Singathology

by Gwee Li Sui

  MAYA: Let’s do a quick survey. Raise your hands if you think you’re a mummy’s kid. OK? Who loves their mother more than their father? OK. Who believes that their mother is the best cook in the whole world? OK. Thank you. To be honest with you, I’m not a mummy’s girl. I loved my father more than my mother. I never really thought that Mama was a good cook. She can cook, but nothing special. But I do respect my mother. I’m proud of her. She worked hard to provide for the two of us. She was a senior secretary in an international company. She kept me in school until I graduated from university. She taught me how to be a successful career woman. She taught me how to look after myself, to be well-groomed and presentable. But, eight years ago, when the economy declined, the company asked her to take early retirement and offered her a payout. A golden handshake. She stopped working and stayed home. She even got remarried. To a widower. But it didn’t last. They were only together for five years. For the last three years, Mama has been on her own. She was pretty miserable. A year ago, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Her dementia gets worse each day. A smart woman, she raised me to be who I am today, but she is no longer like what she was. All that remains is a confused old woman. Even when she is lucid, she is not capable of looking after herself. She needs care the whole day… [Her handphone rings.] Hello, yes… Yah… that’s right. What? The police station?

  COUNSELLOR: Wandering, in persons with dementia, is a common behaviour that causes great risk for the person and concern for caregivers. It is estimated to be the most common type of disruptive behaviour in institutionalised persons with dementia. Although it occurs in several types of dementia, wandering is especially problematic in persons with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). This is because AD frequently produces impaired memory: persons with impaired memory are likely to become disoriented and lost simply because they do not recognise where they are nor remember how they came to be there.

  MAYA: A neighbour found Mama near the market. She was tired and sitting on some steps. The neighbour said that Mama was confused and didn’t know where she was. She was still wearing her nightgown and had walked a kilometre without any shoes on. The neighbour brought Mama back home but the door was shut, and I was with the caretaker. So the neighbour had to take Mama to the police station and ask them to get in touch with me. I saw Mama at the police station. Her feet and legs were wounded and bleeding. I felt really angry…

  MAMA: Dear me, she was really angry. I don’t know why, but there were suddenly lots of people wearing police uniforms near our house. The police were nice. They gave me something to eat and a drink. I was tired. My feet hurt. I fell into a drain and injured myself. I was really sore. That was why I couldn’t sleep. It didn’t help when I sat up. So I went out, I wanted to go to the Chinese herbalist and get some medicine. The shop wasn’t there. It must have moved. When I was tired, I sat down. Some lady brought me here. The woman, the one who brought me here… What was her name? She was very angry. I didn’t say anything. I don’t know why. She didn’t know me, didn’t know anything about me. She just suddenly got very angry. If she had been nice to me, it would have been a completely different story. My sister Raimah never scolded me. When he, when my husband comes back, I’ll tell him about that woman… What was her name? What was your name, heh, who? Maya? Her name was Maya… What a terrible name!

  Song: “Namamu Terukir Di Hatiku” (“Your Name is Engraven in My Heart”) by Uji Rashid.

  COUNSELLOR: As they age, people experience more health problems, and most health problems associated with aging carry a substantial burden of pain; so between twenty-five and fifty percent of older adults experience persistent pain. Seniors with dementia experience the same prevalence of conditions likely to cause pain as seniors without dementia. Pain is often overlooked in older adults and, when screened for, often poorly assessed, especially among those with dementia. Beyond the issue of humane care, unrelieved pain has functional implications. Persistent pain can lead to decreased ambulation, depressed mood, sleep disturbances, impaired appetite, and exacerbation of cognitive impairment, and pain-related interference with activity is a factor contributing to falls in the elderly.

  MAYA: Mama, look at me… I’m Maya, your daughter. Please help me, Mama. Try to remember. There are just the two of us. I’m Maya, your daughter. Daddy is dead. Why are you still looking for him? Mama, try and think… try to remember. Help me, Mama… I don’t know what to do next. I had to stop work so that I could stay home and look after you full-time. But you don’t want me to help you at all. Just help me a bit. Try to remember. You could get better if you really wanted to. [Pause.] I’m tired Mama. I am very tired, Mama.

