Photograph

She thumbed through the pages of faded photographs. It had to be here. There were only so many albums of herself as a baby, and that photo had to be here somewhere, and she was already on the final album…

It was not there.

Muzi slumped, before she flopped onto her back and tossed the album over the side of the bed, to join the rest of the photo albums. Her calico cat, Duck, sat up, as if to consider an investigation of the pile of photographs that smelled of age and water damage.

What am I even doing? Muzi asked herself. With a shaky breath, she covered her eyes with her right forearm. It was not as if it would do any good. It wasn’t proof, not proof of their relationship, not in the eyes of the law. It would not change the decision.

I mean, I even sent over my fucking birth certificate. A baby photo isn’t significant enough to move the goddamn needle. It’s not important anyway.

But it was. It was. It was.

For the fifth time that day, Muzi fought down the irrational urge to scream. All she wanted – all she really wanted – was for her existence to have mattered, for her to be fully, legally recognised as her father’s daughter.

It was not about the money. She didn’t even know if there was any money at all. She didn’t care. They could have all of it. The elusive, unknown they – the ‘real’ family, her half-sisters and half-brother whom she had never ever met, whom she would never want to meet, the ones that went with her father to his ancestral home in Fujian province, the ones who knew if he snored, the ones who knew what he liked to do when he was not wearing his work boots, the ones who were there when he was in the hospital and when he finally passed away, the ones who held his wake and wept together as the coffin went into the incinerator.

She hadn’t known. She had not known until she got the letter from the Ministry of Law, and she had read the letter in the doorway, and had started crying, and had to make that phone call to the Public Trustees Office, fighting down her tears and failing, explaining that she had not known, she was not in contact with the rest of the family, what do you need from me, what am I supposed to do, I don’t know if I’m entitled to the estate, my mother was not married to him-

“I’m sorry for your loss. Perhaps you can call your siblings and ask them if there is an executor of the estate.”

“I can’t. I don’t know them. I don’t know them.”

“In that case just submit what you can. You may be able to receive part of his inheritance.”

So Muzi had complied, and tried her best to retrieve what the Public Trustees Office wanted.

-         A copy of his death certificate. (May 3, 2020, in Khoo Teck Puat hospital. Slightly over two months before she had received the letter.)

-         Her birth certificate, the one with his signature, in large, clear handwriting. Her father had neat penmanship, even though he said he had only been in school to eleven years old, and came to Singapore on the back of his uncle’s truck to find a living when he was thirteen. He had spoken Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Malay, and a smattering of Tamil or Hindi, she wasn’t entirely sure, and understood English well enough. He had thought of himself as an uneducated man.

She had to ask her mother if they had a marriage certificate, though she had known from the start that there was none, because there was no wedding photo, never had been, because Muzi had been an unlucky accident, and her mother had said so to her once, that because of Muzi she had to give up her dreams and her life, as if Muzi had asked to be born in the first place, and it was made clear to her when she was twelve that they were not a family and never would be, but she had guessed by then since her father had never once stayed overnight, not once, and once she had started secondary school the nightly dinners became weekly dinners, and when she had matriculated weekly dinners became monthly dinners, and try as she might she could only meet him once every week or every two weeks, and it became more and more difficult after that because he was not well enough to travel out to meet her and she could not go to his home.

“Wait until I feel better,” her father had said. “Then we will go to Fujian together. I can show you around the village.”

“Of course. Get well soon.”

She had waited for three weeks after submitting the documents, before she called the Public Trustees Office. No decision. Another three weeks, and she called again. This time there was an answer. The person on the phone had been quite polite, but he had not been kind.

“Sorry. That means you will not receive anything.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing.” A pause. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

In the eyes of the law, she was not his.

It did not matter that he was one of the witnesses when she registered her marriage. It did not matter that he had attended her convocation ceremony. It did not matter that he had paid for her tertiary education. It did not matter that he had signed each and every one of her report slips in primary and secondary school.

And it of course did not matter that she had inherited his pale tea-brown eyes and that strange little line just before the bend of the elbow, that she knew he had drunk Guinness stout when he was younger and teh-o kosong when he was older, that she had been amused at his identity card because it only had a birth year and no birth date, that he had driven a Nissan pickup truck, a white Toyota Corolla, and a white Mercedes Benz – in that order – as she was growing up, and had his license suspended when he was caught driving under the influence after he accidentally swiped a motorcyclist. He had decided to give up driving then and in a matter of months had become an expert on the public transportation system in Singapore.

It did not matter that he had been proud of her doing well in school. It did not matter that he had liked her husband. It did not matter, because he had died without a will, at eighty-four years of age, a whole fifty years older than Muzi, and the law did not give a fuck that he was her father and she was his daughter.

In the eyes of the law, she was a bastard.

She exhaled, long and slow. No tears. Not yet.

The tears would come again, eventually, when the frustrated rage subsided and grief resurfaced. They would come when she grieved the holidays they did not take, the meals they did not share, the advice he did not give, the questions he did not ask, the fights they did not have. The familial closeness that she could only ever imagine.

Right now, she just wanted that one baby photo, the one she could not find in five albums of yellowed baby photos of herself in diapers or on the floor, of her chubby self in her mother’s arms or on the laps of aunties whom she did not recognise.

He had been laughing in that missing photo, handsome and delighted, because baby Muzi had somehow managed to wiggle an arm free and her little bemittened left hand had punched him on the chin, and whoever had been wielding the camera had captured that moment on film for posterity.

A father playing with his bastard.