2024 Online Nonfiction Contest Winner: The Asian Koel
By Clement Yue
Nobody loves this bird. Very few even really know what it looks like. It perches hidden in thick arboreal foliage⎯black plumage indistinguishable from the canopic shadows. I used to think it was yellow, until someone pointed out to my embarrassment that I was looking at orioles all my life. School children imitate its cries to irritate the teacher taking attendance. The koel sounds like an unpleasant day. The children are asked to knock it off. We understand the koel to be an alarm clock without a snooze button designed by the devil himself to wake us up on weekends. It heralds the crush of morning traffic. In that dead hour before dawn, it ruffles its feathers, flies up to the highest branch on the tree, stares with beady red eyes at my apartment complex as living room lights turn on reluctantly, and begins to caw.
My mother wakes up before then. She goes to the toilet adjoining her room to brush her teeth. She throws the dirty clothes from the night before into the washing machine. She picks an outfit from the wardrobe. I look through the photos on the family group chat. I try to remember what she likes to wear. I lost my phone in December of 2021. I left it in a cab while drunk from an office party and it was picked up by the next passenger. I wiped the phone remotely, losing all pictures from the group chat. Her style has not changed much. She gets her clothes from small family-owned stores with names like Beauty and Comfort. She likes sleeveless blouses in block colors with detail in the trim; she is impartial to sequins and rhinestones. She often pairs these with jeans that are tight in the calf. I imagine she picks out this combination and lays it on the bed next to my sleeping father.
The koel starts its call. She boils water for her instant coffee. She has a bowl of oatmeal and milk infused with Omega-3 for healthier bones. She used to pour kibble into a bowl for the cat. The cat is gone now. She hangs up the clothes to dry after the cycle is done. I once asked her why she doesn’t use the dryer and she said that she felt the dryer made the clothes stink. Her forehead is completely slick with sweat. She sweeps the house while my father takes his morning shower. She cracks open the doors to our rooms to check if we are still there, if we have not grown up and moved out yet. Singaporeans are expected to live with their parents until they get married because the space scarcity has made home ownership a pipe dream. We are never home when she goes to sleep at eleven; I usually leave the office close to midnight and my brothers are living their best undergrad lives. Satisfied by the physical space our sleeping bodies take up on our beds, she washes her face in the sink and puts on her clothes and patiently waits for my father to finish his coffee while the morning news plays on the TV. They leave the house together as dawn breaks, her to the hospital and him to his office in an industrial park. This is a fairly new routine.
My parents used to hire a succession of domestic helpers to do the chores for us. My parents had careers to build and we were too young to be trusted with anything more than taking the public bus by ourselves. Ginna was the one that lasted the longest. She stayed twenty years with us. She slept in my grandmother’s old room and would be the one to wake up before the koel, until she told my mother she wanted to return to her hometown on the Philippine island of Cebu to open a car and bicycle repair shop with her brother. My mother frets over the news, wondering if she had the mettle to take up the chores Ginna would leave behind. There is a lot on her plate. She complains about her lazy colleagues at the hospital laboratory where they test blood, urine, and stool samples for a smorgasbord of different diseases. She drives down weekly to my grandfather’s apartment to massage his legs, swollen with water that his heart is too weak to pump away. She never asks us to lighten her load. We try anyway to see her face light up in surprise and delight when she finds the laundry swaying precariously from the bamboo pole outside the kitchen window when she comes home from work. She keeps telling us she’s sorry for making us work. This is also a fairly new routine.
The name “koel” is onomatopoeic, coming from the Sanskrit “kokila”, these birds are revered in India and within Hinduism for their birdsong, a loud and shrill “koo-OOO.” My mother once asked me if she can call pest control on these birds. I laughed and told her that we don’t even know where the damn birds are. How was anyone supposed to find them?
The high-rise buildings around us make sound travel funny. The image of khaki-clad National Environment Agency employees peering into every tree with a tranquilizer blowpipe in one hand and binoculars in the other made her laugh too. One day, the calls stopped. We didn’t notice at first, but the absence grew quickly into disquiet. We slept better, but we still woke with a vague disappointment. We all knew the cascade effect: When a small part of the system stops working, it causes a chain of negative outcomes within a carefully calibrated system. One day, my mother woke up with a lump in her breast. We didn’t know where the koels had gone. We cursed them in the morning, we wished them away; but when the koels are gone, there’s nothing to curse but yourself. My mother decided to go for a mammogram.
