Frog Under A Coconut Shell Page 13

  “You know, Mak. I will study very hard and when I finished school, I will earn a lot of money and I shall take you to Malacca to see the place where you used to live and anywhere you want to go.”

  She fell silent at this and she looked down to concentrate on her washboard.

  My mother took me to Robinson’s Petang to buy the material for my school uniform. Robinson’s Petang parodied Robinson’s, the plush English department store at Raffles Square with the status of a Harrods only in its name. One was in the posh part of town, the other in the slums. One sold goods imported from England and America, the other leftovers from sales and goods that fell off the back of a lorry. As a Christmas treat, Ah Tetia would take us to the real Robinson’s to window shop. We would take a rickety Tay Koh Yat bus or sometimes STC’s number 18 to Finalyson Green, then walk a short way through Change Alley, known for its bazaar of moneychangers, mostly South Indian immigrant men who haggled in loud voices and expressive gesticulations. In the alley, stalls selling local crafts of Chinese and Malay dolls, basketwork and batik prints to tourists spilled onto the narrow alley, making it seem even narrower.

  In the big store, most of the clientele were Caucasians. My sisters and I would gawk at the Christmas decorations and the beautiful displays of things beyond our reach. There is a sense of awe when one looks at things unattainable, but it also gives you something to work towards. At that time, so far removed as I was from that world, I did not even harbour any hope of attaining any of the beautiful things and was envious of the children who queued to sit on Santa’s lap to whisper what they wanted for Christmas, kids whose clothes looked princely. I fantasised about being play companion to some rich kid so that I could share in her luxuries, even if they were not mine to own. How greedy I was! In our excursions to Robinson’s, I noticed that the security guard kept on following us everywhere. He must have looked at our clothes and decided that we could not afford anything there. But when I was a child, I thought he was concerned for our safety. Once, when I was about four or five, I actually got myself onto Santa’s lap only to be pulled away roughly by my father. I thought the presents that Santa was giving away were free. Years later, even before I could afford to shop there, a tragedy occurred. The store was destroyed by fire and some people were trapped in the lift, which became their crematorium. The store was then rebuilt on another site in Orchard Road, and later moved to its present location a few doors away when the store expanded. One of my pleasurable memories was when I was able to walk into its Orchard Road store with my mother for her to choose a present for herself. After her long struggle to educate me, I was able to repay her somewhat by buying her some of the nice things she grew up with. But that time of her life was so distant from her many years of deprivation that she found it hard to spend money on trivial things.

  “How much is this?” She pointed to an Italian ceramic posy.

  “$180. Why don’t you have it?”

  “What? That’s a year’s rent for our house in Potong Pasir.”

  “Mak, you’re not in Potong Pasir now. You live in a nice HDB flat. Have it to put on your coffee table.”

  “What about this? How much?”

  It was a display doll with blonde hair and blue eyes.

  “$80. Mak, would you like it?”

  “I just like to know how much they cost.”

  She spent the entire afternoon pointing to different things and asking their prices, being thrilled to bits that we could actually afford to buy them. She beamed at her good fortune, infecting me with her joy. This was one of her characteristics which was very endearing: she was always thankful and never took anything for granted. In the end, she chose a musical box, a ballerina in a delicate tutu poised on the toes of one foot. When the music box was wound, the ballerina twirled round and round.

  “Aiiyah!” She said with a child’s delight and naivete. “How does it turn-turn, lah? Where is music coming from? People are so clever nowadays, hor?”

