Kathu
The road to Kathu was worse than she had imagined.
They rode in a pony trap — a small wooden cart pulled by a short, stocky horse that her father called a Java pony, though it looked nothing like any horse Mei had seen in drawings. The cart jolted over stones and ruts and holes that swallowed the wheels to the axle, and her father gripped the side rail and said nothing, his jaw tight. Aldridge sat across from them with his leather case on his lap, bracing himself with one hand and writing in his notebook with the other, his handwriting lurching across the page each time the cart dropped.
The road cut through jungle. Thick, green, pressing in from both sides — trees with trunks wider than the cart, vines hanging like ropes, the air heavy with the smell of rot and growth. A stream of workers moved along the roadside in both directions: men in rough cotton carrying tools, buffalo carts loaded with timber, and once, an elephant — enormous, grey, patient — hauling a piece of machinery strapped to a wooden frame on its back. Aldridge stared at it. He fumbled for his notebook and started sketching.
"Remarkable," he said. "Absolutely remarkable."
Mei's father pointed ahead, where the treeline broke. "Kathu."
They passed a small shrine at a bend in the road — a wooden spirit house on a post, hung with flowers, a cup of rice set before it. Aldridge asked about it, and about the temples — he had seen the layered rooflines from the harbour. Mei told him about Wat Chalong, the island's main Buddhist temple, to the south of the town. People had fled there once, she said, for refuge.
"Refuge from what?"
"The troubles. In 1876. There was an uprising." She paused. "The monk there — Luang Pho Chaem — is said to have helped negotiate the peace."
Aldridge nodded politely, the way a person nods when filing something away that does not concern them. "Interesting." He turned back to his notebook.
Then the mines opened before them and the shrine was behind and forgotten.
She had heard Ah Seng describe the mines. She had listened to Beng Huat's flat voice telling her what the work did to a man's body. She had imagined it — the mud, the noise, the bent backs. But imagination was a smaller thing than she had known.
The land was stripped bare. Where there had been jungle there was now red-brown earth, churned and scarred, stretching across a valley in every direction. Abandoned test pits dotted the edges, filled with dark, still water — mosquitoes drifted over the surface in clouds. Rivers had been cut from their beds and forced through hand-dug channels — long wooden troughs lined the hillsides, and water roared through them, brown and fast, carrying mud and gravel into sluice boxes where the heavy tin settled and the lighter earth washed away. The sound was enormous. It filled the valley like a living thing — the thunder of water, the crack of picks on stone, the shouts of overseers calling in Hokkien above it all.
And the men. Dozens of them, hundreds, moving through the churned ground in lines. They stood in water up to their knees, bent over wooden pans, sifting. Others carried gravel in baskets on their backs, climbing up the sides of channels that had been dug by hand into the hillside. Their clothes were dark with mud and water. From a distance, the men blurred into the mud and water — shapes bent, moving, part of the terrain.
The mine towkay — a thick-set man in a clean cotton shirt who had been waiting for them at the edge of the worksite — greeted her father with the easy warmth of old business partners. He glanced at Aldridge, then at Mei, and said in Hokkien: "The girl translates?"
"She translates," her father confirmed.
The towkay led them past the working sluices toward a cleared area at the base of a hillside. Aldridge walked ahead, pointing, explaining. The equipment had taken three days to assemble — Mei could see it now: a heavy iron nozzle, dark and blunt, mounted on a swivel atop a wooden platform. Riveted pipes ran from the nozzle back along the ground to a squat steam-driven pump that sat near the river's edge, already hissing. Two of Aldridge's hired men were tending it, feeding the firebox with wood. The pipes were bolted together in sections and braced against wooden stakes driven into the mud.
"The hydraulic monitor," Aldridge said. He was not speaking to anyone in particular. He was looking at it the way Mei's father looked at a column of numbers that added up correctly.
The towkay had called the workers in. The overseers had pulled men from the nearest sluice lines, and they stood in a loose crowd at the edge of the cleared area — fifty, sixty men, still holding their picks and shovels and wooden pans, mud drying on their arms, watching. They had been told to watch. An overseer stood behind them.
Aldridge crouched beside the pump and checked something. Then he stood and nodded to the man at the valve.
The monitor fired.
