Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  The principal had given her a quick quizzical look, but said no more on the matter. He assiduously ignored the rumours that sometimes came to his ears about this teacher, his favourite because almost single-handedly she guaranteed the school’s consistently high national ranking in the English language examination results every year. From a humiliating position of twenty-nine out of forty before Miss Seetoh arrived, it had leapt to number ten, then number five. The school had actually been singled out for honourable mention in one of the Education Minister’s speeches. A good speaker of the English language was not necessarily its best teacher. Miss Seetoh was both, and best of all, she showed a creative flair for speech writing, which, the principal noted with quiet satisfaction, she very generously used to help him craft or fine-tune the many speeches he had to make at principals’ seminars, especially those where senior representatives from the Ministry of Education were present.

  ‘Then I and the rest of the staff will continue to address you as Mrs Tan.’

  Two

  Long live Miss Maria Seetoh Wei Cheng!

  Never again would she abandon that designation for the prized honorific that women were supposed to seek before they hit thirty, spurred on by society’s grim reminders of that relentless biological clock. Anxious mothers, her own mother being a typical example, reminded their daughters, ambitious for university degrees, not to forget the most important one of all – the MRS. Indeed, the whole society seemed to be in thrall of some imperative to get its many single women married, mothered and launched on the road of respectable womanhood.

  It was a movement called ‘Family Values’ spearheaded by the Ministry of Social Development which had marshaled its substantial resources of money and talent to set up an organisation with the sole purpose of helping women find true fulfilment. It was remarkable that her mother who had to endure the feckless ways of a husband for years was always saying to her, ‘If you don’t get married, who will take care of you when I’m gone?’ Her father had suddenly disappeared from their lives when she was a little girl, fleeing from debtors to Thailand where purportedly he had been living with his Thai mistress since.

  The great TPK himself had appeared on TV several times to urge women to cooperate in the national exercise. It did not matter that the reason he gave for its purpose did not match that of the ‘Family Values’ campaign. He left it to the junior ministers to use the soft approach to deal with a delicate subject, so as not to offend an increasingly well-educated electorate, while he and his senior ministers went all the way of the brutal truth, as they spoke to the people on TV, through the newspapers, in face-to-face encounters in the walkabouts through the sprawling housing estates.

  The economy, he warned, was in serious danger. If the birth rate continued to decline, there would be massive labour shortages in the future. Incapable of the language of sentiment used in the campaign posters everywhere showing happy pictures of smiling families, though himself a happily married man with an adoring, adored wife and two bright daughters, he concentrated on the hard statistics of the tiny island-state’s struggle to survive in a relentlessly competitive world. ‘Make no mistake,’ he said sternly. ‘We will be in deep trouble if we do nothing now.’

  Thirty years ago, he had warned of an opposite but no less dangerous demographic trend – Singapore women were having too many babies, and creating a crisis of overpopulation. The Singapore General Maternity Hospital, to the society’s shame, had one of the highest birth rates in the world. These overproductive women were straining national resources and therefore had to be stopped. TPK, looking his sternest on TV, his hair back then still a deep gleaming black, the admonishing forefinger and thrusting jaw already the trademarks of his bellicose style, had threatened a slew of penalties for recalcitrant women who dared to have more than the permitted two children. At the same time, he offered an incentive: the woman who could produce a sterilisation certificate from a government hospital after two children was entitled to enrol her children in Singapore’s choicest schools.

  The man had struck the tenderest of parental chords. For there was but a small number of these elite schools, and parents would kill to get their sons and daughters into them. It was rumoured that the policy, which soon provoked cynical coverage in some international newspapers, would be tweaked to target a special group of women – the uneducated group from the lower socio-economic strata who married early and produced broods.

  The angry protest of V.K. Pandy, the leader of the sole opposition party in Parliament, back then a young aspirant for political life, was almost incoherent in its mix of thunderous denunciations and obscure references to Darwin, eugenics and totalitarianism, and went unreported.

