A Yellow House

by Karien van Ditzhuijzen

  I started to cry. I needed my PoPo. How could I make sense of the world without her? I buried myself in my bed tent and stared at the dark between the sheets. I tried so hard to remember her, to repeat all she’d told me – but it kept slipping away. Then in the distance I heard a comforting sound. It was a rhythmic clicking and it stopped every minute, only to start again as if it had needed a moment to catch its breath. It was a sound I recognised.

  I’d first heard it just after PoPo died. Then I’d listened to it night after night, not scared but comforted, and when one night I didn’t hear it I couldn’t sleep. Neither Mama nor Dad had any idea what it was. I started guessing: an insect, a lizard, a bird? Dad had laughed. ‘More likely some piece of equipment upstairs. It reminds me of the sound an old fashioned traffic light makes, when you have to wait for green. I don’t know, what does it matter? Just go to sleep, sweetie.’

  But I lay awake many nights listening to the weird sound, which I called the traffic-light-bird. One day it had simply stopped and I hadn’t heard it again until now. I’d missed my traffic-light-bird like I missed PoPo, and hearing it now it was almost as if she had come back to me again.

  PoPo had grown up in a house on the East Coast with a real garden. In those days there weren’t condos all over Singapore like there are now. No eternal rows of grey-white Housing Development Board flats – or HDBs, as they’re known. The green spaces weren’t just neatly mown patches of grass interspersed with concrete drains and waterways. Old Singapore was dotted with kampongs, villages where people lived side by side in small wooden houses surrounded by plantations, bushes

  and undulating rivers.

  PoPo’s house was called the Blue House. I would have given my little finger to see this mansion, but it had been torn down to make way for a shopping centre years before I was born. I didn’t even know whether it had really been blue; PoPo had never said, and I’d forgotten to ask. She told many stories, yet so much remained untold. Listening to her tales always made me feel more whole, more me.

  Right now, I remembered the frogs.

  ‘Tell me about the Blue House,’ I begged PoPo.

  ‘Aiyoh, no! Just an old house. Why do you want to hear that lah?’ PoPo muttered, but her eyes shimmered. It didn’t take much to get her started. ‘Sayang, listen, I will tell you. I was about your age. In the garden there was a lotus pond. Early one evening, after the rains, there was a strange noise by the pond.’

  PoPo had demonstrated the sound, a low, bellowing whoop, a bit like a donkey. The haw without the hee.

  I told her that, and PoPo nodded. ‘Like a donkey, but no donkey by our pond. I kept hearing: Bu-wrahhhhh. Bu-wrahhhhh. My skin got goose pimples, like this.’ PoPo rubbed her lower arms, making the hairs stand up. ‘I was afraid to go closer to the pond, so I asked my brother James, and he said it was Hantu Katak.’

  PoPo had said the word in a low, chilling voice, drawing out the syllables: Hantuuuukathak. I sucked in my breath. Hantu meant ghost. I wanted to ask, who, what? But PoPo had already moved on.

  ‘Hantu, what hantu?’ I asked my brother James. And James told me that after the rains the frog phantom comes to look for revenge for her children. Hantu Katak, she is angry, because people eat the zui keuh, water chicken.’

  ‘Water chicken,’ I’d interrupted, ‘what’s that?’

  PoPo grinned. ‘Water chicken, you know. We eat them in Chinatown. You like them.’ Did I? ‘Frogs. You bodoh, you know frogs. As in frog porridge. You like it, is it?’

  I shuddered. ‘Frogs? I don’t like frogs. Ugh.’

  PoPo kissed her fingers. ‘Frogs are shiok. De-li-ci-ous. When you were little I took you to eat frogs in Chinatown. You loved them. But the bones are so small, aiyoh, so difficult to eat for you. You called them baby chicken. Baby chicken legs, hehe! The Chinese call them zui keuh, water chicken. I’ll take you again. You’ll see.’

  I was sure I didn’t like frogs, but I wanted PoPo to go on so I nodded.

  ‘So,’ PoPo continued, ‘I ate frog just the week before, and ran to my room to close the window to make sure Hantu Katak could not come in. But still, I could not sleep.

