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The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir
Lucy Lum
An intense and emotive memoir of one girl’s difficult family upbringing in a Singaporean Chinese family during the Second World War.Lucy Lum was the third of seven children, born in Singapore in 1933 into a Chinese immigrant family ruled with an iron hand by Popo, her fearsome and superstitious grandmother. Popo is a firm believer in the old ways, in stomach-churning herbalist remedies, in the dubious fortune-telling of mystics, and in mischievous little girls like Lucy knowing their place, and is forever keen to dispense her own wicked brand of justice, much to the despair of her adopted family.Yet the suffering does not end at home. This is Singapore in the forties, a former British colony now living under the spectre of the invading Japanese – the hungry worms crawling down from the north as Lucy knows them – and fear floods the streets outside the family home. Lucy's father, a kind-hearted and talented linguist, finds himself being used by the occupiers as a translator, and brings back terrifying stories of his merciless employers, family friends blown apart inside their rickety shelters, dead bodies heaped on top of one another by the roadside, that he confides to his daughter under the heavy teak table in the dining room.‘The Thorn of Lion City’ is a fascinating and honest account of wartime occupation and of a little girl's upbringing in a repressive Chinese family. At times harrowing, at others touching, it breaks the long silence of the Singaporean Chinese and speaks of hardship, family and the softly-spoken, redemptive relationship between a father and daughter.
LUCY LUM
The Thorn of Lion City
A MEMOIR
In memory of my father, Lum Poh-mun
Contents
Title Page (#u28694c8b-8d7f-5a5e-b1b6-ae71f12e7118)Dedication (#u6d75d122-25e6-5ebd-87f7-a59647f70e2b)Chapter One (#u583f6158-96cc-500d-979c-a76c108243e1)Chapter Two (#ua3d9d11d-57e1-543d-8810-16fce987a89f)Chapter Three (#u9dff48b2-bcda-5d81-8e85-d550986eafd2)Chapter Four (#u125d4774-7674-5f47-9e44-8567732eb77f)Chapter Five (#u9ad56690-dc37-5e98-9b02-bae1f7eb49f9)Chapter Six (#uf4fae121-d1bc-566a-beb0-c32b9776cd37)Chapter Seven (#ue42224b2-5dce-5f0a-9235-64123e2783dc)Chapter Eight (#u3121d459-0362-50c6-9a61-dcceb013fedd)Chapter Nine (#u9d5caeac-8e46-5377-aba1-158b5d7f20e0)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#u4e0542ab-ac98-5236-b770-989a22d47033)
‘Look at the red-haired devil’s air-raid shelter,’ Popo said, pointing to our neighbour’s garden. ‘How clever he is. So different from your father. It is like a house, their shelter, with camp beds and chairs, a wireless and lights. And so pretty outside, with tapioca, sugar cane and all those flowers.’
For weeks my grandmother Popo had told us that we were not to worry: the Japanese would never capture Singapore because the British would turn back the invaders. ‘Life will go on as normal,’ she said. But there were soldiers on every street, in the shops and the cinema. Every rickshaw had a soldier inside it. There were air-raid drills, and people dug in their gardens, building makeshift bomb shelters. You could tell how big a family was from the size of the mound of soil in the garden. Some of the shelters were like little foxholes, covered with wooden planks, branches and earth, but in our street the red-haired devil’s shelter was the biggest and best, and we were jealous. He was the English officer in charge of the police station where Father worked. His wife and children had been evacuated to England and he told Father that if the bombs came we could hide in his shelter with him and be safe.
Father said we did not need a hole under the earth to hide in. Instead he put the heavy teak table in the middle of the bedroom, then piled blankets and three kapok mattresses on top. He put more mattresses round the sides. He said these would stop the flying shrapnel and the ceiling crashing down on us. ‘If the bombs come, you won’t need to run outside to our neighbour’s garden. You can jump from your beds and curl up under the table. You must have fresh water and biscuits at the ready in your satchels,’ he said. ‘There will be no time to waste.’ When he talked to us about the bombs he was careful not to catch Popo’s or Mother’s eye. He was frightened of them. They did not like him telling them what to do.
My brothers, my sisters and I looked forward to the air-raid drills. We thought they were games. We five would grab our satchels, as Father had told us, race to the bedroom and dive under the table. It was dark and snug in there and we would play for hours. Sometimes Father would tell us stories about the island his family came from, Hainan, and we would listen and munch our biscuits.
I was seven, and no one explained anything to me. I was frightened of Popo too. Father told me that we should call her Waipo, Outside Grandmother, because she was our mother’s mother, not his. But if we called her Waipo she beat her chest and told us she would kill herself. ‘This old bag of bones has lived too long,’ she would say. ‘Even my grandchildren do not love me.’
One day I was brave: I asked Popo who the invaders were and why they wanted to attack Singapore. She went to a cupboard, pushed aside the piles of paper and the tiny red purses in which she kept the dried umbilical cords of her children and grandchildren, and pulled out a great map of the world. It was yellow with age and almost falling to pieces, but she spread it on the table in front of her.
