by Gwee Li Sui
After demobilisation, my father met my beautiful, elegant mother in the exquisite, hilly surroundings of Ipoh. During their first encounter, his spirits were thrown into turmoil while her nerves were as taut as a startled deer, and both their hearts went bang bang bang so loudly that the whole building could hear them. After that, there was nothing to do but to join their destinies for the rest of their lives!
After the wedding, they lived in Ipoh for ten years. My father struggled to earn a living, hiring workers to mine tin ore, setting up a newspaper called The Swift Report, opening a shop that sold red rice wine – but all those ventures ended up as disastrously as the Battle of Waterloo. There were six of us in the family, living first in a dilapidated thatched hut, then a basic wooden house. Sunk in the muck of life, my parents and their growing brood led a poverty-stricken existence in which hunger was never far away.
Those days allowed me to understand fully the torment of not having enough food. One year, we were living in a tiny rented house, and, on Chinese New Year’s Day, joy was exploding everywhere like firecrackers going pop pop pop all over the place, its sounds and colours bursting irresistibly in every household. Yet, that fellow “joy” turned out to be another snobbish chap who, while passing our house, sped up like a gust of wind, regarding us as utterly beneath contempt.
Father was unemployed and had been for quite a while. Our stockpile of rice dwindled to the point where we were no longer able to cook the hearty meals we desired and needed to dilute them into watery porridge. As other families prepared their sumptuous dishes to present as offerings at the Five Organs Temple, we had only a pot of white congee on the table, even the steam rising from it looking listless. Mother’s face, peering beyond the steam, looked paler than the porridge. I was a growing child, and such an insubstantial meal could hardly coat the walls of my stomach. Mother sent us to bed early as we would not be hungry if we were asleep. Just at that moment, the ear-splitting racket of firecrackers started up outside our home, and dreamland became an unattainable paradise! Our empty stomachs might as well house a colony of vicious frogs croaking kwo kwo kwo that could shake the sky, leaping so hard that our stomachs ached as if they were being trampled on, bringing panic and fear. I was only a young child. On that night when every other family was celebrating, I frantically pressed my tender belly against the hard bed boards, trying to calm the frogs within. I pressed so hard that I practically wore a dent into the bed.
Our lot in life was so pathetic that not even weeds could spring from it. My father did not want to just sit around waiting for death.
Instead, he decided to bring the whole family to a place of greater wealth and potential.
Thus, in 1958, the six of us took a train down the winding track and all the bumpy way to Singapore.
Life on the Big Compound
We alighted from the train and headed straight for the city of fire.
That was in Kallang where a gas tank stood so tall that it seemed to touch the clouds. It was a definite landmark known widely as the fire city. Unfortunately, as the city continued to expand, the gas tank was torn down in the 1990s.
The place we lived was not far from the gas tank, a four-storey tenement building that was showing the depredations of time. Father rented us a room on the top floor.
That place was similar to a compound with many families. There were eight rooms squeezed tightly together. The kitchen, the bathroom, and the pantry were communal. Even our individual rooms were separated by a curtain in the doorway which a neighbour only needed to lift to enter and begin chatting. As a result, all kinds of gossip, exaggerated rumours, and unverified news came like fine rain, blown here and there and all over the place.
When it was time to cook, all the tenants would crowd into the large kitchen to put their culinary skills into practice, each with their own flavours as if pop songs, orchestral music, traditional music, and Chinese opera were bumping into each other. Among us was one Indian family who loved pungent curries, and, when they started frying spices, those who could not take the smell would begin to sneeze while those of us who loved the heady aroma might as well be drooling from our eyes. Those neighbours who got on with the Indians would grab a bowl when the curry was ready and asked for a little gravy, which was so spicy that it could make your hair stand on end. When stirred with rice, it would leave you covered in sweat and craving for more.
Those were days of commotion, sounds, and smells intermingling constantly.
Mother’s personality was more placid. She made dinner on a little charcoal stove. When our finances were in bad shape, fish and meat disappeared from the menu and eggy rice became the dish we saw more often. She made it by pouring beaten egg quickly into boiling rice on the brink of being done, and, when the lid was lifted again, golden light would shoot from the pot as if it were full of radiance. That was a lovely memory from my impoverished childhood. Eggy rice was nutritious and filling, and, surrounded by its aroma, my siblings and I grew taller, inch after inch.
The big compound was truly a compound of all kinds of confusion.
A middle-aged lady, slathered in makeup, adopted a teenage girl. The girl’s crystal-bright eyes hid rebellion and anguish, and the icy determination that shot from her gaze caused her entire face to freeze over. Each time the middle-aged woman looked at her, her glare was like knives, like swords, gouging and stabbing at her ferociously. And, each time the tattooed hunk went to her room, from behind the locked door would come the sound of punching and slapping along with chilling, frantically suppressed sobbing. We knew that patron of hers was dangerous, but no matter how much we pitied the young girl, none of us dared to interfere.
