The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir

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Kung-kung never thought of himself as an addict, even though he had smoked opium since he was a young man. ‘It is for medicinal purposes,’ he always said, reminding everyone that, as a herbalist, he knew what he was talking about. He smoked at home because opium dens were expensive. I heard him complain to Father that the beautiful women who worked there encouraged him to gamble and that this made him smoke more. The dens were dangerous too, he said, and under the protection of the tongs who took a percentage of their takings and beat up any addicts who did not pay. Popo knew that the dens were guarded by the tongs, who sometimes fought territorial wars; she even knew some of the gang members and could interpret their secret hand signals but, as she told her chimui when they discussed what she had done, she was glad to have Kung-kung and his opium out of the house.

After Kung-kung had been forced to abandon his carved bed for the opium den, word spread that he was under the thumb of his wife. He nurtured a silent anger, and spent less and less time at home. Instead he wandered the streets and sat in coffee shops. Some weeks passed and then one day, just after we had finished our dinner, he came out of his bedroom with a suitcase in his hand. ‘Take this,’ he said to Popo, and handed her a wad of banknotes.

‘Where are you going? Where did you get this money?’ Popo cried.

‘I’m going away and that is all you need to know. Don’t wait for me to come back.’

With that, they parted for ever.

After Kung-kung left, my mother went to Trengganu Street where he had had his herb stall to ask the other stallholders if they knew where he had gone, but nobody would say anything. She thought Kung-kung must have asked them not to tell his family. Weeks passed but she didn’t give up hope. She returned to the street every day, at different times, trying to find someone who would tell her where Kung-kung was. As she walked up and down, she would think of her journey with her father on the cargo boat, and how the churning sea and the smell of dried fish had made her seasick, and how Kung-kung had taken care of her. She grew more and more distracted and Father became so worried about her that he went to a seamen’s club to see what he could discover about Kung-kung’s disappearance. When he returned he told us that Kung-kung had met an old friend called Chow, whose ship was in dock for repairs. Chow had told Kung-kung that he had made his home in San Francisco and had offered to get him a job working with him in the ship’s laundry.

Popo behaved as if she had done nothing wrong in causing Kung-kung to leave Singapore and his family. With my father’s monthly wages and the rent from her lodgers, she had plenty of money, so she spent even more time playing mah-jongg with her friends from the temple and with other immigrants who had come to Singapore across the tumultuous South China Sea.

Five (#u4e0542ab-ac98-5236-b770-989a22d47033)

Aunt Chiew-foong was nearly twenty and still unmarried. She had a dark complexion and was less than five feet tall, but she looked even shorter because she walked with a stoop. Compared to my mother she was no beauty, but she liked to smile and show off her decorative gold-capped front teeth. Her voice was high-pitched and shrill, and she would imitate the screeching calls of hawkers, peddling their noodles and chicken congee.

When my mother gave birth to her fourth child, plump and happy with stiff black hair and a chubby face, we nicknamed her Wang-lai. It means ‘pineapple’ and we thought she looked like one. While Mother tended Wang-lai, Aunt Chiew-foong looked after Beng, Miew-kin and me. She liked to play with us – she was still a child at heart – but Popo couldn’t forget that she was still single with no children of her own. She worried that her daughter never had any boyfriends, and I often heard her complaining to her chimui about the hard task of finding a husband for her. ‘Daughters must be married by sixteen, when they are like flowers coming into full bloom and can fetch large dowries,’ she said, ‘and parents can have the choice of suitors. At twenty, women are past their prime. Over twenty-five, they are old maids. Then we must pay the costs of marrying them off in whatever way we can.’

According to Popo’s calculations with the Chinese calendar, one year had to be added to my aunt’s age because she had been born just before the New Year, which made her even older than she was. ‘Time is not on your side, you should already have many babies, like your sister,’ Popo nagged, day in, day out. ‘You wasted many years at school. What work can you do? You can’t read or write. You have no luck with matchmakers. How will you find a good husband?’

‘Why don’t you tell brother-in-law Poh-mun to find one for me, Ma?’ Aunt Chiew-foong asked.

My father was persuaded to invite his bachelor friends home at weekends for lunch, in the hope that one might become Aunt Chiew-foong’s husband. Sometimes three or four young men would join us, and every week there would be new faces. They enjoyed the food but had no idea why they had been invited. Popo was a good cook, with a discriminating palate, and she had taught my mother and aunt well. Now our Sunday lunches became more and more sumptuous and the menu was planned meticulously days in advance. There were always tasty bowls of thin noodle soup, flavoured with herbs, steamed fish, pork or chicken and sometimes snake, bought live from a stall in Chinatown. After dinner on Thursday or Friday, Popo, my mother and my aunt would begin to discuss their strategy.

‘I’m going tomake this Sunday’s lunch extra special to get aman for Chiew-foong,’ my grandmother said one evening.

‘No rich bachelors coming this Sunday,’ said Mother. ‘Poh-mun’s invited people who work in other government departments. We don’t need anything special.’