‘Listen,’ she said, lowering herself into her favourite armchair. ‘My mother told me this story when I was a child. The mulberry tree is covered with rich and delicious leaves, which the silkworm likes. This is China,’ she said, pointing to a huge pink country on the map. ‘It is a country of plenty, like the mulberry tree with its leaves, but it is plagued by starving Japanese silkworms from across the sea.’ She rapped her knuckles on the islands of Japan, which crawled across the blue sea towards China. ‘The silkworms have hardly any food and their greedy eyes are fixed on China where there is plenty. That is why they attack. To devour us.’
Popo told me of the long history of fighting between China and Japan, about how the Japanese invaded French Indochina, about things I didn’t understand then – economic sanctions and oil embargoes, Japan wanting more oil and planning to steal it from Borneo, only four hundred miles to the east, but Singapore was in the way. And she told me of a British man called Raffles, who came in 1819 and wasn’t frightened of the swamps and marshes. He had taken control of the narrow strait between Malaya and Java, and borrowed Singapore from the Sultan of Johor. She told me of how the British had come to Malacca and Penang, Labuan and, most of all, to Singapore, and how the Chinese had come too, from Fukien, Swatow and Kwantung, where she and her husband Kung-kung had been born. She told me all of this, and then she spat, ‘The filthy Japanese! They have killed many Chinese and we will always be their enemies.’
We lived in British government quarters and our house in Paterson Road was across the street from where Father worked. The house was divided into flats. We had the ground floor and a Malay police inspector lived upstairs with his family. The red-haired devil said they, too, could come into his air-raid shelter if the bombs fell. Our house was square and had wide verandas shaded with bamboo blinds. Inside we had three bedrooms, a sitting room and another room for the servants. In the garden there were hibiscus, papaya, banana, cherry and jackfruit trees, and an oriental henna with leaves shaped like little lances; the Malay women in the kampung at the back of our house came to us to ask for the henna leaves and I would watch them stain their palms and fingers for weddings and other ceremonies.
The Malay cemetery, with its lines of numbered round headstones, was next door. It was for Muslims so there were no plants or flowers. From my bedroom window I could see the Chinese cemetery on a hillock across the road, the graves terraced with marble and mosaic. Popo had told me that the richer the family, the more elaborate their ancestor’s resting-place; sometimes we played hide and seek among the graves, and when I hid, I would remember the dead all around me and not want to play any more.
A huge durian tree stood at the bottom of the Chinese cemetery; it was the tallest tree I had ever seen, fifty or sixty feet tall, perhaps more. No one dared climb it to pick the fruits, but waited for them to fall to the ground. In season, the abundance of spiny-shelled durians, hanging high in the tree, made people stare. Then the tree’s owner would hire two guards to stop anyone helping themselves to the fruit. Sometimes the guards left the tree, and when strong winds brought down the durians, the boys from the kampung ran to pick them up. We loved the sweet custardy pulp, and I asked Popo if I could search the ground beneath the tree before the guards arrived in the morning. But she told me, ‘We cannot eat fruit from that tree because it is different. The fei-shui from all those dead people feed and sustain it and we don’t eat the fei-shui of dead people.’
The Malay children upstairs wouldn’t play with us in the garden. When they came to visit, they would not eat or drink. When they cooked for us we ate their tasty food, and we couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t eat ours. Father told me about the Prophet Muhammad, and how Muslims could not eat blood or pork, or food that had been offered in prayers. Whenever Popo and my mother went to Chinatown, they would bring back meat and hang it on a bamboo pole in the garden to dry; in the heat, the fat would melt off the bacon and the pork sausages and drip to the ground. Father said the Malay children would not play in our garden because the soil had in it the fat of pigs.
Popo was always talking about the spirits of the dead and the demons who lived in the world below. If we were ill, or there was an accident in the house, she would say it was because one of us had upset the gods. She prayed hardest when she hadn’t won at mah-jongg for a long time. She would rush to the temple to find out if the gods were angry with her, and pray as hard as she could, then shower them with shongyau, oil for the lamp, and burn gold joss paper with the ends tucked in, like tiny ingots. But sometimes she thought her bad luck had been brought about by the spirits from the Chinese cemetery across the road, who came out after dusk to roam free in the upper world. ‘They are dangerous and unforgiving,’ said Popo, ‘not like the gods. The spirits are invisible, but they hear and feel us. When the gates of the world below open, they come out from the earth. Don’t pee or spit outside,’ she would warn us, ‘but if you must, remember to say first, “Forgive me.”’