Singapore in the late fifties was rife with criminal gangs. From time to time, they would brawl in the streets, and we would hear of revenge killings. The lack of law enforcement made the whole society callous through fear, and we got through each day on the maxim of only sweeping the snow from our own front door. All our hearts were trembling, uncertain.
One day, the young woman appeared with downcast eyes, her bare arms covered in patches of red and purple, looking like a rainbow had been shattered by lightning and the fragments landed on her arms – a heart-rending sight. After several similar incidents, the middle-aged lady abruptly dragged the girl, dressed up to the nines, outside one evening. The girl’s eyes were as desolate as an abandoned mineshaft, so compromised that she might as well be dead.
That same evening, Mother did what Mencius’s mother did and conceived the idea of moving away from that place as quickly as possible.
Yet, we did not know any other place or anyone and had hardly any spare cash. How could we move anywhere?
Moving to the Office
There are no problems without solutions. My Second Uncle (that is, my father’s elder brother Tham Sien Yang) knew of our difficulties and generously reached out a helping hand, allowing us to move into a condominium at Kim Tian Road.
Second Uncle had set up a construction firm there. He indicated that he only needed the hall for office work, and so there were two big rooms at the back that we could move into and a kitchen we were free to use.
Thus, we joyously left the confusion of the big compound and moved into that building at the top of a slope.
In the early sixties, housing in Singapore was not yet under the control of a larger plan. Behind the condo on Kim Tian Road was a vast slum area: tattered wooden houses and tottering zinc-roofed huts squeezed together in crooked confusion like so many rotten teeth. We were not far from Bukit Ho Swee, an even larger, more dilapidated overcrowded slum, with rubbish piled up everywhere, maggots wriggling when you went to use the outdoor toilets, the vile odour of pig and chicken shit unbearably infesting the air all day long. Many underground gang members and illegal immigrants concealed themselves there, and we ordinary folk regarded it as a minefield we ought to stay away from as far as possible.
After life in the tenement, moving to the condominium was like crawling from a swamp onto a verdan
t plain, a sensation of ease and contentment. Yet, after a period of condo living, my mother developed another frustration that we could not anticipate.
As the hall of our apartment was being used as an office, we had to open the doors at eight every morning. Second Uncle, Fourth Uncle, Fifth Uncle, and Seventh Uncle would arrive one after the other, not to mention all their employees. When they started work, the rest of us, crammed into the back room, would have to be utterly silent. Thinking back, at the time, there were four of us children, the oldest, my sister, was nine, and the youngest just a boy of one. How could we, at an age when we should have been noisy and boisterous, sit there all day long as still as clay statues? My mother had the worst of it. She was forced to wield the cane constantly to scare us into silence. To borrow her metaphor at the time, it was as if our whole family had been stuffed into an airless sack, our arms and legs bound, our mouths stuffed with paper.
The best moment was in the evening when work stopped and everyone left the office, and we were finally liberated.
The setting sun spread gently over the earth like golden-yellow dough, soft and warm. And, like the wind, we released ourselves into that cloud of dough, playing to our hearts’ content.
There was another reason to look forward to dusk.
At the time, roving hawkers were everywhere like carp thronging a stream. They sold candyfloss, maltose sweets, sesame peanut paste, char siew wonton noodles, yong tau foo, sweet-and-salty buns, multi-coloured ice balls, and so on, a parade of them stopping on the empty ground in front of our condo. They did not call out, but the food they sold nonetheless let out a constant stream of wordless cries for attention, various aromas colliding with each other, a web of delicious scents like a spider’s web, clinging to every inch of our bodies. I often felt as if the hawkers were music notes swirling around the city, giving it a kind of vivid life. Many, many years later, when the roving hawkers were swallowed by the prosperous city, I felt sadness at the loss, understanding deep down that a beautiful memory had fallen into a bottomless abyss and died there, never to be retrieved.
That was the period when we were poor and could not satisfy our taste buds as often as we had liked. Each time we decided to indulge our appetites, we would have to use up the small sum we had saved painstakingly from several days’ worth of pocket money. So, whether we held a loose cloud of candyfloss or a glittering maltose sweet, we would never just gulp it down but had to conserve it carefully, licking it, taking small mouthfuls, so that the lovely sweetness could seep slowly into us, causing little blossoms of happiness to unfold within our hearts.
After several years in that condominium, a sudden, ferocious conflagration caused Mother to once again entertain thoughts of moving.
That was the Bukit Ho Swee Fire, which sent shockwaves through the whole country.
The afternoon of 25 May 1961 was so unusually hot that even the walls were sweating. The earth was like a giant, red-hot iron sheet, and the rasping winds that swept by even carried the smell of burning.
Mother, distractedly ironing, muttered to herself, “I’m ready to melt. This damn weather is enough to melt a human being.”
At that moment, a jumble of noises came from outside the house: shouting and running footsteps, conveying a sense that all was not well, shot through with panic and helplessness.
Mother looked outside. Arrogant tongues of flame were greedily, violently lapping at the dry, cracked sky like crazed despots. The world outside was dyed a terrifying, malevolent shade of red.