‘What do you know?’ Popo shouted. ‘Another son-in-law in the government service would be most satisfactory.’

Recipes were proposed and discarded until Mother suggested clay-pot chicken. ‘You’ve always liked that,’ she said to Popo. ‘We’ll need chicken, tofu, pork, sea cucumber, Tientsin cabbage, ginger, bean sauce and black vinegar. One taste of the clay-pot chicken and all the men will want to marry her straight away.’

That Sunday the food was the best it had ever been and the guests paid many compliments. At every opportunity my father heaped praise on my aunt’s cooking.

One man said, with his mouth full, ‘This clay-pot chicken is so good. Better than any restaurant.’

‘My sister-in-law prepared everything,’ said my father, winking at my aunt.

With all eyes on her, Aunt Chiew-foong rose shyly from her seat with a bowl in her hand and left for the kitchen, apparently to refill it. When she was out of earshot, Father added, ‘She’s such a good cook. It’s a shame I’ve no brother-in-law.’

Despite the clay-pot chicken, there was no interest in my aunt, and soon my father tired of playing matchmaker. Apart from the cost of the food, it prevented him enjoying quiet weekends or going swimming with his friends. In a rare moment of defiance, he stopped the lunches altogether. But Popo did not give up hope. She had consulted a fortune-teller who had told her, ‘When the time arrives, Chiew-foong will marry a good, caring husband.’

Then, unexpectedly, one of the bachelors who had attended a Sunday lunch approached Father and asked for Aunt Chiew-foong’s hand. He was called Cong and was a government employee from the Municipal Department of Public Utilities. Father was dismayed. ‘He’s short, balding, and has a squint that makes me uneasy,’ he said to my mother. ‘He never meets my eye.’

‘Why did you invite him to the house, then?’ Mother asked.

‘I had no choice. Your mother forced me to consider any man as a husband for your Chiew-foong,’ Father replied.

But Popo had her eye on Cong and confided to my mother that she did not mind his odd appearance. ‘All that matters is that I will gain face when my chimui find out where my second son-in-law works.’ With a toss of her head, she added, ‘They will be so envious. None of them has any family in the government service, but two members of mine will be.’

In view of my aunt’s age, Popo did not demand a dowry and insisted that the pair marry as soon as possible: she was relieved that my aunt was soon to be off her hands.

Aunt Chiew-foong and Cong married and moved into his house in Rangoon Road, a few miles from Chinatown. After their honeymoon, Popo allowed them time to settle in, then made her move. One morning, she packed a bundle of clothes and set out, intending to spend a few days with my aunt: she said she wanted to get to know Chiew-foong’s blind mother-in-law who lived with them – but really she wanted to test the water, find out if she could get my aunt’s family under her thumb as well. She returned the same day, tight-lipped and ill-tempered. It wasn’t until some hours later, after much snorting and cursing, that we found out what had happened. At the midday meal Aunt Chiew-foong had served Popo a bowl of rice congee and a small saucer of pickled sour greens left over from the previous night’s dinner. Popo had eyed what was placed in front of her in disbelief and asked my aunt what kind of food they were having.

‘Teochew,’ Aunt Chiew-foong said apologetically. ‘I have learnt to prepare their kind of food and to keep to a very strict budget. My husband and his mother don’t believe in eating as much as we Cantonese, and I am given enough money each day to buy one meal at the market. I must have meat on the table for dinner.’

‘So, Poh-mun was right about your husband,’ said Popo, sniffing the congee. ‘Yesterday’s leftovers.’

‘I have hardly anything for myself, Ma, so I have to pocket a few cents from the housekeeping for my daily stake on the chap-ji-kee,’ Aunt Chiew-foong moaned.

She was addicted to the lottery. She had a cigarette tin that contained the numbers one to twelve written on small squares of paper rolled into little tubes. That tin went everywhere with her. Whenever she came across burnt-out joss sticks at the foot of a tree, a bush or at the corner of a street, she took that as a sign to ask for numbers. She would kneel, if it was a fine day, or squat, if it was wet, then mutter a prayer, and shake her tin until two numbers fell out, which she would scribble down. Her favourite place to consult the tin was by the pond for rescued turtles at the temple, near the market in Balestier Road. If she struck lucky, she would celebrate by going to the stall that served turtle soup. She kept a record of each day’s draw in a length of red paper rolled up like a scroll.

My aunt told Popo that if there was nothing left from dinner the day before, she and her mother-in-law would have plain congee, with a sprinkle of soy sauce, for lunch but she insisted, miserably, that she was content and adjusting to married life.

When my aunt admitted that she had no say in how the family’s money was spent, Popo’s hopes of staying for a few days and taking control of the family were dashed. It was hardly likely that her second son-in-law was going to part with any of his wages. Still, she was curious about what he did with his money. My father had a large household to feed, and my new uncle earned almost as much as he did. She decided that as a bachelor he must have saved a large amount. She began to press my aunt for the truth about her husband.

‘Is he gambling?’ she asked. ‘Does he go to prostitutes? What does he do with his money?’

