Frog Under A Coconut Shell Page 7

  There was another thing which lightened my mother’s spirit considerably on her visit to England. On the first day that we were out, her wrinkled eyes widened with surprise, her smile bemused.

  “Ah Phine, ah,” she said, “Look, there’s an ang mo cleaning the streets.”

  “They’re all Europeans here, Mak.”

  “A European cleaning the streets! Look, look, there’s another one collecting rubbish. And he hasn’t got a shirt on.”

  At that juncture, I had been out of village life for some considerable years. During that period, Singapore had gained independence through merging with Malaysia in 1963 and then going her own way in 1965. The industrial revolution had reformed the nation, pulling it out of colonial clutches and residual poverty and catapulting her into prosperity. Local businessmen employed local people and the face of employment changed, with the percentage of white bosses becoming fewer and fewer. So my mindset had already been altered for a number of years; brown as we may be, we proved to be as capable as the “White Man”, capable of not only running our own country but of taking it to the heights of success. I had the advantage of education which fed me information of the Western world, its perfections as well as its imperfections. But my mother did not have that kind of exposure. She was still a frog under a coconut shell, her mind deeply etched by colonial supremacy. Initially, I couldn’t understand why she was getting so excited about the idea of a White Man cleaning the streets. Throughout her stay with us, she kept on wanting to go out on drives. I knew she loved the hugeness of England and the lovely scenery but I was still suspicious. Only much later did I realise why. She wanted to absorb this new revelation: White people actually worked at jobs which were relegated to our people in our country. Wherever we went, she would smile and shake her head when she saw a white person working at ordinary jobs, like digging the road or serving us at the grocer’s, butcher’s or at the tea-shop. She actually laughed openly when she saw that the milkman delivering the milk was white and so was the delivery boy delivering the newspaper. It eventually dawned on me that her views of the White Man was that they were in a superior position and therefore would not have to engage in menial labour and seeing them doing so was to her tantamount to seeing the King work!

  In 1932, when Grandmother arrived in Singapore with her 12-year-old son and four teenage daughters, Singapore was still a British colony. Except for a few people, mostly Chinese and Eurasians who came from the upper echelons of society and rubbed shoulders with the British and white community, the majority of the local population had little contact with them socially, only seeing them as their employers and leaders. It should have been no surprise to me that my mother, uneducated as she had been, could not see them otherwise. For Grandmother and her children, it was a time for a new struggle. Nobody spoke of the exodus for a long time, and then only in dribbles like a strangled tap. Neither Mak nor Great Aunt, Second Aunt nor Kanchil, breathed a reason. I never knew Fourth Aunt because she died before I was interested in familial connections and history. Was there really a fire? Did Grandfather die? Why won’t my mother, aunts and uncle talk about it? Was theirs a mutual silence or a laundered memory? Do they not speak of it from shame or from inexplicable pain? I tried to put the pieces of verbal jigsaw together, bits of information gathered from Mak or one of the aunts. But that was not until many years later and, by then, they wanted to forget that it had ever happened. And even what I have pieced together may not be the way it happened, my siblings’ and my variation differing on who had told us what, what we perceived as facts, and what we remembered. Kanchil eventually ran away to Australia — and later to America, a pioneer from the East, beginning his history anew, unfettered by the past.

