The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir

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

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

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.