  ‘The air was so thick I opened the window again, and the bu-wrahhhhh was in my bed. I was convinced Hantu Katak would come for me in my sleep, so I stayed awake until the sound died. The next evening we sat on the patio for drinks before dinner. We heard nothing but the hammering rain on the roof. After the rain stopped, it started. Bu-wrahhhhh. I went pale and still.’

  PoPo fell quiet, remembering. I waited.

  ‘My father asked what was the matter, and I whispered to him, it was Hantu Katak. My father did not understand, and James laugh laugh, and father cannot hear it, so I tell him, “Hantu Katak is coming to eat me.” Then father laughed too, and said there was no such thing as a frog phantom, I should not listen to James. He said, “Do you want to see what makes the sound?”’

  PoPo paused. ‘Yes, I want to see! Please, go on,’ I begged her.

  ‘My father took my hand and walked me to the pond. “There,” he pointed, “There is your Hantu Katak.” In the pond swam a frog, brown with red on its sides. Normal frog, no hantu. Father and I squatted, waiting, my heart beating in my throat. Suddenly, the frog changed. Sucking up air, it blew into a ball. Then, like a squishy toy, it squashed empty again, and a big bubble inflated from its mouth: bu-wrahhhhh. It puffed up again and blew, bu-wrahhhhh. And again. Bu-wrahhhhh. So funny I forgot I was scared!

  ‘Father and I watched the frog for a long time. Father knew about animals. He told me how that frog, the chubby frog, bellows to call females. And that the females liked it too.’

  PoPo smiled at me. ‘Frogs are mad lor.’

  I lay in bed half-dreaming of the mad frogs and listening to the traffic light sound, waiting to be tucked in by Mama. But Mama had gone out and it was Merpati who came that night. I put my finger to my lips when she tried to speak, and when she looked back puzzled, I held out my finger to the still open window until she heard it too. ‘It’s the traffic light bird,’ I said groggily.

  Merpati smiled in the near dark. Without me even asking, she told me it really was a bird, a large brown one. ‘Burung malas,’ she laughed, ‘Lazy bird’. Then she bent over me and whispered into my ear: ‘It is a gravedigger bird. It lives in the cemetery.’

  She closed the window and turned on the air-conditioning. The hum hid the sound of the bird.

  Had Merpati wanted to scare me by talking about graves? Her tone had been friendly enough. But if that’s what she’d wanted, she’d failed. Every time I heard the bird after that, I felt like it brought news from my dead PoPo. Merpati couldn’t ruin my memories. They were my heritage from PoPo. My PoPo, whom she could never replace.

  5

  Not long after the cockroach incident Meena and Jenny had squeezed on both sides of me on the back row of the school bus.

  ‘Good morning,’ Jenny said.

  Meena laughed, like she laughed about most things Jenny said, even if they weren’t remotely funny.

  ‘Morning,’ I mumbled.

  ‘So, you know, we’ve finally figured you out,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Oh, really, have you?’

  ‘Yes, we have. You see, Meena here, she’s Indian. I’m Chinese, I mean, real Chinese, not a stuck-up Singaporean. But you? We weren’t sure at first, but now we know. If you mix a number of stinky nationalities, stir well, and add a bit of cowardice and dirty feet, what do you get?’

  I kept quiet.

  ‘Well?’ Jenny insisted.

  Meena answered for me. ‘A cockroach, of course! You’re a cockroach.’

  Their comments hit a raw nerve. Maybe they were right. I was a mix of so many nationalities I felt like nothing. How could I be sure I wasn’t a cockroach? They say that when you mix all the colours you can make white, but it’s not true; I’d tried with my paints, and it turned out a muddy brown. Cockroach brown.

  The bile rose again from the pit of my stomach. The ghost of the cockroach
would never leave me alone now.

  PoPo had known exactly who she was, and she knew all about Singapore and its creatures and history too. The Singapore it had been before it was bulldozered and covered in concrete. That was because PoPo was Peranakan, and being Peranakan meant you had belonged here for a long time. Peranakans were the ancestors of the first Chinese settlers of Singapore that had married Malay women. As long as I remembered PoPo’s stories, I had proof I belonged here too. But what if I forgot? Looking around me it seemed most people never looked back. My parents didn’t, for sure. Neither did kids like Meena and Jenny, nor others at my international school who weren’t even born here, who seemed to belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time and were perfectly comfortable with that.