  ‘Mrs Tan, I thought I had sent round a circular that classroom discussion topics should not include politics.’ The principal had called her into his office. Even among the forty adoring students in her class, there must have been a spy or two.

  ‘We were not discussing politics, sir. V.K. Pandy’s name had just come up only very incidentally.’

  The principal winced visibly.

  The opposition leader, always untidy-looking with his bristling eyebrows, overgrown beard and glittering close-set eyes that gave him a simian aspect, always loud, cantankerous, unreasonable in his demands for this or that government policy to be subjected to public debate, had become a national embarrassment, a blot on the society’s pristine face.

  Years ago, the newspapers ran a lengthy report on his attempt to go by foot all the way to the United Nations headquarters to present his anti-sterilisation plea on behalf of Singapore’s women, highlighting its abrupt end when he developed stomach cramps in Malaysia, twenty-one miles into the heroic walk, and had to accept a car ride back home. The debacle prompted a derisory editorial captioned, ‘Pandy, You’re No Gandhi,’ and for a while the taunt, repeated for its serendipitous pun, was bandied around at cocktail parties and coffee shop gatherings. His few sympathisers marveled at the tenacity of his political aspirations against such overwhelming odds; both sympathy and admiration were necessarily muted. The schools, by tacit agreement, had banned all mention of him in classroom discussions and debates. He could sometimes be seen, in busy shopping centres, waving pamphlets, a lone figure in the centre of a large empty space invariably carved out for him by the crowds, hurrying past, always looking the other way.

  The student editor of the school magazine had inadvertently included, in a commemorative anniversary issue, a photograph showing visitors to St Peter’s School Fun Fair, in which the opposition member could be distinctly seen in the background, waving cheerfully. The oversight was discovered by the magazine’s teacher advisor who rushed to inform the principal who at once picked up the phone to stop the printer. But it was too late and he had to make the decision, a painfully expensive one, of having all eight hundred copies of the magazine destroyed and new ones printed, minus, of course, the offending photograph. The teacher advisor and the student editor were forgiven their carelessness, but never again would they be entrusted with any important assignment.

  ‘Mrs Tan,’ said the principal who hated having to call teachers into his office to admonish them on this or that, ‘you were seen yesterday afternoon talking to the opposition member in Middleton Square, just outside Shelford Building.’ The school had spies everywhere.

  ‘Yes, I was,’ said Miss Seetoh, ‘but it was on my own time,’ adding, ‘and I wasn’t in school uniform.’

  Her husband had dropped her at a dispensary in Shelford Building to collect some medicine for her mother’s asthma; during the fifteen minutes of waiting for him to pick her up, she had seen the opposition member in his lonely precinct in the shopping mall, waving his pamphlets at the streams of shoppers assiduously avoiding him. As she watched him, she instinctively joined forces with them by stepping behind the dispensary door, a safe peeping presence only.

  Then something very like shame swept over her, corresponding precisely with the moment that she saw a small child in a Super
man suit break away from his mother to stand and stare in fascination at V.K. Pandy, saw the man’s frowning face break into smiles, and the mother rushing up to pull the child away. The small rebel, despite the scolding, turned round several times to look at V.K. Pandy who was still grinning and waving. The shame flared, then settled into daring resolution. She strode out of the dispensary, walked straight into the space, a scrupulously cordoned-off infected zone in a clean city, and stretched out a hand to greet its sole occupant, ‘Hello, Mr Pandy.’

  It didn’t matter what he or she said after that; she had done the defiant deed for the day, so that when her husband returned to pick her up at the dispensary, the assertive glow on her neck and cheeks saved the rest of her demeanour from the usual docility. Exuding a radiant confidence before her principal, her colleagues and her students, she shrank in timid deference before her husband. Glowing in the queendom of her classroom, she crawled back each day into the oppression of the marital sanctuary.

