Certainty (26 page)
He said to Gail that sometimes the past could not be made right, not every experience could be made to fit. “I left Sandakan believing that I had to push pieces of my life away. I thought the worst thing would be to lose a sense of balance, to fall. This is how it seemed to me. But I was wrong to hold back.” He hesitated, but something in her expression pushed him to continue. “I never told you how your mother saved me.”
“But I knew,” she had said. In her bearing, in her words, there was an understanding, a recognition that shook him to the core, that now, sitting here, makes him weep. “All along, I knew.”
Beside the soccer field, parents stand beneath coloured umbrellas, sipping their coffee, their chatter soothing to him. He could be in Tawau or Sandakan, a bystander on the
padang
, a child at the edge of the field.
The first maps, he knows, were drawn in the dirt, a picture of a place set tenuously down. He can close his eyes and see the road leading to Mile 8, curving down to the sea. A boy’s hand tracing a circle on the ground, the soil warm against his fingers. He had once gone back to find it, the place between the rows of trees, but what he had tried to keep safe was lost. His childhood, a time before the war. A glass jar that moves from his father’s hand to his, a continuous question that asks, how am I to live now, when all is said and done and grief must finally be set aside. Ani in a park on the other side of the world, the words his father could not say, the remembered voice of his daughter. So many things, he thinks, that we carry all our lives, in the hope that what we know will finally redeem us, that we will find something that abides, even now, in the indefinite, the uncertain, hereafter.
While many books were an immense help to me in the course of my research, I would like to acknowledge, in particular, Erna Paris’s
Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History
(Toronto: Knopf, 2000); Maslyn Williams’s
Five Journeys from Jakarta: Inside Sukarno’s Indonesia
(New York: William Morrow, 1965); Thomas Dormandy’s
The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis
(New York: New York University Press, 1999); K.G. Tregonning’s
North Borneo
(London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1960); Stephen Budiansky’s
Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II
(New York: Touchstone, 2002); Thomas Looker’s
The Sound and the Story: NPR and the Art of Radio
. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995); Russell Miller’s
Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History
(New York: Grove Press, 1997); Raymond Firth’s
Malay Fishermen: Their Peasant Economy
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1975); and Gavan Daws and Marty Fujita’s
Archipelago: The Islands of Indonesia
(University of California Press, 1999). I would also like to acknowledge two documentaries, Karen Levine’s “Hana’s Suitcase” and Jane Lewis’s “My Father’s Story,” both of which originally aired on
CBC
Radio and served as the inspiration for Gail’s radio project. Karen Levine’s book,
Hana’s Suitcase
, based on her radio documentary, is published in Canada by Second Story Press.
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
BC
Arts Council.
In Sandakan, Tawau, Singapore, and Melbourne, I was able to interview many people who shared their stories with me. I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your generosity and trust. To my parents, and to my extended family in Canada, Malaysia, Australia, China, the United States and the Netherlands, all my gratitude and love.
Although aspects of this novel – the Japanese Occupation of British North Borneo, the Sandakan Death Marches, and the events leading to the fall of Sukarno in Indonesia in 1965 – are based on the historical record, the characters in this novel are fictional creations. The geography of Sandakan town has been slightly altered for the sake of simplicity.
William Sullivan’s diary is inspired by the story of Donald Hill, an
RAF
pilot stationed in Hong Kong who was taken prisoner by the Japanese Army in 1941. For those wishing to know more, the story is beautifully told by Andro Linklater in his book
The Code of Love
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000).
For their unwavering support, I am deeply grateful to Asya Muchnick at Little, Brown, and to Marilyn Biderman, Anita Chong, and all those at McClelland & Stewart with whom I have had the pleasure to work. My heartfelt thanks to Alex Schultz for his fine work copyediting this novel. To my editor, Ellen Seligman: I am fortunate indeed, and so grateful to her for sharing this journey with me. My thanks for her faith in this book, and for her wisdom and guidance in helping me to get the words right.
Jane Eaton Hamilton, Joy Masuhara, and Steven Dang generously shared their insights and answered my many and diffuse questions, as did Jeroen Kemperman at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. My thanks and great admiration to Don Mowatt, for opening my eyes to the world of radio. To Amanda Okopski and Dean Bakopoulos, my dear ones, unstinting in their love, generous in their joy, I am blessed by our friendship. And to Willem, my anchor and my love.
To Carol Hudgins, Cynthia Leung, and to my mother, Matilda Thien: no words can express how I miss you.
The epigraph from
The Needs of Strangers
by Michael Ignatieff, copyright © 1985 by Michael Ignatieff. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The quotation about the origins of empathy is from Richard Dawkins’s
The Selfish Gene
(London: Oxford University Press, 1976).
Gail’s description of radio signals is paraphrased from Thomas Looker’s
The Sound and the Story: NPR and the Art of Radio
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995).
The newspaper quotation on page 117 is from the article “Shortest time interval measured.”
BBC
News, February 25, 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/ nature/3486160.stm.
The words heard on the radio on page 256 and spoken by the man on the street on page 266 are from Maslyn Williams’s
Five Journeys from Jakarta: Inside Sukarno’s Indonesia
. Copyright © 1966 by Maslyn Williams. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers/William Morrow.
The quotation on page 290 is from Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “Memory.”
Madeleine Thien’s first work of fiction,
Simple Recipes
, a collection of stories published when she was twenty-six, won four awards in Canada,was a finalist of a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and was named a notable book by the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.
Certainty
is her first novel.
Originally from Vancouver, Madeleine Thien currently lives in Quebec City with her husband,Willem.