  COUNSELLOR: The role of family caregivers has also become more prominent as care in the familiar surroundings of home may delay onset of some symptoms and postpone or eliminate the need for more professional and costly levels of care. Home-based care may entail tremendous economic, emotional, and even psychological costs as well. Family caregivers often give up time from work and forego pay in order to spend an average of forty-seven hours per week with an affected loved one, who frequently cannot be left alone. A caregiver is subject to anticipatory grief which varies as the dementia impairment progresses in the affected parent or spouse. Feelings of loss and grief are frequent for current Alzheimer’s family caregivers, who face anticipatory grief and ambiguous loss.

  MAMA: Ya… Ya… hurts… Ya… It hurts… Daddy… Ya… Daddy… It hurts… Eat… Eat… I don’t want… I don’t want to eat… It hurts… It hurts when I eat… I wish it didn’t… Ya… Ya… Ma… Ya… I love Ya… Mummy loves Ya… [Pause.]

  MAYA: I realise now. I’m ready for whatever happens to us. Whatever it is, it will be hard for Mama. And hard for me. But God is only testing us because He knows everything and He knows we can handle this. I have stopped blaming fate. I have stopped getting angry with Mama because she is like a little child. When I was a child, Mama fed me. She bathed me, dressed me, combed my hair, and applied talcum powder on me. Now it is my turn to look after her the same way. I can feed her, bathe her, dress her, comb her hair, and apply powder. I’m glad that I can help her now and repay her kindness to me. At least I have time to spend with her. Lots of people aren’t that lucky, are they? The saddest thing is that she has forgotten all our beautiful memories about the things we used to do together. And she won’t remember what we do now or in the future. I can only pray that she’ll be healthy, and maybe, in those few moments when she is sane, really sane, she might know how much I love her. Mama… don’t forget, OK? Do I need to tell you again? Don’t forget, OK?

  Song: “Kali Terakhir Ku Lihat Wajahmu” (“The Last Time I Saw Your Face”) by Uji Rashid.

  The Model Family

  BY FELIX CHEONG

  1

  If you had ever wanted a poster-friendly family that cut the Singapore Core to the, well, core, you could do no worse than take a look at the Tang family.

  Up close, they resembled a standee of that sitcom family in Under One Roof: cardboard-hard, daisy-fresh. Not a string and strand out of place, as reel as they came. Except that the Tangs often took themselves seriously. Whatever laughter there was in the house was probably echoes from the family next door. Or whatever was on TV at that hour which, invariably, was tuned to Government broadcasts.

  Mr. Tang was a plumber by inclination who specialised in traditional Chinese medicine. Both trades involved clearing blockages to improve circulation, so it was not that much of a challenge for him to switch from one to the other. Mrs. Tang found her calling as a clerk but became well-known as an accountant who solemnised marriages and delivered babies (sometimes at the same time, for shotgun marriages. Extra charges applied; three weeks’ notification required).

  In their mid-twenties, the couple had already internalised the Government’s mantra to upgrade their skills. Times were good; the country, no longer in denial it was part of a larger hole, was pulling itself up by its short bootstrap, and so were the Tangs. Poverty was no longer an option or a ma
tter of opinion. Before long, the Tangs breezed into their first three-room HDB flat in Queenstown and immediately, if not sooner, had three children. They arrived one after another, two boys and a girl separated by minutes, so, technically, you could round them off as triplets.

  “We’ve contributed two boys to National Service!” Mr. Tang said proudly, wiping the blood of his newborns on his pants. The campaign to save water was flooding the airwaves at that time, so it would not do to wash his hands irresponsibly.