  But in the early 1950s, our family shopped at street stalls. A special outing was to Robinson’s Petang. A Malay name meaning Afternoon or Evening Robinsons, the thieves’ market on Sungei Road was a multitude of outdoor stalls sprawled alongside the river or sungei. Since the market was in the open, the vendors chose to set up their stalls in the late afternoon to take advantage of lengthening shadows, away from the blazing equatorial sun. For this same reason, outdoor markets can be seen all over the island in the cool of the evening at dusk and these are called Pasar Malam. A night market could have stalls spreading over half a mile long. More often than not, the general populace shopped at these night markets, not at the High Street in town with its expensive shops. At Robinson’s Petang, as with the night markets, food stalls compete for custom with stalls selling clothes, household products, vehicle parts and everything else that could be bought and sold. The origins of some of these items were suspicious, giving rise to its name thieves’ market. The sounds and smells were varied. My favourite was always food. I loved the atmosphere. Even now in England, I would seek out market stalls to remind me of my childhood. Although my childhood was a time of deprivation, it was also a time when I felt that people living in the village were friendly and had genuine warmth for each other. I have a favourite market in England, Blackbushe in Hampshire, where a thousand stalls are sprawled over the site of a former airport each Sunday. David thinks I’m mad because on most days, the wind howls through the open air market and the rain comes down in sheets, but I love the market prattle of the stallholders, the interesting stalls and the foods. Whenever I hanker for a bit of Singapore, I’d drive to Blackbushe, 45 minutes away, eat at my favourite nooddle stall in Row D, stop for lunch at Asian Foods for my vegetarian bryani or chappati with mashed spinach. I pay £3 for a huge bag of potatoes which I can share with my stepchildren or neighbours and £1 for a box of mushrooms. In the shops, I would pay 60 to 70 pence for a sheet of wrapping paper; at the market, I can find those of a similar quality at £1 for 18 sheets! Today, I have a choice not to go to the market to buy things, but I still can’t see why I should pay store prices when I can buy the same thing of the same quality from the market at 20 or 50 percent less.

  My friends in England say, “Phine, you’re always so glamourous!”

  They think that my clothes are expensive and I would proudly say, “I bought these from Blackbushe. Guess how much this outfit cost?” And they’d guess £70 or more and I’d say, “It cost me £15.” This is the way I still am, not that I don’t allow myself nice things from nice places; but if I can, I am just as happy to wear something from the market. But all those years ago, when my mother was struggling to put me through school, we had no choice but to go to the market to look for material for my uniform. To celebrate my getting into school, my mother and I shared a bowl of laksa between us, which cost about 30 cents. Sungei Road was famous for its laksa, spicy noodles in coconut milk done nonya style. Modern stalls these days would claim that they originated from that particular stall. As food is so much a part of the lifestyle in Singapore, people will go to great lengths to get to a special place that is known for a particular food.

  After eating, Mak stopped at a stall to finger a bolt of dark blue cloth. The material was affordable on Mak’s meagre budget and looked very much like the blue required for my school pinafore. Very much are the key words here. She couldn’t have been more wrong. On the day that I arrived for the school assembly, I stood out like the flame-of-the forest flowers in the jungle. The children in my new school sniggered. It is terrible to start school in the middle of a year and to be nearly two years older than the other kids in Primary One. And worse, to turn up wearing the wrong shade of blue for the pinafore. I slunk into the back row, feeling like the real country peasant that I was. But I would rather tolerate the taunts of my new schoolmates than break my mother’s heart by telling her that what she had made so much effort to buy was the wrong thing. There was no way that she could afford another few yards of cloth to make two sets of uniform. Al
ready, when I accompanied her to the wet market, I noticed she asked the vegetable sellers for the scrap vegetables, the cut-offs of meat. I lodged the observations in my mind, reminding myself that one day, I would repay her for all these, buy her the freshest vegetables, the juiciest of meats. It is my mother’s dreams sitting on my shoulders and her belief in me which continually presses me to succeed.

  “Oii! Sua ku! (Mountain tortoise)”, someone might shout out in Hokkien to denigrate me for my rural ways. In school, you can be bullied for all sorts of reasons. I was bullied because I was the oldest in my class but the most stupid and I wore the wrong uniform. A month later, Miss D’Souza, who was not only observant but kind, gave me two sets of uniform which came from the parents of a girl who had left school. Only then did I tell my mother the situation and she altered them to fit me.

  The first thing I loved about school was the toilet. Not knowing about flush toilets, I had not expected any difference in school and was amazed when I asked for the jamban and was sent to this large room (bigger than my entire attap house), with a row of sinks where water came out magically from taps, where there were many small rooms, all with doors. I was really a sua ku.

