“You mean there is a not real parade, Abang Karim?” Fatima asked.
“Well, we did have a National Day Parade in 1960 when we supposedly had self-government in certain areas. But that was a washout anyway as it rained heavily…”
“Yes, this will be our proper celebration now that we are truly independent. We must go to show our support,” Zul said. “The theme is ‘National Pride and Confidence in the Future’. The parade will begin at 9am. We have to get there early.”
“I tell you,” I said. “Zul has the makings of a Tuan Besar. He will be a leader one day.”
Pak Osman said, “Confidence in the future, eh? I doubt if I will see such a future. I don’t know if I am going to live through more parades. I’d better go whilst I can still walk. Now it is your turn to let me lean on you, Karim.”
When Karim had sustained severe injuries and could not walk properly after the Prophet Muhammad birthday celebration riot, it had been he who had to lean on Pak Osman.
On 9 August, a contingent from the kampong decided to go to the National Day Parade together. We had celebrated National Day in June after gaining self-governance in 1959, then on 31 August as Malaysians, but never on 9 August. This was a first. So, Karim hired an open-back lorry. Four long wooden boards were placed at intervals across the width of the lorry and fastened, to act as seats for the passengers. Twenty kampong folks, including my father, brothers, sisters and my father’s friend, Ah Gu, scrambled onto the open back of the lorry. If it rained, we would be drenched. But we were not put off. Our spirits were high. Mak couldn’t come as she had to take care of Robert.
“Better hold tight-tight, huh,” Ah Huat the lorry driver cautioned us. Malays and Chinese have a habit of repeating a word for emphasis or to make it plural. “Back of lorry okay for carrying barang-barang ah, but for people, must jaga-jaga hor!”
He was right, as the lorry was for ferrying goods, not passengers. When he negotiated turns on the village road, we swung in the direction the vehicle was going, all of us gripping the edge of the boards till our knuckles showed white, as we exclaimed in fright. When he hit a pothole, our bottoms jumped from our seats and thumped down again with a painful thwack. Fortunately, the road into town was metalled and fairly straight, so we began to relax, and felt safe enough to chat and sing.
“Chan mali chan, oi! oi!” we sang the chorus as Karim’s strong voice took over the folk song. “Di mana dia, anak kambing saya…”
It was such a happy and memorable ride. We passed the fire station, which was opposite the National Aerated Water factory. This factory, sitting on the banks of the Kallang River, manufactured Sinalco, a fizzy reddish drink, our treat at Chinese New Year together with F&N’s Orange, Sarsi and Ice Cream Soda. If we had the drinks with some ice cubes, it would be considered a very, very special treat, as no one except Uncle Krishnan, the civil servant, had an ice box in the kampong!
After we crossed the river, we passed the site of Mr Whampoa’s famous house. From there, attap houses gave way to brick houses, then four-storey flats. We passed Petain Road, where my rich cousins lived. Then we passed the football stadium at Jalan Besar. Electric street lamps began to appear on posts lined up on either side of the road, their overhead cables sagging from the heat. Grander buildings came into view. When we reached Dhoby Ghaut, we knew we were in town. Dhoby was Hindi for laundry. Large bed sheets and washing were fluttering on lines strung across a small copse of trees facing Cathay Cinema. We passed the magnificent white colonial building which housed Rendezvous Restaurant and Hotel. Next to this, along Bras Basah Road was a low-rise row of terraced shophouses, which was one of my favourite places, as they were all bookshops; books were stacked in every corner and space.
Then we passed the iconic colonial building of St Joseph’s Institution. Thousands of people were already at the Padang, as many had started queueing before sunrise. We could not stay in one large group and had to disperse. My father kept my siblings and me close to him. Ah Gu came with us.
The Prime Minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, and his cabinet, all dressed in white, were seated on the steps of City Hall. The red and white national flag of Singapore flew with pride. It had been designed in 1959, the year Singapore became self-governing, whilst still part of the British Commonwealth. The then Deputy Prime Minister Toh Chin Chye and his team had created the design of a crescent moon and five stars, basing it on the idea of a young nation striving to be an exemplary society. The red and white flag was buried when we became Malaysians, as we had to share a communal flag with the other Malaysian states. But after we were ousted from Malaysia on 9 August 1965, the old flag was resurrected as our independent country’s national flag.
