Frog Under A Coconut Shell Page 11

  “What’s the child’s name?”

  “Josephine,” my mother said. She pronounced my name as JosJosFien. “We are converted Catholics.”

  The principal frowned when she heard the corruption of my name and must have been trying to work out what my mother was saying. My heart thumped at the severity of her look. Eurasians like Miss D’Souza were usually Catholics, so my mother’s mention of us being Catholics was probably a point in my favour. I saw my fortune change a little, for now I was as anxious as my mother to get me into school.

  “Has she got a Chinese name?”

  “Ya,” my mother lied quickly. “But I don’t know how to write it, lah. I have no schooling. It’s not in birth certificate because my husband forgot to give it to English clerk.”

  “Why is her father not here?”

  Mak seemed to be suddenly reduced in size. She shifted uneasily and was quiet for a bit, seeming to inspect her clogs. I suspected she was thinking up some lies but fortuitously decided to tell the truth, her speech stumbling over the rocks of her illiteracy, words that are seared forever in my memory.

  “My husband stern-stern man. He thinks girls no need to study, what. Don’t study very terrible for me. So want my daughter to be educated. I don’t know anything. Very bodoh. Stupid. Cut off from so many things. Can’t read road signs. Not even my name.” Her voice thinned and seemed to tear. “Must make my daughter able to read words on signboards: Come, Stop, Go, Wait, Careful. Read newspaper. She must not be like me. Stupid. If educated, she can work, earn own money. No need to ask from man. No need to makan darah (eat blood).”

  Miss D’Souza sat very still, so still, I thought she had not heard my mother. Her face grew hard like stone and her mouth worked wordlessly. Was she angry at my mother’s rhetoric? Did she see me as peasant stock unfit to be educated? I thought my career had ended before it had a chance to begin. She seemed to be examining my mother, weighing her words. Then I heard her heave a loud sigh and thought I noticed a moistness in her eyes — could it be due to the waft of chillies and asam pedas emitting from the school tuckshop? When she found her voice, she said, “Men like your husband are still living in the dark ages. Do you see any boys in this school? Am I a man? Nonya, you have a lot of courage to defy your husband. I’m only sorry that you missed your chance but let us help you to ensure that your daughter will make you proud of your efforts. Get someone to write her Chinese name and bring it to me and she can start school in Second Term.”

  My mother was so moved that she could only keep bowing and bowing in gratitude, her head bobbing up and down like one of those Chinese clay figurines with a hinged neck. She pulled me out of Miss D’Souza’s office as if she was afraid Miss D’Souza might change her mind. But still, she didn’t speak.

  “I will make you really, really proud of me, Mak,” I said afterwards, dancing alongside her on our walk home. “I shall read you stories from books!”

  My mind was filled with the image of the library and all the books I will soon be able to read that at first I did not notice that Mak had gone quiet. She should be triumphant since she had achieved her goal of getting me into school. I did not know that her mind had raced ahead worrying about where she was going to find the money to buy the school uniforms and books. Father had said he would not contribute.

  “Want to go school, must work first. Get money to pay for uniform and books,” she said. “I must sell more kueh. Maybe can take in the neighbour’s washing. You can help me before you leave for school or after you come back.”

  “I’ll help, Mak. I’ll help.”

  We stopped at the shophouses before our village. Along the five-foot-way, there was an old fortune teller sitting at his little wooden stall papered with red and gold rectangles of Chinese characters, his fortune-telling bird twittering and hoping in its cage. When he had a customer, Ah Pek would rattle fortune sticks in a bamboo container. He would release the bird who helped to pick out the stick which told the customer his future. Then Ah Pek read the oracle and provided the interpretation. Ah Pek was very thin and had no hair on his head but had a long wispy beard and he spoke with a rasping, smoky voice. I was curious as to why my mother wanted to consult him on this particular day.

  “Ah Pek,” she said to him in Teochew. “Can give my daughter a good Chinese name or not?”

  She meant an auspicious name which would bring luck. Then she proceeded to tell him why she needed it.

  “What is your family name?”

  “Chia,” my mother said.

  “Nice. It’s Xia in Mandarin. It means gratitude. You call her what name, now?”

  “Ah Phine,” she said.

  “Josephine,” I interjected. “My name is Josephine. It’s from a Christian saint.”

  “Phine sounds like fen, fragrant. Your daughter has a bright face, like Yue, the moon. Why don’t we call her Yue Fen, Moon Fragrant? (Fragrant Moon).”

  He spoke the name in Mandarin, the literate language of the Chinese which was what I had to learn now that I was classed a Chinese. It would be foreign to my tongue for no one in my family spoke the language, our Peranakan Creole being a hybrid of Malay and Teochew, a Chinese dialect. As in Malay, nouns come before adjectives.

  “Yes, that sounds lovely,” my mother said.

