Frog Under A Coconut Shell Read online

  “Macham katak bawah tempurong”

  ( Like a frog under a coconut shell )

  ~ A Malay Idiom ~

  The frog believes that the coconut shell under

  which he lives is his entire world.

  In the same way, a person who is limited in his thinking

  believes that what he knows is all the knowledge there is,

  so he is like the frog under the coconut shell.

  © 2002 Josephine Chia

  Designer: Lock Hong Liang

  Front cover: Model’s Peranakan kebaya courtesy of Peter Wee (Katong Antique House)

  This edition published 2010 by

  Marshall Cavendish Editions

  An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Request for permission should be addressed to the Publisher, Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited, 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196. Tel: (65) 6213 9300. Fax: (65) 6285 4871 E-mail: [email protected]. Website: www.marshallcavendish.com/genref

  The publisher makes no representation or warranties with respect to the contents of this book, and specifically disclaims any implied warranties or merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose, and shall in no events be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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  National Library Board Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Chia, Josephine.

  Frog under a coconut shell /– Josephine Chia. – Singapore :

  Marshall Cavendish Editions,– 2009.

  p. cm.

  eISBN-13 : 978-981-4398-97-8

  1. Mothers – Singapore – Biography. 2. Mothers and daughters – Singapore.

  3. Peranakan (Asian people) – Singapore – Social life and customs. 4. Chia,

  Josephine. I. Title.

  HQ759

  306.8743 – dc22 OCN463528854

  Printed in Singapore by Craft Print International Ltd

  FROG

  UNDER

  A

  COCONUT

  SHELL

  Josephine Chia

  A Tribute to my Mother

  For my brothers and sisters —

  so that they will remember the way our mother was

  before Alzheimer’s disease changed her. And also

  for all those whose loved ones have Alzheimer’s.

  Except for mine and my parents’ names,

  all other family members’ names have been changed.

  “Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true

  Real becomes not real when the unreal’s real”

  — Cao Xue Qin, The Dream of the Red Chamber

  This is a story I have to tell.

  One

  Your mother is beautiful, people say when they see her photograph on the dedication page of my cookbook. Each remark squeezes my heart. Can they see what I see, beyond Mak’s old skin, her body shrinking from her sarong kebaya, her eyes opaque with cataract, her hips rudely angled from arthritis and having borne several children. Why do I feel that when people are praising her, they are praising me? Have we both swayed to the cosmic dance together, sometimes child, sometimes mother, sometimes brother or sister, spouse to each other in different incarnations?

  What I do know is that I am not just my mother’s daughter. I am her hope and dreams. When I separated from her at birth, she passed her baton for me to complete her race. The handing over of the baton didn’t happen in one quick changeover, it has taken years, years of subtle learning through which she feeds me her desires, her hopes, her dreams, her life which has not been. I can re-capture her the way she was, tall and slender in her sarong kebaya, her face a delicate shape, her full head of hair, the way she moved, fluid and elegant, everything about her so fine. As though I have the Beast’s magic mirror, I can conjure up her face in every chosen moment to see the way she tilts her head or the way her lips form crescents of smiles. It is, therefore, ironic that of all her children, it is I who wrought the distance between us, going to a place where she cannot follow.

  “How’s Mak?” I ask, over the telephone. Mak is short for emak, the Malay word for mother. Peranakans like us speak more Malay than Chinese.

  “She’s resting,” says my sister, Bernadette.

  Five years my junior, Bernadette, who is 45, sometimes feels the burden of having Mother in her home. I do not blame her, she has to put up with a great deal on an everyday basis. I am privileged to be spared the nasty bits. Besides, she was too little to know the quiet heroine I know. The youngest since Robert died, Bernadette mostly gripes about the irascible old woman who refuses to let the Filipino maid do her work, who insists on cooking although she forgets whether she has salted the soup or not. It means that Bernadette’s family gets meals that are either over-salted or not salted at all. She sees a stubborn old woman struggling with her rattan basket walking feebly to the wet market, courting danger on the slippery floor when squeaky clean supermarkets are now the norm. She has to tolerate a woman who can’t remember the right bus home but is too thrifty to take a taxi, a woman who mixes past events with the present. And worse, she has to deal with the hysteria of a woman who fights phantoms in her waking moments.