“Here comes President Yusof Ishak!” someone exclaimed excitedly, as the cavalcade drew up at City Hall.
Many of us village folks felt that it was appropriate that our first president should be Malay, as our island was originally the home of indigenous Malays. We saw a tall, slim and handsome man in a songkok and traditional Malay ceremonial costume of elegant brocade, step out of the limousine, to inspect the parade of soldiers. People applauded and cheered. Then a thundering sound exploded into the air as the 21-gun salute went off from nearby Raffles Institution on Bras Basah Road.
For an hour and a half, we watched with rapt attention as an explosion of colour marched past us whilst the brass band played. Contingent after contingent, striding proudly with straight arms and legs, first the military then the uniformed groups, then dance performances by students of the major Malay, Chinese, Tamil and English schools representing our four main cultures. Next marched the PAP contingent, followed by the National Trades Union Congress’s (NTUC) contingent. Then it was the turn of the colourful lion dancers, who pranced around in joyous abundance to the drums and cymbals. Altogether 23,000 people participated in our first National Day Parade. The atmosphere was electrifying and emotions ran high. We had gone through so much in the last 10 years, particularly the previous year when we were ejected from Malaysia and compelled to become our own nation. But we had made it through and were celebrating the nation’s first birthday.
When the National Anthem started, we stood up with pride, right arms crossing our breasts. Our people had sung other anthems before, ‘God save the King’ when King George was on the British throne, then we were forced to mouth the Japanese national anthem ‘Kimigayo’, when we were occupied during the war. After that, we sang ‘God save the Queen’ when Elizabeth II became Queen upon her father’s death. In 1963 when we became part of Malaysia, we sang ‘Negara Ku’. This time, we were singing a national anthem that was uniquely ours, ‘Majulah Singapura’, composed by our own citizen, Zubir Said. We were finally singing for ourselves and for our independent country. As we sang, our throats tightened and tears streamed down our cheeks.
Even the rain that poured down later did not dampen our spirits. In the evening, we returned to the Esplanade for a view of the 500-foot long sea dragon. This was an elongated cellophane Chinese dragon that was supposed to rise to a height of 40 feet! The sky was ablaze with the pinks and reds of the setting sun. The casuarina trees, called rhu in Malay, which gave Tanjung Rhu, the nearby promontory, its eponymous name, started whispering in the breeze. Their soft needles rained on us. As the natural light faded away, the shadows melted into each other and the lamps along the Esplanade were lit. There was an audible murmuring excitement amongst those waiting. And then the sea dragon made its appearance, cheered on by the crowd. It was lighted with 12,500 bulbs and was towed by the small boats which sailed past the Esplanade and swept in front of us with majesty. We were filled with awe and pride. It was our nation’s first birthday and we knew we were watching history in the making. This moment would not happen again.
“Merdeka!” someone exclaimed.
The Malay word for “freedom”, translated as “independence”, fizzed in the air. At last, we were truly free. For eons, Singapore had been under the rule of so many different masters, first the kings of Palembang,
then the Johor Sultanate, the British, the Japanese, then the British again, then Malaysians, and now at long last we were our own rulers. The significance and enormity of it seemed to hit all those who were there. We were quivering with emotion. Suddenly a thicket of fists shot into the air.
“Merdeka! Merdeka,” people shouted in unison again and again, and the sound carried on the wind across our island nation.
A Murmur Rebellion
(1967)
WHEN 17-year-old Twiggy, with her androgynous look, burst onto the world fashion stage, she gave me some hope about myself. British model Lesley Hornby had shot to fame with her thin frame, which gave her the nickname. She was gorgeous, with large eyes, long eyelashes, and short hair. The previous year, she was named “The Face of 1966”, and was voted British Woman of the Year. My only resemblance to Twiggy was my skinny body and short hair. But the important thing was that she made me feel that it was okay to have a chest as flat as an airport. Not every woman could be as buxom as Esther Williams, Jayne Mansfield or Mae West. Very few women could look as stunning as Raquel Welch in her doe-skin bikini in the 1966 British-made film, One Million Years BC. She spoke only about three lines in the entire movie, but her voluptuous figure won her adoring fans and turned her into an overnight sensation, poster girl and star.