After sunset, Popo would lay offerings to the spirits on the ground at the back of our house near the chicken coop, out of sight of the cemeteries. She would burn silver joss paper, lay out flowers and fruit for the Chinese spirits, and a dozen split coconuts for the Muslim spirits. My brother Beng’s job was to stoke the burning joss paper with a metal rod. He liked to pass me the hot end so that I burnt my palm, and screamed in pain. After her prayers Popo would scatter the offerings all over the garden where she said the spirits could find them, but Father worried about our Muslim neighbours. Popo ignored him, and talked of mah-jongg, so he would disappear to swim or lift weights, or to the veranda where he had hung exercise rings from the beams. Time and again he would lift himself on to those rings without removing his glasses; when he swung himself back and forth, they would fall off and smash on the floor beneath him.
One day, my father crawled under the big teak table, where I was eating my biscuits, and told me about his life before he came to Singapore. He had been born in Hainan, he told me, the second largest island in China after Taiwan. I had seen Hainan on the map Popo showed me. His parents had owned a fruit and chestnut farm, which his father worked with hired labourers to help him tend the orchards and fell the chestnut trees for timber. His mother had managed the accounts. Father told me that they found it difficult to make a living from the farm. It would rain and rain, and when the river flooded, the expensive fertilizer would be washed from the soil and they had no money to replace it. Sometimes the fruit crop was diseased and they would have to cut down more chestnut trees to sell. Father told me that chestnut wood made good charcoal, which burnt slowly and gave off an intense heat.
He also told me how, shortly after he was born and his mother was still recovering, it had rained for two weeks. The river had got higher and higher, then overflowed its banks and flooded the farm. His mother had watched the garden furniture float away, then the shed where the farm tools were kept, and the little family of piglets they had reared with the sow. When she saw that sow being swept away in the current, she had got out of bed, taken off her clothes and swum after it. But the pigs and the furniture were too far along on their journey to their new home in the sea with the fish, and she waded back to the house. There, she found she was bleeding, so the doctor came and said she would be unable to have any more children.
My grandfather only knew how to be a farmer, but my grandmother was determined that her son should not follow him and did not let him work on the farm. She wanted him to be a government official, or a school teacher. After a day’s work, no matter how tired she was, she would read the teachings of Confucius to him. She went to great trouble to buy some books in English from friends who had emigrated to Singapore, and kept them for him as a surprise birthday present. Father said that on his birthday he was in his room writing with a brush pen when he heard his mother call him from the hall. ‘Come quick! Come quick!’
When he rushed down to her she was holding out a parcel, and the excitement on her face told him it was a special gift. He took it from her, shook it, squeezed it, and finally tore off the wrapping. The books inside were not new – the covers were worn and the pages thumbed – but he didn’t mind because they were picture books with stories in English. Father told me that when he turned the pages of the first he saw pictures of fierce men, with pistols and cutlasses, dragging a boy with them; the book was Treasure Island. Another, Robinson Crusoe, had pictures of the hero, his dog and a wrecked ship. His favourite was a collection of stories that included ‘Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp’ and ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’. As he looked at the pictures, he was eager to read the stories and so, with the help of a dictionary, he began to teach himself his first foreign language.
Work never stopped on the farm, even on the wettest days. One day, when it was raining and the river was swelling, Grandfather was chopping down a chestnut tree. It fell on top of him and killed him. That day my grandmother decided she would leave the island for ever: she would emigrate to Singapore, the Lion City, with her little boy so that he would not be a farmer.
Two (#u4e0542ab-ac98-5236-b770-989a22d47033)
Father told me how that chestnut tree had buried his father in the mud and how his mother’s tears had mixed with the rain, and that was why he had come to Singapore in 1919, when he was five. His mother was called Kum Tai, and she was only twenty-nine when the tree fell on her husband. At first Kum Tai was frightened by the hustle and bustle of the city, and as the only work she knew was farming, she bought an orchard of rambutan and mangosteen fruit trees in Nee Soon, north of Singapore, with the money from the sale of her home in Hainan.
Kum Tai named my father Poh-mun, but often called him Po-pui, which means precious seed. Father told us that when he came to Singapore he liked the different people in his new country, and their many languages, which he didn’t understand. There were brown-skinned Malay men and women in colourful sarongs, and there were Sikhs from India, who never shaved or cut their hair and wore cloth wrapped round their heads. There were Indian tea-sellers, who carried copper urns heated by charcoal fires on bamboo poles and sold ginger tea or Ceylon tea; some carried rattan baskets full of delicious roti. Father would listen to the different dialects, like nothing he had heard in his village in China, and became determined to understand them. He looked forward to visiting the town’s bookshops, and spent whole afternoons hiding among the shelves, reading and dreaming.
Kum Tai hired workers for the orchard and a servant to cook and clean. The workers spoke different dialects and she became frustrated when she could not communicate with them: when they misunderstood her instructions, they pruned the trees in the wrong way. She did more and more of the work herself, spending long hours in the plantation. At night the sweet smell of rambutan attracted swarms of bats – the locals called them flying foxes – which would tear apart the soft, hairy shells of the ripe fruit and feast on the white flesh inside. In China Kum Tai and her husband had hired fruit-watchers, who had patrolled all night and slept during the day. But in the new country my grandmother, fearful of the cost of hiring extra workers, protected the trees herself. She walked through the orchards with a lantern and a long stick to scare away the bats, and by dawn she would be exhausted. Father would find her asleep in a chair.
