Moonlit Lake

By Neo Xin Yuan

Neo Xin Yuan; Dragon's Pearl; photography and digital art; 2024

🌑

(i. new moon)

Staring up at the temple from a sea of white-clad students, I was reminded of the sole reason I’d enrolled in this school.

The temple was majestic, like an understated peacock, preening its oriental feathers in the morning light. Clothed in granite grandeur, the building lapped up the glow of the half-slumbering sun, and took me into its arms. It was still cool, but soon, in the afternoon, the rough brick ground of the parade square would radiate a growling heat that was sure to continue long into the night. Not that I’ve ever been in school at night. I doubted I ever would.

My eyes grazed the charcoal strokes that swept across the centre of the building: 翡翠楼. I couldn’t read the first two words, but everyone called it the Jade Building. I couldn’t for the life of me understand—wasn’t jade in Chinese 玉 (yù)? Why was there another more elaborate and unreadable name for it? Was it because they wanted something more literary for the literal symbol of Chinese culture? I couldn’t deny the two characters were pretty, though. They shared a word across them like passing a ball from bottom to up: 羽 (yǔ)—the Chinese word for ‘feathers’. 

My primary school friends were nowhere to be found—they had left seeking larger water bodies, and they found them in elite girls’ schools offering the Integrated Programme. I didn’t know why there wasn’t a fancier name for something so coveted. But what I did know was that there was a large body of water right here, in this school, and that it flurried my breath away every time I saw it.

Everyone called it the Richman Lake, but I felt like it deserved a more romantic name. Even the Jadestone Lake would be a more fitting name than that of a British man who happened to build his estate by this lake in the 1930s before abandoning it during the Japanese Occupation. Apparently this had been a secret British military base before it became a Japanese military base, before it became an institution for Chinese boys. But I was not a boy. Clearly they’d let girls in, but remained tight-lipped about the Chinese part.

Anyway, the lake used to be bigger, but it had been shrunk a few times to accommodate new Chinese-looking buildings. The ground I was standing on, the perfunctory parade square, used to be glistening water. I was standing in a ghost sea. Semua kita bersatu… The national anthem blared from invisible speakers and I sang along with half-formed awareness of what the words meant, glowering at the students around me who kept their mouths firmly shut. The white blouse of my classmate in front of me was pristine, but others had theirs sodden and stuck to their backs, bleeding the tan of their skins. Semua kita berseru, I chimed in with the subdued second crescendo of the anthem, noting the subtle difference in language my primary school teacher had drilled into me. I didn’t know what the words meant, but they sounded nice.  

My eyes streaked across the temple and the vast blue dome flecked with cotton feathers, before absentmindedly settling on the slender neck of my classmate, where a dark curl of baby hair stroked the nape. I had come to this school for its beauty, I thought to myself once again.

That was all I knew, then.

🌒

(ii. waning crescent)

I had come to this school for its beauty, but as time stirred, I grew to know more than what meets the eye. It was obvious, of course, that this school was ostensibly, gloriously Chinese, but it was also what they called a Special Assistance Programme school, or SAP for short. At first I thought there was nothing that telling about that name, but now as a seasoned, sceptic linguist I realise names are more insidious than the common man would ever know.

Being in a SAP school meant you had to be as ostensibly, gloriously Chinese as its campus, that you had to deck yourself in cultural appreciation lessons and excursions and Chinese New Year celebrations. It also meant there were no such celebrations for Hari Raya and Deepavali, like I had in primary school. I supposed it wasn’t practical to have them, if nearly all the students were Chinese. But it still felt strange.

Not that the students were fluent in Chinese, though. Everyone was still stuttering and angmoh-like in lessons, jeering in accented, exaggerated voices to flaunt their distaste of their mother tongue. We were all forced to take Higher Chinese, but I wasn’t too fazed as I’d taken it in Upper Primary too.

