The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir

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

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

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.’

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

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.