“I’ve ruled you out.”
“Why?’
“Because you are one of the few people who admired your father.”
SEVEN
INSIDE PARLIAMENT HOUSE, Hoo Liem Choh waits for his turn to move a motion he has tabled earlier. He reads a newspaper report on the funeral of Chow Sze Teck while sitting out another debate on reducing the number of Class C beds in public hospitals. His right leg shakes involuntarily. Hoo looks around at his parliamentary colleagues and thinks he has found evidence of life after death. He feels almost contrite he has to move a motion later and disrupt the affability in the house. He begins to understand why many of his labouring-class constituents wish for their children to become MPs—5,000 dollars a month and no heavy lifting.
His turn comes at last. “Mr Speaker, sir, there are many questions surrounding the death of the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Housing. For example, since the drugs that killed Mr Chow Sze Teck need a prescription, and Mr Chow had been under surveillance for many weeks before his death, how was it possible he got those drugs under the close watch of the CPIB?”
Edward Wee’s face turns crimson, then purple. “Just who is the member for Kampong Bahru insinuating assisted the permanent secretary in his suicide?”
“If it is suicide,” Hoo replies. “The CID has not finished their investigation. Why has the prime minister already formed his conclusion?”
“The member for Kampong Bahru is making a very serious allegation here. He thinks he can be protected by parliamentary privilege.”
“Please, prime minister, hear me out. I’m not here to make any allegations. I was only saying, before I was interrupted, in view of the unusual circumstances surrounding the death of the permanent secretary, I propose a motion to form an independent commission of inquiry to look into—”
A backbencher cuts in. “Mr Speaker, I propose that the member of Kampong Bahru is out of order as he proposed the same in the last sitting and he was ruled out of order.”
Hoo persists. “Mr Speaker, sir, I have tabled a motion according to parliamentary procedures and should be given time to speak without interference from other honourable members.”
The Speaker of the House grants him the floor.
“The need for a commission of inquiry is very critical ah, now that Mr Chow has passed on. The public needs to know what happened to the CPIB investigation of the permanent secretary before his death. Is there a connection between the investigation and Mr Chow’s death?”
“Mr Hoo seems to have forgotten there are relevant agencies taking care of the two cases,” the minister for home affairs interjects.
The opposition MP raises his voice and his hand to regain the floor but the Speaker gives it to Edward Wee. “The CPIB and the CID are concluding their investigations. The public will soon be told the truth. In the meantime, I’ll personally see to it that no one, not even, or especially, members of Parliament, gets away with scurrilous remarks and criminal defamation.”
Once again, the opposition leader has committed lese-majesty, but Hoo is a regular defendant in the prime minister’s legal suits. Woes have dogged him from the time he became the leader of the Labour Party and challenged the ruling juggernaut. The Inland Revenue Department had dredged up his income tax returns for the last ten years, found $200 interest earned from an undeclared fixed deposit account and fined him $7,000. That penalty, under the constitution, disqualified him from standing for election for five years. That was just his rite of passage into the world of opposition politics.
Hoo fell out with his parents when he took up the cudgels for workers at the age of 30 instead of building up his trading firm that imported bathroom accessories from Thailand. His father came to Singapore as a migrant coolie from war-torn, famine-stricken China. Old Hoo worships Edward Wee as heaven’s gift from the British. The man has bestowed him gangster-free streets and a hawker’s licence to sell his noodles to raise his six children. His three-room public housing flat further strengthens his faith in Edward Wee as the best thing to have happened to Singapore after the sun had set on the British Empire. With the Ministry of Housing on a building spree, proud homeowners were scouring for quality bathroom accessories as much as they were spending on Italian sofas. Young Liem Choh’s business was doing a brisk trade. His parents could not understand why their son and the only university graduate in the family would not develop his lucrative business but instead obsess about workers’ rights. That struck fear in the old man who had escaped from Red China. About the time Hoo burst on the scene and pooh-poohed Wee’s population policy that compelled less-educated women to be sterilised after their second child, his father suffered a massive stroke that paralysed the right side of his body. Instead of blaming it on a lifetime of lard, animal innards and cheap alcohol, Liem Choh’s mother never forgave her beloved son, and booted him out of the house.