‘You are working too hard,’ my father said. ‘Let me do it, Mother. Let me stay up and frighten away the bats. It is only for the fruit season.’
‘Do you know why we left China after your father died?’ she said. ‘You must not be a farmer here. You must read your books and then, some day, you will be someone. It is the only way for you in this new country.’
One day, while she was supervising the plantation workers, Kum Tai fell and broke her ankle. She had to be carried back to the house. A bonesetter was called, but he did not come, and throughout the night my father heard his mother cry out in great pain. He went to her side to hold her hand.
The next morning, Lum Pang, the bonesetter, appeared at the farm. He was just five feet tall, very fat, and Father said his grin stretched from ear to ear. Everyone called him Fat Lum. He held his surgery every morning on the pavement of a busy side-street in Singapore. Fat Lum was so fat that the little stool he sat on disappeared beneath his stomach and thighs so that he seemed to be sitting on the ground. He worked next to the tooth-puller, who had a spittoon and cases of extractors and offered only one service: a toothache meant that a tooth had rotted and must come out. When the tooth-puller was called away, he would leave a set of extractors so that Fat Lum could cover for him.
When Fat Lum saw my grandmother’s ankle, he busied himself grinding roots, leaves and cacti in his granite mortar with the pestle, and softened banana leaves over his charcoal fire. Then he spread the mixture on the leaves, which he gently wrapped round my grandmother’s ankle and tied with fibres from a banana tree-trunk.
Fat Lum was a widower and, like Kum Tai, a native of Hainan Island. He had settled in Singapore many years earlier, and spoke the dialects, English and Malay. Everyone thought he was a very good bonesetter, and while Kum Tai was waiting for her ankle to mend, he came each morning with a fresh mixture of ground herbs and banana leaves. When Fat Lum applied them to her leg, he would help her with the instructions to the plantation workers, in their various dialects, then tell them what needed to be done. For the first time in the few months since she had bought the plantation, everything went smoothly for Kum Tai – especially after Fat Lum had come to work for her, alongside his bonesetting. He asked if she had space for him to live there, rather than travelling from his home in the city. He had no family ties, he said, so there was nothing to stop him. Because my grandmother was a widow, she could not allow him to sleep in the main house: that would have led to gossip and she would have lost the respect of her neighbour. Instead she put him up in one of the outbuildings used for storing fruit.
My father was pleased that Fat Lum was living with them: it would ease his mother’s workload. Fat Lum helped him, too, with the dialects. Father loved to follow Fat Lum round the orchards, listening as he gave orders to the workers. Sometimes they would speak Hylam, their mother tongue, but often Fat Lum would use another dialect – the more my father could learn, the less likely it was that he would be a farmer and end up killed by a chestnut tree, as his father had been.
Fat Lum did more and more for Kum Tai and soon he was setting hardly any bones. When he had to respond to an emergency, he would make up for lost time on the farm at the weekend, repairing the house and the outbuildings. Father would gobble his dinner each evening, then rush out to find Fat Lum so that they could sit together on the bench by the duckpond and talk. They would stay there until it was dark when the mosquitoes drove them inside.
One day Fat Lum went to the city and came back, in the middle of dinner, with a stack of books under his arm. Father’s eyes lit up. ‘Uncle Lum, are these English books for me?’ he asked. When Fat Lum nodded, Father stretched out his arms, then remembered his manners and looked at his mother: he did not know whether he should accept the gift. Kum Tai saw the joy in his eyes and knew how much he wanted the books. But she was proud: she did not want it known that she accepted gifts from her workers. On the other hand, she did not want to upset Fat Lum. She insisted on paying for the books, and said that next time all three of them would travel to the city to buy books so that Father would learn not to be a farmer. As they were in the middle of their meal, she asked Fat Lum if he would like to join them. She expected him to say no, because he was an employee, but he said, ‘Yes,’ with a smile, and lowered his huge body into a fragile rattan chair, which groaned under his weight.
Father had never seen so many English books. ‘Thank you, Uncle Lum,’ he said, as he leafed through them. ‘Can I read with you every day?’
‘Of course you can, my son,’ said Fat Lum, ‘and you must come to me if you do not understand something.’
Kum Tai noticed that Fat Lum had called him ‘my son’, and was happy that the pair got on so well together.
After that, Fat Lum and my father would sit by the duckpond each evening with the books, and if it began to rain they would shelter in the outbuilding among the crates of ripe rambutan and scarlet, green-stemmed mangosteen. Kum Tai began to worry that her son was spending too much time away from her so, instead of sending meals to the bonesetter in the outbuilding, she began to invite him to dinner so that she could keep an eye on them both. Father would bolt his food and wait for Fat Lum to finish. Then they would sit and read together under the light of the oil lamp until Kum Tai said it was time for bed. Sometimes Father would be asleep already with a book in his hand, and Fat Lum would carry him to bed. Then he would return to Kum Tai and they would chat late into the night.
