The Great Reclamation

ALSO BY RACHEL HENGSuicide Club RIVERHEAD BOOKSAn imprint of Penguin Random House LLCpenguinrandomhouse.comCopyright © 2023 by Rachel HengPenguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.Riverhead and the R colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Heng, Rachel, author.Title: The great reclamation / Rachel Heng.Description: New York: Riverhead Book, 2023.Identifiers: LCCN 2022001223 (print) | LCCN 2022001224 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593420119 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593420133 (ebook)Classification: LCC PS3608.E548 G74 2023 (print) | LCC PS3608.E548 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001223LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001224International edition ISBN: 9780593713044Cover design: Grace HanCover art: (Detail of painting) © Nicholas Egon. All rights reserved 2022 / Bridgeman ImagesBook design by Cassandra Garruzzo Mueller, adapted for ebook by Maggie HuntThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.pid_prh_6.0_142879847_c0_r0 For my mother We do not lay undue stress on the past. We do not see nation-building and modernization as primarily an exercise in reuniting the present generation with a past generation and its values and glories.S. RAJARATNAM, SPEECH AT THE OPENING OF THE SIXTH ASIAN ADVERTISING CONGRESS AT THE SINGAPORE CONFERENCE HALL, JULY 1, 1968 CONTENTSPART IA Small IslandPART IIOnly Dogs Have Licenses and NumbersPART IIINothing Grows beneath the Banyan TreePART IVFill the Earth and Subdue ItPART VFrom Third World to First_142879847_ PART IA Small Island Chapter OneDecades later, the kampong would trace it all back to this very hour, waves draining the light from this slim, hungry moon. Decades later, they would wonder what could have been had the Lees simply turned back, had some sickness come upon the father manning the outboard motor, or some screaming fit befallen the youngest, forcing them to abandon the day’s work and steer their small wooden craft home. Decades later, they would wonder if any difference could have been made at all.Or would past still coalesce into present: The uncle dying the way he did, an outcast burned to blackened bone in a house some said was never his anyway. The kampong still destroyed, not swallowed whole by the waves in accordance with some angry god’s decree, as the villagers had always feared, but taken to pieces and sold for parts by the inhabitants themselves. If the little boy, the sweetest, most sensitive boy in the kampong, would nevertheless have become a man who so easily bent the future to his will.Perhaps he would have; perhaps this had nothing to do with the hour, the boat, the sea, and everything to do with the boy. But these questions could only be asked after the wars had been fought and the nation born and the sea—once thought of as dependable, eternal—stopped with ton upon ton of sand. These questions would not occur to anyone until the events had fully passed them by, until there was nothing to be done, all were fossils, all was calcified history.For now, though, the year was still 1941, the territory of Singapore still governed by the Ang Mohs as it had been for the past century, and the boy, very little, very afraid, still crouched in the back of his father’s fishing boat. Lee Ah Boon was seven, already a year late, as Hia liked to remind him. Hia, now nine, had taken his first trip on his sixth birthday. But while Hia at six had been a boy with plump, tanned arms and strong calves like springs that could propel him over the low wooden fence at the perimeter of the kampong, Ah Boon at seven was still cave-chested, with the scrawny limbs and delicate hands of a girl. Despite as much time spent in the sun as his brother, Ah Boon’s skin retained its milky pallor, as fine as the white flesh of an expensive fish steamed to perfection. Hence his nickname.“Bawal!”At the sound of his brother’s voice, Ah Boon sprang away from the boat’s side. In the weak moonlight the sea around them appeared as viscous black oil, roiling gently in the breeze. He shuddered to think what could be waiting beneath its pleated surface.“Scared, ah, Bawal?”Hia clambered toward Ah Boon, stepping over the ropes and nets that littered the floor of the small boat. He moved with a careless, threatening ease, like the foot-long monitor lizards that scuttled through the tall grass around the kampong. Hia grabbed Ah Boon’s shoulders, turning his torso out toward the sea.“Wah, so brave!”Hia pushed his brother suddenly, as if to tip him out of the boat. The sea lurched up toward Ah Boon’s face and he clawed at the side, letting out a small whimper.“You know,” Hia said. “Pa never tell you everything about your first trip out. He never tell you about the night swim, hor?”Hia went on to say that it was a tradition that every fisherman’s son went through on his first trip. That soon, Pa would stop the boat in the middle of the empty sea and tell Ah Boon to get out into the water.All around them pulsed the ocean. And up above, blank and starless, was the unending sky. A cloud scraped the thin moon; the darkness deepened.Ah Boon thought of the fish. Bright-eyed creatures with silver bodies of pure, spasming muscle. For the past year it had been his terrible job to help sort them, still alive in the nets when his father came home. Horrified by gasping, desperate mouths and manic shiny eyes, he had run away crying at first, but the jeers of his brother and the stern,