Alas, Ah Tetia’s potent words had rubbed off on me and I thought very little of myself and felt ugly. Looking in the mirror was like watching an Alfred Hitchcock suspense film—what horror would I see in myself? My thick glasses with their black frame made me look like a blind bat. I was brown and not pretty like fair-skinned cousin Mary or my younger sisters. My family was divided into the dark and fair ones. My eldest and Third Elder Brother and I took after our mother’s nutmeg complexion, whilst my second brother and Robert and our sisters took after our father’s fair skin. To make matters worse, my front teeth were crooked! I had an underbite—where the lower teeth protruded in front of the upper ones when I bit. Certainly, far from attractive. So I dared not open my mouth. Fortunately though, I had strong teeth and didn’t need any dental treatment, as the itinerant dentist who periodically visited our village gave me the shivers! His patients sat on wooden stools whilst he treated them in their houses. There was no assigned clinic. When you saw him attending to someone’s teeth, his hands in his patient’s wide-open mouth as his foot peddled furiously on his treadle drill with its high-pitched sound, you would think he was torturing the patient!
I recalled that when I started school in Primary One, the World Health Organisation, or WHO, had supplied our school with cow’s milk and a toothbrush for each child. We were after all a Third World country, and many of us were still impoverished and suffering from malnutrition. It was a morning ritual at school to queue for our compulsory mug of milk. Since we were used to drinking only sweetened condensed milk, the powdered milk provided by WHO tasted horrible. So, I had furtively brought a packet of sugar to spoon into my mug, till the teacher caught me. After drinking the milk, we had to crouch by our school drain in a row to brush our teeth, supervised by our teachers. It was the first time that I had learnt to use a toothbrush! It was a miracle that I hadn’t lost all my teeth to the boiled sweets, especially the gula melaka squares, and round gem biscuits with their colourful hardened icing.
But I was no longer a child. Worse, I was in the throes of teenage angst. I disliked many things about myself. My longish legs were reasonably passable though. If only Ah Tetia would permit me to wear a mini-skirt, no one would focus on my horrible teeth! The mini-skirt was a new fashion rage started by Welsh designer Mary Quant. Twiggy wore this with aplomb, along with her thigh-high boots. Suddenly our High Street and Orchard Road swarmed with young girls, eyes ringed with kohl and false eyelashes like Twiggy, and wearing mini-skirts with boots. Local pop singer and yodeler, Sakura Teng aka Ying Hua, led the way here, wearing a short shift dress with her long boots. At 17, she became famous with her song, ‘I Don't Care If Tomorrow Never Comes’. Her singing partner, Rita Chao, sang both English and Mandarin songs, though Rita had her own hit, ‘Shake, Shake, Shake’. They both wore dresses with hemlines above the knees! Such an avant-garde style was way beyond what was permissible for most kampong girls, and certainly not for me. My father would get apoplectic if even one of my bra straps slipped out onto my shoulder.
“Tak seronoh sekali! Not delicate!” he pontificated. “Intimate items of clothing and parts of the body should be seen by only your husband. Only cabaret girls and prostitutes can show theirs, okay!”
He still insisted that my sisters and I had to wear petticoats under our skirts and dresses in case the sun shone brightly through the fabric of our skirts to give hints of our inner thighs! If Ah Tetia had his way, I would be dressed like a nun all my teenage years! I had an intimate taste of my father’s belt and buckle which had rendered me unconscious once, so all I could express was a murmur of rebellion. Anything more audible would be to risk life and limb.
Nineteen sixty-six was a teething year for the development of our country. We learnt the new feeling of nationhood and taking pride in our own nation. When the Kandang Kerbau maternity hospital won the Guinness World Record for having the highest number of births of 40,000 babies in a year in a maternity hospital, we shared in the joy of the achievement. The name of the hospital had always been one of amusement amongst locals. The Malay words “kandang kerbau” referred to the sheds for cattle! The area was known for its fields, where cows grazed and were housed, thus the nearby roads reflected this, such as Buffalo Road. When they built the maternity hospital, one would have thought the authorities would have had the sense to change its name, as the appellation gave the impression that the pregnant women were the cattle. Fortunately, as the name was a bit long, and many non-Malays could not pronounce it properly, the maternity hospital became abbreviated to KK, which was how most people knew it, instead of its full name.
