The tax takes up all the money they have saved for Song Ying’s education and more, leaving them in debt. The baby is beautiful. He is spoiled by all the members of the family, and grows fat very quickly. Song Ying’s mother is happy and hardly notices Song Ying any more, except to tell her, “Look, you have a beautiful brother. Isn’t that enough?” Song Ying’s father takes a promotion in order to help pay the extra tax, and another night-job in a restaurant. “Don’t worry,” he tells his daughter, “I will find you a good job in the bank even without a university degree.” Song Ying cries into her pillow at night, but nobody hears.
Then Song Ying learns of a college in England where for a modest fee overseas students can enrol and get a student visa, without having to attend any classes. With a student visa, she can come to Britain to study, and still work part-time. No one will check how many hours she is working. The college will gladly confirm that she is attending classes, so long as she pays the fees. They will even help her to find a job. She can work all the hours she likes, and so favourable is the exchange rate with the yuan that, even after paying for the airfare and the college fees, the money she earns will more than fund her first year of university in Beijing-she does the calculations carefully, for she cannot afford to make a mistake. Then she applies to the college, is accepted, and signs an agreement to pay for her airfare and her fees from the wages she will earn.
The college is not what she expected-it is just some rooms above a betting shop in a shabby street miles from the centre of London. There are only four classrooms. Most of the students, like herself, have not come to study. Her job in a busy restaurant often leaves her feeling too tired to concentrate on the few English classes she does attend. Through the college, she meets Soo Lai Bee, a Malay-sian Chinese girl, who has enrolled for an English language course (the college does run some genuine courses alongside its other activities). For Song Ying, having grown up without brothers or sisters in the intensely protected environment of her parents’ home, to have the company of another girl of her age is delightful. They speak the same language, and they have so much to talk about. Soo Lai Bee is sympathetic to her troubles, and has problems of her own to share. They become inseparable. When the college puts out information about the strawberry-picking job, and offers to provide (for a fee, of course) the requisite papers declaring that they are students of agriculture, they both decide on the spur of the moment to give it a try.
Although the college found Song Ying the strawberry-picking job, she has not yet earned enough to pay her college fees, let alone save enough for university. However, she is hard-working, intelligent and ambitious. Surely she will find a way to achieve her dream?
To be Chinese in Malaysia you have to be twice as clever and work twice as hard to get anywhere, that’s what Soo Lai Bee’s father told her. Even then, it’s not always enough. So when Soo Lai Bee, known to the others as Chinese Girl Two, got five straight A’s in her STPM exams and still failed to get a place in medical school, while a number of Bumiputra Malay students with lower grades got quota places, her hopes were dashed. It’s because the Chinese are too successful in Malaysia, her father muttered darkly. If the majority Bumiputra population gets resentful, there will be riots against the Chinese. Look at Indonesia. Even so, it rankled. Her parents, who were ambitious for her, agreed that she should study in England.
Yes, it would cost a lot of money. But her father had funds, having built up a successful family construction business. If you’re Chinese in Malaysia, the only way to do business is to team up with a Bumiputra company. They get the contract, under regulations which restrict granting of contracts to non-Malays, then you buy the contract from them. They get the business, you do the work, the law is observed, and everybody is happy.
In fact Soo Lai Bee’s father got on quite well with his Bumiputra business partner, Abdul Ismail, who had made his millions selling on Bumiputra-quota car-import permits to the Chinese, and dabbled in construction contracts as a sideline; they even met socially sometimes. It was at one of these gatherings that Soo Lai Bee met Zia Ismail, his son. It was partly the fact that he was Bumiputra that attracted her to him; it was partly the fact that she was not Malay that attracted him to her. It is the privilege of young people to fall in love with the wrong person, and they did.
Abdul Ismail was furious. He gave his business partner an ultimatum: break up the relationship, or break up the business partnership. Soo Lai Bee wept and wept, but really, there was no choice. Her mother and two older sisters put pressure on her. Her father warned that without the business partnership, and the lucrative public sector contracts, there would be no fees to fund her English university education. Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you, said Zia Ismail.
Her English medical school place was conditional on her achieving a Grade 7 in the International English Language Test, and her parents thought it best to get her out of the way at once. She signed up with a college for overseas students in London. Within two weeks of her departure for England, Soo Lai Bee learnt that Zia was engaged to someone else.
At first she was sad, then she was furious, then she was glad to be away from home, and in a new country where nobody cared what race you were. At the college, she made friends with Song Ying, another Chinese girl, who wasn’t even studying but just needed a work permit. They talked for hours about mothers, fathers, boyfriends, brothers, sisters, Poles, Ukrainians, Malays and Englishes. They laughed and cried together. They went off to pick strawberries together. They went off to Amsterdam together.
Buttercup Meadow
The Majestic Hotel at Shermouth might have been considered luxurious in the 19505, compared with hotels on the Baltic, but it has seen little by way of refurbishment or even basic maintenance since then. Among its many discomforts are the fact that the lift is broken (Yola and Malta ’s room is on the fifth floor), the water in the communal bathrooms is turned off after 9 PM (en suite? You must be joking) and it is infested with cockroaches. They do, however, have a very nice view of the sea.
But the worst thing about the Majestic Hotel is that inside its massive redbrick-Gothic cockroach-crawling walls are housed some two hundred people, not travellers or holiday makers, but people trying to live their lives here-migrant workers like themselves, asylum-seekers from every strife-torn corner of the world, homeless families from city slums in England-stacked one above the other like souls in hell, jostling in the queues for the filthy toilets, stealing each other’s milk from the mouldy communal fridges, keeping each other awake with their arguments, celebrations and nightmares.
There are no communal meals, and ‘guests’ have to take their meals in cafes or forage for themselves and eat in their own rooms-nice for the cockroaches. And though there is no birdsong, neither is there ever silence; for even in the dead of night there is always someone getting up for an early morning shift or returning from a late one, playing music or having a fight or making a baby, or comforting a crying child, so that the only way to stay sane is to cut yourself off, to block out the crush of humanity pressing in through the walls, the floors and the ceilings. Yola sums it up in three words: “Too many foreigners.”