  The couple could not be happier. In fact, they were even featured once on national television as a model family, as young in prospects as the country and just as eager to prosper. The good life was beckoning from the distance, and, collectively, they were hurtling themselves headlong towards it.

  When the “Stop at Two” population policy came into force in the 1970s, the Tangs were initially disoriented. In one bureaucratic stroke, they were suddenly rendered imperfect, no longer a model family toeing the national line.

  “What do we do?” Mrs. Tang asked in her reed-thin voice.

  Mr. Tang thought long and hard. It was not long before his instinct as a plumber kicked in. It was simple. The blockage simply had to be cleared, he decided. It would not do to disobey the Prime Minister. He had a way of reaching into the TV with his eyes and throttling you from a distance. Even in black-and-white, he was fearsome, matched by a formidable voice that could cut you down to your knees, often literally.

  That night, the Tangs held a family conference as the TV news played softly in the background. The children, by then in Primary One and already preparing for their PSLE, quickly understood why one of them had to be evicted. After all, they were all brought up on campaign taglines. It was simpler than living by the Bible. At least you did not have to plough through a thick book just to learn a few aphorisms. The good life could be summed up in one friendly image (colour was optional) and one snappy tagline (grammar was non-negotiable). The rest was just a matter of scrambling your brain to learn it well.

  In fact, Gene, the eldest, said matter-of-factly, “If we don’t obey the Government, who will?”

  Mr. Tang nodded and smiled proudly. This boy would amount to something one day. Perhaps a politician. Or a bus conductor.

  As it turned out, when the lots were drawn, it was Gene who ended up with the short stick. Quietly, he went to his room and packed his bag. There was neither a squeal nor a squeak. What would be the point?

  Armed with ten dollars, a princely sum in those days, Gene hugged his siblings and kissed his parents one last time. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s all for our own good.”

  And he was gone.

  As the TV news continued humming about job creation, Mr. and Mrs. Tang let out a sigh of relief. Officially, they had now stopped at two. They could now re-register Eugene and Genette as twins and become, once again, the model family the campaign posters had always painted and promised.

  2

  By the late 1970s, Mr. Tang could no longer communicate with his parents. Although they were close, his parents, who would be feted in future as the “Pioneer Generation” and showered with bonuses they had little time left to live for, could not speak a word of Mandarin. No matter how hard they tried, their tongues were unwilling to create the sounds necessary to please the Government. Dialects had, by then, committed the grave sin of being unfashionable, having already been banned on and off air, in the streets and anywhere within hearing distance of a Government official. And there were campaign posters aplenty to prove it.

  Mr. and Mrs. Tang had discussed this issue over several evenings. Both felt the compulsion to cut all family ties. Thankfully, Mrs. Tang’s parents, recalcitrant Cantonese speakers, had the good grace to pass away before the “Speak Mandarin” campaign steamrolled along with its spokes and spokespersons.

  “To speak dialect would be unpatriotic, thank you,” Mr. Tang said in a short farewell letter to his parents. Naturally, it was written courteously. Every sentence was punctuated with either a “please” or a “thank you”, in line with the recently launched Courtesy Campaign. It would not do to disown your parents any other way. It was just not the Singapore way.

  His parents, so illiterate they were sometimes mistaken for being hard of hearing or hard to be heard, had to hire a translator to make sense of their son’s mellifluous Mandarin. The translator, who would one day be called into service to explain the “Pioneer Generation Package” in dialects to senior citizens, was impressed with his penmanship. So much so she sighed and said in Hokkien, “Your son is so highly educated. You should be so proud of him!”

  His parents could only nod, lost for words. In being disowned, they knew they had done right by their country. It was a matter of time before they took their Hokkien to their graves.

  3

  “My tubes are tied!” Mrs. Tang said, in her reed-thin voice.

  She had just put out a solid – in all senses of the word – dinner of frozen pork and frozen fish, which the Government were now exhorting the country to eat. The food looked tasty in campaign posters but turned out to so hard that Genette lost two teeth that evening.