  PoPo’s great, great – I wasn’t sure how many greats – grandfather had come from Southern China to Singapore. Her family stopped speaking Chinese and used Malay instead, Baba Malay. It was a local version that PoPo still fell into when she got excited, the words mixed with her mother’s Cantonese in a hotchpotch I struggled to follow. My parents always spoke English to me, but at school they made me learn Mandarin Chinese, even though I was rubbish at it. When I tried to read it, the characters crawled in front of me and off the paper like ants. Mama spoke it quite well, and insisted I learned. I wanted to learn Malay, like PoPo, but Mama said Malay was a pointless language. Everyone in Singapore spoke perfectly sufficient English, she said, and Malaysia was a dirty and dangerous country, so why go there? Mandarin Chinese would be much more useful for when I grew up and had to do business with China.

  I had no intention of ever doing business with China.

  Mama always told PoPo off for speaking Malay to me. ‘Speak proper English to the girl,’ she’d say, ‘or Mandarin if you want to teach her something useful.’

  But PoPo didn’t speak Mandarin, just Malay, English and Cantonese. She said Mandarin was nobody’s language in Singapore, and that the government just promoted it to suck up to China. That first part was true: most immigrants spoke Hakka, Teochew, Hokkien, Cantonese, or other Southern dialects. The Northern tones of Mandarin did not suit our tropical island, and to spite Mama PoPo would change from her normal speech to a thick Singlish, the pidgin version of English commonly spoken in Singapore. Mama was too modern for Singlish, and would tell me off for replying with a curt ‘can’ or ‘cannot,’ or when I added ‘lah’ to any of my sentences. I secretly loved Singlish, and hoped speaking it could make me a true Singaporean. Unfortunately nobody spoke it at international school, so it was hard to pick up.

  PoPo’s stories recounted her childhood, but she never told me anything about her life after her early teens. I had to piece together the rest from snippets of overheard conversations between my parents, and the basic facts of my mother’s life.

  PoPo had grown up to marry an older Indian man, Mama’s appa, against the wishes of her family. She moved from the East Coast mansion to an HBD flat in Ang Mo Kio, one of Singapore’s new high-rise heartlands. My mother said that growing up there was a hell of concrete dullness. The rows and rows of identical apartment blocks, built to replace the bamboo and attap-palm leaf huts of the kampongs, were solid, with good plumbing and electricity, but offered little space or freedom. Our modern condo was just a more luxurious version of the same.

  Simple maths told me my mother was not born until PoPo was forty, and appa had died when Mama was little. Mama barely remembered him or his family, and PoPo raised her as a single mother. Occasionally I had been taken to Deepavali celebrations with people PoPo referred to as aunties, uncles and cousins; but they seemed too distant, too different, too much like real Indian people to be connected to me. When PoPo took me to see my Indian cousins, Mama stayed at home. ‘You go,’ she said, ‘I’ll come next time.’ But there never was a next time.

  Mama’s Indian and Peranakan Chinese mix made her the most beautiful woman I ever saw. I knew I would never be stylish like her. Her looks turned heads on any continent, and people would guess at her racial heritage. They usually got it wrong, and she loved to keep an air of mystery. ‘I am a proud Singaporean,’ she would say, ‘or better yet, a global citizen.’ Maybe that was why she’d married Dad, who hailed from Europe. His parents, Grandma and Opa, lived in England, but Opa was from the Netherlands originally. In my case, the effect of mixing all those nationalities was muddled, rather than mysterious: burnt caramel skin, the double folded eyelids the Chinese craved but looked plain on me, and mousey hair that twisted in ways I didn’t want it to.

  PoPo said it didn’t matter where your parents came from. Peranakan meant ‘local born,’ and since I was born in Singapore, I qualified. She said Peranakans had always mixed with other races, Indians as well as Europeans. PoPo’s stories made me Peranakan too, which felt good; but now she was gone and the feeling had gone too.

  If I didn’t fit anywhere else, maybe I really was a cockroach. And if so, I could act like one too. I might not dare to fight Jenny and Meena, but I could fight her. I wanted Mama and Dad back, so Merpati had to go. Merpati and those smiles of hers I still couldn’t figure out.