Finally Aunt Chiew-foong lost patience. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘He never goes to prostitutes. We go to bed early every night because he wants a fat son quickly.’ Then, in a hushed tone, she added, ‘I wouldn’t dare ask him for money but he talks about it with his mother. She has a lot of gold jewellery.’ She nodded towards her mother-in-law’s room and whispered, ‘It is hidden under her mattress and she never leaves her bed.’

‘Why? Is she lame?’

‘No, only blind. The jewellery keeps her in bed. She is afraid to leave it unguarded.’ Aunt Chiew-foong told Popo that as her mother-in-law never left her bed, her legs had become weak. She took her mother-in-law’s meals to her and the woman ate them leaning against the pillows. She wouldn’t even take a bath, but was wiped with a wet towel as she lay on her bed. Rather than go to the toilet, she used an enamel pot.

‘My husband used to pay someone to come in to help a few times a week, but he sacked her after we got married. Emptying the pot and cleaning her every morning is my duty now,’ said Aunt Chiew-foong.

Popo shook her head. ‘How can you do this without complaining?’ she scolded. ‘Aiii-yah, after all the trouble I took to find you a husband, you are a servant to a blind old woman.’

Six (#u4e0542ab-ac98-5236-b770-989a22d47033)

Three years before the starving Japanese silkworms would begin their deadly journey across the sea to Singapore, we moved from Popo’s flat in Chinatown to a two-storey house in the Tanglin area of Singapore. Father was doing well as an interpreter and thought that now he could afford a house for his family he would escape Popo. But she decided to let her flat and come with us.

Our new house seemed full of light after the gloom of the flat in Chinatown. Downstairs we had a sitting room, a dining room and a kitchen. Half of the kitchen was open to the sky: that was where we did the laundry and where we ground soaked glutinous rice into the flour that we used to make sweet dumplings. Outside our front door, I would watch passers-by, and families sitting and talking outside their houses. Tanglin was different from noisy Chinatown where people pushed and shoved, chattered loudly in different dialects, and the smelly open drains were always filled with stagnant water and rubbish. The house stood on Emerald Hill Road, which snaked up to meet Cairnhill Circle, and in the afternoons piano and violin music drifted into our house from the children next door. On the pavement boys and girls played badminton and marbles.

Our neighbours in Tanglin were Chinese but dressed in Malay clothes. They spoke Malay and English, but only a few words of Cantonese. The women wore colourful sarongs and the long-sleeved kebaya, made of voile and embroidered along the edges and the cuffs. In place of buttons, a krosang – three long gold pins linked with a fine chain – held it together at the front. On their feet they wore multi-coloured beaded cloth slippers, and it wasn’t long before my mother and Popo discarded their clogs for a pair each.

We discovered from our neighbours that they were ‘Straits Chinese’ or Peranakans, which means ‘locally born’. Their Chinese ancestors had settled in Malacca, one of the four British Straits Settlements; the men were known as babas, the women as nyonyas. Popo said it was strange that a Chinese person could not speak Chinese. Over the centuries the Peranakans had adopted the culture and language of the Malays; my mother and Popo noticed that the nyonyas were polite and refined, unlike their own women friends.

My father’s office was close by, so he no longer had to cycle to work early in the morning. Instead, he walked through the leafy streets, and I would watch him set out each morning, his black hair gleaming with Brylcreem, combed straight back with a side parting; he wore a crisply starched white shirt and trousers. He enjoyed his job, but his interest in books and languages did not die away. He bought books all the time, regardless of the cost, and paid for them in monthly instalments, building up a small library at our new home. He stamped each one ‘Lum Poh-mun Library’. There were books on language, history, psychology and the classics, and one shelf was filled with paperback novels. I would often see my father reading books like The History of the Roman Empire, or the five classics: Changes; History; Poetry; Collection of Ritual; Spring and Autumn. He told me there was so much wisdom in their pages that he could never finish learning from them. His favourites, though, were the Four Books of Confucian literature – the only ones he had that his mother had brought from China. He told me that reading them reminded him of Kum Tai, who had read them to him on their farm, where the rambutans and the scarlet mangosteens had grown. From them he had understood the value of learning, the importance of integrity, sacrifice and duty, and that human nature tends to be good.

Popo still ran the house and my mother did not dare challenge her. Father tried to insist that his wife should have his wages but did nothing when she handed it to Popo. With the family money in her hands, Popo dismissed the cleaner, who had come in for a few hours in the morning, and hired a live-in servant to do the washing. Father said that the real reason Popo had taken her on was to impress the neighbours.

Sum-chay belonged to an association of professional servants, known as mah chay. They looked down on other servants who did not have their special training and would carry out only certain duties. They wore black trousers and white Chinese blouses, and we called them ‘the black-and-white snobs’. Sum-chay made it clear at her interview that she would not cook or look after children. Although she was in her early forties, she had never married and didn’t like this to be mentioned. We children called her by her name followed by the respectful ‘Older Sister’, and after a while she softened towards us and would sometimes keep an eye on my younger sister Wang-lai while my mother was playing mah-jongg with her friends. Every festival day she left our house and returned to her lodgings in the coolie fong, where all the mah chay would congregate, to celebrate with her fellow professionals.