  ‘Look at that idiot,’ he said with a smile, pointing to the man now squatting on the ground, his tie askew, his pamphlets still in a large stack beside him, staring absently into the distance, ‘thinking he can bring down the government. Did you see that?’ he continued with a spiteful chuckle, as the man took a small bottle out of his pocket, looked around furtively, drank from it and wiped his beard with his hand. ‘A drunk as well.’

  Bernard Tan Boon Siong had written a number of scathing letters to The Singapore Tribune about the obstreperous opposition member, which he always passed to his boss for approval and endorsement. She had actually offered to help him craft some of the letters, after he told her that the boss, the formidable Dr Phang with his two PhDs, the first from Oxford University, the second from Harvard, someone clearly being marked out by the government for a life in politics, was a stickler for perfect grammar and appropriate style. He had once invited Dr Phang and some office friends home for dinner, an expensively catered affair that had her nervous mother on tenterhooks all evening repeatedly inspecting each tray and pot of food as it was brought in by the caterers.

  The disobedient act of her adventure in Middleton Square had given rise to a confusion of many feelings: surprise at her own audacity, fear of recrimination from her husband, dislike of his boss, guilt towards V.K. Pandy for her hypocrisy. For she had played the part of the loyal government supporter, delving into her rich repertoire of derogatory terms to spice the venom of her husband’s letter to the newspaper. He had smiled in approval and later told her the boss had thought it an excellent letter.

  It was an act of unkindness to V.K. Pandy for which she was prepared to pay the price of more secret ventures into that banned space, perhaps even with the offer of a hamburger and a can of cold beer for his lunch. The confusion of feelings was soon no more than a whirligig of emotions easily tamed into a single, very pleasurable sensation, as she thought in tremulous excitement, My God, what if he finds out. V.K. Pandy’s pamphlet was safely tucked between the pages of her teacher’s record book which was placed, in a continuing show of defiance, side by side with his briefcase on the sitting room table.

  The act of rebellion had brought back the memory of a girlhood incident very similar in its triumphant reclaim of self-regard. She was eight years old, a bright, alert pupil who enjoyed the English language lessons, in particular, the dictation lesson during which the pupils were required to transcribe each sentence of a short story, as it was slowly read out, phrase by phrase, by the English language teacher, Sister St Agatha. The story was usually taken from a small collection of readers which, from a very young age, she had read voraciously and knew by heart.

  Sister gave the students a few minutes to get acquainted with the more difficult words in the story before the dictation lesson began. Proudly dispensing with the assistance, she wrote down in her copy book the entire story, perfectly registered in her memory, in a fraction of the dictation lesson time. So when Sister began the exercise, it was a simple matter of pretending to write, by letting her pencil tip float lightly over each phrase in her copy book. Sister’s sharp eyes caught the pretence; her nostrils flared with the angry triumph of catching a cheat red-handed. She pulled the culprit up from her seat, pinned the evidence of the dishonesty to her blouse and made her stand in front of the class all morning. It all happened so quickly that she was unable to explain the truth to Sister, and in any case, probably could not have done so in her confusion. Burning with shame, she wished that she would die that instant.

  In the next dictation lesson, Sister was astonished to see her furiously writing down in her copy book the entire three paragraphs of the designated story, even before the dictation lesson had begun. Then she got up with her book, laid it on Sister’s table without a word, and returned to her desk glowing with restored self-esteem.

  ‘Mrs Tan, you know that even outside the school premises, staff and students are supposed to behave with decorum.’ Miss Seetoh’s large innocent eyes widened in surprise.

  ‘I was behaving with perfect decorum, sir, since we were in an open, public place. Mr V.K. Pandy was explaining something in his pamphlet. It had to do with the sterilisation policy, sir.’

  The principal muttered, ‘That was so long ago,’ his acute discomfort betrayed by a facial tic and a tightening of the hands clasped behind his back. He sometimes wondered if Miss Seetoh, of the refreshingly open countenance and helpful writing skills, was secretly mocking him.