Kum Tai was alone in a strange country and was grateful for the bonesetter’s attention. She thought him a good and honourable man, and feelings for him stirred in her heart. One evening, after dinner, he asked her to marry him. Father was awake in his bed in the next room and waited anxiously for her reply. He knew how difficult it had been for her, alone on the plantation, and since the arrival of the bonesetter her life had been easier. He wanted her to marry again and to sit by the duckpond with Uncle Lum.
Kum Tai and Fat Lum were married at the Chinese Consulate, then had a wedding dinner at a restaurant. The next day Fat Lum told Father that ‘Lum’ meant forest, like their plantation, and that it would be best if Father changed his name to Lum. Kum Tai agreed that they should all bear the same name, so when Father went to register at the Anglo-Chinese Primary School it was under the surname ‘Lum’.
He excelled at school. ‘Study hard,’ Kum Tai would remind him, ‘and get a government job. You must mix with city people, not farmers.’ Father told me that he spent his holidays with friends, hiking, camping and swimming in Penang, and that he always worked hard for his exams. ‘One day we will sell the plantation and move to the city,’ his mother told him. ‘But everything depends on you passing your exams and finding a good job.’
Fat Lum took over the running of the plantation and dealt with all the paperwork. Kum Tai was glad that all she had to do was sign the letters. She did not stop guarding the orchards though, and when the trees were fruiting she would walk about with her long stick and a lantern, frightening off the bats. In the mornings she was so tired that Fat Lum could get hardly any sense out of her. ‘Why not shoot those flying foxes?’ he asked. ‘Buy a gun. A few bangs here and there and they will fly away.’
Father told me that at first after Kum Tai bought her rifle things were easier. She only needed to fire a few shots and the bats would be gone for the night. Sometimes she would kill some and take them home to make bat soup. She added medicinal herbs to strengthen Father’s weak bladder so that he did not have to rush out in the middle of his lessons.
One night, shortly before the rambutan harvest, Kum Tai was in high spirits when she went out with the rifle to patrol the plantation. As she walked through the trees she thought of the life they would have in the city after her son had passed his exams. The rambutans had turned red and were very ripe and there were more bats than she could ever remember, so she shot many rounds into the night sky. She was under a cluster of trees firing her rifle when, suddenly, there was a thump on the ground and she saw a dark shape a few yards from her. She approached with her lantern and, as she drew closer, saw a dead monkey. Blood was pouring from its chest and its hands were clasped as if in prayer. Kum Tai felt faint and began to tremble. She turned and ran through the dark. ‘Aii-ee, aii-ee,’ she cried. ‘I have killed the monkey god! I have killed the great monkey god! My life is not worth living.’ As she ran, the low branches of the fruit trees cut her face and eyes and, Father told me, as we sat under the big teak table, the wounds eventually caused the loss of her eyesight.
Back at the house, Kum Tai knew what she had to do. She took hold of the rifle by its barrel and smashed it on the cement floor, screaming at the evil spirit in the gun: ‘Get out, get out, get out!’ she cried. But the rifle would not break, so she ran outside and threw it into the duck-pond. It sank to the bottom and was never seen again.
After that night Kum Tai was never the same. She became tense and nervous, and would not go into the plantation. Soon she was unable to work at all and Fat Lum had to take over. She would mumble to herself about how she had shot the monkey god out of the sky, and Father would try to comfort her. ‘It’s like any other meat, Ma,’ he told her. ‘They serve monkey at all the best restaurants in Chinatown.’ But Kum Tai would put her hands together, showing Father how the monkey’s had been clasped in prayer, and she would turn her head and walk away, whispering sadly to herself.
Fat Lum ruled the plantation like a dictator. If a worker arrived a few minutes late he was sacked on the spot, and if anyone was disrespectful he, too, was replaced. Kum Tai did not discuss the farm with him: she had lost interest in it. Father hoped that in time she would regain her health and take back control from Fat Lum, but she did not improve. Instead she began to worry about her only son finding a wife and starting a family.
‘Listen carefully, Poh-mun,’ said Kum Tai. ‘Your father was young when he married me. It is time for you to take a wife. I want to see grandchildren before the end of my days.’
The first time Father saw my mother was at a meeting arranged by the local matchmaker. It happened like this. One day Father and Kum Tai sat at a table near the entrance of a little tea-house in Chinatown and, at the appointed time, a rickshaw, with the hood down, pulled up in front. The matchmaker and the bride-to-be, my mother, were inside.
‘She will make you happy, Poh-mun,’ whispered Kum Tai, pointing to the girl sitting next to the matchmaker. ‘That is Chiew-wah. She will be a good wife, trust me.’
Father told me that she was only fifteen, and he had stared shyly at her, unable to speak. The rickshaw stayed for a few minutes, then left. Kum Tai explained that it was not necessary for him to see Chiew-wah again before the wedding, that love was like the wind and would soon blow through them. She talked to him every night about his duty.