Despite our small success, 1966 had not ended well for our country. There had been a murmur of rebellion, which lasted 26 days. In October of that year, 1,000 students from Nanyang University staged a demonstration, when the Prime Minister was due to open its new library. They were advocating for greater academic freedom and for Chinese-educated graduates to be given jobs in the civil service. On 4 November, Ngee Ann College students went on a rampage at City Hall.
“Aiyyah,” Uncle Krishnan, our wise civil servant villager had said, after the villagers heard the news on Rediffusion. “People think it’s so easy to govern a country. Some people want this, some people want that…”
Before the advent of TV, Rediffusion was an important source for illiterate kampong folks to get the news and to be entertained, as the majority could not read. Besides English, Malay and Tamil, there were many programmes in Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese, so that dialect speakers could get the news and be entertained too.
“But they are right to protest what,” our resident complainer Ah Gu said. “Why should only English-educated people serve the country, huh? Why can’t we get to University of Singapore? Why can’t we be in the civil service. Not fair right? Why? We Chinese-educated not so good or what?”
“Ah Gu,” my father said to his friend. “Don’t be so grumpy lah! Historically, the Chinese-educated always saw China as their native home what. Many were communists. So how can the government trust that they will put Singapore first?”
“Cannot trust meh? I think very prejudice hor! Not all Chinese who want to adhere to their culture and respect their ancestors are communists ah!”
“Ya, not easy to govern a country lah,” Pak Osman said, to defuse the situation. “You young people listen to me ah! I may not be around for long ah. You got to give this Mr Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) some chance. He’s our first homegrown leader. Suddenly power is foisted on him. His situation is like that of a young man marrying a widow with 16 kids! Overnight, he has to feed a ready-made family and be responsible for them. So, the same for LKY. With our country being thrown out of Malaysia, he has suddenly gained a new n
ation and responsibilities. He has also inherited huge problems that the British have left behind: Not enough jobs, so not enough food; not enough houses for our growing population. He has to develop our country’s defence before the British military pull out. Wah! So much to do. Very big headache for our Prime Minister, you know…”
I wondered why Pak Osman had talked about not being around for much longer. Was Pak Osman prescient? I would miss Pak Osman when he went. He had an innate wisdom, like my mother, and he knew how to put things across tactfully.
In his 1967 New Year message, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew injected his voice with a positive note: “We will survive without the British.”
He and his team must have sensed the slight feeling of unease in the country. Some of the people had not yet gotten used to the fact that we were indeed irrevocably separated from Malaysia and were on our own. We had travelled freely up-country before the separation, so we felt cut off as we now needed to have a passport to cross the Causeway. A special passport was issued, specifically for use for going into Malaysia only. The dust from the separation hadn’t settled completely. Come 12 June, we would have a separate currency from Malaysia. Since 1953 we had been using the Malaya and Borneo Dollar issued by the Board of Commissioners of Currency. Soon we would be using a different currency. All this was unsettling for the common folks. Then there was the apprehension that maybe we couldn’t make it on our own without the British. It was not an easy time, for the people or for the government. Mr Lee had to be courageous for us, and show faith that we would survive on our own.
In January, the winds howled and the monsoon rains battered everything in their path. Moving curtains of rain made visibility poor. Crowns of raindrops spat and dug at our sandy lorongs, creating more potholes. Our farmers could not farm. Our fishermen could not fish. Our village river began to swell, a frightening sight to behold. Still the water level rose. Eventually, the Kallang River could not contain itself, and broke its banks. Potong Pasir was flooded again. Every year, the monsoon wreaked havoc in our village. Several factors made Potong Pasir vulnerable during the heavy rains: the location of the village in such a low-lying area right next to the fast-flowing river, the four large ponds, three springs called Pipe Besar, blocked monsoon drains, and poor drainage. Our village was known to be one of the worst flood-prone areas in Singapore. We had a huge flood in 1954 and this year’s flood was just as bad. Our country recorded six inches of heavy rainfall within a very short time.
Goodbye My Kampong Page 4