Beng Beng Revolution Read online

  Beng Beng revolution

  A Novel

  Lu Huiyi

  ISBN: 978-981-48-4517-5

  First Edition, July 2019

  © 2019 by Lu Huiyi

  Author photo by Joanne Goh. Used with permission.

  Cover design by Chee Jia Yi & Ong Hiang Ling.

  Published in Singapore by Epigram Books

  www.epigrambooks.sg

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Part One: The Deprivation

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Two: The Steam Revival

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Three: The Gentlemen’s Rebellion

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  ALSO FROM THE EPIGRAM BOOKS FICTION PRIZE

  WINNER

  Impractical Uses of Cake by Yeoh Jo-Ann

  FINALIST

  The Movie That No One Saw by May Seah

  The Lights That Find Us by Anittha Thanabalan

  2017

  The Riot Act by Sebastian Sim (winner)

  Sofia and the Utopia Machine by Judith Huang

  9th of August by Andre Yeo

  Nimita’s Place by Akshita Nanda

  If It Were Up to Mrs Dada by Carissa Foo

  18 Walls by Teo Xue Shen

  Kallang Basin Adagio by Khor Kuan Liang

  Band Eight by Tham Cheng-E

  2016

  The Gatekeeper by Nuraliah Norasid (winner)

  State of Emergency by Jeremy Tiang

  Fox Fire Girl by O Thiam Chin

  Surrogate Protocol by Tham Cheng-E

  Misdirection by Ning Cai

  Lieutenant Kurosawa’s Errand Boy by Warran Kalasegaran

  The Last Immigrant by Lau Siew Mei

  Lion Boy and Drummer Girl by Pauline Loh

  2015

  Now That It’s Over by O Thiam Chin (winner)

  Sugarbread by Balli Kaur Jaswal

  Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao! by Sebastian Sim

  Death of a Perm Sec by Wong Souk Yee

  Annabelle Thong by Imran Hashim

  Kappa Quartet by Daryl Qilin Yam

  Altered Straits by Kevin Martens Wong

  Dedicated to my family, with love.

  Part One: The Deprivation

  Chapter 1

  “Whatever affects the world is going to affect us,” said Father one day, as he nursed his morning coffee. “It’s all linked. We can’t run away.”

  The news was flashing on television, but the volume was muted because Mother was still sleeping in. Huat had long since gone out, because he had a strange penchant for doing meaningful things with his life. Beng, who was slightly less inclined towards productivity, made himself comfortable at the dining table and glanced at the screen. Another war, another conflict, another crisis.

  “There, see?” said Father, gesturing at the screen. “All linked.”

  The Deprivation had begun in the Middle East, early in the year. Nobody had really thought the day would come when national leaders would declare, in sombre, bewildered tones, that their societies were finally running out of raw energy to harvest and use. But there they were, and the rest of the world watched in shock and dismay as oil prices soared.

  “So you think the Deprivation is going to affect us?” Beng said, watching the programme with more concern than comprehension.

  “If it’s as bad as some people say, then maybe,” Father said, but he didn’t look all that worried, as though he didn’t quite believe it himself.

  “They always say until so bad, but—” Grandfather shrugged and took a swig of his coffee. His eyes fluttered shut in a display of bliss somewhat disproportionate to the consumption of three-in-one instant coffee off the discount rack. Beng had an enduring suspicion that Grandfather had a habit of lacing his coffee with something out of the liquor cabinet, and nine in the morning was really pushing it, even for Grandfather. But Grandfather had turned vice into a subtle art and was very good at not getting caught.

  “They’ve been saying it’s bad for a very long time, though,” Beng persisted. “Don’t you think we should worry?”

  Father and Grandfather exchanged good-humoured looks of derision. Or at least, Father’s look was one of good-humoured derision. Grandfather was probably just good-humoured because he was buzzed as hell.

  “Worry for what?” said Father. “It’s not like we can do anything even if it’s bad.”

  He got up to refill his mug. Beng shrugged and reached for another piece of toast. It was a pleasant, lazy kind of weekend morning, and Beng had errands to run and a social appointment or two to get to. The conversation subsided into the realm of the frivolous and was soon forgotten.

  But Beng, as it turned out, was eventually proven right—although Father, as it turned out, wasn’t wrong about that last bit too.

  “I’m sure the world won’t just run out of oil,” said Huat that same night, rolling his eyes. Beng frowned. Huat was a full eight years older than Beng was, and the only one in the family with a university degree and a freshly-landed executive job. This apparently allowed him to make declarations about the state of the world with far greater arrogance than the average man, but not necessarily a corresponding degree of accuracy.

  Father huffed a little unhappily as Huat’s voice cut above the drama serial that he was watching on television. It was some kind of period drama—Father was a sucker for Chinese imperial dramas and watched them religiously every evening, though for some reason he didn’t like acknowledging it to everyone else. Possibly because Mother tended to make snide remarks about people hooked on outdated shows that just recycled the same plots over and over again, and because Grandfather tended to laugh uproariously at every tragic exile or imprisonment scene that the dramas offered. By way of self-defence, Father usually claimed that he only watched it because people had left the television on, which was technically not untrue if by “people” he meant himself.

