When a Flower Dies Read online

  “When I pick up one of Josephine Chia’s books on Singapore’s past, I always know that I’m in for a treat. Josephine brings her readers back to the Singapore of the 1950s and 60s that she grew up in and, in her simple, accessible prose she realistically evokes its sights and sounds and smells. In doing so, she helps us to re-live and re-imagine those days and, in singing her song, she helps us to sing ours.”

  - Dr Angeline Yap, lawyer and poet

  “When it comes to historical fiction, Josephine Chia is in a class of her own. Combining beautifully history with memory, strong reality with desired fantasy, she has woven a poetical tapestry that proves engaging, even alluring. I have no doubt that this novel will appeal to readers old and young, Singaporean and non-Singaporean for it is, ultimately, about love. Love in its manifold splendour.”

  - Dr Kirpal Singh, author of Thinking Hats & Coloured Turbans and Director, Wee Kim Wee Centre, SingaporeManagement University

  When a flower dies© Josephine Chia, 2015

  ISBN: 978-981-09-6314-9 (Print)

  ISBN: 978-981-14-3257-6 (E-book)

  Published under the imprint Ethos Books

  by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd

  28 Sin Ming Lane #06-131

  Singapore 573972

  www.ethosbooks.com.sg

  www.facebook.com/ethosbooks

  The publisher reserves all rights to this title.

  Cover Design by Yen Phang

  Design and layout by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd

  Printed by Markono Print Media Pte Ltd

  Published with the support of

  Made possible with the

  Writer-in-the-Gardens Residency Programme

  National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Chia, Josephine, author.

  When a flower dies / Josephine Chia. – Singapore : Ethos Books, [2015]

  pages cm

  ISBN : 978-981-09-6314-9 (pbk)

  ISBN : 978-981-14-3257-6 (ebk)

  1. Loss (Psychology) – Fiction. 2. Bereavement – fiction. 3. Spouses – fiction. 4. Singapore – History – 20th century – Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9570.S53

  S823 -- dc23

  OCN918767817

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.

  If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please consider getting your own copy from ethosbooks.com.sg. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The world is too much with us; late and soon,

  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

  Little we see in Nature that is ours;

  We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

  The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

  The winds that will be howling at all hours

  And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

  For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

  It moves us not.

  —William Wordsworth, 1806

  Note from the author:

  This is a work of fiction. The main village in this story, Kampong Tepi Laut, is a fictional village and it never existed though it is representative of the seaside kampongs which did. However, all the other coastal villages that are mentioned in this book and which were eventually destroyed did exist both on the east and west coasts of Singapore. The three banyan trees that are featured in the novel are the few vestigial remains of the eastern kampongs. Though based on some historical facts, the unfolding of events is purely fictional.

  Note from the editors:

  In this book, we made the decision not to italicise terms and references that are at home in Peranakan culture. These would include Malay names and Singlish expressions. The act of italicising words from one’s own culture is also an act of dispossession, and we would like to bring your reading experience closer to life as lived by the characters in this book.

  Chapter 1

  What a joy it is to come across a host of daffodils here in tropical Singapore! The temperature-controlled Flower Dome at Gardens by the Bay, simulating spring, has made the phenomenon possible—a twenty-first century miracle, surely? William Wordsworth would have been amazed. He had caught sight of his daffodils whilst on his walks in nineteenth century England’s wide-spaced and hilly Lake District in Cumbria. It was his poem which Pansy Chan has always associated with these flowers:

  I wandered lonely as a cloud

  That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

  When all at once I saw a crowd

  A host of golden daffodils

  Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

  Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

  She was taught the English poem at St Teresa of Avila’s Convent on the old East Coast Road, before land reclamation from 1966 to 1976 stole part of the sea and pushed the coastline out, altering the physical shape of Singapore forever and irrevocably changing the lives of the coastal dwellers. The image of the daffodils had lived in her mind as a symbol of beauty and freedom. And when she eventually saw them for the first time in England, she was smitten, their image instantly becoming a reality which she fell in love with. She would also associate the spring flowers with George, and their constant love for each other. And now to see them here in her own home country was nothing short of a miracle.

  Since she was a pre-war baby, in her youth the country was still a British colony and many of the English schools’ syllabi contained references to its rich literature. This was a time when schoolchildren read Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Keats, Tennyson, Shelley, Blake, Eliot, Frost, Auden; the Bronte sisters, Austen and many others. It never occurred to Pansy that it was odd that young Asian children should be reciting Here we go round the mulberry bush when nobody knew what a mulberry bush looked like. Out of school, they read Dennis the Menace and Desperate Dan comics, Postman Pat, Roald Dahl, Beatrix Potter and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Secret Seven and Malory Towers series, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Young girls dreamt about having adventures, falling in love with knights in shining armour, or being free from parental tyranny at boarding schools in the UK. To them, England was a magical country where everybody was rich and children had lots to eat and had flush toilets, where there were no cockroaches or rats running around the base of the outhouses. England was where children had store-bought clothes, toys and books. Boys imagined scaling rocky cliffs and castles, discovering secret hide-outs, being slayers of dragons, and escapades with Robin Hood, Captain Hook, Captain Flint and Tarzan. They were taught maths in pound sterling, shilling and pence, when only the Straits dollar was used here. Even more challenging was learning the use of pounds, ounces and stones when local weight measurements were in kati and tahil.

