There is a conspicuous gap in Lian Hui’s memory, two years of her life she can’t remember despite efforts to recall what was hers. All she knows is that she came to a country – Malaysia – speaking a dialect of Mandarin, and she guesses she was born a mainland Chinese before being shipped off to Southeast Asia. It frustrates her that she does not know her origins – more so than she will ever let on – and even though it has been twenty years, she hasn’t given up on it.
Lian Hui spent her years of childhood as a kid on the streets. There were nights when she went to sleep on curbs with a disquieted stomach. Sometimes such nights ran consecutive. Finding food was not easy, and even if she did stumble across a rare treasure, she would have to defend her scraps from wild dogs that were as tall as her, and twice as large. Back then, she was a grubby little thing, a feral kid who picked up language roughly from other kids in just as dire straits as her. Lian Hui thinks an entire lifetime of sorrow and tears must have been wasted in her first five years, for none to be left now.
Her prospects improved significantly when taken in by a man she knew as Ah Huang. Nothing was known about him, except that he owned a small, decrepit shop-house overlooking a street that children under his care were tasked to tout along. Every morning, after a spare breakfast and a night’s sleep on the hardwood floor of the only room in the shop-house, roughly a dozen children would troop out armed with key-chains and tissue packets to hassle people on the streets with while he watched from the chair by his door. The amount of food waiting on your plate was directly proportional to how loudly your coin-pouch jangled when Ah Huang rattled it by his ear come sundown. After a month, Lian Hui learned that the tourists were the best targets. Blonde and European, with straw hats and unrestrained comments about a heat they were un-acclimatised to, it was so simple to shove her grimy hands in their laps, cradling her goods, staring up at them with wide eyes and a blank expression. Most of them cracked open their wallets at once, cooing over the poor sight before them. Others were simply unsettled by her relentless gaze, pinning them there with imagined accusation.
To the resentment of the other children, Lian Hui became a favourite of Ah Huang, and received enviable servings as payment. Ah Huang even paid her special attention, teaching her how to read using newspaper clippings. She cared little and less about their grievances, when she was going to sleep less hungry, when she could see the scribbles on the road signs and finally meld them into letters, words, names that made sense. What did it matter that the children all dragged their forms away from her when she settled down to sleep, with pointed looks of loathing? She was being given room to breathe and stretch out while they all huddled away from her. Perhaps before, this isolation would have brought a quiver to her lips and welled tears to her sockets. Now, it brought Lian Hui nothing.
It was tradition for them to scavenge on the streets when they weren’t touting, and most of the children would return brandishing bracelets dug from the rubbish, or broken toys wealthier children had tossed away with nary a thought, but which became monumental artifacts in the cramped shop-house. Lian Hui partook once, and brought back a book on plants. For nights, she was riveted by the section on poisonous plants, each page emblazoned with a warning to stay well away from those specie. Lian Hui only wanted to get closer, to touch and feel her fingers burn herself, if only to get out of the place.
And so one day she carried no tissue packets, no crudely-fashioned trinkets, but made her way out on the streets with only her book in tow. She walked, walked out of the seedy street and then walked even further, until she chanced upon a shop with a flower design on its front window. She propped herself up on the counter before a very bemused-looking shop-owner, and asked to be taught everything about poisonous plants.
It was evidently enough, and Lian Hui moved homes to the florist’s. In the day she helped around the shop. At night she slept by the refrigerators that hummed a rattling lullaby as she fell asleep, head swimming with whatever the florist could teach her during their lessons after the shop closed.
It wasn’t until an elderly lady came to patronise the florist that Lian Hui actually began to learn. Spotting the scrawny ten-year-old perched on a high stool with her head bent over a page on poison ivy, she made inquiries with the shopkeeper, and stayed a few hours, after which Lian Hui was softly ushered out the door to go home with the old lady.
Lian Hui was told to call her the affectionate endearment Popo, but in all her recollections, Lian Hui will ever only remember her as Manchineel, for she bore the most toxic fruit possible. Under Manchineel’s roof, there was always a warm bed, a full meal, and biscuits if Lian Hui’s stomach still growled. Outside of it in the cosy backyard, was a sprawling garden that Lian Hui was expressly forbidden from exploring, but which Manchineel would often step into wearing over-the-top gear: gloves that reached her elbows, Wellington boots, and a suit that left no skin bare. Lian Hui recognised enough plants from her book, to know Manchineel kept an odd hobby Lian Hui herself could appreciate, and for a while Manchineel only ever imparted theoretical knowledge about her little plants.