  “Why are we talking about politics? TV time is family time,” he said.

  “Technically, you’re the one who began talking about it in the morning,” Beng said.

  “And why’re you still watching that?” Huat said, just as the programme flickered and jumped wildly before resuming as though nothing had happened. “Reception’s been terrible.”

  “Probably because of the power cuts,” said Mother at once.

  “Correlation isn’t causation, Mother.”

  “My colleagues were talking about something in the Middle East,” said Mother, but Huat merely shrugged.

  “They’re all over-reacting, that’s what,” he said.

  “And how do you know you aren’t under-reacting, Huat?” said Beng.

  Huat blinked. There was a bit of a pause, broken only by the weeping of an abandoned concubine, Father’s stifled sniffles and Grandfather’s low irreverent chortling.

  “Don’t call me that,” Huat said at last.

  Beng was understandably bewildered.

  “Under-reacting isn’t exactly an insult, Huat—”

  “No, not that,” his brother said, closing his eyes briefly as if mortally offended. God. What a drama queen. “My name’s Archibald. Call me Archibald.”

  “When did you become Archibald?” Beng said, so loudly that Father sighed and glanced away from his show.

  “I’ve t
old you before. You weren’t listening.”

  “Ahh-kee-ball—” Father attempted obligingly, having given up on his show as lost. The name was so badly butchered that both Huat and Beng cringed as one. The conversation devolved into an involuntarily-imposed exercise in pronunciation, and the discussion was momentarily forgotten.

  Admittedly, most people had shared Huat’s view on the whole matter at that point in time. The Deprivation had begun in brief, alarming flashes—alarming because nobody had ever believed that the world would run out of power—but in brief enough spates that everybody could pretend it wasn’t happening or spreading with vicious, unstoppable urgency.

  Beng had heard about the oil and gas crisis overseas, which every week seemed to bring with it updates on conflicts being escalated, and gloomy doomsday predictions from anxious, withered-looking professors on TV. Something about a global shutdown, an end to all modern services and the potentially unstoppable nose-diving of the world economy. But somehow, in spite of all that, it didn’t occur to anyone that the fear should transcend beyond a low-grade passive sort of worry. It was the kind of worrying that people usually indulged in when they talked about how vulnerable Singapore was as a country, lacking in natural resources and so very small, and how every major conflict would bring with it ripple effects that the state could not quite evade—ideas in abstract, but spoken with the confidence that all consequences could be effectively mitigated, if not prevented.

  After all, wars had been fought and lost over oil before, and the world had gone on ticking. The country continued in its bubble of stability, albeit with more frequent blackouts and electrical shortages than its people had ever remembered; the siege mentality remained more of a cautionary bedtime tale than an actual cause for mass hysteria.

  To fret with others was to entertain a legitimate concern, but to fret alone was an indicator of paranoia. Beng, whose attempts at discussing the situation were laughed off by almost everyone he spoke to, thought that their reactions were hugely uncalled-for. To be fair to his friends and family, Beng had never really been known for his astuteness as a political critic (or for any other sort of astuteness, if he was being honest), but he hadn’t expected such a uniform dismissal regardless.

  Then one day, one of the northern towns in Singapore experienced a complete blackout that simply could not be reversed. A power outage, the news said with bland composure, and furnished few other details by way of clarification.

  “Okay, so what do you say to that now?” said Beng, with more triumph than was probably socially appropriate.

  Huat’s eyebrow twitched a little, but he otherwise retained impressive composure.

  “The news said it was a power outage,” he said.

  “Yes, because we’re running out of power, Huat,” said Beng, slowly, as if talking to an idiot. Which, to be fair, sometimes felt like the case with someone as stubborn as Huat could be.

  “Look,” said Huat, who was good at multitasking, even when it came to being stubborn. “I’ve told you—my name is Archibald.”

  The Yishun town outage was never properly resolved. People began carrying lanterns around when in the area, and the loss of functioning traffic lights turned driving in Yishun into quite the adventure, but nobody really expected this state of things to last forever. Of course, there was a lot of complaining and some angry Internet postings and a flurry of online jokes in very bad taste. But other than that, nobody was too fussed for the rest of the week.

  At least, until the next town went dark, and the next, and the next, and then the entire island.

  Beng went to the nearest supermarket for torches. It was a mess there—the entire place was dim and bleak—the Hougang supermarket meets film noir aesthetic, he thought to himself with a sudden flash of humour. There were hundreds of frantic people thronging the aisles and sweeping whatever they could off the shelves. By the time Beng had shoved his way to the correct aisle, it was empty.

  “Huh,” Beng said.

  Not a single torch remained.

  An auntie strode past him, her trolley loaded high with what looked like a hundred torches—hand-cranked, battery-operated, the works.