Koels are members of the cuckoo family; they are brood parasites. They particularly like laying eggs in the nests of house crows. The koel chicks imitate their hosts; they learn crow-song. Crows are known to be among the most intelligent avians⎯they supposedly have a mental faculty similar to chimpanzees. Still, the mother crow feeds the odd-looking baby bird regardless, and it grows.
The doctor didn’t know what to make of the report. He couldn’t tell if the dark spots were benign. He referred my mother to a specialist clinic in her own hospital. She was delighted—she would get to use her employee pass for discounts at the canteen during lunch. I am on the outside looking into that cold, sterile room deep in the bowels of the hospital. Masked men using cold, sterile words to judge my mother’s mortality. “Metastasis. Non-zero chance.”
I found my grandmother’s, my ah ma’s, death certificate by chance while flipping through an old file. She died when I was fourteen. The cancer had corrupted her lungs. We all knew for months that she was losing the war of attrition. The chemotherapy made her hair fall out in clumps. She stubbornly dyed the remaining strands a deep maroon. The veins in her arms were green like the jade bangle she had worn since she was a child. Her bones had grown into the bangle and filled it out; it sat against skin as pale as starlight. “Any day now,” my mother whispered to me. “Prepare yourself.” I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. There wasn’t a Buzzfeed listicle on the Top 10 Ways to Face Death.
We were brought up Christian. The pastors kept telling us that death was supposed to be a joyous occasion⎯your beloved is going to paradise. There was a pastor present in the ward on the night the doctors said that it would be prudent for the entire family to be there. The pastor prayed for her soul. She wore a gold cross around her neck, tubes in her nose. I was standing by the bedside and my mother told her that her eldest grandchild was here to see her. Her eyelids fluttered. Visiting hours came and went. My parents told me it was time to go home; it was getting late. She survived the night.
The next day my ah ma died while I was at school. I was expecting a call. In some perverse fantasy, I wanted the call to come while I was at school and to be grief-stricken by it so I could get the hugs and the sympathy of my classmates. The call didn’t come.
My mother told me years later that they had rushed ah ma home at ten in the morning because she wanted to die in her bed and not in a ward painted a weak green. It was a hassle; there was no time; there was so much medical equipment and so many people to move. The ambulance drove fast, rushing against the dying beeps of the EKG. My mother said that my ah ma’s smile as she lay on her bed next to a shelf, busy with the framed pictures of her grandchildren, was worth the trouble.
Funerals in Singapore are public affairs. The wide-open communal spaces on the ground floor of apartment buildings, called void decks, are transformed into makeshift parlors. In preparation for Chinese funerals, large sheets of fabric are used to create a structure that looks like a three-sided tent holding the grief within. The sheets are like semaphores, signifying different religions. White was reserved for Christian funerals, while yellow indicated Buddhist or Taoist services. It helped set expectations—whether you were going to listen to a sermon or offer a joss stick in remembrance and respect. Neighbors dipped their heads in respect and tried not to look at the large portraits of the dearly departed. They hurried to the lift with bags of shopping in their hands or with curious dogs that strained against their leashes.
I returned to my grandmother’s void deck turned palatial. Splayed in linen, trite passages from the Bible printed onto white cloth draped between concrete pillars rippled gently in the wind. A photograph of my grandmother with a half-smile on an easel garlanded by tri-colour chrysanthemums stood guard in front of her coffin.
The funeral director had provided us with a sound mixer and a few amps. Soon the musicians arrived to plug in their acoustic guitars and a Yamaha keyboard. They did a soundcheck, largely ignored over the chewing of spiced watermelon seeds, the opening of peanut shells, and light conversation. We, the bereaved, wear plain white t-shirts with a black square of fabric pinned to our right sleeves to indicate mourning. My t-shirt was so thin it showed the dark circles of my areola. We were sent out like banquet servers through the maze of round tables, draped in starchy white cloth, refilling seeds and nuts, handing out packets of sweet lemon tea. People stopped us and made us sit on hard plastic chairs to chit-chat. You don’t talk about the dead person at the funeral. How’s school? How’s church? How’s your mother? These were safe; these didn’t confront those with black squares on their arms with red-rimmed eyes and empty, conversational smiles.
