“Really?” I say. “My father used to love him. He took me to all the Boris Karloff films, frightened the life out of me, but I loved them anyway. He must be quite old if he’s alive.”
“I think he’s dead. But his garden is shaped like a coffin. You can drive all the way around it. I’ll take you to see it if you like.”
And so the builder takes my elder son and me down the road to see Boris Karloff’s house and garden. Of course, my son is too young to know about Boris Karloff but, like all youngsters, he’s into horror and action films like Stephen King’s, where guts are spilled and heads decapitated, so he’s truly fascinated to see a coffin-shaped garden. I think the garden is interesting, but what is more intriguing to me is the fact that this tenuous link with my father should emerge at this very juncture when I am re-thinking my thoughts about my father. Perhaps his spirit has returned to remind me of some of the lovely things that he and I had shared.
“You’re making too much of a co-incidence,” David says, the perpetual sceptic.
But I believe that there is no such thing as a coincidence, that everything happens because they are meant to do so — and it happens at the right time, whether we recognise it or not. My father’s two favourite actors were Boris Karloff and Edward G Robinson. I don’t recall much of the latter but can never forget Boris Karloff’s face, which always looked terribly evil. Going to the real cinema was a very special treat, so I never minded what type of films we saw. Most of the time, we only got to see films that the film-man brought and we had to see it outdoors on the cemented badminton court. So it felt really grand to be sitting in an enclosed auditorium on proper seats and not on boards straddling kerosene tins. The cinemas my father took my siblings and myself to were the Alhambra, Cathay and Lido. Unlike the Alhambra, the other two were really posh and had air-conditioning which was a new thing. Downstairs from the Lido was a Magnolia cafe and ice cream parlour. I used to peer through its glass walls and watched all the grand people in there eating and laughing and I promised myself that I would eat in there one day. (I actually worked briefly as a marketing executive for the firm that produced Magnolia ice cream after I graduated from the University Of Singapore and had eaten all the ice cream I wanted until I was sick!)
Agatha would often scream with uncontrollable fear when she went to horror films, so our father stopped taking her. Bernadette was too little to understand, so she got left at home, too. Ah Tetia usually took Matthew and myself. So it was my father who sowed the love of films in both my brother and myself. He took us to English epic films like The Ten Commandments, Spartacus and period Chinese films, like Madam White Snake and The Water Margin. Every now and again, when P Ramlee or Saloma were starring, he would take our mother and us to a Malay film, Mak’s favourite being Ibu Mertua-ku. It is interesting that I should recall this now because when I reviewed my mother’s married life and remembered how few her outings had been, it was easy to let these trips to the cinemas slip past my memory, too. So she did have some days of frivolity with my father, acting like the young lovers they must have been. When she went out, she used to thread the small bunga melor around her single bun and she would wear her best kebaya, her face powedered with bedak sejok. Although she walked several paces behind Ah Tetia, he would hold his head proudly to have such a beautiful wife trailing behind him.
Once when they were out, I was left in Matthew’s charge. He decided to take me to the playing field at the bottom of the hill where the rich people lived to teach me to fly a kite. I was about five or six. I held the spool of string that was attached to the kite. Matthew held the kite and hoisted it up and I was supposed to keep the kite in the air. It was fun when eventually the kite started to fly. I kept my eyes on the kite and moved about on the field. At one point, I moved backward and suddenly fell into the monsoon drain, screaming as I went down. Matthew rushed to get me out but I was already bleeding and grazed. Mak and Ah Tetia arrived home to find me in this state and Ah Tetia gave Matthew a whipping. It was the one time I remembered my mother holding me so close. Our people do not openly hug and kiss like in the west, so a physical display of love is unusual. But on that day, Mak held me close to comfort me and I remember thinking how beautiful she looked and how lovely her fragrance was.
