Non-Fiction
goodbye house / Samantha Cheh
Image courtesy of the author.
I. periodical
In Kuala Lumpur, we are three generations of family spread out across four houses, but on WhatsApp, we may as well have been living under the same roof. Towards the beginning of monsoon season in April 2021, the chat swirled with photos and gossip; PDFs detailing new SOPs and ministerial dispatches; rumours of a third lockdown. And then the news that my aunt’s Kelana Jaya house had been sold to pay off the family debts arrived with the sudden force of an unexpected monsoon.
My aunt used to live in the now-affluent Seksyen 12 neighbourhood, in a one-storey bungalow at the centre of a sprawl of land that stretched in all directions. I never knew that house but my big sister did. She grew up amidst a tumble of cousins and mischief. In the evening, they clambered into the arms of a giantess rambutan tree, a rambling canopy kingdom of leaf and fruit with a skirt that hung low to the ground. Two branches served as mighty steeds named Thunder and Lightning. When night fell, the mosquitoes attacked and they rushed into the safety of home. When the family eventually moved to Kelana Jaya, my uncle sold the land to some rich man who cut down the rambutan tree and demolished the house. That was the year my parents and elder sister moved to our second home—just before I was born, just after my paternal grandfather, Yeye, died.
In their own ways, these houses were the centre of us; pulling together the disparate, sometimes broken pieces of our family into a coherent whole. The Kelana Jaya house held a lot of memories for us, but much of its value came from knowing it had borne witness to the last vestiges of the family we had once been. Hearing about the sale was like knowing you were reading the final pages of a beloved book: the end must come, it always does, and after is mourning.
Around the same time we found out about the house, mid-Atlantic Americans were worrying about the impending arrival of the Brood X cicadas. Journalists on the radio talked about how after 17 years, cicada swarms were about to explode into wakefulness, prompting an Eliot-esque spring: moist, fertile, and uneasy. Some feared it was yet another sign of the apocalypse, likening it to a Biblical plague; others enthused about their biological impact, how the eruption would refresh bird populations and plant growth. The implications were clear: the world after Brood X would not look like the one that preceded it. You’re going to see birth! You’re going to see death! proclaimed one excitement-jittered scientist.
In many senses, the debts that led to the sale of the house were like those cicadas: sleeping in secrecy and silence, weaving in and out of our periphery. We always knew they—the cicadas, the debts—were there, though it was not always clear where they had come from. The adults were loath to talk about it, so for a long time my understanding about them was vague: something about a failed business, a circular shell-game of collateral and promissory notes. Time had a way of peeling the debts into a thousand slivers of rumour that stretched out over the years, shards slipped between arguments and whispers. Eventually we began to notice empty lots where there were once cars, how dinners and clothes dwindled, and the Kelana Jaya house gradually emptied until it was little more than bare bones. Cicadas survive years-long hibernations underground by leaching sugars from tree roots—similarly, the debts took their toll on my aunt, incessant worry eating away at her easy joys. The debts wrought small, imperceptible changes that, taken all together, unfolded a story of slow-rolling decay. Now, with the sale, there was a date, an exchange of keys, a turning of locks and owners.
***
The houses of my childhood have all been like this: redolent with birth and death, places of gathering and leaving. In Malaysia and many parts of Asia, homes tend to be multigenerational—housing is expensive, so it’s common to find at least two generations sharing the same space long after jobs, marriages, and children have been obtained. Families in these homes can be close (though not always) and big; in my own family, for instance, the average gathering comes in at 15 people, making dinners expensive and logistically-challenging. Yet they remain among my most cherished memories. Even now, when I close my eyes, my memory conjures scenes of feasting and play: tables pushed together for steamboats and reunion dinners, bodies huddled around gossip, dessert, or video games. The bookshelves and bannisters were repurposed into climbing gyms, the beds into forts.
These houses, the idylls of my childhood, were made wild and lush by Gongong, my maternal grandfather and the family gardener. My memory is pockmarked by his comings and goings as he tended to his children’s gardens. He planted the first saplings that would flourish into glorious halos of the white and pink bougainvilleas that still rule my front garden, and the teardrop-shaped fir that we decorated like a tropical Christmas tree. In my aunt’s garden, he laid rough stepping stones and rooted down the lipstick palms that still spear the sky.