  The government organisation, tasked with helping single women find husbands and unburdened by any memory of that awful time of draconian population controls three decades ago, went all the way of friendly cajolery, and would probably have no objection to extending its help to widows still capable of bearing children. Miss Seetoh, aged thirty-nine, happy once more, thought, Never again. The government organisation’s request for help, very discreetly worded, went out to the schools which were known to have large numbers of single women on their staff. The principal of St Peter’s responded to the request by passing on the official letter to the unmarried women teachers, together with his own personal encouragement, also delicately worded, about the Christian ideal of motherhood and the importance of cooperation to solve a problem highlighted by the Prime Minister himself.

  There was a form to be filled by the single women to indicate their interest or otherwise in participating in a variety of social events, such as tea dances and computer games, being organised for them to meet eligible single men. Here was another reason for poor plain Miss Teresa Pang, never courted in her life, to be unfavourably compared, in whispered comments, to the pretty widow, Miss Seetoh. An unkind joke went round, in the form of a riddle, purportedly started by a waggish young trainee teacher: what is the only thing, desired by Singapore men that Miss Pang has which Miss Seetoh doesn’t? Answer: her virginity.

  Miss Seetoh had put a large tick in the ‘Not Interested’ box on the form, and then, as an afterthought, had added, ‘But thank you for the kind consideration.’

  Three

  The celebration of her new status would have to remain private in an atmosphere charged with matrimony’s sanctity, so she quickly peeled the proclamatory label from the tin box, taking care not to dislodge the absurd little pink rosettes that Maggie had sprinkled all around it. She rolled up the band of paper and put it inside her handbag.

  ‘Thank you, Maggie,’ she said. ‘As I’ve told you, I like it very much but it had best stay out of sight!’

  That was invitation enough for the girl, ever inquisitive and talkative, to engage in conversation clearly intended to draw out information on the carefully guarded private life of the fascinating Miss Seetoh. If her favourite teacher remained unyielding, she simply changed the topic to other teachers’ private lives. Mrs Naidu, the geography teacher, had again been taken ill in class, sitting down heavily in the midst of a lesson and furiously rubbing Tiger Balm on her forehead and chest. In such moments of distress, her carefully coiled hair uncoiled into a mess of waving strands around her fac
e, giving her the appearance of a grieving Medusa, frightening the students. Everyone knew that the cause of her endless headaches, stomach cramps and mouth ulcers was her husband.

  Miss Monteiro, the physical education teacher, spoke openly about her German boyfriend: once she took medical leave for two days, and somebody saw her on the resort island of Sentosa with him. She kept a photo of him in her wallet, shirtless on a beach, his wind-blown, sun-drenched blondness instantly placing him among the advertising world’s golden boys, and passed it round among her colleagues and students. One of her students, the scary Jaswant Singh, sixteen years old, hairy, deep-voiced, a muscular six-footer towering over his classmates, had tried to date her once.

  Maggie had developed the knack of catching hold of teachers while they were walking along the corridors, down the stairs or across the yard to the school canteen, and in the few available minutes, mixing innocuous student inquiries with a load of trivia and gossip, watching their reaction, storing up for future use whatever they said in response, no matter how brief or brusque. Some teachers chose to simply ignore her and turn away. In class, they chose to ignore her hand raised eagerly to answer every question of which she had not the faintest idea. The overaged student had surely overstayed her welcome in the school. They were reproachful of the young sports coach who was nicknamed Singapore’s Tony Curtis, for his being unable to turn away from the persistent Maggie; someone had seen him once give her a ride on his motorcycle.

  Her net of influence, cast out to reach the largest possible number of St Peter’s Secondary School inhabitants, included the humble workers, such as the gardener, the cleaning woman and the noodles seller at the school canteen, for these too could be sources of useful information or pleasurable gossip, and occasionally the opportunity for the commendable practice of Christian charity. Maggie once initiated a class donation for the school gardener when his wife fell ill and had to be hospitalised for a month.