The sound came first — a deep crack, then a roar that swallowed every other noise in the valley. A jet of water — white, thick as a man's body — slammed into the hillside thirty feet away. The earth tore apart. Rock and soil exploded outward in a cascade of brown mud, sliding downhill in a heavy flood toward the sluice channels below. Mei felt the ground shake under her feet. Spray hit her face, warm and gritty.
In minutes, a section of hillside that would have taken a crew of men days to dig by hand was gone — carved out, washed away, reduced to a river of mud and gravel flowing toward the sluice boxes where the heavy cassiterite would settle.
The workers watched in silence. Mei scanned their faces — the same expression, repeated across the crowd. Not awe. Something colder.
The towkay watched with a different kind of silence. He was doing arithmetic. He turned to Mei's father and said, in Hokkien, quietly: "I could run this section with six men instead of sixty."
Aldridge was in his element. He walked Mei and her father along the pipe line, pointing out where additional monitors would go, explaining the palong system — elevated sluice boxes built on wooden scaffolding — that would process the runoff at scale. His voice was warm with certainty. He crouched beside a section of pipe and ran his hand along the rivets.
She asked him what happened to the workers. She asked it carefully, as if the question had just occurred to her, as if it were small.
He did not hesitate. "I find this kind of labour deeply troubling, Miss Lim. It breaks men young. There is no future in it." He gestured at the valley — the water, the mud, the lines of bent figures. "The monitors will free these workers. They can find better lives — fishing, farming, the rubber plantations opening up in the north." He said it steadily, with the conviction of a person who had thought it through. "Honestly, Miss Lim, they'll be better off."
She translated his next remark — something about pipe fittings — with perfect accuracy. She said nothing about the rest.
The workers had been dismissed back to the sluice lines, but some lingered at the edge of the cleared area, looking at the monitor, the pipes, the pump. The machine sat cooling in the sun. Water dripped from the nozzle.
Mei was standing beside Aldridge, holding his notebook while he sketched the hillside cut, when a figure broke from the lingering group.
Kwek.
He stood at the edge of the cleared ground, his face streaked with mud, and he looked at her. At her, standing beside the British man in a linen jacket. At the notebook in her hands. At the machine that had just torn apart the hillside he and sixty other men had been paid to dig.
He walked toward her, and before she could speak he was talking — fast, raw, in Hokkien.
"What are you doing here?"
"Kwek — "
"Is this it? Is this what you were hiding? Your father's business — this is the visitor?" He pointed at Aldridge without looking at him. "The British company. The machine. You knew." His voice cracked. "You sat in that room with us and ate our rice and you knew what was coming."
Other workers were turning to look. The towkay barked at Kwek to get back in the line. Aldridge looked from Kwek to Mei, unable to follow, his face confused.
"What is he saying?" Aldridge asked.
Mei could not answer him without revealing she knew this worker. She could not explain to Kwek without exposing Ah Seng in front of strangers. Every direction was a wall.
And then — almost without thinking — she said to Kwek in Hokkien, quickly, under her breath: "This work is not good work. It breaks men. He says there will be other things when the machines come."
She was repeating Aldridge's words. She heard them leave her mouth and she heard what they sounded like in this place, spoken to this person, three feet from the machine that had just made him obsolete, and she wanted to pull them back.
Kwek went still. His face changed — not surprise, something older than that. He had heard this before. From people who did not carry gravel.
Then, quietly: "What else am I supposed to do?"
He was asking her. He owed a debt he could not pay. He had a mother and two sisters who ate because he sent money. Fishing? Farming? With what savings, what land, what connections? Mei had no answer.
She said to Aldridge, her voice steady: "He is asking about the demonstration. The workers are nervous."
To Kwek, rapidly, under her breath: "Not here. Not now. I will explain."
Kwek stared at her. The overseer pulled him back toward the line. He went. He did not look at her again.
Aldridge sketched. Mei translated. Her voice did not shake.
That night, back at the shophouse, Mei sat in the inner courtyard where the sky showed between the rooflines — a narrow stripe of dark blue, the first stars. The house was quiet. Her father was in the front room, writing in his account book. Her mother was upstairs.
She did not go to see Ah Seng. She did not know what to say to him. She did not know what to say to anyone.
She sat in the courtyard and listened to the sounds of the house — the creak of wood, the distant drums of the festival, the soft hiss of incense burning at the ancestor shrine. She did not move.