Amidst The Stars

Where The Lights Were

  The city of Macau never slept, and neither did Vicente.

  His brother told him of how he, as a baby, would stay up for hours, staring out the window at the street lamps and buildings through his crib with wide eyes. Vicente didn't remember much about Macau except for those lights, shining like stars even when the clock struck midnight. There were lights of every colour of the rainbow, some arranged in patterns and some gleaming alone. He would stare at them, the sight outside the window blinking and flashing in a dazzling show, practically all night long until the sun came up and replaced them with its own glow.

  Night after night he'd gaze at the myriad of artificial stars that blazed in the city beyond. They were so different from his brother Yao, who had hair and eyes as black as ink.

  One night, Yao had scooped him up from his crib and carried him, grunting from his weight, to look out the window and into the night. "Look," he'd whispered in his accented Cantonese, "look at where we are. It's huge, isn't it? When you grow bigger, Mother and Father will take us out there, and we'll walk and walk until we know this place like the back of our hands."

  He told him about his old home another night, under the soft glow of Vicente's night-light. "Before you were born, Mom, Dad and I lived in Beijing," he'd said, "and it was nothing like Macau. The nighttimes were always dark, and I don't think anybody walked in the streets after sunset. This is far more beautiful, don't you think?"

  Yao spoke to him like that almost every night, sitting by his crib and talking. He remembered Yao saying once, when he was almost two years old, "Mom made us egg tarts today for dessert. One day, she'll teach me how and we can eat them together. I'll learn how to make all kinds of things so that I can cook dinner all by myself."

  He helped Vicente towards the window and pointed at a massive structure in the distance, surrounded by scaffolding and lit up like a beacon. "You see that? The news says that that building is called the Venetian Hotel, and it will be finished very soon. When it's open, we can visit it! I bet it will look like a castle."

  That day never came.

  When Yao turned six years old, the Huang family bundled into a ferry and sailed away from Macau. Away from the blinding lights, away from the quiet lullabies and bedtime stories.

  His brother Leon was born soon after Vicente turned two, in an apartment within the heart of Hong Kong. The nighttimes were different there, with the curtains drawn in his bedroom and Leon's wails splitting the air every hour. Yao never stayed with him, and with him went the quiet radiance that he remembered from his two short years in Macau.

  Vicente remembered much more of Hong Kong, of shouting shopkeepers in markets and shopping malls filled with chattering people. He remembered sesame rolls that looked like film and curry-filled puff pastries, cold tea and warm milk and everything in between.

  Not much was quiet any more — not the deafening hustle and bustle outside his home, not the nonsensical babbling of his younger brother, definitely not the conversations his parents had after dinner in their bedroom. Vicente never understood what his parents were talking about, although snatches of the loud, unpleasant discussions told him they were about Leon and a man from England.

  He watched Yao and his mother cook, preparing everything from steamed eggs to potstickers. He was let into the kitchen for the first time on his third birthday. Yao gave Vicente a spoon and a bowl of chives and instructed him to spoon the chives into the bubbling pot of soup on the stove, while he kneaded the dough and pulled it into thin strands. His mother, busy wrapping wontons, had not noticed Vicente and his brother dropping egg noodles into the soup and finishing the rest of the dish together.

  His father proclaimed that day's dinner to be the best he'd ever had.

  He never got a second chance to cook in Hong Kong.

  Vicente's first time on an aeroplane was when he was almost four years old, when the family left Hong Kong and took off for a different country. Taiwan was so different from Hong Kong and Macau; it was like an entirely different world altogether.

  He barely understood the rapid Mandarin that people spoke, and he saw no lights out from the window of the apartment at night. Yao was the only one out of the three brothers who fit in perfectly, with his flawless, accent-free Mandarin.

  Their mother was barely at home, and with their father at work, Yao had to take up the role of caretaker. Dinners were, more often than not, nothing but steamed rice and the occasional fried egg. Their father would come home hungry and disappointed at the meagre servings, and they would fuss over one-year-old Leon and wonder where their mother went.

  The answer came when Vicente's sister was born.

  Yue Ling, nicknamed "Ling", was nothing like the rest of her family. Her eyes were a deep, glittering hazel and, like Leon, she had glossy brown hair instead of Yao and Vicente's black locks. Their father soon went to his wife and confronted her about Ling's strange appearance, but he never got an answer.

  "You look just like your father," their mother had once whispered while rocking Ling to sleep. Vicente, busy peering at a book, had barely heard it. But it was clear that Ling and her father were like day and night, and as Vicente glanced back and forth from his sister to his father, he noticed how he stared at Ling like she was some sort of stranger.

  He nearly forgot about it, as he graduated from kindergarten and went on to primary school. Their mother continued to disappear mysteriously, and Yao was weighed down by both schoolwork and the burden of taking care of his three siblings. Vicente soon joined Yao in cooking, cleaning and tutoring, crashing into bed half-asleep and waking up the next day praying he wouldn't fall asleep in class.

  His first year of primary school passed quietly, even though he barely had the energy to study. Ling started going to kindergarten, and their mother was home even less. That left Yao and Vicente dead on their feet as they continued to work and work and work.

  Then the days were barely quiet. On the rare occasion that their mother was home after Yao and Vicente returned from school, she would fly into arguments with their father behind closed doors and at night, when they thought the siblings were asleep.

  They never were.

  Once, during a particularly nasty fight, Leon had gone crawling into Vicente's bed, sniffling and covering his ears. Every sharp remark and harsh accusation could be heard through their closed door.

  It was that night that he decided he'd never find anything like the quietness of his birthplace anywhere else.

  He'd shifted over and covered his brother with his thin blanket, trying his best to think of what Yao would do and patted Leon's head. "Y-You'll be fine," he'd tried to say, handing Leon a piece of tissue. "We'll be fine."

  Vicente had tried his best to sound honest, lying there awkwardly as Leon cried in his arms and their parents shouted and screamed outside the room.

  They had drifted off to sleep holding each other, hiding under the blanket in an attempt to block out the sounds of conflict.