  Grandmother, in her late 40s, suddenly widowed and plunged from riches to rags, never recovered from her loss. There was the loss of her husband, and then the loss of all material comfort. Unknown to her, Grandfather’s love of gambling had resulted in huge debts which sealed their fate. Or so Uncle Choong said. Uncle Choong was Grandfather’s accountant. In the end, it appeared that Grandfather couldn’t cope and ended his life in such a dramatic fashion. Grandmother must have held her pain at bay, kept her wits about her to flee the creditors. She ran away with some pieces of jewellery, her money belts and her daughters. With the help of Uncle Choong, Grandmother and her daughters were housed in Kuala Lumpur and then taken down to Johor by train, then into Singapore by car. My mother remembered the horrendous journey, recalled the dark and long hours hidden in this and that home. She remembered not liking Uncle Choong, who had a thin moustache and a manner that was simply too unctuous. He seemed keen on getting them out of the state and into another country; perhaps so that Grandmother could not know the real state of affairs or lay claim to Grandfather’s estate or what was left of it. As the four girls were not literate nor understood business affairs and Kanchil too young, they never questioned Uncle Choong’s authoritative plans. Of course, they never saw him again after they sought solace in anonymity in a new country. It was left to her daughters to mend their lives. Soon Hua, the elder at 19, sulked because her nails were broken and she had to fetch her drinking water from the stand-pipe a distance from their attap-hut they found themselves in. To bathe, they had to draw water from a well, something she had never done before. At night, she grumbled that her sisters’ bodies were too close to hers in the small hut which was no bigger than their bath-house back in Malacca. Soon Chew sat on the platform bed all day hugging her knees because she hated the rats running around its base. Soon Mei was mesmerised by the sight of all the screaming children from the other families, dirty children in rags with spittle and mucus running down their faces. Kanchil sat with thumb in mouth, eyes wide as if the shift from an opulent house to this basic existence was a nightmare he was struggling to awake from. Grandmother sat wherever she was put, as if all life had left her, her eyes blank. It was Soon Neo who pawned their jewellery and it was Soon Neo who found them the hut on the edge of a Malay kampong. It was Soon Neo who went to the market to get food, who learnt how to start the fire in the clay stove, whose hands were chaffed from washing their clothes outside by the village well. Soon Neo was 16 going on 17. Slender, like the willowy bamboo, she had a grace that was not diminished even by the change in her station. Her face was soft, her eyes large, her hair plaited and coiled on either side of her head. She gave the impression that she needed looking after, but a strong crust was slowly emerging — she realised that for the family to survive, she had to set aside her own grief. That was the first time she pulled herself up tall and stuck her chin out.

  “We have to find husbands for you three,” Soon Neo said.

  “You think you madam or what, ah! Giving orders,” Soon Chew remonstrated.

  “Sure Chin Tuck will come for me, lah. Just because we have no money is not going to stop him. Mother is stupid to have run away.”

  “You know what is best, Third Sister,” Soon Mei nodded meekly.

  “Dream on, lah, you two. Find work, starve or get married. It’s your choice. I’ll see if anyone will pay me to do their washing.”

  “Aren’t you stooping a bit low?”

  “The men around here are such peasants.”

  “We’re ruined and we’ve no dowry. We will be lucky if anyone want us.”

  “Dek-dek, how come you so tough all of a sudden, huh?”

  The girls were young and pretty. That was enough to bring the suitors. There were many immigrant men in Singapore hoping to accrue enough money to start a new life or have enough to send back to starving families back home in China or India. Hardworking but lonely, decent men who would appreciate a little bit of home life. A man in his 30s came forward for Soon Hua. Recently widowed, he baited her with his attap house and a business selling chicken rice in Albert Street. Soon Hua accepted after all hopes of Chin Tuck coming for her were dashed. The man gave her four children and a lot of devotion. Soon Chew, Second Aunt, married a man who spent money like a sultan, only to discover that he w
as a gardener who gambled. Later, he had TB and succumbed to it after providing Second Aunt with two children. She then married an Indian who gave her four more and a multitude of heartaches. Soon Mei was approached by a shopkeeper and she gave him a son and a daughter but did not live to see them grow up. Soon Neo held the family together with her sound mind and her diligence. She had just turned 17 when she married my father.