So, the picture of my father that is now emerging from the deep recesses of my mind is less of a hateful person. It was he who generously took my grandmother and Uncle Kanchil in with him when he married my mother. This is not the deed of a cruel or hateful man. Perhaps I have allowed the pain he inflicted on me to colour my perception of him. Now that the sluices are open, I permit myself another memory, of my father taking me to see the fireworks that sprang from the ships at sea. My sisters and I stood at the Victorian balustrade of Queen Elizabeth’s promenade, and clapped our hands in glee as we watched the colourful sparkles that flew into the sky. I think it was a celebration of the Queen’s Coronation or something. Although Ah Tetia went to the cabarets without my mother, he would return home bringing her a peace offering: a packet of Hokkien Mee, Char Kway Teow, Chicken Rice, Char Siew Rice or Satay. And she, in turn, would wake us up to share in her largess. I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to wake up to the smell of food when there were days when we would wake up not knowing if we were to be fed at all. If my father had been as evil as I tended to remember him, he would not have had the kind of heart to show such concern. So I learn that memories can be shaded by pain. My mother’s recent reluctance to go with my father, even to the spirit world, showed me that my memory with regard to my father, though shaded, is not flawed. But I am ready to forgive him now because I can see that he was as much a victim and product of his circumstances as each of us can be in our own time. I am sure that his soul was giving him lessons, too, and all our lessons differ, depending on what we have incarnated to learn. Now, I am more willing to resurrect that soft side of him, a man whose face was occasionally lit by a smile. Now with an adult eye, I can see that he, too, lived within the limitations of his own education and social status. He was also constrained by the strictures of society. He was not alone in his views of wives and daughters and the way to treat them. He believed sincerely that education was not for women. Sure, he had a hot temper and was prone to wield his strength on his wife and children, but it must have been a result of his own despair. After all, he started his working life as a clerk and he had so many children to feed, three brothers to put through school and he was supporting a mother whose husband was lost somewhere in China or enroute. When my mother lost her babies, he must have felt some guilt and perhaps some pain, too, though he would never admit or talk about it. The pressure on him must have been phenomenal.
It has taken me all these years for me to see my father as he really was. I was blinded to his true nature by the physical and mental pain he inflicted on my mother, my siblings and myself. He had marked my life, marked me in the way I related to men. I have been weary of depending on either of my husbands for sustenance, secure only when I am working and in control of my own finances and fate. Perhaps in my subconscious mind I put them, as men, in the same ilk as my father, willing to trade me for a price. So I had to keep guard, be vigilant. One of the reasons my first marriage failed was because my ex-husband tried to be what my father was to my mother, he refused to let me be free. He’d drive me everywhere, dropped me off and picked me up even if I was out for a girl’s lunch, examined my dressing when I go out to check that the hem was not above my knees, nor the neckline too low. Even though I wore little make-up, simply a lipstick and an eye-liner, that was forbidden to me, too. This was in the 1970s! He was so insecure that he even stopped me singing pop songs which might have suggested that I had feelings for another. Eventually, the straw that broke this camel’s back was that he became like my father, using his muscles when words failed him. When I left, he said, “So the bird has broken out of its cage.” Yet he did not see or understand the irony of his own words.
