Goodbye My Kampong

by Josephine Chia

  “Imagine if we had flush toilets, I wouldn’t have to empty the tambui anymore,” Mak said wistfully, using the Teochew term for a chamber pot.

  Our Sennett Estate neighbours across Upper Serangoon Road had flush toilets, and the village kids had devised a game of listening for the flush. The first one to hear it received a prize of one boiled sweet in its shiny, crackling paper! By now, I was one of the privileged few, as I had access to flush toilets in school. It was a monumental feat to save my “big jobs” for school! It was my very first effort at self-control. But my poor mother did not have such a privilege, except when we visited my rich cousins in town, which was at Chinese New Year and Christmas, in the days when my grandmother Lao Ee was still alive. Twice a year, Mak would have the sheer luxury of squatting in a clean cubicle to do her business. I so dreamt of giving her a life of ease, where she could use the toilet in comfort and had soft toilet paper, instead of our squares of old newspaper. Once, I had stolen some from school for her, but she had said I should not have stolen it, though her telltale eyes were moist with emotion.

  My family was in the minority group of Peranakans who were Teochew, since Peranakans were generally Hokkien. The Peranakans were themselves a minority group within the Chinese community due to our mixed heritage of Chinese and Malay/Indonesian, with possible traces of Portuguese and Dutch, the latter two having colonised the seaport of Malacca, where the majority of Peranakans in Singapore originated from. Other groups of Chinese Peranakans came from Penang. My own maternal grandmother was Portuguese, with some elusive Dutch connections.

  It didn’t seem appropriate for Mak, still slim and elegant in her sarong kebaya at 51, to be performing such an inelegant chore. Though the enamel tambui was pretty, with a shapely white body painted with pink peonies and green leaves, its contents were not. The chamber pot was not only her curse, it was mine too. It was supposedly for the use of my younger siblings at nights so that they didn’t have to traipse in the dark to the public toilets, courting the danger of falling into the hole in the platform of the cubicle or being bitten by a rat, centipede or scorpion. Or encountering the python on its nightly ramble. But my father often used the chamber pot in the night for his big job, and its stench would linger all night throughout our house which had no proper bedrooms. Wooden walls separated the kitchen from the bedroom and living room; fabric curtains served as doors. It was my mother’s task to empty the chamber pot each morning. Since my father had refused to educate me and would beat Mak if she used the housekeeping money for my schooling, she had taken in the neighbours’ washing, plus made and sold her nasi lemak so that I could go to school. To repay her in some way, I took it upon myself to take over her unpleasant task.

  Mak had lost daughters and sons to the Japanese Occupation, poverty and disease, plus some were stillborn, an unspeakable pain which she would not divulge, so we never really knew the exact number of children she had, though she told us she bore a child every other year from the age of 17. One child was given away when my parents were struggling to get food for the family. She had her last child, my brother Robert, at 42. Robert was seven years younger than I was. We estimated that Mak must have had approximately 16 pregnancies. He was born normal, but a few weeks after his birth he contracted a fever, which damaged his brain. Robert never grew up. He remained a child all his life. He could not speak, sit or walk, though he could smile and chuckle. His head was over-large in relation to his small body. Some defect in his hips caused him to twist and permanently cross his thin legs. For a child so bereft, he displayed uninhibited joy, something he definitely inherited from Mak. Whenever I sang to him, especially Simon & Garfunkel’s 1964 hit, ‘Sounds of Silence’, he would thump the bed with his emaciated arm with joyous glee, his eyes flashing brightly.

  I was now in Secondary Three in Cedar Secondary School. It was located opposite our village, past Wan Tho Avenue and the Alkaff Lakes. Our uniform attracted lots of comments as it was unusual for that period, a grey pinafore over a sky-blue blouse, when most uniforms for girls were a dark blue pinafore with a white blouse. Prefects wore a skirt rather than a pinafore. Our principal, Mrs T, was known for her obsessive aversion to short skirts, and had been known to wait at the entrance of the school hall with a ruler, to measure the length of our skirts. Woe betide any girl if the length did not fall below the knee! It was detention, the ruler or the cane. Mrs T was a stickler for us to look decorous yet smart. She herself was never seen in anything but her calf-length cheongsam, with its buttoned high collar.