  Chia Yong Tong, then 20, was cycling down the dusty lorong when he saw a pretty girl squatting by the village well washing pails of clothes on the wooden washboard. Although she was golden brown and was dressed in a sarong kebaya like his own mother, he knew she wasn’t Malay. He had been on his way to attend the wake of one of his father’s old colleagues when he saw the girl, whose skin was like burnished copper. He himself was fair complexioned, like his Chinese father who had come from China. The girl’s head was bent down attending to her washings. There was something about the angle of her face, the long sweep of her neck and the small delicate ears which made him stop in mid-cycle putting his foot down in the dust scattering the chickens and ducks who clucked and quacked in protest. The other girls who were also washing clothes looked up and giggled, except her. She glanced at him briefly, then she modestly dropped her gaze. Twice more he cycled past that route. But he never approached her. Instead, he made enquiries and found out where she lived. He told his mother who arranged for an Old Aunt to make a proposal to Grandmother, but as Grandmother was not in a fit state to conduct such affairs, Soon Neo received the Old Aunt herself, which caused the old lady to frown.

  “I will discuss these things with your mother.”

  “I speak for my mother and myself,” said Soon Neo. Her voice was soft and deferential but she was leaning a force into it.

  After seeing Grandmother and understanding the situation a little better, the Old Aunt outlined the proposal.

  “I will not marry unless my mother and brother come with me.”

  “Young lady,” the Old Aunt reproached Soon Neo. “There are many girls in your position who would die for an educated man like Mr Chia.”

  But secretly, the old lady knew that Soon Neo wasn’t a peasant girl, she saw that from the texture of the girl’s skin, her refined movements and speech. It was a match that would earn her a lot of money.

  Yong Tong was third of five boys. His own father, years before on the brink of his own adulthood had fled from the squalor and famine of Swatow, in mainland China. Grandpa had heard about the island of opportunities, an island in the South China Sea. He left his parents, brothers and sisters in tears to journey on foot to the port to find a tongkang which would take him to Singapore. There were so many people on board that they had to sleep sitting up amongst the rats which ran about their feet. When the tongkang hit open waters, it heaved with the swells, some people were sick and the others had to put handkerchieves to noses. There were more men than women, men in pig-tails like himself, all seeking a new life. Just before they landed, a crowd of them stood on deck and in one heroic gesture snipped their pigtails off and flung them into the murky Singapore River. Grandpa became a coolie, carrying sacks of rice on his back, walking the gang planks between bumboats and warehouses. The work was relentless, bending his spine into his ribcage. The hot equatorial sun scraped raw his creamy white skin and bleached his blue-black hair. Lying on his wooden bunk in the cubicle which he shared with six other labourers, listening to the others cough and wheeze, he swore that the sacks of rice would break his back first before they broke his spirit.

  I never knew either of my grandfathers. Nor my mother’s mother. Nor their parents before them. I feel bereaved by this lack, a lotus floating on the surface of life without roots. My brothers and sisters seemed unconcerned about not knowing about our ancestry, but I feel it keenly. I don’t know enough about my ancestors to be sure about myself. When I was in school, the other kids made fun of me because I was so brown. “Are you Chinese or Malay?” They asked. Even now when I return to Singapore, people would say to me, “Eh, how come you so black, huh?”

  I had a brief dalliance with a grandparent — Lao Ee, my father’s mother. He called her Ah Kou, Aunty. Once I asked my mother why. And she explained that it was a Chinese superstition. If the gods knew that you had borne a son, they might take him away, so the simple folk tried to deceive the gods by making the son call his mother Aunty so that he would not be taken away. I must have been about 14 when Lao Ee died in her late 80s. It always seemed strange to me that we called her Lao Ee which meant Old (Maternal) Aunty. She lived with Fourth Uncle and his wife. When we visited them, Lao Ee was often on her platform bed reclining on her hard wooden pillow. She too was a prisoner of her mind and she smelled of moth-balls and Tiger Balm. She always used Tiger Balm for her headaches. I didn’t like hugging her because she also smelled of urine. And sometimes, something worse. When she died, Mak sewed a beautiful long dress in cream lace to drape over her kebaya panjang. I still remember standing looking over the coffin wondering why Lao Ee had such an unnaturally stretched smile when Mak said, “I wonder who’s going to make sure that when I die, I will go in something beautiful.” And I promptly said, “I will see to it, Mak,” although I could not imagine my mother dying or going anywhere without me. Lao Ee seemed to have come and gone without my even having noticed. Or cared. Then. Such is the callousness of youth. But I regret it now. She was my history but I’ve let her go without learning her.