  I had already been used to being called Ah Phine, so I was not particularly interested in using another name. Would having a new name change the way I was? Is naming a kind of branding? I decided to amuse myself and tickled the bird under its chin. With meticulous care, Ah Pek spread out a clean sheet of rice paper. He dipped his Chinese brush into the pot of black ink then held his hand poised in mid-air as if he was waiting for inspiration. When it came, he let it flow through his arm into his hand and into the brush so that hand and brush moved in symphony to each other and my new Chinese name flowed from his fingers expressing itself in beautiful calligraphy onto the rice paper. As far as I was concerned, it was without doubt lovely brushwork but it had nothing to do with the essence of me. The name did not connect. Neither Mak nor I could read what was on the paper and I was thinking: This is going to be hard to write.

  And I still can’t write it today.

  Seven

  Before I went to school, I was a frog under the coconut shell, my kampong was the coconut shell. After I went to school, the coconut shell became bigger. But I was still a frog, limited by my upbringing and attitudes. Schooling shifts the walls of the coconut shell but doesn’t make them disappear. Unless you break free, dare to search and venture outside the shell. We know who we are in the confines of the coconut shell, but once we step outside, into the larger world, under the open sky, we lose ourselves in the crowd, lose our clear space, our sense of who we are, and perhaps our sense of importance. For that security, we confine ourselves. Prison walls can be made of different things.

  My mother is now a frog imprisoned under the coconut shell of her debilitating mind. Her world is limited to what she can grasp at any one moment. Nothing exists for her except what her Self makes up. Cogito, Ergo Sum — I think therefore I am. Can she think about who she really is? She believes she is what she thinks, but those who have known her know that her perception of herself is inaccurate, that her thinking is flawed. She construes a Self which is really a conglomerate of supposed ideas of herself, her life a hotch-potch of what she remembers. In her make-belief setting, the Self she creates is real. It is fiction at its best. Her belief is absolute.

  The first time I suspected that something was wrong with her was on one of my trips back to Singapore when she told me, “I went to Australia on holiday on my own, you know. Oh, I had good-good time!”

  Mak still cannot construct a whole sentence in English and can only string some words together, words which she borrows from listening in to our conversations, TV soap operas and sitcoms; sentences without articles nor tenses as in the languages we speak. With her usual determination, she had been intent on conversing with David in his language when they first met. He recalled the
day when we had lunched at a smart hotel in Singapore. I had gone to get the car and David was waiting with Mak in the hotel lobby. Mak pulled up her sarong to expose her knee and she grumbled to David, “My leg very trouble, lah.” With such limitations and no travel sense, I could not imagine her going off to Australia on her own. She would not know how to go about buying herself a ticket, let alone board a plane. Her knowledge of the world is limited to the coconut shell of her life. Bernadette confirmed that the trip was a construction of Mak’s imagination. Bernadette had told her of her own trip to Australia and somehow my mother had seized the experience as her own. When you are desperate for new memories, you steal from others. That was the beginning.

  I watch her now with a feeling of deep sadness as she plays out her tragic comedy because in some ways, the things she makes up are funny, in others, pathetic. How deep do her emotions go? Are her emotions like her memory, only skimming the surface of her heart and mind? She is animated one minute, full of joy, and the next she is sullen, full of complaints. It can’t be easy for Bernadette and her husband, especially when they have guests for lunch. Mak is extremely voluble, talking to one of their friends, Kenny, who is also a Peranakan. She talks to him in our Peranakan Creole in a voice which is louder and more shrill than usual as though someone else and not herself has taken control over it. She talks as if she has never had a chance to talk before and now that she has a captive audience, she has to bare her heart. If you did not know the true story, you would believe some of the things she says because she is so convincing. She acts like a petulant child and seems almost malicious in intent which is totally unlike my mother. She tells Kenny that Bernadette and her husband do not talk to her all day, that Dolores chats over the fence to the neighbour’s maid rather then look after her, that she has been discarded to the ground floor room next to Dolores’ as though she were the servant.

  “Apa nak buat? Sudah tua, apa. What to do? So old, what.” She laments.

  In reality, Bernadette allocated that particular room to her to save her climbing up the stairs. Initially when they moved in and her mind was still in working order, Mak had been overjoyed with her room because it had ensuite facilities and had easy access to the kitchen and living room. For a woman who has lived most of her adult life in make-shift huts without proper sanitation, water or electricity, to have an entire room to herself for the first time with bathroom attached, running water and electricity, she has indeed been reinstated to the glory of her parents’ wealthier days. Why she should then consider that she has been relegated to the position of a servant is difficult to understand. She has always been such a positive person with such a lovely nature that this dark side seems out of character. It appears that Alzheimer’s is the culprit for these personality changes. But whatever the cause, the reality of having to deal with these strange manifestations of dark moods is a living nightmare.

  Later, Bernadette’s husband says to me, “You see that’s why we can’t invite business colleagues to the house. Kenny understands because he’s a close friend but people we know casually in business might not understand. Especially when Mak makes it out that we ill-treat her.”