The matchmaker negotiated a dowry to be paid by my father’s family and a trousseau to be given by the family of the bride. Chiew-wah’s mother had discovered that my father’s family were well-off and requested ten tables for the guests of the bride’s family at the wedding dinner; she demanded a fine restaurant and the very best food. My mother Chiew-wah’s trousseau included a set of new teak bedroom furniture, three sets of embroidered linen, a jade bangle, jade and pearl earrings and a thick necklace of pure gold. Father told me that the Singer sewing-machine had been a wedding gift, the very best model, and that was why Mother never let my sister and me use it.
Three (#u4e0542ab-ac98-5236-b770-989a22d47033)
My father told me all of this while we were under the table with the mattresses stacked on top and around it, and I was curled up next to him in the dark, munching my biscuits. Then I could forget the hungry Japanese silkworms crawling towards us with their bombs. I was happy in that place with my father, who had come from the island where the rain had carried the pigs and the furniture down the river to their new home in the sea with the fish.
Father was only sixteen when he was married, and one year later he had his first child, my brother Beng. He told me how Kum Tai had held him in her arms for the first time. ‘First Grandson! You look just like your father, my Po-pui,’ she said, and tears ran down her face.
‘Why are you sad, Ma? Are you not happy with your grandson?’ asked my mother.
‘I am happy, Chiew-wah, very happy,’ she said. ‘When I look at my grandson, I think of a time before. I always wanted more children, but after Poh-mun I was not able to have another.’ She was lost in thought as she stared at the child in her arms. ‘You must not walk too much or carry heavy things, because it will hurt you,’ she said eventually. Then she told Chiew-wah how she had swum after the pigs and how it had damaged her womb. ‘Don’t make the same mistake,’ she said. ‘You and Poh-mun must have many children, a big family. You must rest. And no housework for one month!’
Father told me that Beng’s birth did not interrupt his studies. In fact it made him work harder. He was impatient to pass his exams so that he could get a good job and move to the city, his mother’s dream. Her eyesight was fading and she talked all the time about the monkey with its hands locked in prayer. She never left her bedroom: Father took her meals to her there, and in the evenings he would sit with her, reading the book of Confucius that she had once read to him.
Early one morning, in the middle of a thunderstorm, Kum Tai jumped out of bed, got dressed and mumbled that she was going to inspect the fruit trees. Father was at school and Fat Lum had gone to the city on business. Kum Tai stumbled outside in the rain and Chiew-wah, with Beng strapped to her back, worried until Father returned in the late afternoon.
Dusk set in early because of the heavy rain and Father lit a lantern and rushed out of the house. He met Fat Lum returning from the city and explained to him what had happened, then went straight to the tree where the monkey had been killed but his mother wasn’t there. He breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps she had gone to a neighbour’s house. And then, in the distance, he saw Fat Lum’s lantern. As he ran towards it, he saw that his step-father was bending over a figure on the ground.
Father and Fat Lum carried Kum Tai back to the house, blood pouring from a deep gash on her head. She had fallen and hit it on a stone. When the plantation workers saw her, some left for good because they were frightened of the monkey god’s revenge.
Father told me that Fat Lum changed after his mother’s death: he wasn’t interested in him any more. He made all the funeral arrangements without consulting him. On the last day of the third week after her death, when the prayer rites had been completed, in accordance with the Taoist observance, Father thought the time was right to approach Fat Lum about the plantation and his mother’s property.
But Fat Lum beat him to it. ‘You can forget about lessons today, Poh-mun. We have things to discuss,’ he told my father, as he was leaving for school.
Father was surprised to hear Fat Lum use his name – he always called him ‘my son’. ‘Can we talk when I get back from school?’ Father asked.
‘No. You will not be returning here. This is no longer your home.’
Fat Lum went into the bedroom. When he came back, he had with him a pile of documents that proved the plantation had been transferred to him.
‘My mother would never have signed those papers if she had been able to read English,’ said Father.
It was no use. ‘Take your wife and baby and leave. Your mother is dead. We no longer have any family connection,’ said Fat Lum. ‘Furthermore, the monthly allowance for your education will be discontinued.’
Father told me that he, Chiew-wah and little Beng went to live with Popo, my mother’s mother, in her flat in Chinatown – where I can remember living as a small child. There, Mother gave birth to her second child, my older sister Miew-kin; the nurses thought it a good omen that she was born on the sixth birthday of the elder daughter of the King and Queen of England. Popo was a devout believer in Chinese astrology: ‘A birthdate that coincides with a royal child cannot be more auspicious for your daughter,’ she said to my mother. For once Popo thought an astrological consultation unnecessary. ‘What better news can the astrologer forecast?’
When Father talked to me under the table about Popo he would lower his voice to a whisper. She did not like him telling us about those years. I would peep round the mattresses to make sure she was not listening to the stories Father was telling me.
