1957. The British still fly the Union Jack over
City Hall, but the streets smell of burnt joss
paper and fear. In a crumbling kampong near
Kallang, sixteenyearold Mei Lin skips school to
dig through her dead grandmother’s trunk, not
for gold, but for the clay figurines — seven of
them, each with a different face, each carved
with a fingerbone fragment. Her mother had
smashed the eighth one with a hammer the night
the Kempeitai came. That was ’45. The figurines
weren’t toys. They were anchors.
Mei Lin didn’t know her grandmother was a tong
yuen — a spirit bridge — until she found the
rice bowl filled with salt, a candle made from
beeswax and monkey dung, and the rules scratched
into the lid: Do not speak their names. Do not
offer food after midnight. Do not let them
follow you home.
The Japanese Occupation didn’t end with
surrender. It ended with silence. The British
turned a blind eye to ghosthunters who cleansed
cursed houses, because the dead kept quiet — and
the living didn’t dare ask why. But after ’55,
the new National Registration Act forced
families to register ancestral rites. Any
unlicensed spirit medium faced deportation. Or
worse.
Mei Lin’s father, a clerk in the Public Works
Department, burned all their documents. He said
the past was dead. But the figurines whispered
when the moon hit the HDB Block 127 wall.
That night, three boys from the local NS unit
broke into the abandoned Block 127 — not for
thrills, but to steal copper pipes. They never
came out. The next morning, their bodies were
found kneeling in the stairwell, mouths stuffed
with betel nut, eyes wide open. The police
called it a gang initiation. The old folks knew
better.
Mei Lin heard them. Not with ears. With the
figurines vibrating in her satchel.
She had to perform the Tian Di Hui — the
HeavenEarth Reconciliation — before dawn. No one
else could. Her grandmother’s spirit was trapped
in the seventh figurine, screaming because the
others were already gone, consumed by the
state’s purge.
She slipped past the cordon. Took the salt. Lit
the candle. Placed the seven figurines in a
circle around the staircase where the boys died.
The rules bit hard: Do not let them follow you
home.
She didn’t look up. Didn’t speak. Just pressed
her palm to the wall — the same wall her
grandmother had pressed hers to, thirty years
before, when the Japanese burned the temple at
Jalan Besar.
The air turned thick with incense that didn’t
burn. The walls wept black moisture. The
figurines cracked open — one by one — releasing
shapes that smelled of dried fish and wet earth.
One of them touched her forehead.
Not a voice. Not a name. Just a memory: her
grandmother, in 1942, feeding a dying British
soldier a spoon of kueh lapis, whispering to the
spirits to let him sleep.
At 5:03 a.m., the first police car arrived.
Mei Lin was gone.
The figurines lay in ash.
The wall was dry.
And the next morning, three boys woke up in
Kandang Kerbau Hospital — alive, terrified, and
speaking perfect Mandarin, though none had ever
learned it.
No one asked how.
The authorities buried the report.
Mei Lin’s father never spoke to her again.
But in the kitchen, the rice bowl still had salt
in it.
And every night, the seventh figurine, now
cracked and empty, sat beside her bed — humming.