Tucking in the back of my skirt with my hand, I settled into my seat at the front of the classroom. My mother always reminded me to mind the back of my skirt, which could get ruffled and scrunched up easily if I sat down too carelessly. Sliding out my Higher Chinese textbook from my bag, I pursed my lips at its creased corner—it had been folded and crushed when I crammed it between my other textbooks yesterday.

Beside me, my classmate tutted lightly. I turned to glance at her. She had a saccharine Christian name to adorn her lesser Chinese one. Madeline Yong Yulin. Everyone called her Maddie. The only person who called her Yulin was our Chinese teacher. But I thought her Chinese name was beautiful.

杨雩凛

When I first saw those words written in such elegant clarity on the front of her workbook, I couldn’t read the last two words, her given name, at all. I had never seen such strange, beautiful characters in my life. “What’s that?” I’d blurted, pointing at her book. A bemused smile had tugged the corner of her lips, before she shook her head in resignation.

“Why, that’s my name.” Her voice was silvery, and I’d torn my gaze from the book to study her face. Everything about her sang elegance. She laughed, and the sound was like wind chimes. “I get this a lot. But it’s Yu Lin. Yáng Yú Lín. All dì èr shēng. Sounds horrible to me.”

She’d meant that all three words were pronounced with the same rising intonation, making it sound contrived and awkward. Names sounded best when they had varying intonations that blended into a lovely harmony. But I didn’t mind it—it was just another peacock’s feather that distinguished her from the flock of pigeons.

🌓

(iii. first quarter)

Chinese lessons continued, and every Monday our principal addressed us in the musty innards of the temple. Monday assemblies doubled as ceremonies where we had to don school ties as blazing red as the temple’s roof. The sun cradled the temple with its tendrils, transforming it into a broiling sauna. Most of my classmates left the topmost button undone as always, shielding it with their ties—but I would button up my shirt completely, pushing up my tie till it tightened around my throat.

“Remember, we are bilinguals,” puffed the principal, after a routine dose of our school song written in Chinese. “Shuāng yǔ tiān cái. Adept at both English and Chinese. We are huá rén. We ought to be good at our own mother tongue. We are the pride of Singapore.”

Everyone applauded politely, and as the principal tottered off the stage, Madeline leaned in, whispering, “Hey, it’s over. You can remove your tie now.” She nodded over to our classmates who were doing the same, and my eyes dropped to her shirt, where the topmost buttons were long undone, revealing a sliver of pale skin that dipped below her collarbone.

Shaking my head, I looked straight ahead and waited for our teacher to release us. On the way back to class, I walked alone, through sunlit walkways, windy bridges and green-roofed, red-pillared columns, my tie perfectly fastened and my stride unswayed. Truly centred and proper.

🌔

(iv. waxing gibbous)

Nine a.m. barrelled us straight into Chinese lessons, and while the first month I pulled through with the guise of a half-imposter, the new passage left me reeling with strange words and coded meanings. It was like poetry—I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the author was trying to say. The assigned workbook exercise proved just as maddening.

During lunch break, when everyone else had rushed to the canteen, I glanced over at Madeline, who was halfway through the exercise. She always rushed through her work so that she could focus all her extracurricular time on dancing. “What do these words mean?” I pointed at the foreign words printed in the box, meant to be filled into the blanks in the passage below. She must have registered an undercurrent of frustrated helplessness in my voice, because she put down her gel pen and eased my workbook towards her.

“This is líng tīng,” she said, pointing to the first word. “And this is qǐng tīng.” She pointed at the second word.

I frowned. “What’s the difference?”

Madeline looked taken aback. “Well, they both mean to listen attentively and with care,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s like synonyms… you know?”

When she explained it that way, I understood. But that didn’t really help me complete the exercise. I hazarded a glance at her workbook and noted the answers she’d filled in. Qǐng, then líng. If they meant the same thing, couldn’t they be interchangeable? They even rhymed.

“I still don’t really get it,” I said, and Madeline’s expression was painfully sympathetic. Before I knew it, she was leaning in again, dipping her head towards my ear. I felt the mild warmth of her body and her gentle breath on my neck as she took my hand in hers.