  “Eh, I wanted one,” Beng said.

  “Issit?” said the auntie with casual, infuriating unconcern. She walked faster.

  Beng reached out and grabbed the trolley; it jerked to a halt.

  “I’ll just take one,” he said, plucking the top one off the heap.

  She snatched it back with incredible swiftness and strength.

  “Who said you can take?” she snapped.

  “You took all of them!”

  “My house got blackout what!”

  “Your house got blackout then nobody’s house got blackout ah?”

  She bristled like an angry cat. “I was first!”

  Beng made to reply, but the pin-drop silence behind him gave him pause. He turned slowly to find that everyone in the supermarket had gathered behind the two of them, watching in deadly stillness, undisguised want in their eyes.

  “Um,” Beng said, with all the eloquence and charisma needed for such a delicate situation.

  “First come, first serve,” the auntie sniffed with reckless abandon, all ready eloquence and no charisma at all.

  The crowd charged.

  In retrospect, it was a bit of a stupid fight, because more torches were smashed than actually obtained, and the folks who got themselves just one or two of the torches probably weren’t going to make them last for more than a week at most. The auntie emerged from the wrangle with a sizeable bump on her head and three torches clutched tightly and indignantly to her chest, but already she was doing better than most of the other participants in the fight, and infinitely better than Beng, who wasn’t very good in any kind of physical pow-wow.

  “And you think we were overreacting? Come on now, Huat,” said Beng an hour or two later, as the family dined in the flickering glow of tall altar candles.

  “I haven’t die, then already light funeral candles,” smirked Grandfather, with his morbid and thoroughly inappropriate sense of humour. His comparatively more squeamish relations responded on cue with outraged cries of “Touch wood!”, accompanied by vigorous smacks on the wooden table surface. That unfortunately jarred the table so much that all the candles went out at once, and dinner was put on hold while everyone felt around for their precious supply of matches to re-light them with.

  “You sure these were the only things you could buy?” Father complained, once the candles were re-lit. “So unlucky.”

  Grandfather was still laughing.

  “On the bright side, I haven’t been treated to a candlelight dinner in a while,” said Mother, with a hard brightness that was equal parts humour and bitterness. Everyone at the table winced a little except for Father, who promptly shut up and began chewing on his food as though the bok choy had done him grievous wrong.

  “See, Huat?” said Beng, refusing to let his point go. “You can’t pretend everything’s still working.”

  “My name is Archibald,” said Huat in a long-suffering voice.

  “You have a terrible sense of priorities,” said Beng.

  “You have a terrible face,” said Huat.

  “And when did you even decide you were getting that name anyway?” Mother chimed in, switching targets.

  “I wrote Beng Huat on your birth cert,” Father clarified, in case anyone was suspicious of his intentions in this whole debacle.

  “You converted, is it?” said Mother.

  Huat went from exasperated to mildly confused.

  “What’re you all talking about?” he said. “I just wanted a professional name. For networking. And meeting new clients. What’s wrong with Archibald?”

  “What’s wrong with Koh Beng Huat?” said Father.

  “A lot of things I could think of,” said Beng, unable to resist.

  Huat abruptly lost all his dignified eldest-son composure and flicked a piece of bok choy at him.

  “Well,” said B
eng, as oyster sauce dripped slowly down his face. He snitched a slice of meat off one of the communal dishes in what he fancied was a stealthy and dangerous manner.

  “You started it,” said Huat, picking up his glass pre-emptively.

  Beng smirked. “I love the smell of bok choy in the evening,” he said.

  Huat snorted in spite of himself, but did not put his glass down.

  “Boys.”

  Their mother’s glare quelled the imminent food fight at once. Huat lifted his glass to his lips as though that was what he had meant to do all along, while an outraged Beng settled for peeling the greasy vegetable off his forehead.

  “Anyway, it’s not that there’s anything wrong,” said Huat. “I just wanted something a bit more...polished.”

  “Archibald?” the whole table said in unison.

  Huat was a little taken aback, and considerably wounded.

  “It’s aristocratic,” he said defensively.

  “I thought your name was Archibald,” said Grandfather. He sounded a little upset, and rightly so, because he had had to put in a lot of effort to get his grandson’s new name right.

  “Huat means prosperity,” said Father, at the same time.

  “I meant that it’s classy,” said Huat, before anyone else could get a word in. “The first part means something precious—and the second—”

  “Means bald,” said Beng.

  “It does not.”

  “Our family has good genes for hair,” said Mother reassuringly.

  “Fifty-five and never had to dye it black!” Father chimed in helpfully.

  “So is your name still Archibald?” Grandfather wanted to know.

  Huat made a wordless appeal to the ceiling for sanity and patience.

  “Anyway, I’ve introduced myself to all my colleagues as Archibald,” he said. “So can we please move on?”

  A pause.

  “Archibald Koh Beng Huat,” Mother said, experimentally.