One evening at the house in Tanglin I caught a chill after I had spent too long bathing in cold water. Hot water was a luxury in my family, and we only had it when we were unwell. My cold had persisted for more than a week and I developed a burning fever. I did not see a doctor as my grandmother never allowed us to use Western medicines: she took charge of our health and had a cure for every ailment. Bottles of dried herbs lined the kitchen cupboards, alongside jars of birds’ nests, lotus roots, dried bees, lizards, sea-horses and cockroaches. Some, like the sea-horses, were added to soups and stews as a health-giving ingredient; others, like the many bitter herbs, were for medicines. Whenever we were ill, Popo would point at several jars in turn and Sum-chay would take them down and put them on the table. Then Popo would take a handful from one, a pinch from another, mix the herbs on a bamboo tray and tip them into a pot for boiling. Some of her treatments were simple: if a rash appeared on someone’s skin, she would say it was caused by spiders crawling over it in the night and would soak dried orange peel in water, chew it to a pulp, then paste it over the rash. Her concoction for my fever was made up of nearly twenty herbs, insects and animal parts, simmered to a black, glutinous soup. I swallowed it obediently, trying to ignore the horrible smell.

Then Popo said I needed a treatment called mungsa, which means to ‘draw out the sand’. My heart sank. She had done this to me before and it had been very painful. I put on a cheery face and lied: I felt much better, I said. Popo was not deceived. She summoned Sum-chay and told her to hold me down on the bed. She dipped her fingers into a bowl of salted water and began to pinch me, starting at my neck and moving gradually over my chest, my waist and along my ribs to my armpits. I screamed and kicked, but Sum-chay held me fast and Popo kept up the pinching for more than an hour. When she had finished my skin was red and sore.

I knew that for seven days after a mungsa treatment I would only be allowed sweetened condensed milk, soda biscuits and fruit, and prayer water from the altar mixed with specks of ash from burnt joss sticks. I would have to embark on this regime the next morning. When day dawned, my fever had not subsided despite the bowl of herbal brew. ‘It serves you right for playing with water, Miew-yong,’ my mother scolded, and as I lay there I remembered how Mother and Popo doted on Beng when he was ill. As my fever worsened Father became very worried about me, but Popo forbade him to call a doctor. He watched me anxiously, but when I looked up at him his face swam and I wondered who he was. He pleaded with Popo to try something else and finally she prepared a different remedy with rhinoceros horn. As she squeezed open my jaws and forced the liquid into my mouth I heard her scold, ‘Don’t spit it out, Miew-yong. This medicine is very expensive.’

Popo was worried, not for me but for herself. She was concerned that I would die and she would be held accountable, but she was still determined not to call a doctor. My mother followed her orders and together they made sure my father did not find out that I was dangerously ill. They massaged me with pungent red-flower liniment and waited. Two days later I woke with a burning sensation all over my body and began to choke at the suffocating scent. My mother was standing next to my bed. I looked up at the woman from whose body I had come, in the blink of an eye, into a world fragrant with a hundred spices, and she gazed back at me with no joy in her eyes. ‘Are you hungry?’ she said flatly.

A few weeks later my mother had her fifth child, a son. When he arrived, he did not cry until the doctor had held him upside-down and smacked his bottom. Popo said it was a sign that he would grow up to be stubborn. Father said she was happy to have a second male grandchild, after three girls, and she carried him in her arms whispering her pet name for him, ‘Little Cow’. ‘Sai-ngau, Sai-ngau,’ she would say, ‘you will grow up to be big and strong.’

Seven (#u4e0542ab-ac98-5236-b770-989a22d47033)

As my father’s grasp of dialects and languages grew, so did his wages. When I was six we moved to Paterson Road, opposite the police station run by the English officer, the red-haired devil. As soon as I saw it I loved that big house, with its many windows and wide verandas. The first thing Popo did when we moved in was call in the feng-shui master to inspect it. He arrived wearing a Chinese jacket and looked very wise. For nearly an hour he spoke with Popo and my mother, pointing from time to time at a list he had placed in front of him on the table. On it were the names of each member of our family with the time, date and name of the animal year in which each of us had been born. I was curious about what he would do next so when he went out into the garden I followed him. I watched him take out of his jacket pocket a small, octagonal block of wood carved with elaborate decorations and with a compass set in the centre. With outstretched arms he held it out, turning in various directions, and mumbled, ‘Too many tombstones, too many tombstones.’ With a frown, he replaced it in his pocket, took out a piece of paper, made some notes, then walked to a different place and did it again.