Lian Hui never understood why she couldn’t share Manchineel’s pastime. It was a garden, after all, of the only thing that had held Lian Hui’s fancy for this long. Of course she should be indulged. One day, Manchineel came into her backyard with all her protection to find Lian Hui frolicking in the garden, face split in her widest grin as she sniffed at a bright purple flower.
It was the first time Lian Hui had ever heard Manchineel scream.
She was quickly whisked back into the house, while Manchineel fussed and half-sobbed over her, turning her palms over and over and lifting the front of her shirt, looking for rashes, spots, festering blisters. And then Lian Hui began to understand exactly why she was never meant to play in the garden of toxic plants. For a moment, she was arrested with fear, that now she would surely die from horrible wounds. She had spent ten minutes – ten admittedly glorious minutes – exposing her bare skin to an intense range of poison, and all there was left to do was wait for the Grim Reaper to claim her.
But it never did. Manchineel declared it a mystery, and even as she sternly reprimanded Lian Hui for her disobedience, she continued to look puzzled as to why Lian Hui could possibly be all right. It was an even greater mystery when she found that the dying plants she had been trying so hard to keep alive were instead now flourishing, blossoming with vivid colours.
After that, Lian Hui was never restricted from the garden, and no plants ever died.
When she was sixteen, Lian Hui moved to America, after Manchineel passed away. She stayed long enough for the funeral, before she packed her bags dry-eyed and took the flight. She had already found a humble little cottage, where she recreated Manchineel’s garden, and added a few more choice specie to the mix. Overnight, the yard was overrun with poisonous plants. It was another two days of researching on the Internet before Lian Hui attempted her first toxic brew, which she fed to a neighbour’s cat. Suffice to say her first try was a smashing success, but which the neighbour would never learn about. After that, she learned the ropes quickly and began to experiment. Her test subjects were always chosen at random, from a sea of faces made of strangers and eventually turning featureless.
Word got around somehow however after Lian Hui was seen walking out of a café right after a high school athlete collapsed of an unexplained spontaneous heart collapse. In hindsight, it was not the first time she had been linked to a scene of a victim’s death, but back then – a novice – Lian Hui had been absolutely clumsy. One day, she was grabbed in a back alley and thrown into a van, where Lian Hui was frisked and her vials were produced from her pockets and purse. It wasn’t the most conventional way to proposition someone, but the organisation that had taken an interest in Lian Hui’s movements did exactly that. They made an offer of money and creature comforts in exchange for her services. Lian Hui accepted.
Initially, they’d only wanted her for her poisons, and Lian Hui had no qualms about handing over vials of her poisons under tables and at street corners as she passed by. But then they found that their agents were incompetent at handling them, after more than five died during their missions due to misuse. Some of them were foolish enough to touch the poisons, others fumbled and drank from cups meant for their targets. Frustrated, the organisation proposed a contract change, and Lian Hui suddenly joined their ranks as an assassin.
Having suspected it was a mercenary business but not caring enough to ask questions, Lian Hui began her own training, learning to slip through crowds, to lure targets away from the heart of the crowds, to make them crave a little solitude. She learnt to be a shadow, which was no problem, because what had she been before?
Lian Hui relied on her appearances to deceive others into believing she was tame. It was all too easy to learn how to infiltrate a brewery, and pass for a waitress long enough to slip a victim a lethal drink. She could be an escort for an hour, and offer a massage before the intended could even realise the skin on his back was being eaten away by what felt like acid. Soon enough, she was given the alias Aconitum – for the toxic flower. Lian Hui liked the name, especially since it was also known by wolf’s bane, Devil’s helmet and – best of all – the Queen of Poisons.
But soon enough Aconitum came to be on the Wanted list, and Lian Hui was caught during a mission. It was difficult to explain away all the tiny vials in her pockets and linings of her dress, and she was taken into custody. While being transported to the correctional facility, Lian Hui mused over breaking out the poisons and forcing them down the throats of her captors. But that seemed like too much trouble, and bemusedly subdued she allowed herself to be taken away.