The Journey V

"Long, how have you been? Is everything alright? Is work difficult? Are you eating well? Have you lost weight? The rice is almost ready for harvesting, and someone offered a high price for our ox the other day...." The standard questions each time Long called home which he answered in monosyllabic umms and ahhs.

"Don't worry about me, I have to go, calls are expensive. Good bye. Send my regards to Mei mei." Click and the phone line went dead.

In the rowdy noisy background of his dormitory, the silence on the other end of the line to his family in the village was deafening. It wasn't that Long didn't want to call home. It wasn't that calls were expensive, in fact they were ridiculously cheap. It wasn't that life was rosy here in Singapore. It wasn't that work was lonely, being the only grown man who could not make himself understood in this community. It wasn't that colleagues ostracised him, and customers shouted at his inability to converse in English. It wasn't that he was not willing to try, but Long just wanted to speak mandarin so he could be understood better and serve his customers quicker.

It was that he could not bring himself to let his family know any of this, at all. The more frequent the calls, the greater the temptation to breakdown each time he heard his mother's concerned voice. The longer each phone call, the higher the longing to return home to his village fields. The more words spoken, the shakier his voice may become to betray the strong front Long has been staging for the past 10 months.

There was no way but to speak less and call less frequently. Numbness is better than weakness.

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In the new flat Long now shares with 3 other acquaintances, he no longer needed to sleep on the floor on a thin, dirty, bug-ridden mattress. Long finally had his own bed albeit a double deck. It was paradise compared to what he had put up with for the past year.

While many of his more resourceful friends found accomodation in HDB flats much sooner, Long did not know many people and was shy to mix around even with his own countrymen. It was difficult for him to rent a place on his own as it was way beyond his affordability. So when the opportunity came up from Lucy who was pre-disposed to look after the welfare of foreign workers in the company, Long quickly grabbed the chance to move to a new flat.

With Lucy's resourcefulness, she got the rented place for a good deal and Long paid almost the same rent for sharing a room with 3 others, as he had been paying the unscrupulous agent for sharing the room with 7 other workers.

At least not everyone here is out to exploit foreign workers like me, Long thought to himself, grateful for the help and attention that Lucy has been giving him since he arrived.

In this new flat, Long no longer needed to share a bathroom and toilet with 30 other workers. He only had 7 other people in the flat which was brightly ventilated with sparse furnishing. A dining table and some plastic stools sat in the kitchen, and a 14 inch TV sat on a console in the living room with a 3 seater couch.

He bought himself a plastic box to keep his clothes and some other belongings he accumulated during his stay in Singapore. He no longer needed to live out of his suitcase, even if it meant having his pseudo cupboard of a plastic box hidden under his bed.

Here, he was allowed to boil water and cook rice and instant noodles. No frying or other methods of cooking were allowed except boiling.

Enterprising Long then started to cook rice for dinner and lunch the next day, topping his lunch box with boiled vegetables and boiled egg. Sometimes he added pickled vegetables for flavour. What he cooked for dinner, often was what he will have for his next meal at lunch. And this diet persisted for a long time, given the constraits of his living conditions.

Long also took on a sideline distributing flyers at the MRT stations. He didn't need to speak to anyone, just needed to ensure the flyers were handed out diligently to passers-by. For each kilo of flyers he distributed, he earned 60 cents.
This job he took on during his days off and sometimes for a few hours before he started his night shift at work, or after his day shift at work.

Soon he found out that he could also distribute more flyers if he delivered them to doorsteps or into postal boxes of housing estates. Long soon carried heavy bags of flyers and walked all over his estate to deliver them. He took the lift to the highest floor of a block of flats and walked his way down distributing flyers at the doorstep of each household. He could not understand why residents in Singapore often locked their post boxes. Perhaps it was a central government control to prevent media circulation of negative news that would affect the ruling party. Such acts were nothing new to him. But he secretly applauded the government for installing such beautiful steel postal boxes which came with a central lock which only a legitimate postman could unlock, probably with a key issued from the central government.

He also learned how to make occasional requests on his work roster to allow him to distribute flyers during pedestrian peak hours along MRT walkways. Slowly but surely Long was accumulating a tiny bit of savings from his job as well as his part time job.

With each meal that he cooked, he was saving himself a tiny sum each day. And this was the portion that he had to fork out for his utility bills in his new flat. In the previous dormitory, the utilities were included in the $250 he paid each month to the agent.

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Long thought about his tiny savings each month and smiled contentedly. He had done his family proud and his village proud by coming out here to eke a living. Here he earned 5 times more than what he made back home, and was not vulnerable to droughts and floods. He was working in a cosmopolitan city in a slick working environment.

These were the flashy things he must say, and not the loneliness or discrimination he faced and still faces daily. True that he earned 5 times more but expenses were 5-6 times higher as well. Sigh. We all see what we choose to see.

Counting down, he had 6 more months to go before his 2 year contract is up.