While the feng-shui master made his calculations Popo walked round the garden, followed by the gardener, to look at the flowers and fruit trees. In the far corner a bush of mauve bougainvillea had been trimmed into a ball, and was surrounded by orange bird-of-paradise, motherin-law’s tongue, gladioli and spider orchids. Gladioli and spider orchids were Popo’s favourite flowers for the altar and she told the gardener to put plenty of cow dung on the beds where they grew. When she got to a huge cactus, with flat fleshy stems and deadly needles, she said: ‘Ah, palm of spirit. How useful. I won’t have to travel to Chinatown for dried ones now.’ She used it to treat the sole of the foot for aches and pains. She would clip off the spines, roast the stems on charcoal and lay them on newspaper. The patient would stand on the hot cactus flesh while it drew the unhealthy wind from the body.

There was another useful tree in the garden, the papaya. Popo did not like the fruit, but she used the leaves when she made a stew of pig’s stomach, garlic, tofu and mustard greens in dark soy sauce. She used them to scrub the pig’s stomach and remove the lining of slime and the nasty smell. We often ate pig-stomach stew. When Popo and Kung-kung had arrived in Singapore with little money, she had searched for the cheapest food and discovered that Europeans, Malays and Indians did not eat pigs’ stomachs, which could be bought for next to nothing. Of course, she never served such cheap food to guests.

When the feng-shui master had finished in the garden, he returned to the house and went from room to room, pointing his compass. I wanted to follow him and watch everything he did, but one glare from Popo told me to stay where I was. I wondered whether he had come to cleanse the house of the spirits from the cemetery, but when his inspection was complete, he sat with Popo and told her that he had calculated the lucky date and position for the setting of the altar, then wrote a list of other things Popo had to do around the house so that we would enjoy the beneficial effects of chi. After he had gone Popo followed his instructions to the letter.

I found that by climbing over the verandas I was able to get in and out of the house without using the front or back doors, which meant I could come and go unnoticed. While my brothers and sisters stayed at home, I would sneak off to the police-station courtyard to play with the policemen’s children. The station stood on two acres of ground at the corner of Orchard Road and Paterson Road. The main building was a typical two-storey colonial-style structure, bordered by verandas on all sides. The charge room, cells and some small offices were on the ground floor, and upstairs the offices of senior policemen and the administration staff, including my father. The red-haired devil’s room was the largest, and just outside his veranda a Union flag fluttered on a long pole. Apart from the main building, there were living quarters for about sixty policemen, the prisoner interrogation rooms, the canteen and the recreation hall. In the middle, screened from public view, was the quadrangle where the policemen had their daily parades and drills.

When the drills were taking place, children were not allowed in the grounds, so I would watch from my friend’s house close by. As I looked at the policemen, sweat dripping down their foreheads and drenching their shirts, I wondered why they wore such warm clothes for their parades. Eventually I learnt from Father that they had to wear British uniforms – bluish-grey shirts, khaki shorts, knee-high woollen socks and woollen berets.

When I was not at the police station or playing in the garden I would wile away my time on the veranda, watching the lorries pass with their loads of tin, rubber or timber on their way from the plantations in Malaya to the wharves where they would be loaded on to ships for export to Britain. I could always tell if a load of rubber had gone by as it gave off an unpleasant chemical smell that stayed in the air for a long time. The timber lorries carried huge logs held together with a few ropes, and a man sitting precariously on the top log. I thought those men deserved extra wages for being so brave, but my father told me they sat on the load because they had no choice: they needed the work. One day, walking home with my father, we saw a timber lorry brake suddenly and swerve to avoid colliding with a car. As it screeched to a halt, the man on the top log was thrown on to the road and, a split second later, crushed to death under the load of timber that followed him.

With more money and a big house to show off, my grandmother and my mother began to transform themselves. They invited old and new friends to play mah-jongg and for meals, and we had visitors almost every day. When Father returned from work, he had to smile at people he hardly knew. My mother stopped doing housework and caring for us to spend most of her time attending to her makeup and going out with her friends. She would see our former neighbours from Tanglin, Mr and Mrs Khoo, and together they would go ballroom dancing and never missed a Sunday tea-dance. She bought a gramophone and invited them to our new house to practise the waltz, the quickstep and the tango. She urged my father to learn, but ballroom dancing was not for him, although he joined in to humour her.

On most Friday evenings two square tables on the veranda were wiped down so that my parents, Popo and the same five friends could play mah-jongg. I was already an expert at setting the mah-jongg tables but although I felt I could play as well as they did, I was never allowed to. First I lined a table with five or six layers of brown paper to lessen the constant noise of the solid white bricks knocking against each other. Then I poured out the 144 little bricks and left them for the players to ‘wash’. Next I counted the chips needed for each player and placed a set before each chair.

The atmosphere at the two tables was very different. At my father’s there was quiet, cheerful conversation and analysis of the play. At Popo’s, there was loud chatter and the slamming of bricks as the game went on. When Popo, using all her ingenuity to outguess her equally skilled opponents, mistakenly gave away the one brick needed by someone else, she would excuse herself to ‘wash away’ the bad luck: she would visit the lavatory and wash her face, then light joss sticks at the altar and pray for the return of good fortune.