  But Pansy hadn’t minded, had loved it in fact; the diverse cultures did not clash, they enriched her. For a girl living in a small, isolated kampong by the sea on the East Coast of Singapore, with little possibility of travel, it was wonderful to be exposed to a different country right across the other side of the world, to its culture, lifestyle and literature. This was the era before mobile phones, the Internet, computers or easy air travel. There was only one phone box in the entire village that was the villagers’ means of communicating with the outside world. Pansy loved English poetry, especially poems that described nature and brought the English outdoors to her in Kampong Tepi Laut. The village’s Malay name aptly described its position by the sea, straddled as it was between the rivers, Sungei Bedok and Sungei Ketapang, one of the many places which had fallen victim to the land reclamation project. After the reclam
ation, even the two rivers had been redirected from their natural flow to pour into Bedok Canal, before they were permitted to reach the sea.

  Pansy enjoyed poems which painted the colour and glories of seasons absent in the tropics. They taught her to be sensitive to the nature around her, alerted her to the changing moods of the clouds and sky, opened her ears to subtler sounds. Sister Catherine was largely instrumental in showing her how carefully selected words framed in verse could transport her into exalted experiences. It was Sister Catherine’s very English, Home Counties’ voice, scaling the poetic metre and enunciating the words ever so properly, that converted Pansy into a life-long disciple of poetry.

  “Round your ‘Os’ and end your words clearly, Pansy,” she said. “Don’t talk like the rat-tat-tat of a gun. Hear the rhythm of the verse in your inner ear. Don’t rush! Linger over the meaning of a word. Experience the emotion of the word. Feel with your senses!”

  Poems like William Wordsworth’s ‘To the Small Celandine’ or John Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’ offered Pansy a virtual experience she would otherwise not have had, except for that moment which George had shared with her when they were teenagers. She loved learning the poems by heart and reciting them, resonating with their rhythm and cadence as if she were recapturing a memory of an earlier life incarnated in Britain.

  Even though the poetry was from and about England, there was a universality about it that transcended race and culture and touched the human heart deeply. Another poem that moved her was ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake. The majesty and awe of the tiger had come alive for her in Blake’s telling, and the sense of the Creative Power inspired her:

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  “Listen, listen,” Sister Catherine’s voice comes to Pansy again. “Pay attention to Blake’s choice of words. You can almost hear the heartbeat of the tiger…”

  Beloved Sister Catherine, her unfailing moral support. Pity they never met up after she left Singapore. Despite her age and failing memory, Pansy can still recite the poem in its entirety. Except that these days, she cannot find any listening ear; people nowadays are always in a hurry, too busy and too preoccupied.

  “Aiyoh!” her son Anthony said when she grumbled, “Who can be bothered to sit and listen to poetry these days? We don’t even teach literature in our schools lor. Do you know that ten years ago we had forty thousand students studying literature but this year only three thousand students offered it as a subject…?”

  “That’s so sad…” Pansy started to say.

  “That’s logical what…” Anthony’s wife, Emily, CEO of Tiger Global Investments, interrupted. “Literature very hard to score ‘A’ what. What for waste time memorising such things? Doesn’t bring any benefit or pay the bills what. Remember what LKY said when he was trying to build a nation: ‘There is no time for poetry…’”

  “Are you sure he said that?” Anthony said. “Hey, don’t misquote the guy…”

  LKY. Lee Kuan Yew. Now ailing and nearly ninety. The present Prime Minister’s father. Builder of modern Singapore. Gutsy. Formidable. He built a wealthy nation from a land of mudflats and swamps, without natural resources; pulled up a post-colonial struggling country up by the bootstraps to shape into a First World nation. There was much to thank him for. There were also dissenting voices who levelled barbed remarks.

  It followed that none of Anthony and Emily’s three daughters studied literature in school. Emily had named all her daughters after famous film actresses, called actors these days, so as not to be sexist—Goldie, the eldest at twenty-six, followed by Winona and Andie, all two years apart from one another. Nobody speaks of it now, but Andie was the result of Anthony and Emily’s last attempt to have a boy.

  “I hate my name,” Goldie used to whisper to Pansy. “Mum is obsessed with film stars. I feel ridiculous when my hair is so black and I’m so brown!”

  Pansy couldn’t let on that she disapproved of Emily’s choice of names as she would have preferred more traditional ones that had reference to the family clan. At least if she had to choose modern names, why not beautiful meanings and positive attributes rather than names of actresses? But then who was she to comment when her own mother had given her an English floral name that was non-traditional too? To console her eldest granddaughter, she merely patted Goldie’s hand.