Our neighbours were all staring at the gigantic puffs of smoke bubbling upward and the flames that sprang up in clumps. As they looked on, their horrified faces took on a faint blue tinge. Then someone said, in a burst of realisation, “Aiyah, behind us is all wooden huts. With a fire this big, before too long they will all be in flames too!” As if they were suddenly sprayed with a hose, everyone separated at once and ran towards their own homes, gathering their valuables in readiness to flee.
Mother walked quickly back inside and nimbly pulled out of a locked drawer an enormous leather envelope. It contained every important document – birth certificates, identity cards, and so on. Not even glancing at the rest of the flat’s contents, she calmly led her four young children out of the place before standing at a safe distance away to look back at the condominium that had housed us as well as at the unruly row of wooden huts behind our building. In that instant, she once again made the decision to move.
In the end, the fire did not spread to our building.
Nonetheless, the awful disaster left thirty thousand residents homeless. Afterwards, Singapore’s Housing Development Board began a programme of building accommodation on a massive scale, completely changing citizens’ way of life.
Speaking frankly, given our financial situation at the time, the idea of buying an apartment was like a lunatic fantasy. Yet the government had announced their policy that every resident should have a home of their own, and my parents looked with joy at the dawn of a new era.
Buying a Home
Through an instalment plan, my parents bought a three-room HDB flat in Alexandra.
Mother was like a happy spinning top, the smile never leaving her face as she swirled to and fro, getting the flat absolutely spotless. It was the first time in our lives that we were under our own roof, with no need to worry about what anyone else thought or to take orders from them. Once the door closed behind us, we could laugh or cry, speak loudly or sing a song, just as we felt. The sense of ease from living as we pleased planted the first shoots of belonging we had felt since moving to this patch of earth.
Our neighbours to the right were an Indian couple. Both the man and the woman were overweight, the rolls of fat on their bodies resembling fermented dough. The day after we moved in, the Indian lady came to say hello, and the smile on her face was so broad that every tooth in her head seemed to participate in it. She presented us with some fried pastries, thus opening the door to good neighbourly relations.
On the whole, we were good neighbours who often saw each other, but there was one thing that caused Mother distress: the Indian family next door ground chillies and spices in a pestle and mortar every day, and the dong dong dong sounds, each more resonant than the last, were like an axe striking against our foreheads. Of course, Mother understood that they were not doing that deliberately to annoy her but that it was essential in the preparation of Indian food. She was also aware that understanding and tolerance were crucial to preserving racial harmony. Besides, our family often brewed traditional Chinese medicine, and surely the unique smell of the steeping herbs must be a form of silent harassment to any other racial group. And yet there they were, generously putting up with it. Considering that, Mother grew easier in her mind.
Thereafter, Mother tried to regard the pounding sound as a kind of background music, listening to it every second of every hour of every day until she grew so used to it that her head no longer ached. Later on, she was even able to make fun of herself, joking that, when our Indian neighbours were not pounding anything, it was so quiet that she found it hard to get used to the silence! Ha ha!
Actually, Mother was adept at adapting to new circumstances. Unpleasant words or spiteful comments also got treated as background music and did not enter her ears, let alone her heart. As a result, she was always comfortable in her own skin and sanguine in her mind.
Like many model Singaporeans, my parents wanted to strive upwards when it came to the question of housing. After they had saved up money bit by bit, they sold the three-room flat in Alexandra and bought a four-room one on Holland Road.
Holland Road was a lively place to live! Across from us was a row of shops: a photographic studio, a hardware store, a furniture shop, a stationer, a joss merchant, a barber, a boutique, a fruit market, and a bakery – everything we could possibly need. There was also a little hawker centre with an array of delectable dishes, a supermarket with all sorts of goods, a wet market offering meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables. Ever
y convenience had been provided, and we could not ask for anything more.
The boat of my parents’ lives had eased its way slowly into a safe harbour.
After a very contented stretch of time, we moved again.
My parents decided to live out their old age in a spacious five-room condominium on Farrer Road.
In that condo, Mother smiled sweetly as she went about her chores, her entire body emanating a sort of butterfly energy, radiating self-sufficiency as she gathered the nectar of life, displaying a joy without restraint, revealing the satisfaction of fulfilled dreams.
1958 was the watershed of our lives.
In that year, we moved from Ipoh to Singapore. To this day, our nation presently celebrating a half-century of independence is both a paradise we have established ourselves in and a homeland into which we have sunk deep roots.
MCMLXV
BY TOH HSIEN MIN
Morning begins in darkness on a rubber plantation.
Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in for his elected term
as US President. One morning, I see my wife staring
intently at me in the yellow of the single lamp
in the tappers’ lodgings. President Sukarno
withdraws Indonesia from the United Nations.
“Why do we work so hard here for so little gain?”
Sir Winston Churchill dies, nine days after suffering
a stroke. Within weeks, we receive a letter
from her brother, who had left Muar some months ago.
Canada adopts the red and white maple leaf flag.
“It’s a good life here,” the clerk reads out to us.
Ranger 8 crashes onto the moon after photographing