We were allowed to stand behind the players to watch them select and discard the bricks. Miew-kin and I had to empty the ashtrays, which Popo and some of the other chain-smoking players soon filled again, and refill their cups with black coffee. Beng would sit beside Popo. The games went on for four hours; sometimes the players would break for dinner, and carry on afterwards until early morning.

The number of guests made extra work in the house and Popo engaged a cook. Dai-chay came from the same coolie fong as Sum-chay and knew her own value: she stated at her interview that she would do no housework and would shop where she pleased. She was short, with enormous buttocks, breasts that hung to her waist, and a deafening voice. Before she agreed to take the job, she strode about our house to inspect it. As we soon discovered, she detested children and took much pleasure in telling tales about us to our parents and Popo. We were forbidden to enter her kitchen without her consent to get drinks and snacks.

Until now Popo had collected the rent every month from her tenants, but now that she had a successful son-in-law and lived in a big house with an experienced cook, she was too proud to do it. Instead she paid her friend Tai-pow Wong, whom everyone called Gasbag Wong, to collect it and deliver the money to her. Popo and Gasbag Wong had been friends from the time when they had first been neighbours in Chinatown. Gasbag Wong was a go-between, doing deals and running errands for a living, and knew many people. Sometimes she helped drug addicts and debt-ridden gamblers to sell their children. Boys were usually reserved before birth by families who had no sons and were willing to pay large sums, but girls were readily available and sold as muichai. Although this was against a law introduced by the British, the trade in girl slaves was widespread in Singapore.

On one of her visits Gasbag Wong arrived with a big smile. She normally came alone at the end of each month to deliver the rent money, but this time there were three girls with her, between ten and twelve years old. They looked pathetic and frightened. There were holes in their clothes and they were not wearing shoes. Popo handed a roll of money to Gasbag Wong and ordered them to kneel. Then she said, ‘You must be obedient. If you run away, you will be severely punished and your parents must pay back a lot of money.’

Popo’s family in China had owned muichai rather than employ servants and she was happy to disobey the law. In the households of their owners the muichai lived in fear and drudgery. They could be sexually assaulted, beaten, given away to other families or sold by their owners as wives or prostitutes. They were paid nothing and wore their mistress’s old clothes. One of the most distressing ordeals for a muichai was to be sent back to her parents if she was disobedient. The parents were usually so poor that they would refuse to accept her for fear of having to repay the money they had received from selling her into slavery.

While the girls were kneeling, our cook Dai-chay walked into the room. She looked at them, sniffed the air and said to Popo, ‘How can I cook with such a foul smell coming into my kitchen?’ It was clear that they had not washed for some time so they were ordered to the bathroom to bathe and have their hair trimmed, then told to try on some of my mother’s old clothes. The blouses were taken in, the trousers shortened to fit, and then they were summoned before Popo. The transformation was remarkable. Two of the girls were cousins and their names were Lai-yuen and Lai-pin. But Popo did not like the first part of their names, Lai, meaning ‘to look askance’, so she changed it to ‘Ah’, renaming them Ah-pin and Ah-yuen. The other girl was Yan-fok.

Popo chose Ah-pin as her personal maid because she had a pleasant face and would wash and iron Popo’s costly silk clothes. Yan-fok had to do the menial work and was at the beck and call of the household, including Sum-chay and Dai-chay. The muichai worked non-stop, hurrying to answer every call in fear of a beating or a knuckle round the head and they were not allowed out on their own. Neither were they given time off to visit their families.

After many weeks of learning how to do the housework, Ah-yuen was sent to Aunt Chiew-foong, who by now had had her first child and was expecting a second. My aunt said that her husband Cong would not waste money employing a servant, but he had no objection to accepting a free muichai who could take his blind mother her meals, empty her enamel pot and clean her as she lay on her bed, day after day, guarding her gold jewellery. Before she handed over the muichai, Popo was careful to point out to my aunt and uncle that Ah-yuen would continue to remain her property and only she could decide her ultimate fate.

Eight (#u4e0542ab-ac98-5236-b770-989a22d47033)

Not long after the muichai arrived, my mother had her sixth child, a girl. My sister, Miew-lan, was premature and underweight. Mother was disappointed that she wasn’t a boy and refused to breastfeed or care for her when they returned from the hospital. She engaged a live-in amah to look after her but the amah was young and inexperienced. My father had strong misgivings about employing her because my sister, who weighed no more than four pounds, was so tiny and fragile.

‘This amah has never looked after premature babies. Can she be trusted to care for one so small?’ Father asked.

‘Well, I’m not going to nurse her. If you don’t trust the amah, you can look after her yourself,’ Mother replied.

