The Great Reclamation

But the grief, once a harsh rope that seemed to tighten at every turn, had now softened with time into a delicate thread, woven invisibly into the fabric of their daily lives.

It was elegant in its simplicity, shameless in its daring, as most of the Gah Men's plans were. Squatters? Move them. Communists? Jail them. Housing? Build it. Even the earth itself was deemed malleable, a cost-benefit analysis conducted, a decision made. The rest was execution.

But as the old body of his father's boat thudded over the dull brown waves, the smell of fish pursuing him always, he saw the city, gleaming and spotless, rising as if dormant from the sea. Sparkling buildings of metal and glass, roads of flawless asphalt, bright electric streetlights;. . .it was a beautiful, impossible sight. A beautiful, improbable, ulikely nation" (Heng 447).

He wished for the noise of the pile driver, the clattering of the conveyor belt. He wished for something to prove that life had changed. But it was as if nothing had changed, nothing would ever change (Heng 432).

Ah Boon drew back, but when he did, she leaned into him to fill the space that opened up between them. Her face was heavy against his chest, and he felt, finally, that it was really happening. The smell of her skin was one that he felt already familiar with, for he had observed it faintly, unconsciously, as they went about their days. He breathed against her scalp, taking in the salty-sweet scent of her. He would be safe now. A different future was possible, one in which the ghosts of Pa did not matter, a bright, orderly, prosperous future. And Natalie would take him there (Heng 332).

Now a silent rule had been broken. The possibility of a real conversation loomed—the unspoken envy and resentment that had simmered all these years, the fact that yes, every morning since she had fallen ill, Ma had asked for Natalie, and they were forced to lie, to say that she had gone out to the market and would be back in a few hours, just to calm Ma until she forgot again. The sisters looked at one another, examined their nails, then finally met Natalie's gaze. "No," they said. "She doesn't talk about you" (Heng 261).

You know. You cannot just–" Ah Boon stopped. *Walk in here and ask me to open myself up all over again*, he thought, but he did not say (Heng 253).

When he pulled up the nets, they contained only one kind of fish– black pomfres, the flat diamonds of their bodies slick in the morning light. The uniformity did not surprise him; over the years, he'd learned that the waters here were temperamental. They could be relied upon for a good catch, but from time to time they threw up only praws or squid, and other times colorful varieties of fish that weren't even supposed to be found in this region. He'd grown to accept the unpredictability, embracing it as a game to be played, like the reading of tea leaves or the grooves of a palm (Heng 217).

But the white uniform had a magic about it, one that rinsed the disdain from the voices of men like these, that straightened their backs and subdued their gazes.

But home was not a place. Home was people, home was family.

There was a trim, tidy quality to the vegetation here, one that the Lees were unused to, so different was it from the sprawling, encroaching mangroves, the tree roots that destabilized the foundations of their houses, the slimy moss that crept over everything left outside. Here, the dead leaves were swept up as soon as they dared fall; the grass was permitted to grow only to a certain height. Wildflowers and weeds were rare, springing only occasionally from the wet cracks in the rounded walls of wide storm drains.