  “It’s all right for you,” she often says, “You’re so far away.”

  She doesn’t know that I cannot be separated from Mak even though we are 10,000 miles apart. She and I share the same soul space.

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “Heart attack. Dolores found her in the morning, gasping, clutching her chest, whites of eyes showing. Scared the life out of me.”

  I get the details in brutal graphics in true Singaporean fashion. Unsparing. Bernadette cannot know how much it pains me. Like when I ask her if Mak knows who has written the cookbook for her. “Ya, she recognises her photo and knows that you sent it. Then five minutes later, she has forgotten. No use at all, lah!”

  “Shall I come out?”

  “Not at the moment I’ll keep you posted.”

  I had wondered earlier if I should go out there for Christmas, which is in five weeks. It is hard to speculate when it might be Mak’s last. She’s 85 and definitely on the wane. But when you’ve got family in two different countries, it’s not easy to decide how to split yourself; or decide which takes first priority. It’s been my dilemma the last 15 years.

  “I’ve put her in a private room. Costs a lot of money, you know. And I’ve got Dolores staying with her 24 hours so that Mak won’t be confused when she wakes up.”

  Bernadette isn’t fishing for financial assistance, she’s seeking empathy — to be recognised as the one taking responsibility for our mother although she is the youngest. She does have a right. There are so many of us, but the burden has fallen on her. But it’s not as if she had been forced. In the beginning, it was our mother who had taken care of her, t
aking her under her wing when Bernadette was unmarried. Whilst she carved a career for herself, Mak kept Bernadette’s flat clean, did all the washing and had meals ready when Bernadette came home. It was natural that when Bernadette got married, Mak would stay on, still keeping house and cooking for Bernadette and her husband. When Andy came along, he had a ready grandmother at home which suited everybody. Our mother was already 76 then, but still able. When she started to find things unmanageable, Bernadette employed Dolores. It was not until Mak was 80 that her forgetfulness became a concern — she got lost a couple of times on her way back from the wet market. Then she started getting disorientated, saying that she wanted to go home when she was already at home. We thought it was a bad case of senile dementia, but the doctor said something worse, “Alzheimer’s”. It sounded like a sentence. Sadly, we are learning that it is a sentence — her spirit imprisoned by a debilitating mind.

  So now, the cared has become the carer, daughter mothering the mother. I am grateful that Mak is in Bernadette’s main care, because my sister is usually patient, has a heart of gold and is not the type to answer back an elder. Our mother had been hospitalised before for goitre and cataracts removal but not a heart attack — it’s her first. It’s times like this that I wish she’s only a bus hop away. Her progress report dribbles in via e-mails and, occasionally, the telephone. The days stretch precariously like hardened elastic, as though they might snap. Will she see in the new millennium? And even if she did, will she even understand what it means to be in the new millennium? Her body and mind are both teetering on the point of a sword.

