Ancient China

Two old street scavengers slumped at the corner Starbucks table behind the pillar getting some shut-eye. Almost noon. Beside the palm their trolley mounted high with flattened cardboard, contours of the aluminum cans in the black garbage bags on top. Early seventies the man, fine black coif combed back, spare frame. The woman younger, stouter, abundant thick hair down her back almost to the waist. Being taller she is slumped further in her chair. The hard iron of the Starbucks veranda seating she softens with a piece of cardboard torn to fit, the remainder on the table for her head. Hair tamed behind by a thick elastic band; he has one around a wrist. They use them to tie off the bags. To hold the bags on top of the pile they use dangerous bungee cords. The woman's hair flows out from the band, wide across her back and streaked with grey. Such a mass of hair on an old woman. Years back she must have kept it in a queue. A man's black shirt, black slacks. At a number of points there was some doubt about her gender, but she is a woman alright. Her hair was about the length that she could bring it round to the front under her arm-pit and scissor the ends herself. For all the grey, the black still predominated.
         The man regularly visited a barber. A number of times he stirred from his slumber, on one occasion just in time to catch an office girl attempting to stuff her used tissue between the cardboard sheets on the trolley. The young woman was gruffly told where to get off, dark looks following. The disturbance woke the woman and she looked after her too, without matching annoyance. At no point was there any communication between the pair. When he goes to move the trolley he does so abruptly without a word. The woman rises from her seat looking after him. After a minute or two she resumes her seat; another minute or two he returns. The face the woman shows is almost Amerindian. Nut brown in this case, not red; thick-lipped, a broad brow and long face. Among the office crowd and tourists she presents a startling figure, much the more striking of the pair. Directly in front of them people stop to photograph the windmills and dear installed in the corner of the small square. On the other side there is a mechanically spurting fountain that draws children under the water and other photographers. In the course of waking the woman had revealed the cigarette lighter she had been clutching, its sudden emergence like a magician's trick. Now from the pocket of her shirt a little bundle drawn which she bends to scrutinize. The colour and size suggested money, tightly bound. Likely it wasn't money. A small pink-framed magnifying glass used in her study. The bundle went back where it had come from. Hidden before, in the action she showed the two bangles on her right wrist. Simple plastic bands, one black, one white—ying and yang. Large circular silver ear-rings, larger than fifty cent pieces, swung when she looked after the office lass. The woman was part gypsy, part Amerindian; Chinese of a form that hasn't been seen at Bugis Junction for an eternity.

(An item in the Straits Times gives the price of re-cycled cardboard currently as nine cents per kilogram. S.T. 24 Dec. 2011 p. C10.)

Ancient China was published in a longer sequence in the Hong Kong based Asian Cha Literary Journal, Dec 2013, under the title “Ancient China: Post- (Almost) LKY Singapore”