  Her sense of being neglected and ill-treated seems a large part of her make-up now. My heart bleeds that she should feel like this. I want so much for her to be happy and comfortable in her old age, as I am sure my brothers and sisters want her to be. I want her to feel loved the way she has loved me and cared for me. But an unspoken sorrow inside her makes her sit down and weep sometimes and I know there is nothing I can say to console her. Every now and again, she gets it into her head that someone is coming to steal something from the house and she will go to the French windows to keep watch. To Bernadette’s continuous frustration, she would collect ornaments that Bernadette has placed around the house to put them away in the cupboard in her room so that whoever comes into the house would not be able to steal them. What we didn’t know was that our mother was also putting away food, presumably for leaner times. When Mak was in hospital, Bernadette opened the cupboard to retrieve her ornaments and found the shelves full of ants because Mak had also put away fruits and food for goodness know how long, food which she couldn’t remember was hidden. No words can reassure Mak that she is being fed and looked after when she gets into that sort of mood. I pray that deep inside her, she knows she is being loved and cared for, that there is a part of her which still remains wholesome and beautiful. I sometimes wonder if this need to save food and things comes from her days of deprivation, and whether her sense of persecution stems from my father’s treatment of her. I have a memory of an incident which will not go away. I remember that on the day I was told I could go to school, I had been elated but my father spoiled the day for me. I remember pressing my face into the folds of my mother’s sarong in a bid to comfort her as she sat huddled in the corner of the darkened kitchen with the tears sliding silently down her cheeks. That one time, I felt the air thick with her sense of hopelessness, so thick that I wanted to take a parang, wield it to slice through the thicket to free her. I felt so responsible because it was her endeavour to get me into school, her dream to want something different for me, that had caused her the trouble.

  My father was a volatile man. My eldest brother suffered my father’s wrath. There is a bitterness in him that scrapes him raw. Perhaps experiences with our father has marked him like this and I wish that he can let go of the past. Perhaps he is also bitter about the opportunities he had lost because he helped put us through school. This is understandable but, grateful as I am to him, I also feel that it wasn’t too late for him to improve his lot if he really wanted to — and he should have, and could have, because he was very intelligent. But then again, perhaps marriage intervened, its responsibilities, the need to support wife and children. How much are we a victim of circumstances and how much are we our own person? Although Jacob is darker skinned than our father, he has the same good looks and strong personality. Ah Tetia was so smitten by my mother’s beauty that he thought all other men would look at her in the same way that he looked at her. He wanted her where he could be assured of her fidelity. If she strayed from his field of surveillance, he would get edgy, his imagination going wild. This trait of his was exactly like my ex-husband’s. KC always insisted that he drove me everywhere. If I was lunching with a girlfriend, he would drive me to the meeting place and at a specified time, turn up to pick me. He was terrified that I would appear attractive to other men, so he made me button up my blouse to my neck in all this heat and humidity, made sure that he selected my clothes so that they were not sexy, and made sure that I wore no make-up. He was a prison guard, rewarded me when I behaved, bought me food, nice things, took me on holidays. But I had to obey his rules. I could not crave for the outdoor or sunshine if he was not there to watch over me, could not crave to stretch my legs or my mind without his sanction. When I was pregnant with my younger son, he said,

  “I wanted you to be pregnant so that you won’t think of leaving home.”

  And I saw my mother’s fate becoming mine, a child every other year, a baby still in the arms and another on the way. I saw myself bloated, a beached whale unable to reach the open sea, and was terrified. I needed to swim. And then one day, I snapped. I was working as a conventions co-ordinator for an international hotel and KC phoned my secretary to find out which restaurant I was at for my luncheon meeting with a male client. He came and sat in the same restaurant throughout my meeting, to keep an eye on the predator, as if all men were interested in his wife. But that is another story.

  My mother’s story was already written the moment she was born. She was born a woman, in a day and age when only a man could determine a woman’s fate. Her life was in his hands. It was this she wanted to change for me. Education is the key to undo the lock that men have over women. If I could break out of the stronghold, I could write my own life story. I don’t have to play the part a man sets out for me. I can write my own part. This is what my mother has given me, a pen to write
my own story. But she was skillful, brought talent to her part, brought her own individuality to the role my father prescribed for her. Though she remained a dutiful wife, she played other roles in the village. The village folks called my mother Nonya. Even with her multitude of chores, she always found time for others. One of the things she was good at was delivering babies. Professional midwives and doctors were not readily available then. My mother’s training came from the delivery of her own children: she never went to hospital when she brought us into the world. Only Robert, her last child, was delivered by a professional midwife. Therefore, it was ironic that of all her children, it was Robert who became damaged, his brain filled with water when he was a few weeks old and it swelled disproportionately to his wasted body. He spent his 24 years of life imprisoned in his body and mind, never learning to sit, crawl or toddle. He came as a child and left as a child. Yet he taught us so much, with his quick chuckles, his wordless voice, his eyes which flashed brightly whenever I sang him a song. Till today, I can remember the songs which gave him pleasure. One of his favourites was Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence. All his life, he could only swallow baby food. But he would not eat if someone did not sing to him or if the radio was not switched on. He signaled his approval of a song by thumping his permanently clenched fist vigorously on the mattress or by rocking his congenitally crossed legs. My third elder brother, Matthew, was most affected by Robert’s death, though he knew it was for the best. But before Robert came and tied my mother to his daily needs, Mak served as the village midwife. My father could have shown a little pride of his wife’s natural expertise, but like a lot of Chinese men, praise from him was rare. Instead, he seemed to enjoy putting her down.