  “But where is the toilet?” I asked my new friend, Elizabeth.

  She looked at me in puzzlement. Elizabeth came from a middle class family and lived in a lovely brick terraced house in Sennet Estate, which I thought was Millionaires’ Row. She wouldn’t recognise a jamban if she saw one, in the same way that I couldn’t recognise a flush toilet.

  “There,” she pointed to one of the cubicles.

  I walked in there and it smelled beautifully of disinfectant, had a very clean ceramic squatting bowl with a chain; no foul smells, no sign of other people’s faeces, no rats and no cockroaches. It was so vastly different from what I was used to that I could not believe that this could be a toilet. I walked out again, quite non-plussed. In case the other girls in the lavatory heard, I said to Elizabeth quietly, “I can’t find the toilet.”

  She walked me into the toilet and pointed to it. She was a wise girl because she suddenly realised that I wouldn’t know what a toilet would look like. She was puzzled but she didn’t make me feel small. “Here! You place your feet on these pads, lah and squat down. When you finish your job, you pull this chain and the water will flush it away.”

  “You’re kidding!” my eyes widened. At first, I thought she might be making fun of me because I was a kampong girl but she was such a nice person that I didn’t think she would be that sort of person. She left me to it and I tried it out and, lo and behold, water came out from under the ceramic bowl to wash away my pee! I forced another pee and pulled the chain again to see if it would work one more time and it did! I thought it was great. I wondered what Elizabeth must have thought, waiting for me outside the cubicle when she heard the flush going on a few times. For bigger jobs, Elizabeth explained, I could use the toilet paper which was on a roll. I couldn’t believe it! The paper was soft and malleable and felt like cotton wool on my bottom, not at all like the coarse newspaper squares which we used. Sometimes when we walked in the rain to the jamban, the newspaper squares might have gotten damp or wet and we ended up with newsprint on our backsides! But this toilet paper was without newsprint and was pure white and soft. There was even a tap in the cubicle for us to chaybok, wash our bottoms properly after wiping it. It was quite an experience for me, this introduction to a flushing toilet — it was pure luxury! I wanted so much for my mother to share my good fortune instead of having to squat in the smelly jamban where the flies swarmed around and the rats ran underneath. Sadly, I couldn’t take the flush toilet to her but I could steal the soft toilet paper for her, so I unrolled a yard of it, folded it, and stuffed it into my rafiaed school-bag to take it home to her. I thought her eyes looked moist when I handed the soft, toilet paper to her. But she said, “Don’t steal anything, huh. To take what is not yours is debt to your soul.”

  My form teacher told us that we had to put up our hand to ask for permission to go to the bathroom. So I kept putting up my hand all day on my first week in school. Until she said to me, “Josephine, do you have a stomach problem?” I nodded, not daring to tell a lie but also wanting to enjoy the pleasures of this new found luxury. But eventually, I was afraid of being found out, so I went less often after that. Since I discovered those clean toilets, I tried to control my bowel movements and saved all my big jobs for school so that I didn’t have to go to the horrible, smelly jambans in the village. If you want to control yourself, you have to stop whatever you’re doing, count slowly and be very still until the spasm in your abdomen has passed. School started at seven in the morning, so I always tried to practise control until I got there. I was really cross that my father didn’t save his big jobs for his workplace because he was fond of doing them at night into the chamber pot. My poor mother had to clear its contents every morning and when I was ten, it became my job. I dumped the mess he made into the nearby monsoon drain. But since we did not have a separate room where the chamber pot was placed, whenever Ah Tetia did his job at night, the smell would premeate the whole house. He always started his big job by passing wind and his farts would echo in the empty enamel chamber pot like firecrackers going off. And of course for the rest of the night, the whole house stank. So the introduction to a flush toilet was a milestone in my life. When I learnt to read, it was such enormous pleasure to be able to take a book into the beautifully clean and luxurious lavatory. Sometimes when I got up, my legs would be all pins-and-needles! Years later when I moved into a flat with my first throne or sitting toilet, I was so overwhelmed by the sheer luxury of it, I’d sit on it and read a whole book. When I moved to England and learnt that the English called a toilet a loo, I dubbed my toilet a loo-brary.

