He did not hear the shot when it hit him. They rushed him to the hospital with blood leaking from his chest. It stained the shirt of his uniform, stained their dirt-blackened hands. He was passed from arm to arm to makeshift stretcher, hoisted high above the crowd. "Fucking dogs got him," someone was yelling, "move!" But he could not feel a thing. From the stretcher he was only aware of the dull roar of the crowd, and the sea of their arms pounding the sky. He could not see who had shot him. They were pushing him away from the scene, away from the roar. What surprised him the most, as the darkness fell, was how little of his anger had remained.

("It suddenly meant very little to me," Mr. Chong wrote to me from his flat, years after the incident, "how much I was putting on the line. The louder boys, they were the ones who were fighting. I hung back. I was the one who got shot.")

When he awoke, he was in a hospital. It had been eight days since the march. His father was in the room, as was Mr. Koh, who taught his class history at school. He remembers crying, as his father held his hand. There was a tightness in his chest; when he opened his mouth to ask Mr. Koh about his classmates, he realised that he could not. His father explained that the bullet had ripped through his left lung, tumbling through to the other side. When his father's back was turned, Mr. Koh leaned over and confided in him in Mandarin that he was very lucky to be alive at all.

All in all, thirty-one people had been injured. The fighting had gone on till morning, and the factories were just beginning to open again along Alexandra Road. Now that his anger was behind him, he found that very little of the action had been imprinted on his mind. He often found himself staring at the ceiling, aching to draw breath against the air that stuck like mud, and he could not recall what was it that had drove him to stand with his compatriots, or even what it was that precipitated that fateful shot into his chest. Was there an escalation? Did someone cross a line? He was keenly aware only of the objective reasons that had brought him there, which were even now beginning to fade: the sacking of the workers, the calls for solidarity, the letters and petitions he himself had helped to hand out by the school gates. But of any passion that surely remained, it remained to him as elusive as the words in his chest, or the silence of the hospital at dawn.

He was discharged without incident. No warrant of arrest had been issued. He was sent home in the back seat of Mr. Koh's Datsun, leaning against his father's shoulders. Bed rest did not suit him well. As soon as he could sit up straight without retching, he taught himself how to walk again, bracing against the walls of his home, down the stairs to the family shop and back up again. When he returned to class, after more than a month's absence, his classmates could scarcely tell that he'd been shot at all. They were triumphant -- nearly in tears -- at the story they had on their hands; the school newspaper (and, if the school administration could be convinced, the local press) was waiting for his comments, to fill in the gap of their struggle. For the fight had left their resolve battered but not broken. "Go and see," they told him, shoving the papers in his face. "We made the news -- we've really done it this time." They wanted him to be the face of their story, to be for all of Singapore an example of what the police would have done -- what kind of life they would have taken in cold blood.

("In another life," he would come to reflect in his letters, "perhaps that would have happened. But I would not have been silenced in that other life.")

The heat of his fame soon faded, and it was not before long that he stopped going to school. His father thought it was his injury; he grew distant from his friends, and could not run a round of the parade square without collapsing to catch his breath. But that would not have affected his grades. In fact, he had turned to writing after his silence, and Mr. Koh himself had remarked on the remarkable clarity and imaginativeness of his essays that term. No, what he could not stand was how the fire had died. When they arrested the students at Chung Cheng, he could only feign gritted teeth and smile. Because what else was there left to do? Power, despite everything, still remained. People were still starving. Mathematics and chemistry and history could wait. Besides, his father needed extra hands at the shop, and his juniors could very well continue fighting on their own.

This was where his story ended. A mute young man, hauling rice at the family shop, which continued to sell dried goods and eggs right up until the day the bulldozers came. He passed his days restlessly and with much effort, though more consciously than before. With his father, who always had had trouble reading, he developed a language of tones that did not strain his lungs; together, they made ends meet coordinating stock deliveries for their former suppliers, the older man interpreting for the younger. In this way they made a comfortable living. His father passed in nineteen-eighty-two, from a weakness of the heart.

I came to know him in the hottest month of the year, going door to door along the crumbling blocks of old Toa Payoh. He was eighty-three then. His flat, though it was stacked from floor to ceiling with folded cardboard and egg cartons, was well-kept and without smell. It was through my many visits that I pieced together his story from the backs of old receipts and cardboard scraps, on which he wrote to me unerringly in red ink.

"Now I'll tell you," he wrote on my last visit, "about the policeman."

On the final day of the millennium, as the tents for his neighbourhood's countdown party began to be raised, Mr. Chong received a letter from an address he did not know. The sender introduced himself as Mr. Sng, whose father (or so he claimed) was a police officer during the violence of '55. On his father's request, he had traced the stories of a boy who had been shot amidst the chaos; over the years, as his father grew bedridden and weak, he had narrowed it down to a certain set of students from a certain class who had been there on the day the shot was heard. Mr. Sng was wondering, with all due respect, if he had any knowledge of the events of that day, or perhaps the identity of the injured boy?

The old man wrote back, claiming that he was, and outlining the nature of his state that the injury had left him in. He immediately got a reply the next day (those were the days when the letters were still delivered on time). The elder Mr. Sng, as it turned out, was days from death. It was a matter of great importance that the two of them should meet -- for the elder Mr. Sng was the one who had fired the gun.

With the help of a neighbour, Mr. Chong made his way to Alexandra Hospital, where he himself had been warded in the weeks after the incident. There, in a damp C-Class ward, he came face to face with the man who had shot him. His son was sitting by the bed, drying his father's forehead with a white towel. When he saw Mr. Chong, he stood up from his chair, and bowed his head very low.

"See if you can talk to him," he said. So Mr. Chong approached where the younger Mr. Sng sat, and bent down towards the sick man.

(At this point, the old man stopped writing. I resisted the urge to ask what happened next. Writing happens in its own time, an ocean away from speech. After a period of several minutes, during which I was consciously aware of the sun setting through the flat's tattered curtains, he continued, carefully choosing his words.)

"He couldn't say anything," he wrote. "There he was, on the bed with tubes in his face, and his eyes were half-open, like a dog's. They barely followed me as I approached. When I took his hand, which was as dry as a leaf, I could feel that it was trembling. I realised that I was holding the very finger that would have pulled the trigger which robbed me of my voice. The old pain came back: that searing grip on my chest. I gasped."

"That was when I learned that the fire had never really died -- and that we must feel its heat today, despite its silence. For through his hand, I could feel the pounding of his heart, which was as strong as the pounding of my classmates' fists in the air on the day that I was shot, and as strong as the roaring waves."