He was patron saint of the orchids, and the small forecourt of his house was their sacred high temple. Orchids have a reputation for being temperamental, but under Gongong’s ministry, they regularly bloomed to profusion. His cathedral was a makeshift trellis built out of PVC pipes and metal frames whose boughs were hung with an array of pots that dripped an abundance of orchids like incense from a censer. White, pink, and purple phalaenopsis with their wide-skirted bell shapes formed angelic frescoes, while dancing ladies and dendrobiums, their heads heavy with flowering, were staked to rattan with raffia string so their necks drooped low, seeming to reach down in invitation. I’ve lost the details of Gongong’s face, but it’s surprising how easy it is to conjure the memory of his lean, muscled body moving through a garden with all the surety of belonging. Look at him making quick work of the bougainvillea, pruning back its disordered growth just enough so the neighbours don’t complain. He knows exactly how to read sunlight and water, how they rush and pool, feed or drown, carefully ordering his court to protect and nourish. Strong arms bear bags of soil and fertiliser from his squat, gold Proton Wira car to my mother’s doorstep. I mostly remember him this way: browned by the Malaysian sun, strong and thick-torsoed like an oak.
Of course, this was all before the cancer.
Like the debts and cicadas, it lurked beneath the surface, growing wild in the fertile dark before exploding into undeniable view. Cicadas are often confused with locusts because of their tendency to swarm, but though they are both children of the earth, the latter is a creature defined by ravenous hunger. In 2020, a plague of locusts devastated fields of crops all across the African continent. Cancer is of the body as much as it is a corruption of it—treatment cannot discern between benign and malignant tissues. The first time Gongong beat back the growth, the treatment pruned the weeds with such ferocity that his body raisined under the care of the chemicals. You must remember that Gongong was a gardener before he was ever a patient. He would draw comparisons between the body and the garden, which is how I know he would say that weeding and chemotherapies are two kinds of scorched earth warfare: you must destroy everything, because anything can become a weapon. The body will use what’s left behind into mulch for new growth. New rot.
We got another two years with him. In that time, there were more dinners and outings though his wandering pace became slower. As a kid, I didn’t understand that cancer could come back, that it could be as seasonal as the monsoons that fall in angled sheets, drowning the crab grass and stepping stones in great lakes of water. Cancer isn’t predictable and the seasons have themselves become erratic, shifting at unexpected degrees: in the north, summer now calls far in advance of her arrival, and winter refuses to loosen her grip. I feel the cicadas shift in restless sleep beneath my feet.
When my grandfather died, he took the orchids with him. Without their saint and confessor, the flowers languished and then stopped appearing altogether.
II. seasonal
We visited the Kelana Jaya house for the last time in the middle of May 2021. Soon, the government would announce a third lockdown, and I knew it would be the final chance I had to see the house before it was turned over to its new owners. Over the last few days, my aunt scrambled to divest herself of the few belongings left to her. Weeks before, I had seen for myself how empty the house had become, like someone had taken a spoon to the insides of a watermelon. When I finally visited, so little remained in the house I couldn’t imagine what was left to give away or discard: a pair of deflated armchairs, some knickknacks, a scattering of magazines and books. My niece zoomed up and down on her scooter, unencumbered by obstacles like furniture or rugs. Even looking at the house from the outside, its white facade stained by damp and age, you could tell a light had gone out from inside it.
***
Kelana Jaya is a Malay-majority neighbourhood that sits at the edge of Petaling Jaya, a large city located 20 minutes from Kuala Lumpur, the capital. Bound on either side by highways, its quiet peace is regularly punctured by off-key calls to prayer from the small mosque at its heart. For a long time, my aunt’s house was considered The Big House, until we moved to Petaling Jaya and brought another big house into the family fold. Since it was located strategically between Subang Jaya (where my late grandparents lived) and Petaling Jaya, it made sense to host most of our celebration meals at Kelana Jaya rather than in my Yeemah’s small terrace. And since my mother worked and my aunt didn’t—since Gongong was dead and Popo couldn’t manage us on her own—I ended up spending a lot of time with my cousins in Kelana Jaya, its garden the backdrop of my childhood.
Amid the afternoon heat, we played tag and football, lobbed water balloons at each other, and danced with the water hose in hand. We carved intricate routes on our bikes between parked cars and potted plants, across rough turf and tiled floors. My cousin taught me how to shoot an arrow. The tall black gates were our makeshift badminton net. I plucked flowers until my skin rashed with a temporary allergy. Here too was evidence of my Gongong’s magic: orchids and bougainvilleas, snake plants and lime trees lined the edges of the veranda. Monkey cups dangled over a wide bowl of water filled with lilies and fish bred as a natural remedy for the mosquitoes. There was a huge ixora bush with tiny red flowers we loved to peel apart to get at the nectar hiding inside, and when the rains came, water coursed down algae-coated drain chains in peals of light and song.
Right in the middle was a path of octagonal stepping stones that led from the sliding doors to a corner of the garden made wild by low bushes and tall palms. We imagined ourselves as pirates leaping across treacherous, shark-infested waters, questing for a treasure buried beneath the brush. The bushes hid us from predators and adults, and there we dreamed of finding a lost city amid the towering red palms.