As she had done after each birth, my mother washed every day in fragrant water and ate the specially prepared pigs’ trotters at every meal. Most of our Chinese relatives and friends were superstitious and considered a house unclean until a new baby was a month old. My mother was impatient for the cleansing ceremony to be over so that her friends could visit again. She spent the evenings before bedtime leafing through the calendar, sighing, ‘I wish tomorrow was Miew-lan’s full month.’ When at last that day arrived, the ceremony was performed. Sprays of leaves from the pomelo tree were added to the baby’s bathwater and Miew-lan was rubbed with them to purify her and bring her luck. My mother dipped her own hair and body in the same water and then we sat down with some friends to eat pig’s trotters. After the meal the guests were sent on their way with hard-boiled eggs for good luck, the shells dyed bright red.

The next morning, after breakfast, my mother sat for an hour in front of the huge circular mirror and put on her makeup. Miew-kin and I were fascinated by the collection of perfumes, lipsticks, nail varnishes, face creams and boxes of powder that were neatly arranged on her dressing-table, but we knew better than to touch any of Mother’s belongings. If we did she said she would burn our fingers with a lighted wick. We would stand on the threshold of her room, as though held back by an invisible barrier, and watch her transform her face. Our fingers itched to reach out and play with a lipstick or perfume bottle. Later that day my mother had her Shanghainese tailor come to the house for fittings. The Shanghainese were regarded as the finest ladies’ tailors; my mother’s hand-embroidered cheongsams were trimmed with piping and she wore them with matching shoes.

After the birth of Miew-lan my mother left Popo in charge of us. She was very strict and always had a cane by her side at mealtimes. We were constantly reminded that children ‘should not have plenty of mouth’. If my elbows rested on the dining-table or were spread too far apart while I was holding my bowl and chopsticks, she would strike them with the cane, and did the same to my sisters. When my brothers made the same mistakes, they were left alone.

Popo would fill our bowls with food and we could not leave the table until we had eaten every scrap. I preferred the Malay food of vegetables, anchovies and beans, which I was sometimes given at friends’ houses, to the oily Chinese meat. Sometimes I would look in dismay at the food in my bowl and make an excuse to leave the table without finishing, but Popo would see this as a temper tantrum and beat me.

Not long after we moved to Paterson Road, when I was seven, I started school. My grandmother would wake us early each morning and Miew-kin and I would get ready. I would put on my white blouse and Yan-fok would help me tuck in my cotton trousers, which we wrapped round my waist and tied with a sash. Then she would tie my shoelaces and I would join my family at the breakfast table. We had bowls of rice congee topped with chopped fried breadsticks or piles of steamed dumplings. After breakfast two red-painted rickshaws would arrive outside the front door. Beng would climb into one and Miew-kin and I would get into the other. The rickshaw-pullers, in Chinese jacket, short trousers and straw coolie hat, would take us to school where we would learn to read and write in English, practise arithmetic and sing songs.

Miew-kin started at the school a year before I did and I had only been there a few days when I got into trouble. At mid-morning we had tiffin, and Miew-kin always spent her break with a rich girl who was the granddaughter of one of Popo’s friends, a woman whose husband was the biggest importer of herbs in Singapore. This girl was always accompanied by a servant, who carried her metal tiffin box. Once the girl had finished eating, she would offer Miew-kin the rest of her food. When I began at the school I would sit with them during tiffin and eat some too. One morning, as we waited for the girl to finish eating, I decided I did not want to eat her leftovers. I pulled Miew-kin away and said, ‘Let’s not eat – we don’t want it.’ Then I turned to the servant and said, ‘We are not beggars. Why must we wait until she has finished? Why can’t we eat at the same time?’

When we returned home from school at lunchtime, Popo was waiting for me with her cane. The servant had told her mistress what I had said and she had stormed round to speak to Popo. ‘Why did you make trouble?’ Popo shouted at me, as I struggled in her grip. ‘Look at your sister! Now she will have no food.’

As Popo beat me I thought defiantly, I don’t want to eat that food. No matter how much you beat me I’m not going to eat like a servant!

After that Miew-kin’s friend never offered her leftover food to us again and instead we were sent to school with two cents each to spend in the ‘tuck shop’. It was a collection of stalls selling home-made cakes, vermicelli, fried noodles, mixed nuts in paper cones made out of the pages of an exercise book and, best of all, chocolate milk from England, which I loved to buy even though it cost half my tiffin allowance.

It wasn’t long before I was in trouble with Popo again. After school finished each day we would go home in a rickshaw and during the journey the rickshaw-puller would unbutton his jacket. One hot afternoon Miew-kin and I were pulling faces at the strong smell of his sweat.

‘Button your jacket!’ I yelled to him. ‘If you don’t button it, I don’t want to sit in your rickshaw.’

When we arrived at home, the rickshaw-puller complained to Popo about my behaviour and, once again, she beat me. Afterwards, just as she did every day, she welcomed Beng home from school, sat him on her lap and asked him what he had been doing. I watched as they smiled, laughed and talked in a babyish way to each other. I did not know what to think.