At eight in the evening, the service began. The mourners were directed to the front and handed pink pamphlets with my grandmother’s face in greyscale on the first page followed by her favorite hymns in Mandarin. The pastor’s wife led us through the three hymns. I spied my mother, hands clasped in front of her, swaying to the music. 无人陪伴我也不孤独. The lonely road will not faze me. The pastor trotted out his well-worn sermon on how the dead are not really dead. “Sister Choon Kim,” her name sat oddly on his tongue. Saying her name made it feel official, like a government document. The pastor finished his closing prayer and invited the mourners up to the open casket to pay their final respects. My grandmother’s face looked frostbitten, caked in powder, cheeks rouged to sunburst. Her scarlet lips a violent slash in her undying repose. Her blood had been drained, replaced by formaldehyde, eyelids held closed by spiked plastic “eye-caps” placed over her deflating eyeballs. My mother stood at the head of the casket with my father’s arm draped around her shoulders, her face leaden as she thanked the mourners for coming.
I puzzled over her funeral for years. Why didn’t she cry? Why didn’t I cry? I felt like the tide had pulled back over the horizon and I was waiting for a tsunami that still hasn’t come. I’ve walked through the exposed mudflats, littered with the dead and dying every day since. I walked with my mother beside me, willing for the water to come roaring back, washing the footprints of our hurt away.
My mother called me at ten in the morning. I finished pouring milk into my ersatz latte and walked outside to my office’s smoking porch with my mug cooling in my hands to pick up the phone. She told me that the doctors were pretty sure that the dark spots were benign, but they were going to take a tissue sample to be absolutely sure.
Unlike most cuckoos, the koel chicks don’t attempt to kill the chicks of their host. Scientists speculate that this is because it’s too risky for the smaller koel chicks to attempt this. They live in an uneasy relationship. They exist within the ambiguity of inadvertent kindness born out of convenience, chance, and practicality.
Can I think of those dark masses as kind because they have not yet gone rogue? I cried as I sat on the bare concrete of the smoking porch, partly in relief, partly in fear of words I didn’t fully understand. The practiced neutrality of the specialist doctor made him sound like an FBI agent out of the movies: “I can neither confirm nor deny.” The truth will kill you.
The next morning, I woke up to my mother hanging the clothes and sweeping the floor, an ocean of calm undisturbed by birdsong. I asked her how she felt. She showed me the X-ray images. The black, Rorschach blobs resemble eggs. I wondered if she lied to us so we wouldn’t worry.
I half-seriously constructed a playlist for my own funeral on Spotify. I wanted to find that song again, right now only existing as fragments in my head. I mourned my limited Chinese as my Google search revealed nothing but Indonesian Chinese Church videos. Cherubic blushing children and bad choreography, but not the song. I texted my mother if she knew the title and on her lunch break, she sent me a link. 感恩歌. The Thankfulness Song.
She told me the meaning of the song had changed for her. She told me that even though she thinks about her mother less and less, she feels she is more present. She asked me if that makes sense.
Every year on Grave Sweeping Day she goes to visit her mother’s niche in the columbarium, and she makes small talk with her ashes. She will wipe the oval picture of my ah ma with a damp cloth and the dust from the miniatures of bowls of ramen and dim sum stuck on the mantel of her lot with blu-tack. I joined her for the first time last year. She placed me in front of Ang Choon Kim. “Mother, look who came to visit you. Your eldest grandson, grow up already. So big. He make you so proud, go university. Ani kiang. So clever. Say something to ah ma.”
I stood stock-still. Something fluttered in the nearby trees. Something cried out. The tide swelled and lapped at our ankles.
The lonely road will not faze me. That’s not quite right. The context has changed. An alternative translation of 无人陪伴我也不孤独 is I will not be lonely even when no one is with me.
Dark mornings, still. She gets up to silence. As she makes the coffee and loads the washer, she moves with the lightness of absence.
About the Author:
Clement Yue is an essayist from Singapore. He explores family, queerness, religion, and the general strangeness of growing up in Singapore. His essays have been published in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and The Slow Press. He currently resides in Brooklyn with a beat-up rice cooker and is an avid petter of cats. His favorite breed of cat is orange.