The Great Reclamation

by Rachel Heng

In time, the Gah Men would reshape the island in their own likeness, a landscape filled with the architecture of reasoned brutality.

like gallstones in the glare of a surgeon’s lamp. Ah Boon felt as though he had been brought here to witness some crime that he would later be asked to testify about.

There was no room for the old feelings of fear and awe at the unknown vastness of all that was around him. A whole new city awaited, one that would be shaped out of this very mud, and he was to be a part of it.

Ah Boon realized with a jolt that by fill site, the foreman meant the swampy beach by the kampong, the mud flats where he had, as a child, roamed barefoot with Hia while stalking mudskippers. The shallow waters from which they had, for so many decades, launched their boats. The dimpled shore where he’d collected unusual seashells with the intention of giving them to Siok Mei, but later chickened out. The shifting sand that crumbled beneath his feet as the waves washed in and out, the spot where he had once stepped on a rogue sea urchin and wet his pants from the pain.

Squatters? Move them. Communists? Jail them. Housing? Build it. Even the earth itself was deemed malleable, the constraints of geography surmountable. A coastline was identified, a cost-benefit analysis conducted, a decision made. The rest was execution.

Fill the Earth and Subdue It

In the distance, a single bird landed on the metal arm of the lone bulldozer, and the cry of the night insects began to rise from the bushes.