“See?” Stroke by stroke, she traced the characters on my palm. Her figures made me shiver, and I pulled back my hand. She continued watching me with her dark, liquid eyes. “Just use the diàn zi cí diǎn if you’re unsure.”

I began to hate Madeline, her supple, swanlike grace that imbued her from head and toe to her fingertips, how Chinese came to her as silken streams she spun into threads upon the pages of the workbook. What must it feel like, I thought bitterly, to grasp both languages, one in each hand, to be effortlessly ambidextrous in the pursuit of art and beauty? My jealousy waxed and grew and burned brighter. Long after she left, back at home, I pored over the textbook with my wavering pen, and wept. Tears sullied and warped the page, blotting and blurring Madeline’s handwriting where she had written in the blanks, until I was emptied of my ink. 

That was how my mother found me later. She gathered me up in her arms and wrapped me up in a cocoon of familiar words. English would never forsake me. It flowed through me like a river, nourishing me in places I knew by heart and guiding me to places untravelled. Chinese was the half-rhyme to the initial English, fallen leaves scattered and lost in the torrential channel. One was straight, the other meandering. It was hard, being forced to row along a trickling tributary of the yellow river and find out that you were never that good at rowing. Chinese, huá yǔ, your mother tongue. The tongue had never belonged to you but to your ancestors and they’d forgotten to sew it on for you. 

“You will get better,” said my mother, and I believed her because I believed in everything my mother said.

🌕

(v. full moon)

And I did get better, because of two things. One: I was an obnoxious overachiever, a hard worker who didn’t take lousy mediocrity for an answer. I was not one of those Anglicised students, and I would never be. And two: I wanted to be as good as Madeline, if not better.

Immersed in oriental tea, it got easier and easier. Chinese swept through my daydreams and Google searches. I changed my phone’s language to Chinese. I strode into the bookstore, heading past the English books of my childhood and straight towards the Malaysian Chinese novels. I was a bilingual talent—it was time to discover and develop that long-untouched part of me.

In between lessons of English, Science, Maths, and Chinese, we headed to the tea studio and calligraphy room. Through it all, Madeline was right there beside me. It was Madeline who handled the porcelain tea set and brewed the most fragrant tea which tingled my insides. It was Madeline’s measured brush strokes that beautified the rice parchment, while my sloppy words struggled to imitate the shadow of ancestral greatness.

But it was fine, because I was already greater than those who found pleasure in hiding their identity and heritage, in deriding and mocking them while donning on popular uniforms. It was fine, because the tea made me delirious with pleasure, and I thought I could stay in this beautiful palace forever.

Cleaved so entirely in two, there was no room for anything else. I grew more and more gifted in Chinese, my tongue subconsciously mimicking the accents of my classmates from China, becoming increasingly adept in passage readings where I pronounced each word aloud for my teacher and classmates to hear. I was always the well-behaved, docile kid, but now I earned another badge: the one who was good at not just English, but Chinese, too.

I was never going to stop. I had fallen back into the yellow river and I was going to ride its current back, back to the sea of stars where it all began.

🌖

(vi. waning gibbous)

But I still couldn’t ignore English. English was the language I had first been taught, the language I thought in, the language that taught me others. It was, to me, a great lake, deepening year by year. But I wasn’t afraid of its depths, not at all—it was as if I’d known it my whole life. Diving further each passing day, I carved out my own Atlantis.

My English teacher recognised my aptitude, littered in the lines of my composition. “Continue writing,” he said, pressing a book into my hand. “And continue reading. You’re going places.”

My pride shone from within, and I took the book with warm pleasure, nursing a growing feeling that this was what I was meant to do in life—write. I needed to become an author, by whatever means possible.

Behind me, Madeline watched silently, but I made no move to engage her even as I returned to my seat beside her. These days, she practised experimental dance steps and flexibility rather than doing homework.

