Chapter One: Moving Out

Chow Yi Nuo stood in the shadows by the window, her back to the room. From her vantage position on the thirtieth floor of the building where their flat was located, she had a bird's eye view of the sprawling town. The rising sun shone on the rooftops, giving them a yellowish tinge. Across the roads that crisscrossed the town, diminutive figures of men and women hurried briskly to their places of work. Uniformed school children, rucksacks on their backs, joisted boisterously as they alighted from one public transportation means to another. Beneath her, down at the courtyard, she could see her father, Chow Mingze moving and fussing. He was organising and directing, with obvious shortness of temper, the loading of two ten tonne lorries. He was gesticulating violently, apparently reprimanding loaders for being slow and inept in carrying out the task before them.

Chow Yi Nuo knew her father well. He was not a man who cared to have his well laid work plans delayed or disrupted. She had noticed that he had become even more belligerent ever since the family learn that he had been retrenched and they were now being forced to vacate the house and relocate to the rural town he had left many years back. Although the distance would not allow her to hear what he was telling the loaders, Chow Yi Nuo felt a mild but quite genuine twinge of sympathy for the poor fellows down there, for she knew the sting of her father's tongue.

It reminded her of her own recent battle with him when he had denied her permission to travel to the museum in the city with the other young men and women who had been selected by a television station to attend the tour. She had stubbornly put up a spirited struggle but the battle was so predictably and utterly lost. That had left a wound in her heart that was still too raw to probe. Her rage, she realised, was still seething within her. The simple faith and certainty of childhood upon which her life until then had been found, had failed her. Also, her trust that her father would give her whatever she requested for had been badly shaken.

Stemming those thoughts out of her mind, she raised her head and looked through the morning sun beams that gleamed brightly across the rooftops of Yang Hui town; that beloved town was the Mother of all flamingos. A town that she was now about to leave. Tears welled in her eyes. She blinked suddenly and rapidly.

Chow Yi Nuo did not hear her younger sister, Chow Xin Yi approach. Briefly and in silence, they stood by the window side by side in the empty room. As far back as the two sisters could remember, they had always stood by that window every Monday morning before they went to University classes. But their little habit of observing what went on below the streets of the town was made poignant that morning; it was going to be the last time they would do this.