  She could have had a different life. Mak was born to play music, embroider and look pretty for her husband. Up until the time when the disaster occurred, that was all she was trained for. A school education wasn’t even considered. For her brother, it was seen as a necessity, but certainly not for her sisters and herself. Like them, she believed that her good fortune would last forever. Fortunately, unlike her sisters, she took advantage of those times of plenty to teach herself many useful things. That luxuriant warm glow of her skin comes from good food and mixed ancestry, an untraced Chinese great great-grandparent with an indigenous Malay wife. Peranakans, our people are called. Or Straits Chinese. To differentiate us from the overseas Chinese who stick to their own kind, clinging to their own beliefs and customs. Peranakans incorporate Malay customs, language, cuisine and mode of dressing into our culture though we retain Chinese names, religion and New Year. I believe we are the true Singaporeans, a people who have absorbed and integrated with the locals, not just remaining an immigrant race. In many cases, we have also inherited the Malays’ large brown eyes, delicate noses and coppertone complexion. And, if we are lucky, their nature — laid back and gentle, more interested in creating a beautiful home, making cakes, music, a craft or a piece of art than in amassing wealth. Fortunately, though, Grandfather had a stronger Chinese streak. He inherited his entrepreneurial skill from our Chinese ancestors and had fruit estates which spanned the breastbone of what used to be called Peninsular Malaya — durian, rambutan, mango, chikku and other fruits. Before the Second World War, like many wealthy Peranakans who were pro-British, Grandfather wore English suits on special occasions. When he inspected his fruit estates, he wore a safari-type khaki outfit with a pith helmet. Mak often said with a delightful laugh that the helmet was an insurance against the thorny durian falling on his head. During his most affluent years, he employed hundreds of workers, mostly Malays and South Indian immigrants. He sold the fruits to market traders in the country and wholesalers in Singapore. If only he had not inherited that other strong Chinese propensity — the love of gambling.

  “Every, every morning, we had fresh fruit-fruit for breakfast.” Mak told me when I was a child. She had been divorced from her previous life for years but would extract bits of it to recount to me as though they were fresh in her mind. “The servants cut and slice many fruit-fruit, arrange slices on beautiful wooden platter. Look like colorful rainbow. But not durian, lah. We never have durian for breakfast, otherwise eat too full for anything else.”

  My mother’s words conjured up images in my mind. I could picture the delicious mouth-watering fruits, their different colours layered in a spectrum. At the time she was telling me about them, we had only one sad papaya tree in our sandy backyard in the kampong and some banana trees, nothing as exotic as the ones she talked about. The history of our family and people came through her mouth to me, from her grandmother to her, from great-grandmother to grandmother. Nothing was ever written down because women of her ilk could not write, and our history is, therefore, easily warped by memory, fragile as soap bubbles.

  Peranakans settled mostly in Malacca or Penang, and later in Singapore, the three places the British named the Straits Settlements. My English husband, David, sometimes tease me about aspiring to royalty when I tell him of the origins of our race. The Straits of Malacca which ran between the Western hip of Peninsular Malaya and the flank of Indonesia was an important shipping lane between the East and the West. Ships from the West who wanted to trade with China had to use this narrow strip of water to reach the South China Sea. In the early 13th or 14th century, the Emperor of China felt that he could exert a measure of control over this important stretch of water by establishing a good relationship with the sultan of Malacca. So he gave his daughter Princess Hang Li Po in marriage to the then-ruler, Sultan Mansur Shah. When the Chinese princess went over to Malaya, she took with her her retinue of servants and courtiers. Chinese merchants also took the opportunity to trade there and they married local Malay girls. These intermarriages resulted in a new race. Our Peranakan race. As Grandfather was an astute businessman, it is more than likely that our family descended from the merchants or even one of the labourers. But when David jokes about how the British colonised Singapore, I get on my high horse to serve back a ball about my possible royal connections. Malacca was first conquered by the Portugese and then the Dutch. The British had a small stronghold, Batavia, in an otherwise Dutch Indonesia. The two powers traded, the British gave up Batavia for Malacca, so that Malaya became wholly British and Indonesia wholly Dutch.

  Before the catastrophe, my maternal grandparents had a beautiful bungalow on concrete supports by the shores of Malacca, a house carved out of local wood, the designs on the lintel intricate with mythological tales, an open verandah surrounding the house, the back stairs leading into the sea. The bungalow sat on a private golden sand beach, fringed by palm trees which arched towards the Straits of Malacca. Like much of our family history, my mother’s birth year is edged in mystery because there is no birth certificate. She was born sometime between 1914 and 1916, with a given name of Soon Neo, later christened Catherine, though she never used the English name. Soon Neo used to sit on the steps of her parents’ bungalow to let the salt waves lap gently over her feet as she watched the sun throw off its mantle of orange as it slipped over the horizon. The child, Soon Neo, elbows propped on knees would breathe in the sea air and the colours of the sky into her memory. Even after her life changed so drastically, she would recall those moments, painting a verbal picture for me as though the scene was ever present in front of her eyes.