  Our canvas shoes had to be pristine white. Every day after school, we had to blanco them with a kind of watery white chalk and then dry them in the sun, so that they were fresh and clean for her inspection. Of course, on rainy days we could not dry the shoes in the sun. Some of us only owned one pair of school shoes. Often, on those kind of days, I had no alternative but to wear the wet shoes to school. Despite putting on socks, the dampness was still yucky on the inside.

  The worst thing was that when I put my weight on them, the wet chalky fluid would ooze out. As I put my feet down, the shoes squelched, creating white footprints of chalk all along the pavement as I walked. The other schoolkids thought this was hilarious.

  “Ooooo... Chalky Girl! Chalky Girl!” they chanted, pretending to be fearful.

  At that time, there was widespread horror of the Oily Man, or Orang Minyak in Malay, who was reputed to capture young children, especially girls. The story began in Malacca, circulated around Malaysia, then filtered down to us in Singapore. Whether he was real or just a figment of an overactive imagination we never discovered, but the myth of him terrorised the country. Some folks believed that he was a supernatural creature who coated himself with grease which was as black as his soul. It was for this reason that he was elusive and could not be caught, as he was too slippery. Wherever he had been, he left behind his mark—black, oily footprints and handprints.

  “Orang Minyak, Orang Minyak,” people would scream, if they thought they saw him.

  This was the faux-horrified tone the girls used, to make fun of my wet shoe-prints.

  The problem with wet canvas was that it picked up dirt and smeared easily. By the time I arrived at the school hall for assembly, having walked through my muddy kampong, all the way along Sennett Estate and past the Alkaff Gardens, both my shoes would be in a horrible state. Whenever Mrs T called out my name in full in her booming voice, “Jo-se-phine!” I knew I was done for. To this day, I have an aversion of being called by my full name. I could not tell you how often my knuckles had been rapped by Mrs T’s metal ruler. In those days, teachers were allowed to cane and discipline pupils. Some days, she would even make me cut the grass in the school field under the blazing sun with a pair of small scissors!

  Though my school was a government school, there was a distinct difference between students who came from kampongs and those from concrete housing estates with electricity, running water and flush toilets. The young ladies from the housing estates like Sennett Estate, Wan Tho Avenue and Braddell, came to school in chauffeured cars, and were given Straits Dollar paper notes for recess. I was given 30 cents per day, just enough for a bowl of noodles and a drink. Those other girls were the ones who played the piano and took music or ballet lessons outside school. They talked about things that were beyond the ken of kampong kids. Those days they were talking endlessly about the first discotheque that had recently opened on Tanglin Road, Gino’s A-Go-Go. I had no clue what a discotheque was!

  “You swa ku!” one of the girls said, calling me a mountain tortoise, shorthand for stupid, really. “It’s a place you go to dance, lah!”

  Each morning before school, before I put on my uniform, I would squeeze my nostrils tight, to pick up the family’s chamber pot with both hands, hurrying down the kampong lorong with extra caution, taking care not to spill its contents on my feet. I’d stand on the edge of the grassy, monsoon drain, tip the chamber pot over, to throw out its contents. I imagined a scene like mine repeated all over the
country, women emptying chamber pots into the monsoon drains. Also, food and market stallholders squatted next to drains and rivers with their large enamel basins, cleaning, peeling and cutting vegetables, fish and meat. Whatever was discarded—rotten vegetables, fish entrails, and carcasses of meat—were all being dumped into open drains, which then found their way into our rivers and lakes. These were compounded by toilets perched right over drains, river banks and ponds, so human waste was also being poured directly into the drainage system. No wonder the Singapore River was a slow-moving sludge of debris and murky water, and it stank to high heaven!

  Someday, someone had to do something about this awful mess.

