ling had packed everything—the boy’s slippers, blanket, his drawings—into a large shopping bag and placed it aside. She excused herself when she saw the father talking to the principal. He glanced in her direction, but did not make any sign of acknowledging her. He seemed diminished, his shoulders hunched, his eyes dull. Ai Ling tried to smile at him, but he turned away.