  Her husband let her go, too. Whether from choice or not, no one knew. He left after giving her a nice home and five sons. Grandpa had made good. From coolie to warehouse hand. Enough to get out of the cubicle into a decent flat, enough to educate his four boys. They had lost their eldest at birth. Then one day, when his two older boys had started work, Second Uncle, an inspector with the municipal and my father a store hand, he told Lao Ee that he was going back to China, take his mother twenty-four carat gold, take his father a handsome watch, money for his brothers and sisters. He set sail and never came back. No one knows what happened, whether the ship sank, whether he died on his journey up to the mountains or decided to stay on. No letter, no news. Suddenly, abruptly, Lao Ee was amputated of a husband. Another part of our history hacked off. Never to be spoken of or pried into. Perhaps this is one of the reasons for writing this story, to collect a history for myself and for my descendants and to etch it into memory so that we can recall it as though it has always been there.

  But more important than documenting a family tree is the celebration of my mother’s life. I don’t want her grandchildren to remember this old, shrunken lady who acts funny sometimes, saying strange things or raving like a mad woman. I want to give them the gift of a wonderful grandmother whose life had been a selfless service to their parents without whom they would not be alive. I want them to read and capture the real portrait of a warm being not yet malformed by disease. It is easy to remember the bad rather than the good, easier to remember the deeds of Adolf Hitler rather than the deeds of Martin Luther King. The bad and the negative tend to over-shadow the good and beautiful. I want my brothers and sisters to remember not this troublesome old lady who has tantrums and nightmares, who uses abusive words, but to remember her as she had been, tall, slender and beautiful; the same woman many of the villagers in Kampong Potong Pasir saw as an Angel of Mercy. They loved and valued her so much that when the shanty village was about to be razed to the ground to make the land available for high-rise blocks of flats, before the villagers were to be re-housed, they came and knelt at her feet and wet them with their tears. The most generous years of her life coincide with my childhood, so her story and mine are intrinsically linked, even though we were at the different ends of the spectrum of our mortal lives. Under all her wrinkled old skin, there is still a beautiful woman, intelligence behind her dull, opaque eyes. And somewhere inside her is her wonderful spirit, imprisoned now by her debilitating mortal mind.

  Five

  Mak told me that when I was born in March 1951, a neighbour was dying. The eternal cycle
of life. How many lifetimes do we need before our learning is completed? Who directs our learning in this earth-school? Our Higher Selves or a Supreme Consciousness? All I know is that my mortal education was made all the easier with my mother by my side because she showed me joy where there was pain, beauty where there was bleakness, richness in poverty. If it is ever said that angels do walk this earth, I would say I have the honour of knowing one. Whatever assaulted her physical, emotional and mental bodies, she had managed to keep her spirit intact. She was so rare a selfless being that I have not found another match. It was this nature of hers, more than her physical characteristics that made her radiate such beauty; even though her skin is wrinkled and her eyes opaque with cataracts. She had allowed nothing in life to beat her. Until now.

  My mother in the throes of birthing could hear Kurumbia Vikaram’s wife two doors away wailing as her husband entered the gates of death. Just as Mr Vikaram slipped into his soul, I slipped into my body. Mak described that day so vividly that I could see it as if I was an onlooker. This knack of hers to imprint her words into my memory throws me into confusion and I can’t tell if what I know is what I personally remember or what I remembered from what she told me. For instance I can see myself, quite clearly, at six months, chubby, chuckling, my dimples showing. A Bengali woman was carrying me, a roll of fat visible between her choli and sari, a thick rope of well-oiled hair snaking down her back. She pinched my cheeks and said to my mother in Malay, “Very cute baby, very cute. You sell to me.”