🌗

(vii. third quarter)

Three years passed like autumn leaves returning to their roots, and soon I was standing in the concourse with a graduation certificate in my hand, looking out at the calm lake. The wind carried my classmates’ chatting to my ears, but I blocked them out and stared out at the weeping willows bowed in a perpetual slumber over the lakeside. Their leaves rustled and shivered, and I shivered with them—

Someone called my name. I turned around and saw my Chinese teacher sitting with my classmates, beckoning me over. Clutching my cert, I walked to their table.

We talked listlessly for a while. Then my Chinese teacher tilted her head at me. “How come you only got a B3 for Higher Chinese?” she complained. “I was expecting you to get at least an A2.”

I pressed my lips together; there was no way I could give both a satisfactory and honest answer. What could I even say? I’m not actually that good at Chinese? That was what my heart wanted to tell her, but I didn’t need to—she already knew. The both of us knew. I wasn’t a genius, nor a tightrope walker—I had rowed my boat along the river with confidence, but still got swept astray by its undercurrent.

So I just shrugged and offered a sheepish smile, and she took her leave. Involuntarily, I huddled closer with my classmates, as if sharing a secret and a future. Sunlight danced across the table, spilling on the linoleum floor, and I took another peek at my O-Levels results slip. Other than Higher Chinese, I had gotten A’s for all my subjects.

“I can’t believe Maddie isn’t here anymore,” one of my classmates commented. “She couldn’t have waited to graduate before going overseas meh?”

“Come on lah, she had a chance to escape and focus on dancing, her true love,” retorted another classmate. “Why would she stay here?”

As with all other conversations, I blocked out this one. My upper-secondary classmates didn’t know I knew Madeline, and they didn’t need to, especially since the two of us weren’t friends in the first place. We had just been tablemates, casual acquaintances who moved in parallel social circles—and drifted apart when we ended up in different classes. She’d left at the end of Secondary Three, and I hadn’t even known, not until the new school year had started.

But even before she’d left, I was already better than her. I still was.

🌘

(viii. waning crescent)

For me, when I wrote my stories in English, it was like everything clicked, and the world, in between my tap-dance across the keyboard, felt absolutely right. There was no world to fear in the margins of the document, no one else but my raw voice, gallant and proud. But when I left my hermetic junior college for a literature degree, suddenly stranger words were everywhere, spilled from the mouths of people old and new, as if they had all caught the same virus. I won’t write them here.

Words, like I have come to learn again and again, have a real impact on the world. It doesn’t matter if I know all the theories behind language and society: why people behave a certain way, why people say the things they say, and why they speak the same language in different ways. All I know is: the ocean is so wide and vast, and wraps around the entire earth, connecting continents like kintsugi—but people still find ways to find difference, deficit, and dominance.

Here, there is no room for a dreamer like me. My mind rots with blue light, and I spend sunlight on my part-time summer job. It is the only thing that keeps me from feeling useless, but it steals my words from me. In the factory outlet store, I am but a faceless, fossilised worker, my words clipped and primed for obsequence. In stretched bouts of idleness, my fingers dance across the counter, continuing my untold story where I left off. But the words fade from my mind when I get home and stew in bed.

I am no dancer. I am no author, either. But I can settle myself into the in-between, into the golden fault-lines. Now I am engaged to English like a well-worn shirt, and I barely use Mandarin unless it is needed. But now I explore other previously untouched facets of my life, like Cantonese. Now I have grasped the basics of Cantonese from my grandparents who have moved in with me.

My bookshelves are still in this house. When I was in primary school, I used to reread story after story in my ever-expanding collection. In secondary school, two rows of Chinese novels crammed in the shelves above. In junior college, my English literature books joined the borders. There were no margins, no limits to what I could absorb and what I could create.

Now I stare at my books and watch them wilt.

🌑

(ix. new moon)

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Born and raised in Singapore, Neo Xin Yuan is a full-time student at Nanyang Technological University, trying to find time to write the stories that matter to her. Her writing puts a twist on the moving and disturbing things in her daily life. She believes in making local literature accessible, and making the mundane and the marginal extraordinary. Currently, she is working on a fantasy novel and a contemporary local play. “Moonlit Lake” is her first published work.

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