  It is true that in an era when information can be downloaded instantly from iPhones and iPads, not many have the inclination to sit and listen to a whole poem being recited. Those early days when multi-ethnic neighbours used to commune in the evenings outside their kampong houses, to sit and chat, recite poetry or Malay pantun, sing songs or tell stories, are now long gone, relegated to nostalgia, purveyed as ‘heritage’.

  Urban life in any major city like Singapore is a rush of continual activity from morning to night, many in full-time employment, struggling to pay off hefty housing and car loans; kids to drop off and pick up from school, tuition classes and extra-curricular activities; or for singles, shopping, binges at bars, discos and night-clubs; and for the fit and active, surfing artificially generated waves in wave pools, cycling and evening strolls in manicured parks. Others watch TV programmes in High Definition on numerous cable channels, or play video games on their personal mobile devices, immersed in made-up worlds. Some people even live in virtual worlds, buying, selling, negotiating, and even falling in love with online avatars and a totally invented life.

  The pressure that all these impose is subtle. To sit or stand still doing nothing would be considered peculiar. Communication is expected to be instant, with people answering text messages and calls immediately. People send photos of their meal as they eat, tweet their every move, and post selfies on Instagrams, as if the whole world must be privy to the minutiae of their daily lives, as if such affirmation rescues their lives from ordinariness and vacuity. Somewhere from the deep recesses of her mind, Socrates’ words float into Pansy’s mind, “Beware the barrenness of a busy life”. Indeed, Pansy thinks, it is so easy to believe one is living a fruitful life if one is constantly on the go. The irony of all these modern modes of communication is that though it will only take seconds these days for someone to send Pansy a message or photo of her grandchildren, those seconds remain unused. But then, it was as expected. Her grandchildren are young adults with their own lives to lead: Goldie is already a full-fledged accountant, Winona, studying to be a doctor, and Andie, a lawyer.

  “You have to take her home when I die,” George Chan had said.

  “Dad, you’re not going to die…” Anthony had protested weakly.

  Anthony had flown to England with his family when he was told that his father had advanced prostate cancer. George was seventy-nine, three years older than Pansy. Anthony and Emily were surprised to find him at home and not in hospital. George wanted to die in his own home, a home which Pansy had made for them in the countryside where he had set up his own practice after moving out of Singapore. Initially, the locals had been surprised to encounter a Chinese Singaporean doctor when they turned up at the surgery but they were respectful, and gradually respect and acceptance turned into admiration. Anthony was mildly shocked to see his father’s gaunt face, his hair grown white. The deterioration had been swift. Of all the grandchildren, Goldie had seemed the most distraught. She projected a hard exterior with her short-cropped hair and manly clothes unlike her uber-feminine sisters, yet Pansy suspected she had a soft centre.

  “I’m a doctor, son,” said George. “No need to pretend with me. Even physicians cannot out-beat the grim reaper. We think we know so much but in effect we know so little. Yet, I can die happy only if I know your mother is going to be taken care of. I think she has the onset of some form of dementia, perhaps Alzheimer’s. We don’t know which yet. No point her living here in England all by herself. You take her home. I was going to do it once I realised that my cancer was terminal,
but it looks like I might be too late. So we’ll see a solicitor today and sign over the power of attorney to you, so you can handle all our affairs, take charge of all the money. It might not be long before she won’t be capable of managing these things. Promise me, you’ll take care of your mother…”

  Anthony was their only child.

  “I promise, dad.”

  “Maybe you can have her live with you…?”

  “Oh, that will not be possible lah,” Emily rushed in quickly. “With our three girls, the live-in helper, and another to cook and clean, our apartment is already quite crowded...”

  George had been too weak to argue. He wished that Anthony had interjected, but he didn’t. It appeared that Anthony’s voice had begun to slowly diminish as his marriage trudged on. In the old days, it was the woman who lost her voice and her identity when she married. But today, a woman has economic freedom, so she can assert herself; her earning power is sometimes greater than her husband’s, resulting in a new breed of men. Fortunately, Pansy did not hear the exchange. She was busy in the kitchen preparing roast beef with all the trimmings, especially Yorkshire pudding, which she knew Anthony loved to lace with a deluge of gravy, quite apart from his predilection for Peranakan cuisine and Singapore hawker food. Goldie was taking a walk along the pebbled beach whilst her sisters were busy updating their Facebook and other social networking accounts on their iPads.

  “Grandma, this place is heaven!” Goldie enthused when she returned. “I don’t know why but lately I’ve come to love the sea more and more. The sea here is so wild, so alive!”

  Pansy did not have the presence of mind to pay much attention to Goldie then as her mind was on cooking for George. But later, she was to regret not taking the opportunity to tell Goldie about her own love for her village by the sea on the East Coast of Singapore.