The Weight of Open Windows

Every evening at six, Mdm Liew Sook Har would stand at the kitchen window and count the lights coming on across the corridor block. She had done this for thirty-one years, since the year her son Weixiang was born, and she could not have explained why she continued now that he was gone to Melbourne and the flat held only her and the sound of the ceiling fan's slow rotation.

The window faced east. This had always bothered Weixiang, who preferred the sunset side, but Sook Har had chosen the unit for its cross-ventilation and for the way the morning light fell across the kitchen tiles in a pale gold sheet — a private extravagance she had never told anyone about, not even her husband before he died. Some pleasures, she had long believed, lose their nature when named.

She was making tau yew bak. Not because she was hungry, exactly, but because the pork belly was in the fridge and because Weixiang had called two nights ago and said, without particular emphasis, that he missed it. She had heard the word miss and set it aside carefully, the way you set aside a fragile thing you are not sure you are permitted to hold.

The soy sauce went in first, then the dark sugar, then the water. She pressed two cloves of garlic flat with the side of the cleaver, not peeling them, the way her own mother had done and her mother's mother before that, some instruction passed down not through speech but through the position of a wrist. She had tried to show Weixiang once. He had watched her with his phone in his hand, half-attentive, and she had felt — not anger, she wanted to be precise about this — a small, bloodless severing.

Outside, the corridor light flickered. A neighbour's child was running past, sandals slapping the concrete, and Sook Har watched until the shape of him disappeared around the lift lobby. For a moment the block was very quiet. Somewhere several floors up, someone was frying something with ginger.

The pork began to colour. She turned it with chopsticks, patient, attending to the sound of it, the way her hearing had sharpened these last two years into a kind of compensation for the conversations that no longer happened in these rooms.

Weixiang had a girlfriend now, a Taiwanese woman named Fang Yi who worked in sustainable design. He had described her carefully over video call, watching Sook Har's face the way he used to watch it as a child before asking for something he wasn't sure she would give. Sook Har had said the correct things. She had meant them, mostly. What she had not said — what she did not know how to say across eight thousand kilometres and a pixelated connection — was that she understood more than he assumed. That she had once been a young woman in a new city herself, a girl from Bukit Timah navigating marriage into a Toa Payoh family with different dialects and different notions of what deference looked like.

The braising liquid was reducing. She lowered the flame and put the lid on, that particular metallic sound — a note she could not notate but would know blindfolded.

She wondered sometimes whether love between parents and children was always this: a long practice of watching someone become a person you did not entirely design, and finding, somewhere in the gap between what you intended and what emerged, something that still held your shape. Like how Weixiang had her tendency toward silence. Like how he kept plants on his Melbourne balcony and photographed them — she had seen them on Instagram, three small terracotta pots — though she had never seen him show interest in growing things here.

She had her mother's hands. She noticed this suddenly, looking down at them resting on the edge of the pot. The same slightly squared fingernails, the same tendon visible along the thumb when she gripped something. Her mother was twelve years dead and here she was, living in Sook Har's kitchen.

The lights were on now in most of the windows she could see. Families settling into the particular gravity of evening. She would portion the tau yew bak into containers — two for tomorrow, two for her colleague Mrs Tan who was recovering from a knee replacement — and she would eat a small bowl of rice alone at the table where Weixiang used to do his homework, and this would be enough. It had always been enough. The question was simply whether enough was the same as full.

She lifted the lid. The smell rose, dark and sweet and faintly anise-edged, and she breathed it in before it dispersed into the flat's still air, knowing it would linger in the curtains until morning.

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