The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir

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

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

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.

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