  Mama was strict with what we ate. We were allowed only fruit, biscuits and crackers for our after-school snack. She particularly hated lollipops – oh, the danger of those sticks! – and hard boiled sweets. I had some sweets stashed in secret, the leftovers from a party-bag; I would offer them up to use against her.

  Just before Mama came home, I ate four of them and dropped the wrappers on the living room floor, next to where Chloe was sitting. Merpati was in the kitchen, so there was no chance of her seeing them and tidying them up before Mama came home.

  Mama spotted them straight away. ‘Maya, who’s been eating sweets?’

  I lowered my eyes. ‘Sorry Mama, Merpati gave them to us. I should have said no.’

  Chloe, beautiful ally, picked up one of the colourful papers and stuck it in her mouth. ‘Please tell me Chloe didn’t have any. You know she can’t.’

  ‘I know Mama, but she had them before I came home. Don’t worry, she didn’t choke.’

  Mama turned purple. ‘Merpati, can you come here for a minute?’ She came over from the kitchen. ‘Merpati, did you give Chloe sweets?’ Mama’s voice was sharp. ‘My instructions were quite clear on what they should have after school, and that sweets were not on the menu. Don’t you know how dangerous it is to give a baby sweets? They can choke on them.’

  Merpati bent to pick up the wrappers from the floor and wrestled the remaining paper from Chloe’s fist. She shook her head and then looked at me.

  Mama followed her gaze. ‘Maya. Did you…?’

  Mama looked from me to Merpati, trying to make up her mind. I felt myself shrink, and wondered if I’d get small enough to run and hide under the sofa, like a real cockroach.

  ‘Maya?’ Mama asked again.

  ‘No ma’am,’ Merpati said, ‘I’m so sorry. I gave them the sweets. I did not know, I did not work with kids before.’

  Mama started a lecture on health and safety, muttering that one could not leave anything important to a man, who’d hire someone without experience to watch their children. Merpati swallowed it like I’d swallowed the sweets. Chloe, not understanding what was happening, held on to Merpati’s leg. That switching of allegiance hurt most of all.

  When Mama left the room, Merpati said nothing to me. She just went back to the kitchen and dropped the sweet wrappers in the bin. I followed, feeling I had to say something – but I couldn’t say it. I could no longer remember why I’d started this, nor what I’d wanted to happen. Instead I asked, ‘Did you really never work with kids before?’

  Merpati turned around, that sad look back. ‘No, never in my work. I wish I knew more about ten-year-old girls. If I did, maybe I could…’

  She stopped talking and looked past me, sad, as if she wasn’t thinking about me at all. I’d tried to hurt her, but now I worried whether the fact that she hadn’t got angry meant she didn’t care about me. Who or what was she thinking about?
>
  Merpati said abruptly, ‘But I do know babies. I did tell your Dad that.’ She looked like she wanted to say something else, but didn’t.

  I felt utterly confused. My plan had succeeded in making Mama angry with Merpati, so why did I feel like I had failed?

  6

  On a hot afternoon, about a week after the showdown with Sri’s employer, we were back at the playground. I loitered about, not knowing where to put my arms and legs. The voice in my head said I should just go and play, but boredom surrounded me like a cocoon. It wrapped itself around the cockroach in my tummy. Bored was better than bullied.

  Anyway, there was no one to play with, only babies like Chloe. I told myself I didn’t mind.

  I hung around the aunties, where Merpati had slid into the posse as if she’d known them forever. Even though being her friend was the last thing I wanted, I secretly craved to be part of their group. The aunties at the playground were mostly Filipina and Indonesian. They spoke English together, so eavesdropping was easy. Most of the time they spoke of tedious things – boyfriends, dresses, the weather. Condo gossip was better. Today, it was a long moan about their employers.

  Jenalyn’s employer first. Jenalyn looked after two toddlers, twin boys who were goofing about on the see-saw. I didn’t know their mother. She was pregnant again, Jenalyn said.

  ‘She always complains, she sooo tired, the boys so tiring,’ Jenalyn said. ‘But why is she tired? She lies on the couch, she does nothing. I have to get up, run after the twins, clean the house, cook food. Wait on her, bring water to the couch. Charlie wakes up in the night, and now, now she asks me to sleep in the boys’ room. She sleeps all day, and all night too.’

  The others echoed, ‘So lazy.’