  “I love to swim, what. But not easy in old days. Only ang mos (Europeans) wore swimsuits. Show legs, show arm-pit! White flesh on thighs. Our sarongs, if too much above ankles, we got scolding, lah! Not like modern young people now. Your grandmother made Great Aunt, Second Aunt, Fourth Aunt and I wear our sarongs, draped around our breasts when we swam. Susah sekali! Really cumbersome! The water caused our sarongs to plume around us when we plunged in. Like balloons. Grandmother made our amahs watch over us, scolding us if we splash-splash and show much-much leg or if we went too far out to sea. One day, I got real thrashing. Grandfather, he really angry. He never used rotan on me before but oh, that occasion! Want to hear or not?”

  “Want, want,” I said.

  I must have been about six or seven, still unschooled. When she told me her story, we were
both squatting on the threshold of our attap hut, my back to her. She was picking the lice from my head, squashing each between thumb and finger. Lice crawled about on many heads in our shanty village — it was a mark of our deprivation. No one had running water at home, rats and cockroaches scuttled about like members of the family. When the population of lice became too dense and therefore too arduous to pick, the ultimate remedy was kerosene, poured generously onto heads. I hated it. It stung my scalp, its fumes made me want to puke. It would have been dangerous to go near anyone with a lighted match. After the dousing, Mak would scrub my scalp with vigour using black carbolic soap. We had no shampoos then. That day when she was telling me her story, the lice were only beginning to birth in my forest of hair.

  “It was hot-hot night. I just couldn’t sleep, lah. I thought how wonderful to swim like fish in cool-cool water. I was about 13 or 14. I slipped out of bed, making sure that my amah, Ah Moi, did not hear me. She was snore-snore, her jaw loose. I quickly, quickly drape sarong around me, then tip-toed out of room, creeping along floor-boards on my bare feet. Can see quite clearly because moon splash-splash light into room, make stand out statues of Goddess Kwan Yin and Grandfather’s jade Good Luck Dragon. At top step of stairs leading into sea, I stopped to listen if anybody was about. Only hear tide shush-shush underneath house, like rough tongue scraping sandy shore. Very nice sound. So peaceful. Always make me think safe. Outside, coconut trees toss their heads shy-shy, shaking heads like women just wash long hair, trying to dry in wind. Also, I hear branches scratching attap roof. Sure-sure that I was only one awake, I dropped sarong on verandah and tested my foot in the water. It was little bit cool, lah, so flesh go suddenly goose-pimpling. Some people scared of dark sea, but I did not mind it because its crests were made silver by moon. Sure very good, what, dark-dark, no one can see me. I walk down steps slowly and then let waves take me so that I did not make many noise. Water met my skin, silky, sensuous. Aiiyah, soooooo nice, lah. Very soon, I felt warm, as if I belonged there and was always creature of sea. Sea-waves lick-lick my body, my long hair floating around me like black seaweed. I sliced through water, turned this way and that to face Lady Moon. So heaven, lah! I didn’t realise how long I lay like that. Then suddenly, cutting through salty sea air, I smelled it — Grandfather’s cheroot. Coconut trees were fanning pungent smell to me. Grandfather must be strolling on other side of verandah, unable to sleep, too. Either he was hot as well or he was tensed and worried. I felt a little sad for him, wondering what business problems were keeping him awake. He never discussed business with Grandmother. I knew that on hot night like this, he would only be in his sarong, his chest bare. He was definitely around corner, smell of his cheroot coming to me in puffs like train racing to Singapura. My heart started to beat hard-hard, if he walked this way, he sure to see my sarong. Mati, lah! Die, lah! Sure get killed, one. To be half-dressed was bad enough. To be completely without clothes was very big wrong. But if I was quick-quick, I would escape his eye.”