Читать книгу The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir - Lucy Lum - Страница 9

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.’