2. Slum (Excerpts from Stranded: A Memoir)

2. Slum

Some thirty years ago, my dad used to sit in front of the TV, playing his favourite video CD. Some of them depicted blossoms on the streets of the Netherlands: a florist attending to his tulips in the early morning, a quiet street after the rain, an array of grachtenpanden along Amsterdam canals… The videos were accompanied by piano and saxophone, and he would stare pensively at the screen for hours, lost in a trance. When he was not watching TV, he and my mom would play mahjong with neighbours and left the pet dog or cat to take care of me.

“You’re a latchkey child. We never ask you to attend any music, or art lessons, isn’t that nice?” My mom was cajoling me into thinking their poverty and her lazy parenting were offering me the best life, and I actually believed at that age.

At that time, we just moved from a temporary apartment in a nearby industrial town to one of the poorest residential blocks on the outskirt of the city. They were not residential apartments, but make-do living quarters converted from office blocks. A factory processing metal scraps was downstairs incessantly blasting loud bangs. The squealing, grinding, metal-cutting and thunderous unloading of I-beams accompanied the constant smell of burning metal carried by the wind into the rooms. On the other side was a huge bus interchange, shrieks from bus brakes constantly bombarded the air with deafening shockwaves. Our “apartment” was made of two single rooms separated by a public corridor flanked by rolls of single rooms acting as living space, like a hotel floor, except that each room had no attached toilet. My mom told me to go to the women’s public toilet shared by some ten households living on the same floor. “If it is full, just wait, unless you want to go to the male one.” The stench from the filthy male restroom could travel to as far as the bus interchange. Flies, maggots, mosquitos, spiders, and cockroaches congregated in a nightmarish swarm that visibly barricaded the male restroom as their exclusive biohazard zone. No sane person would consider stepping into that hellfire, but men had the courage, and they left putrid footprints from whatever dark matter they trod on ground zero.

In the bedrooms, there was no attached bathroom so my parents portioned off half of the small balcony and converted it into a shower room with a mirror on a wall made of laminated wood. There was no space for drying clothes so she put up two strings over the ceiling of my bedroom to hang all the wet laundry. I slept with the entire family’s wet laundry still dripping water next to my bed. We were poor, still, she had more than enough clothes for herself to fill her wardrobe, my wardrobe and a separate stash under my bed. My dad rarely came home, occasionally I would see his thick coarse-fabric pants and shirts hanging in my room, it seemed my dad never changed clothes — always shirts and pants. Even today I had no idea how men are accustomed to wearing the same thing for the entirety of their lives, it must be incredibly boring, like eating the same dish for one’s whole life. How did men get used to that? It was a mystery. I played with my mom’s clothes like they were mine, and I wondered how I would dress up when I grow up.

There was no heating in the winter, while in summer power outages happened on half of the days without any warning. All the families would sit in the corridor holding paper fans and when the night fell, flickering candles lit each room. Somebody once tried to tap into the state power grid during the outage and was electrocuted, after that, no one tried again. In an age when electricity was a scarcity, it was common that there were no lights illuminating the long corridors and the staircases at the two ends. As our family lived on the top floor, I travelled daily in the eerie darkness that shrouded the seven-storey block at night, but I was not alone. As my footsteps reverberated in complete silence, they were usually accompanied by the tiny sounds from rodent residents sharing a roof with their human counterparts. Sometimes I met their tiny eyes shaped like a colon, unfazed by my incursion. Entire rodent families seemed to live in the tiny space near the male toilet where piles of garbage formed trash islands, their burrowing generated seismic activities that often led to avalanches and landslides on their archipelago of trash. These posed no hindrance to the men who used the toilet, after several months of blockade some wives would volunteer to remove the trash. My observations taught me that I should never consent to marrying creatures like men when I grew up — I would never share my bed with such selfish and filthy wretches and clean trash for them.

My mom had never stopped reminding me of our poverty. “We are poor.” “This is a slum.” “Your dad has no job.” “He had such a knack for blundering.” “I’m the sole breadwinner.” “I’m not sure whether there’s enough for next month.” “Now your mom is a lay-off, thanks to those wicked people in the company. They are utterly despicable.” “How am I going to feed you?” Those grievances filled my memory, and her presence was always accompanied by her curses. I had no idea who those wicked people she was referring to that time. Many years later I heard that the privatisation reform taking place in the state companies left most workers indefinitely furloughed, my mother was among them. An ordinary clerk like her with little connections or was too poor to build them stood no chance of continued employment, while my father had long been fired by the company for regular AWOL, a.k.a absent without leave.