  After emptying the tambui, I had the unenviable task of cleaning out the chamber pot with well-water, with my bare hands. We had no long-handled brush. It was always at this juncture that I would recall the words of one of my heroes, African-American Baptist Minister and civil rights activist, Martin Luther King, Jr. He had delivered his famous speech in March 1963 in Washington, when he had organised non-violent protests against racial discrimination. His speech began with “I have a dream…”

  “I have a dream, I have a dream…” I chanted.

  Mostly to tell myself that I will not die like this, in this state of utter deprivation.

  I yearned to live a life where there was always enough to eat, a life of luxury and adventures. Like the Famous Five children in Enid Blyton’s novels, which I was introduced to by scavenging the rubbish bins of the English at the hill above our village, which we called Atas Bukit. However, Elder and Second Brothers had started working, so I no longer needed to raid any rubbish bins for food anymore, though we had done so for years. Besides, the British were in the process of moving out after our independence and the houses at Atas Bukit were taken over by our PWD, to manage the sewage works further along the road. But food was still not plentiful.

  My cousin George had once taken nine-year-old me to the red-brick National Library on Stamford Road, which had opened in 1960. It nearly cost me my life, as my father had punished me for going out with a boy. I never saw George after that incident. These days, I no longer had to depend on books and magazines discarded by the English. Ever since I could read, I devoured books, reading them at night by the light of the carbide and kerosene lamps, until we got electricity. Still, the electricity was rationed and was turned off at 9pm. From then, it was back to carbide and kerosene lamps or torchlight under my thin blanket, because the whole family slept in one room, and I couldn’t disturb the others, though I slept on the floor in the living/dining area.

  The majority of people spoke Malay and Hokkien in those times, and the word “kampong” was a Malay one. Although the farmers tilling the land close to the banks of the Kallang River were mainly Chinese, my family lived in the Malay part of the kampong, where people did not raise any pigs, unlike in the Chinese settlements.

  To walk to school, I had to pass Bidadari, the Christian cemetery, although there was a Muslim section further up the road near Braddell Road. I also had to walk past the delightful park, Alkaff Gardens. The gardens comprised small hillocks enclosing a beautiful lake set amongst verdant forest, where we swam and picnicked, and people who had boats used to sail in them. Local film companies like Shaw Brothers and Cathay-Keris shot their films here, some with my idol, the dashing Malay actor P. Ramlee. It used to be one of the greatest moments whenever he arrived on the film set. But in 1964, just after the formation of Malaysia, P. Ramlee had returned to his roots. There was also an exodus of Malay neighbours from our village, who went to live in Peninsular Malaysia when the separation of our countries took place in 1965. The impact of our political divorce was felt even at the grassroot level. We had relatives on both sides of the causeway. Families were torn apart. Earlier in that year, Premier Tunku Abdul Rahman, who had a major role first in the merger of Malaysia, and later, in our subsequent separation, made the announcement that he was giving up the reins and would be succeeded by Tun Abdul Razak in Malaysia. In Indonesia, Suharto had become president.

  “Tima,” I said excitedly to Fatima, who was the same age as me. I clasped her hands and twirled her around with glee. “Singapore has just got its first female judge, Miss Jenny Lau Buong Bee. See! See! I told you! These are changing times. Women are no longer just breeding mares!”

  Over the years, I had shared such announcements every time a woman was appointed to a senior position somewhere in the world; the first female prime minister, the first doctor, et cetera, so that girls in my village could live in the hope that women would not be relegated to menial tasks, jobs and positions all their lives. But Fatima was not impressed; she dropped my hands.

  “But I don’t have study what. I only weave wicker baskets at our rattan factory. How can I be anything but a breeding mare?” she asked. “Like Parvathi’s father, my father wants to marry me off at 16 or 17…”

  The fate of a girl was still in the hands of fathers and elder brothers.

  “My father says it too,” I reminded her. “But remember when I read that Enid Blyton book, Five Run Away Together, to you? We’d said we’d run away before our fathers forced us to marry?”