  “My tubes are tied too!” Mr. Tang said, half-listening to what he was saying, since he was half-listening to the TV news singing delightedly at the latest economic numbers.

  Two years after Gene had left the house, the couple had allowed their fertility to be fine-tuned by the Government. The procedure was painless, subsidised, and, best of all, irreversible. But it had, invariably, caused a rift between Mr. and Mrs. Tang because, for the first time in their marriage, they could no longer enjoy sex purely for a national cause. As a result, they stopped having sex altogether. What if another child showed up, unannounced? The consequences would be devastating. It could bankrupt the family and, by extension, the country, what with one more mouth to feed.

  But when the Government suddenly reversed its population policy – the statisticians could not be wrong, just as they could not have been wrong a decade earlier – the Tangs leapt with joy. “Have three, if you can afford it,” so ran the latest campaign tagline. Sex for a national cause was officially sanctioned again! By then, the Tangs were comfortably middle-class, as was the country, and could certainly afford to feed and spoonfeed another mouth. It was time to stand up and be courted.

  But no matter what herbs he brewed and what plumbing equipment he introduced, Mr. Tang simply could not clear his or his wife’s blockage. Biology, it seemed, could not be as easily reversed as Government gazettes.

  “How?” they said as the omnipresent presence of the Prime Minister, now in colour and all the more fearsome for it, flickered on their TV screen. His eyes were older but they still shone like interrogation spotlights.

  The Tang family brainstormed for days while waiting for the frozen pork and frozen fish to thaw. If only Gene was still around…

  “We still have Gene’s birth certificate, right?” Mrs. Tang asked as she finally managed to swallow some frozen pork with a lump of rice. Thank goodness the Chinese invented sesame oil!

  “So? We already threw him out long ago.”

  Mrs. Tang smiled. “Ah, but that is reversible.”

  4

  Like any citizen disenfranchised by abrupt changes in Government policies, Gene lived by his wits. It helped that he had an earnest face and an honest haircut, two qualities that would one day stand him in good stead as a politician. Or a bus conductor. Day in, day out, he would park himself at places where guilt gathered in abundance, like churches and outside Parliament House.

  “Please, sir, my family kicked me out because of the two-child policy,” he said, dressed in his Sunday best. Somewhere at the back of his mind, he did not see himself growing up as a beggar but as an enforcer of the public’s generosity.

  Without hesitation, people dropped loose change like jingle bells in his bowl, their conscience appropriately lighter. They offered him food they could not finish and clothes their children had deemed unfashionable. The country was now
on the cusp of nouveau riche, and there was enough wastage around to prove it.

  At night, Gene would sleep at the beach, coffee shops, sometimes on the steps of City Hall. He would wash himself in public toilets and trim his hair weekly. A good haircut, he knew, could make or break a superficial impression. His childhood had once been traumatised by a poster that said, “Men with long hair will be served last.” Gene had had nightmares since of never making it to middle class if he had long hair.

  Apart from keeping up appearances throughout his years living on the streets, Gene also kept faith with the one constant: campaign taglines were never wrong. They were thought up by clever people who studied thick books to condense the good life into one catchy sentence. That was what his parents had taught him and his siblings.

  So Gene, on his own, picked up Mandarin (by eavesdropping on students his age), kept Singapore clean (by picking up things he could recycle and reuse), and kept up his productivity. He even washed his hands so often that he developed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. For instance, all his coins would be washed with soap before they were used. He might look like a vagabond, but at least he was a patriotic one with finicky, Government-approved habits.

  That day, Gene was, as usual, begging – no, waiting – for alms outside a church. It was slim pickings because the country had slid into recession, as you would if you ran towards First World without looking back at whom you had been stepping on.

  Against the sunlight, he saw a family of four walking towards him. It did not look like a campaign-abiding family, for the Government now wanted to bribe you into having three children or more. He had seen the posters. Maybe they wanted to adopt him? The possibility hung in the air but only if the family had middle-class aspirations.