Every week, I heard quarrels coming from their rooms. Sometimes it ended with a loud bang at midnight followed by my dad’s footsteps going downstairs. In those days, kids were few and divorce was common, I was the only kid living on the top floor. My mother said, again and again, she was bearing all the pain for me, that was why she and my father were still together, but I rarely ever saw my dad and he rarely ever talked to me, it never really made much difference from a single-parent family. “Your dad is a total liability, he has no income and does no housework. I alone carry the burden of the entire family — I clean the house, I cook, I raise you, I work. Your mom is not a superwoman, your mom is a slave.” Sometimes her anger would spill over and she began to blame my existence as if I too were a parasite living off her. “Put away your homework and get down to help do some choirs, make yourself useful.” Her tantrums almost always ended with a fearsome command. “Yes, ma’am,” answered me as I quickly picked up the broom, avoiding her eyes that tolerated no disobedience. Once I was done I would slip into my room and close the door, hiding like a rat in my hole. She was a victim of her own angry complaints and hot temper that contributed to my dad’s absenteeism at home. Other than sympathising with her loneliness and abandonment, I empathised with my dad — I too wanted to stay as far away from her and for as long as possible.

After almost thirty years, She never changed, as with their poverty. My parents had moved from place to place without a permanent home despite all the economical miracles that were purportedly happening in this country. “The sun shines on the entire land, except on our household, thanks to all those wicked people,” she always said with stressed resentment. Who were those wicked people, I no longer had any idea. Many years later after moving out of the slum, she turned to help manage her billionaire sister’s warehouse. Without officially cutting ties with the state company, she continued to receive benefits as a furloughed staff. Her wealthy sister gave her a job, but she looked at it differently. “There is more stinginess than blood relation inside your wealthy aunt,” She said to me at home then, “born in the same household, one destined for a life of richness, another for a life of poverty.” Her temper seemed to only get worse as she started her job, in her imagination, fate was scoffing at her every day.?

It was said that long before I was born, my aunt and her husband ran a family workshop manufacturing mattresses and made a fortune, through investment in leather, wine, real estate and other businesses their wealth?swelled. They were among the early trailblazers who took the risk to leave the planned economy and stable jobs at state companies to seek business opportunities. When economical reform happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s, those once much-envied stable jobs vaporised overnight as privatisation took hold. They had their first taste of the volatility of socialist promises, and many other reforms would ensue and doom the vast majority of their generation to the lowest social stratum. Yet that never changed their mentality, they never stopped forcing their generation’s mottos upon us: find stable jobs, live an easy life, marry at an appropriate age, raise children and age gracefully, even when such things no longer existed in their own world.?

I would later break every one of them and merit her full fury, but that was nothing compared to my father’s blunder. Some years later, they would cobble enough money from relatives to purchase a flat in the city, only to sell it to pay for the court ruling after my dad lost a lawsuit, for many years he was in debt while my aunt helped pay the bill. It happened because when he was working as a contractor, he disappeared with the workers’ salaries and was brought back to the court and made to pay back everything and a hefty fine. I realised I never properly grasped the full weight of her sentence when my mother said, “Your dad has a flair for blunders.”?

The pride of a father kept him from mentioning the matter to me, not even until I returned home to find myself homeless. It was not in his nature to share anything. He rarely talked to me when I was a child; to him, child-rearing was the woman’s business. While taking care of me, my mom took the opportunity to vent all her anger, “Your father had no job.” “He rarely came back home.” “I don’t know what he is doing out there with his so-called friends.”

I doubt whether my father’s ineptitude ever changed throughout his life. I had no way of knowing nor made any effort to, as he was mostly absent. I never missed him. He did try to make up for his absence during my childhood, in his own way, but that could not redeem him from his negligence. “I did my best, life is not very fair to me.” Every one of their generations believed they did their best and life was not fair to them, there was no guilt, no soul-searching, and there was only appalling self-righteousness. Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book Talking to Strangers saying when asked, every prisoner believed he or she was innocent, I was sure that it was how my dad thought of himself when the judge sentenced him guilty of embezzlement — “I did my best, life is not fair to me.”?