  “Then why didn’t Parvathi run away? Why did she have to kill herself?”

  Our old wound bled still. Parvathi was never far from our minds, but we found it too painful to speak of her suicide which took place in 1964. Yet her ghost lived with us. We had been a threesome since a tender age, and her spirit still hovered around us. Parvathi took her own life because she refused to be married to the widower her father had chosen for her, who had been twenty years older than her, with three kids. That was the curse of a lack of education. Because she could not earn a proper living, she was subject to her father’s command. Mr Lee Kuan Yew was wise to insist on education for everyone, particularly for kampong kids.

  “I wish it was not so too,” I said as Parvathi’s beautiful face flashed before me, her eyes large and lined with kohl. She did not even make it to her 17th birthday.

  “Ah Phine,” Fatima said sadly. “I don’t want to die…”

  Fatima started to cry. I put my arm around her and silently cursed a woman’s lot. When would we begin to make our own choices and live our own lives?

  “Listen, your English is coming along nicely,” I said, referring to the English tuition classes I gave to the kampong children, to get money to buy my school exercise books. I used song lyrics to make it fun for them. “You just need to practise more and you can get a better job. Then you won’t be forced to marry. Come on. I will teach you Naomi’s ‘Happy Happy Birthday, Baby!’ song and we can sing it for Singapore’s first birthday on 9 August. ‘Happy, happy birthday, baby’…”

  “Naomi must come from a rich Singaporean Indian family, not like Parvathi’s. That’s why she can pursue her dream of being a singer in a pop band,” Fatima said enviously.

  Naomi and The Boys took their song to the top of the local hit-parade the previous year. Fresh-faced Naomi had a voice rich in resonance and could make people weep with her lyrics of tragedy. More and more local singers and musicians had been making their mark in the local music industry, singers like Susan Lim, The Crescendos, The Quests, Rufino Soliano, Louis Soliano and many more. Their music was played on Rediffusion, alongside the Beatles, Elvis, Cliff Richard, Johnny Matthis and others too numerous to mention. Because they sang cover versions of British and American popular songs in English, they were in demand, entertaining the British and Allied troops in Singapore. They were also featured on radio and television and at our National Theatre, as well as at tea dances and nightclubs. There was a sense of pride and ownership with local musicians and singers. They were ours. It was like our nationhood, it helped us to identify ourselves with this country. Our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents might have been immigrants, but we belonged here now. Our generation did not look to China or India as our home country. Singapore was our home. Ruled by our own people. We knew what it was like to be ruled by others, so we baske
d in the glory of our homegrown leaders.

  In May, national re-registration began. Everyone above 12 was to be issued with an identity card for the first time, pink for citizens, blue for non-citizens. Those who did not want to register as Singaporeans went up-country, back to Malaysia. These were people who felt they had a better chance of a livelihood in a bigger country with better natural resources, since Singapore had none.

  “We don’t even have our own water here, and have to get it piped from Malaysia,” one of them said in Hokkien. “What if Malaysia decides to cut us off? We will si kiao kiao. Die standing lah!”

  “We have to believe in this new government,” others, who were staying, said.

  The majority of us had moved from being British subjects to Malaysians, and now we were Singaporeans, three different nationalities in one lifetime, though some had lived under Japanese rule too.

  “Come on,” Karim said. “Let us all go and see our first real National Day Parade at the Padang. I’m sure your brothers want to go too, Ah Phine…”

  Karim was the local night-soil carrier man turned professional guitarist. He had long tapered fingers and was very graceful, except for a slight limp incurred after being caught in the infamous 1964 Malay-Chinese riots that had resulted from Prophet Muhammad’s birthday celebration procession. From slogging at the worst job ever of removing the disgusting, overflowing buckets from under our outhouses, to finding his niche, playing with local bands at the three worlds of entertainment: New World, Great World and Gay World. So, like other musicians, he grew his hair long. Unlike the Chinese, whose hair tended to be straight, the Malays had beautiful wavy hair.