After school, we would do our homework on the veranda and then, in our free time, I would play with insects under the henna tree, or explore the kampung behind our house. My brothers and sisters stayed indoors. The boys liked playing in the bathroom, splashing each other and wetting the wall and floor. Miew-kin and I took care to keep away in case we were blamed for the wasted water. Our bathroom had a squat toilet at the far side and measured about seven by ten feet. In one corner, beneath the cold-water tap, an oval stoneware tub held more than a hundred gallons of water. Popo thought we would save money if the tap was left to drip continuously, day and night, so the water meter would run very slowly, if at all. Every day we each had a bath using an aluminium bowl to scoop the water and, by morning, the tub would be filled to the brim again.

One day some decorators were in the bathroom, repainting the walls and ceilings white and touching up the black skirting. In the evening, when they left, they reminded Dai-chay to keep an eye on the wet paint. Dai-chay yelled a warning to us: ‘Listen, all of you, the paint in the bathroom is still wet. You can use only the toilet. No one can bathe until tomorrow. Is that clear?’

Only my sisters and I responded, and I wondered what my brothers were up to. I found them sitting on the bathroom floor. Beng was trying to remove paint from his feet with a towel and I saw that the walls were smudged and streaked with black. ‘Beng, you’re in trouble now. Popo will surely punish you,’ I cried, imagining her striking him with her cane for the first time. But he put down the towel and then, springing to his feet, he pushed me against the smudged wall. I lost my balance, turned to brace myself against the wall and, pressing my hands on the slippery wet paint, slid to the floor. Before I could get up, he shouted, ‘Popo, come quickly! I saw her, Popo, she did it.’

My grandmother and my mother came running. I tried to tell them what had happened but they wouldn’t listen to me. Popo flew into a rage and my mother held my hair in a tight grip to stop me running to the garden. Together they dragged me into the dining room and pushed me down by the teak table. My arms were pulled round one of the legs and my wrists were tied. Holding my left hand, Popo wove a chopstick between my fingers, then did the same with the right. She put my hands together and tied the chopsticks tightly at both ends, squeezing them against my finger joints. The loose ends of the string were tied round my wrists so that any movement would increase the pressure of the chopsticks against my fingers. There was no escape. The thin rattan cane, looped at one end for a handle, slashed down on to my back, delivering the first sting. ‘Did you do it?’ Popo screamed after each lash. ‘Did you? Did you?’ The more I cried out my innocence, the harder she beat me. As I struggled, the chopsticks tightened on my fingers and the string bit into my skin. Blood streamed from the cuts in my wrists.

Mother, believing that my brother would never lie, snatched the cane from Popo and rained blows all over me. ‘Where did you learn to be so stubborn, Miew-yong? Is it from your father? Is it?’ she asked, again and again. I tried to hold out against the pain, and take my mind to the places I enjoyed visiting in secret after I had delivered Popo’s chap-ji-kee lottery stakes. I shut my eyes and pictured the giant trees in the botanical gardens with their huge exposed roots and imagined myself sitting on the low-hanging branch gazing at the water-lilies in the still pond beneath. After a while, Mother and Popo got tired of beating me and sat down to smoke cigarettes. They called the muichai to bring them tea. I thought they had given up, until Popo said I was to have nothing to eat or drink until I had admitted my guilt. I was left kneeling on the floor, tied to the table, while my family had dinner. Only Miew-kin felt sorry for me, but her fear of Mother was greater so she stayed silent. My father had not returned from his office and I suspected he had heard of my plight and stayed away. I knew he loved me, but he never had the courage to stand up to Mother and Popo.

After dinner, my mother and Popo returned their attention to me. I knelt on the floor resting against the table leg with my eyes tightly closed. Popo lit a grass wick, the same type she used for the oil lamp on the altar, and each time I protested my innocence she pressed it, lighted, to my lips to teach me not to lie. When tears ran down my cheeks, she doused the wick on my eyelids, to stop me crying. My lips and the skin round my eyes were soon swollen and blistered. ‘If you want the punishment to stop, admit your fault and stop crying,’ she shouted. In the end I gave in and said what she wanted me to say.

I did not cry again and I would not cry for many years. That night, I sleepwalked for the first time. I climbed on to a chair, unbolted the kitchen door, opened it and walked through our garden towards the Muslim cemetery, past the beautiful mauve bougainvillea, the orange bird-of-paradise and the huge cactus, which loomed dark against the night sky. Popo saw me go and watched me as I walked but she didn’t wake me because she believed that the soul wandered during sleepwalking: should the sleepwalker be awakened, the wan pak might not return to the body and the sleepwalker would fall into a deeper sleep from which they would never return.

Many times, after that first night, my soul would wander while my bare feet took my body outside into the night and back again through the kitchen door, which I always bolted firmly behind me.

Nine (#u4e0542ab-ac98-5236-b770-989a22d47033)

When a new black Wolseley arrived outside our house in January 1941 we were all excited. My grandmother and my mother had raised the money for the car by buying tontine shares, a method of investing that was popular with housewives. Few people had bank accounts and they had paid for the car in cash. That afternoon, when Popo went to the temple, she made Father drive her there in the car so that the people at the entrance would see her arrive in style. She boasted to her friends that she had paid for the car, and added that she had a clever way with money.