The Boris Karloff reminder is the key that has set me
free from my father. I am beginning to see that if my father’s circumstances had been different, he could have been a much nicer man. He had only been human, with human failings and weaknesses. I realise now that to hate him is to tether him to my psyche, to poison my own insides. Besides, everyone who comes into our sphere in life teaches us something, whether that person is good or bad, gives us joy or pain. It is not what they do to us that teaches us, it is how we respond to them that is the teacher. And, we can only keep growing if we keep on learning. It’s when we stop learning that we stagnate. At last, in middle age, I dare to look at myself and see what I had inherited from him. When I was younger, I wanted so much to cleanse myself of my father’s influence that I had refused to accept that some parts of his being might linger in me. I wanted to believe that I was all of my mother and nothing of my father. In this respect, I was as naive as my father had been, not comprehending that once the genetic codes have been written, they cannot be erased. Once or twice, when I was a child, when my mother was cross with me, she had flung the words, “You got a temper just like your father!” I would shrivel up inside and run away somewhere to cry. How could I be like the man I hated? I worked really hard to rid myself of this taint, tried to scrub myself clean. Now I know, not all of my father’s characteristics had been bad, there were some aspects of him that could be lovable. He had shared with me his love for the cinema, and in so doing he had helped me to expand my horizons, helped me to focus on my visual sense. He had always been one to care about fitness, cycling everywhere and carrying weights every evening after work. Without my realising it, he had bequested this to me, for I am into yoga and go to the gym regularly and love walking. How can I hate what is so intrinsically a part of myself? So what I thought had been a dark relationship with my father had actually been filled with spaces of light, too. Alas, I cannot tell him of my revised thinking nor can we sign the peace pact between us. Surely this is a human tragedy — that realisations can sometimes come too late? But believing in the spirit as I do, I know that he and I have both been teachers to each other, and I know that he and I shall meet in the spirit world for our reconciliation. Perhaps by then, I would have released all of the mental and physical pain he had inflicted on me personally. What good does it serve to keep on harping about a past that we cannot change? I must try to focus on the pearl, not just the grit — and get on with my own journey. Perhaps then I shall be able to embrace him and thank him; for without him, my soul would not have found a body to inhabit. Perhaps it would be time, too, to tell him that despite everything, I do love him.
I have been back three weeks now, have struggled through a mountain of post, called up friends; in short, regain my footing in my adopted country. Crossing continents and cultures requires a period of adjustment, when the mind and tongue can let go of the last place and slip back into the customs and language of the present. It’s like re-adjusting oneself to wearing woollen jumpers and warm clothes when all you’ve been wearing is light cotton clothes, T-shirts and shorts. It’s like adjusting your mind to accept that when you wake up, the sun may not be shining and it’s going to be dark and wet all day. Adjustments require an ability to control and manipulate the mind. My mother is beyond this, the controller having become the controlled. I used to call her weekly on a Monday so that she is conscious of a routine and awaits my call with anticipation. But it doesn’t matter now what day I call her, her days and years sliding like mud into one another on the slippery slope of her mind. I feel sad for her when I think there can be no hope or anticipation for her because, for her, there is no visible future. If every moment exists only in this pin-prick of time, it is not possible to look forward. And this is what my mother’s life has become. Through e-mails and telephone calls, I learn from Agatha and Bernadette about Mak’s continuing condition.
“I guess she’s over the hump,” Agatha writes. “I can go on holiday now.”
We have been given a short respite. In an Alzheimer’s patient, you worry about the deterioration of the body as well as the mind. It’s a dark race, no ribbon for the first to reach the tape. Only oblivion.
Some weeks later, Bernadette calls, “She doesn’t know how to walk anymore.”
Can it get worse? Our reference book says yes. Some patients go blind, some cannot speak. It all depends on which of the brain cells die. In the end, they can succumb to a simple cold, a chest infection, whatever. Their body is already weakened, too weary to fight any invasion of germs. Then the war will be over. So my family and I wait this agonising wait. We have to be vigilant about different things now, whether she is comfortable, how we can prevent bedsores. I send across some strong antibiotic cream. When I pick up the telephone to call her these days, I am not assured that I can actually get to speak to her. It is the price I have to pay for it was I who wrought the distance between us, choosing to go to a place where she cannot follow. Yet, I cannot be separated from Mak even though we are 10,000 miles apart. She and I share the same soul space. Sometimes when I call, she is too poorly and cannot be put into the wheelchair to get to the phone or she may not be in a frame of mind to talk into the mouthpiece. Even a simple thing like talking into a telephone is a task that is sometimes insurmountable, like climbing a flight of stairs is a monumental task for a disabled person. My mother is disabled in so many ways now. This is her lot, the frog under the coconut shell. But I can re-capture her the way she was, tall and slender in her sarong kebaya, her face a delicate shape, her full head of hair, the way she moved, fluid and elegant, everything about her so fine. As though I have the Beast’s magic mirror, I can conjure up her face in every chosen moment to see the way she tilts her head or the way her lips form crescents of smiles. I can see her as a young teenager sitting on her paino stool in her father’s bungalow by the sea, sitting upright, her slender fingers rippling along the piano keys, her long black hair lifted by the sea breeze, a soft smile on her face.