Father explained that Popo paid for my mother’s stay in the maternity hospital, and when Mother came home, Popo employed a pue yuet, an attendant for the first month. Every day my mother was washed with towels dipped in hot water in which a mixture of lemon grass, pomelo leaves and ginger roots had simmered for an hour. She had to eat special foods to chase away the wind that enters the body after childbirth: ginger roots, dark brown sugar and black Chinese vinegar were heated, then left to mature in great earthenware pots; later, pigs’ trotters were added to the mixture, cooked, and served to Mother at every mealtime for four weeks. She was made to drink tea made from roasted ginger roots and boiled black beans, which, Popo said, would prevent arthritis in old age.
The pue yuet was the best in the area and Popo paid her well to look after Mother. She spared no expense. Father was not yet working and had no money, so Popo did not consult him. When my sister was born she treated him like a bystander. He offered to care for Beng while my mother nursed the new baby, but Popo would take Beng from him, saying, ‘Go away. This is not a man’s work.’ Then she would mock, ‘Poh-mun, how can you stare at books all day and night when you have two children to care for? You should leave school now and find a job.’ But Father had no intention of abandoning his studies after all the sacrifices his mother had made, so he buried himself in his books and let Popo take control of his family.
A year later, just before I was born, he passed his final examinations and found a job as an interpreter. He told me how glad he was to have fulfilled his mother’s dream that he would not become a farmer, and how proud he was to be earning money for his family at last.
My grandmother wasted no time in reminding him of what he owed her. ‘You are in my debt for life,’ she told him, ‘and you can never finish repaying me. I took pity on my daughter and grandson. I did not do it for you.’
Father told me that she had worn him down with her insults and demands, and that he had surrendered his first pay packet to her. When he talked about these years I could tell from his voice how sad he was, and tired, and I was afraid of the Japanese bombs coming down on my head, through the ceiling and the mattresses and the thick teak table.
Four (#u4e0542ab-ac98-5236-b770-989a22d47033)
I was the third child and Popo gave me my name. On the day I was born, 19 December 1933, she consulted with an astrologer and chose the name Miew-yong, Subtle Lotus.
I slipped out of my mother in the blink of an eye at the maternity hospital close to Serangoon Road, where the air was thick with spices from the shops where they were milled, and people queued on the pavement, clutching their precious bags of turmeric, cardamom and cumin, grown on their plots of land and brought to the shops for grinding. As they waited their turn patiently, they watched the women squatting over enamel basins of buds and flowers that they threaded deftly into delicate hair ornaments. Undulating rows of floral garlands were draped over poles, the sacred star-shaped champaca among the sweet-scented blooms. Next to the milling shops, goldsmiths sold exquisite jewellery, and fabric merchants displayed layer upon layer of sarees in a tangle of colours. Along the road, tucked away, tiny restaurants served curries, sweetmeats and yoghurt on banana leaves cut into squares.
We lived in Chinatown until I was five. Popo’s flat was on the first floor of a three-storey building on a busy tram route, which cut across Chinatown towards Geylang, above a little coffee shop in Tanjong Pagar Road. The flat was divided into small rooms and cubicles, and Father and Mother, Beng, Miew-kin and I had a tiny room at the front. The overhead tram cables hummed a few feet from our window, and as I stood looking out on life in the street below, the trams lumbered by, shooting sparks. How easy it would be, I thought, to touch the cable with Popo’s rattan cane. Aunt Chiew-foong, my mother’s younger sister, lived in the next room; she had a sewing-machine that she pedalled all day long. Popo and Kung-kung, my grandfather, lived at the back and the three windowless cubicles in the middle of the flat were let, as was the space under the stairs.
To reach the flat we climbed a dark staircase to the large landing area with an altar and the table at which we had our meals. The walls around the altar were sooty with the smoke from the hundreds of joss sticks my family and the tenants had burnt. The flat was gloomy: Kung-kung insisted on fifteen-watt bulbs to save money, but on his birthday he replaced them with sixty watts and, for that day, the flat was flooded with light. In the kitchen there were charcoal stoves for cooking, and in the bathroom a big tub for washing and a toilet, the bowl stained black with age.
Outside, the street was always busy. Workers went to and from the tobacco factory, women struggled with bags of food from the market, hawkers called their wares, and at the tea-shop opposite people met, talked and laughed. I would stand at the window and watch all this for hours, and when I grew bored I would go outside on to the pavement by the door to our flat. Sometimes I would venture further with my father, or one of the tenants, past the tall, terraced buildings with brightly painted shutters and through the tangled streets lined with shops and stalls selling glistening fish, steaming bowls of noodles, cloth of every colour, pots, pans, and songbirds in cages. Sometimes I would be taken to the temple in the heart of Chinatown where my grandmother went to gossip and exchange news with her friends, or to my grandfather Kung-kung’s herb stall, where he spent his days telling customers how to treat their ailments and selling them the remedies they needed.
