Читать книгу The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir - Lucy Lum - Страница 10

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.

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.