“Mak,” I say, grateful that today she can come to the telephone. “It’s Ah Phine.”
“Cannot be, cannot be,” she says vehemently. “You can’t be Ah Phine. Ah Phine is right here with me now, feeding me my dinner.”
Someone had said that Alzheimer’s is like a long funeral. I never understood what that meant before. Now I take it to mean that it is a long grieving before the person is even dead. Despite her pretence at confidence, I can hear the confusion and agitation in her voice. So I don’t correct her anymore. Perhaps it is better for her to think I am there with her. Her race is over. I am her hope and dreams, she has passed the baton for me to finish the race and now I must. It is what she would have wanted. It is a heartbreaking acknowledgment but I know that I have lost her whilst she is still alive.
Afterword
Of all my books, this book generated the most response from readers across the Globe. I have received letters and e-mails from Singapore, Malaysia, United Kingdom, USA and Australia. Some of the readers had received the book as a gift or had been told about it by others. Many of the readers have had a friend or relative who had or is afflicted by Alzheimer’s Disease. They said that reading about one family’s experiences with a parent who has Alzheimer’s disease had helped them to cope. Many wrote to thank me.
Some readers said they laughed and cried as they read. I took it to mean that they were deeply moved. Therefore it is hard to say that this is a book to enjoy. But certainly, everyone found it to be a must-read. They wrote to say what a marvellous woman my mother must have been, and I was always proud to respond that she was indeed special. I felt that she was an angel on earth.
Another group of readers who wrote to me were those who had lived in Singapore and the then Malaya in the 1950s. Many of these people were English. My descriptions of kampong life and old Singapore evoked strong, mostly wonderful memories for them as well as for local Singaporeans. They felt that this book recorded a way of life that is now gone and should be preserved in text.
Others were interested in the Peranakan culture and their way of life.<
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In the writing of such a work which has to explore the different facets of life and behaviour of various characters, some people are bound to take issues. My purpose is to exalt my mother and her life of service to others. If anyone is hurt by anything in this book, I beg forgiveness.
For every single one of my readers, I say Thank You. Without you, (and my publisher), my mother’s story cannot be told. She inspired my life and I am a writer today because of what she gave of herself to help me achieve my dream.
Josephine Chia, 2010
About the Author
Josephine, is a Peranakan who is proud of her heritage. She was born and raised in Kampong Potong Pasir in the 1950s. Living in the rural village then, she too felt like a frog under a coconut shell.
Since then, she has picked up BA Honours from the University of Singapore and an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University College, United Kingdom.
Her short stories were first published in SINGA, the literary Journal of Singapore and also in The Straits Times.
She later migrated to England in 1985. Besides the Ian. St. James Award, Josephine has won other prizes for both her short stories and articles; some of which have been published in various anthologies. In 2009, she won a highly commended prize from the Society of Women Writers & Journalists for her travel article. Josephine is an eclectic writer. Her fiction oeuvre includes two novels and a collection of short stories, while her non-fiction collection consists of a cook book and two others on yoga.
Josephine is also a member of the UK Society Of Authors and is a Council Member of UK’s Society of Women Writers & Journalists. She teaches creative writing and yoga, and give regular talks on the Peranakan culture in the UK. She is also a facilitator in the Ministry of Education, Creative Arts Programme (CAP) Seminars and is a mentor to aspiring writers. She is also involved with programmes run by National Library board (NLB) and National Book development Council.
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