  “Xia Yue Fen, Xia Yue Fen,” the teacher called out during Chinese class.

  This was Miss Tang, the teacher who taught us Mandarin. She was Chinese-educated herself and spoke highly accented English. She had all of the charactistics of a Chinese-educated person with her old-fashioned and severe demeanour. The cheong sum, which hung loosely around her rigid body, made her look painfully thin, her arms like sticks protruding from the short sleeves. The spectacles had numerous rings on her thick glasses, which gave her a weird gaze. Her grey-streaked hair cut in a page-boy style seemed rather incongruous with her age. She stood at the front of the class repeatedly calling out the name, looking round the class for a hand to shoot up in acknowledgement. She grew more and more impatient when no one responded. No one got up to receive the homework book from her. It was my first few weeks in school and I was sitting right at the back of the class but I could already feel the tension building up in the room. I had been too shy to make friends, conscious of my ignorance and of my upbringing, and except for Elizabeth, no one in the Chinese class had approached me to be friends. The other girls were unsure if I was Chinese because I was so dark in complexion compared to them. To make matters worse, I didn’t understand what they said.

  The Mandarin teacher’s voice was getting strident and all my classmates turned in their seats to look at the back of the class. I thought perhaps they were looking for a girl behind me, so I, too, turned to look but there was no one else behind me. An unnatural hush fell over the class as Miss Tang strode down the aisle between two rows of desks carrying the brown exercise book. Her mouth was a tight moue. She stopped at my desk.

  “Why didn’t you answer me? Isn’t your name Xia Yue Fen?”

  “My name is Josephine ...” I stammered. She looked so fierce, I was terrified.

  “It says here on this book that it’s Xia Yue Fen. Did you write this?”

  As I did not know how to read the Chinese characters, I was not sure and did not answer her. I looked down at the characters on the book and dimly recognised the scrawl. She repeated her question again. And this time, I felt pushed to give her a reply.

  “Yes, Miss Tang.”

  “So why didn’t you answer me?” She slapped the book acros
s my face.

  My face stung. It took a while before it dawned on me that perhaps, she was calling me by the name that my mother had got from Ah Pek, the old fortune-teller. Of course, I didn’t remember that that was supposed to be my Chinese name. I couldn’t recognise the characters since they were mere squiggles to me. I had simply copied Ah Pek’s brushwork onto all my exercise books for Chinese lessons and then completely forgotten about it. And the worse thing was that I still couldn’t read the words because I didn’t recognise the Chinese characters which were foreign to me. At home, we only spoke our Peranakan patois and Malay, and Teochew with my father. At Miss Tang’s repeated question about whether the name on the book was mine, the rest of the class giggled.

  “Quiet!” Then turning to me, she said. “What kind of a girl are you that you don’t know your own name? Are you Chinese or Malay? I’m going to see Miss D’Souza about you. If you are not telling me the truth, you are going to get a few Order Marks from me! As far as your work is concerned, it is total gibberish! What did you think you were writing?”

  There was some sounds of strangled laughter, hands cupped over mouths. I was so ashamed, I dared not say anything. The exercise she set us was to form sentences with selected words which she gave us. The rest of the class was a term ahead. How could I explain to her that the Chinese characters didn’t make any sense to me? Afraid to ask because I did not want to appear stupid, I scanned a storybook, looked for a similarly-formed character and simply copied the sentence with the character in it. I hadn’t any idea what the sentence said, whether it was at all a full sentence or just a clause, I just copied to where the line ended with a Chinese full stop, which was like a tiny circle. That was the only clue I had that the line was complete. Miss Tang was probably right that it was gibberish. As the months went by, she despaired of me. My comprehension of the literate Chinese language was nil. I could not understand the meaning or usefulness of a stroke and therefore could not construct a word. I was so frightened to ask her that I couldn’t learn anything. At the end of the year, I failed her subject. The worse thing was that I had to go home to tell my mother.