At home Popo would spend hours talking with her chimui, sitting in the kitchen as the trams rattled by outside. The chimui were her closest friends, her ‘foster sisters’, and many owned herb shops. Together, they discussed ailments, symptoms and remedies, but they also liked to talk about the past. When she was in a good mood Popo loved to tell her story, and sometimes Miew-kin and I would sit quietly by the women and listen to her talk. We never interrupted: we were careful not to do that.
Kung-kung and Popo had been born in a village in Canton, she said, the capital of Kwantung Province; they married when she was nineteen and he twenty-one. Popo would tell her chimui of how she had left her village for Hong Kong in 1911, the year of the Canton uprising, with her husband and his family. They had set up a herb shop in Nine Dragons, and when they had settled in, Popo’s mother-in-law had decided to leave her share of the work to Popo. That was how Popo had gained her wide knowledge of medicinal leaves, fruit and roots, and how to use them to treat all sorts of ailments.
Popo said that she had given birth to my mother, Chiew-wah, in the year of the tiger and, two years later, in the year of the dragon, to her second daughter, Chiew-foong. When Kung-kung was not in the shop, he often ventured to the docks to hear tales of faraway countries – America, Russia and Liverpool in England – from Chinese seamen with grey in their beards. He couldn’t tear himself away, and on his return to the flat he would grumble to Popo about his long hair, which was plaited into a queue. It had never troubled him until he started going to watch the ships, and now he wanted to look like the sailors: ‘They have no queue but short-cropped hair. I want to cut mine off,’ Kung-kung said. ‘When I bend down it sweeps the floor.’ Popo was not surprised when he came home one day with short hair, and it wasn’t long after this that he decided to leave Hong Kong and take his young family with him.
As soon as his younger brother was old enough to take over the shop and look after their parents, Kung-kung, Popo and their two daughters boarded a cargo boat bound for Singapore. The island offered many opportunities, he said. They would find good fortune and prosperity there.
My mother was ten and not a good traveller. While crossing the South China Sea, a heavy storm churned the waters and the boat tossed violently. She was seasick and could not keep down any food during the long journey. She stayed on deck with Kung-kung, but every time she felt a little better, the smell of dried fish and meat from the cargo hold below would make her sick again.
Popo would tell her friends how the family had found the flat in Chinatown, and how my grandfather had had to pay the landlord more than he could afford for the lease because so many immigrants were pouring into Singapore. He spent what was left on setting up his market stall selling herbs, the only trade he knew well, but to safeguard his business he had to pay the tongs, the gangsters of the district. They told him that only they could protect him from other stallholders and those who wished him ill, but mainly they guaranteed him freedom from the threats and intimidation of other tongs. Kung-kung worked hard and looked to the future: he wanted to expand into a proper medicine shop some day, like the one his family owned. He expected Popo to help him sell the herbs, as she had in Hong Kong, but he soon found that only one pair of hands did the work – his own. Popo told her friends that she would not work on the stall, and she expressed no shame for her failure to behave as a loyal and dutiful wife should; neither did she care that she had not borne Kung-kung sons who would carry on the family name.
My grandfather Kung-kung was a quiet man and paid me little attention, but he let me sit in the corner of his bedroom to watch him smoke his opium, which he did every night after dinner. Kung-kung’s bed was his special place, made especially for smoking; there were elaborate carvings on the headboard and on a rosewood panel at the foot. Instead of a mattress, a closely woven rattan mat fitted over the frame. Every night after dinner he would spread over it a piece of heavily stained canvas to catch the tiniest drop of spilt resin. On top he would place a teacup-sized oil lamp and his polished black pipe, which was two feet long with a wooden bowl at one end. When everything was ready he would unwrap the packet of precious opium pellets and place one in his pipe. Then, stretched out comfortably on his side, he would rest his head on a porcelain-block pillow, and begin to smoke.
As I sat watching him from the floor, I would enjoy the aroma of the opium, a delicious roasting smell. Later, when he had finished, he would unscrew the bowl from the pipe, scrape the residue into a container, then painstakingly retrieve every speck of opium that had fallen on to the canvas.
One evening Kung-kung returned home after another hard day’s work on his stall. After he had eaten, he hurried to his bedroom and I followed. Sitting quietly on the floor, I watched him make his usual preparations and start to enjoy his pipe. Before he had finished, Popo marched into the bedroom with fire in her eyes. ‘Go and smoke in the opium den down the road,’ she said. ‘I cannot stand it any more.’
Kung-kung looked at her in amazement and I could see that he was angry. ‘I have smoked it all these years and now you cannot stand it?’ he said, through clenched teeth that the opium had stained brown.
‘I am thinking of the grandchildren,’ said Popo, looking at me.
‘So it’s all right for them when the tenants smoke – or will you tell them to go to the opium dens too? Why don’t you tell the truth? I’m not stupid. You’ve made life miserable for Poh-mun, forcing him to hand over his wages, and now you want to do the same with me. I will go to the opium den, but you will regret it.’