On my last visit to the house, I stood in that once-magical place and marvelled at how barren it had become. What was once a lush jungle filled with all the mystery and enchantment in the world had withered down into a skeletal memory, patchy in places. The palms didn’t feel so tall anymore.
***
We had to wear shoes inside the house because the movers had tracked dirt all over the marble and pale wood floors. Our footsteps thundered in the cavernous space—there was no more furniture to muffle the sound, and without curtains, sunlight turned the interior bright and hot. As my aunts and mom stood around chatting, I wandered the house with my phone camera to snatch at whatever memory was left in this place. There was the staircase my cousins and I would slide down, the varnish worn through in places. On the far wall, a rectangular outline glowed where a beloved painting of my uncle’s Grik kampung house used to hang. My sister and I pressed our hands against a cool wall of distorted glass bricks, and suddenly we were kids again, playing at shadow theatre. Upstairs, nearly everything was gone: the mid-century light fixtures, my uncle’s recliner, the beds, and television set. My aunt’s bathroom was still the most glamorous bathroom I had ever seen, though now the counters were bare, the sink dry. The floors scuffed beneath my shoes. Without the noise of furniture and decoration, I noticed for the first time the actual contours of the house. It had been designed by my aunt’s neighbour, and it was beautiful but now naked, too intimate. It felt like looking at something you weren’t supposed to.
You could also see how decay had set in. Minor cosmetic damage, once easily ignored, became impossible to overlook. The paint peeled back in one corner to reveal the unmistakable intrusion of damp. The wooden door jambs were cracked in places, the windows frosted with dirt and mildew. I stood before the huge, empty shelves of the library, the corner I loved best, and saw how it had become a forest that has unleaved itself in anticipation of winter. Once crammed with every conceivable genre of book—from encyclopedias, novels, leather-backed, gilded copies of the Quran and hadiths, and comics—the shelves now stood bare, having lost its army of book spines that had once stood guard like trees or promises. There were no more pages to turn. Dust coated the surface, and the gleaming wood looked tired and old.
It made me think of Tintern Abbey, that Welsh ruin hollowed out by neglect. Death walks there, gathered in the corners of the vaulted ceilings and bare walls—you feel as though you are walking through the skeleton of some long-dead beast, its bones picked clean by carrion creatures. Nevertheless, you can see life in the stones’ mossy overgrowth and the winding ivy curling up to caress the face of a glassless rose window. Birds swoop between arches and pillars as visitors loll about in the sun. I imagine the Kelana Jaya house could be like that given enough time: the manila grass would spread beyond its borders, running across stone and marble to find cracks through which to root down. Rain would dribble down the drains, turning the ground into a still, reflective pool. The hardy money plant we left behind would grow over the lip of its pot and find a way to curl up through the windows, beginning a slow, determined conquest of the house. Life would find a way, somehow.
***
Over the years, my mother has slowly adopted all of Gongong’s orchid plants, taking them from her sisters who were too happy to give them up. My aunt’s dancing ladies were the last to come home. Instead of relying on a pot or tree, the plants had been bound together with wire to allow them to grow into each other, a beehive-clump of root, dirt and leaf. Mom began slicing them apart into individual pieces, careful to avoid severing something crucial. Some of the cuttings she would keep to nurture back to flowering; others she would parcel out to friends as gifts, and so my grandfather’s legacy lives on.
Orchids flower in their own time, only when they are ready. Often this can feel like a futile game of random guesswork but then, you must remember: orchids are epiphytes, plants of the air. Their beauty lies in suspension, the irregular circularity of its blooming. The cicadas have come and they are going. Brood X will return in 2038, but until then, the newly-born children of the past generation will sleep where they have been buried in the dirt, growing in secrecy until it is time for their next song. Their parents’ carcasses, scattered across suburban backyards and golden glades, turn the soil rich for the forests to come.
The sale of the house clears the debts. There is something bittersweet in that: the loss of one thing pre-empting the beginning of something new. Freedom, maybe.
I am told the house’s new owner is a doctor, and she has grandchildren. Before they move in, they will have to renovate the house, and I mourn the loss inherent in that—but I try to remember that the dead must give way to the living. Soon, the bookshelves will brim with pages and adventure again. Children will tussle in the grass, and maybe they will hide treasure in a wild tangle of bushes and trees. I hope they do.
It’s now June. My mother has been building a new trellis for the orchids, turning our house into their new high temple. I think of this as an investment in the hope of the orchid. For a long while after my grandfather’s death, the orchids remained dormant—six years later, during the hot season, the flowers came back to life. Someday, the house will too.