Over the years, his hatred for Edward Wee has grown in intensity and taken on a personal slant. Behind the stoicism in his slanging matches with Wee in Parliament, he has wished his arch enemy death from a heart bypass or assassination. For if he can’t beat Wee in politics, the younger Hoo hopes to outlive him. So each time Hoo reads about the prime minister running five kilometres every morning, bodyguards in tow, he curses.
Hoo feels no sorrow over the death of Chow Sze Teck, who had been one of the most virulent attackers of the Labour Party during his days as chief of the National Trade Union. Still, Hoo smells a rat in the Chow tragedy and any self-respecting MP, oxymoron notwithstanding, should raise the alarm. With the resultant legal threat from the prime minister, he can only sit on his hands and wait. The PM has never lost in a Singaporean court of law.
But Hoo is reassured by the fact that he is living in a rented flat and enjoying public transport. Therefore he has nothing more to lose in the event of another defamation farce. Of course, he may yet be bankrupted and debarred from Parliament forever. But since being elected, he has done everything by the book, has had his accountant check every figure on his income tax returns and has developed the habit of counting to ten and not responding to any provocation in Parliament or in the media.
Many people ask him why he is doing what he does when it is exacting such a high personal cost, when he could have made a lot of money from his trading business. The 45-year-old bachelor can only answer, “I don’t like dictators.”
EIGHT
CHOW YANG HAS arranged to meet the inspector in a pub in Holland Village instead of at home so as not to disturb his mother. He has some time to kill, as usual, before the appointed time and strolls to a hawker centre in Tiong Bahru. The food stalls here, next to the wet market, were his school-day hangout, selling bouncy fishball noodles in soya and chilli sauces and tooth-decaying desserts. He also loved the sweet and savoury barbecued pork bun voted the best island-wide for many years.
He treads carefully on the slippery cement floor and orders a cheng tng. He is tempted to get a couple of barbecued pork buns but is deterred by the long queue at the stall, snaking out to the roadside. Singaporeans love their food—it is about the only constant in the fast changing society, he smiles benignly to himself. The hawker centre is swarming with diners who find it cheaper and endlessly more convenient to eat out than cook at home. He finds a small rickety table and a wooden stool that have missed the eyes of the other prowlers, and settles down. At the next table a man slurps up his noodle soup and chats loudly with his mate as though they were having an irreconcilable quarrel. The man turns and spits out something caught between his teeth, which lands inches from Yang’s feet, then continues his animated conversation. At another table, a woman shouts in Hokkien at a small child for refusing to eat as her husband has ordered a tableful of food. The woman is presently told off by her teenage son to stop making a scene. Yang believes he has returned to a city of shouters, something he had not noticed before he left for the West. He blames the cold and the reserved English for making him intolerant of noise. He concentrates on enjoying his chen
g tng but is repulsed by a stench rising from an open drain choked with food scraps. He gets up and leaves the hawker centre to take a taxi to the pub.
The Barnhouse is an unpretentious watering hole, unlike the swanky bars on Orchard Road. It is the closest he can find to the workers’ pubs in London; even the cigarette smoke and toilet soap smell like those in The Rose. Except that the people who come here are Western expatriates and local professionals. Cradling a glass of beer between his hands calms him, as does the rhythm and blues in the background. He sits on a high stool by a dark wooden table in a corner, near a timber-latticed window. He looks out to the yellow lamp-lit street and envies the purposeful faces of the pedestrians, their brisk pace. They seem to amplify his own listlessness. He never has to rush for the bus or taxi since he has neither work nor critical appointments. The only time in the last two years he got agitated waiting for a taxi was when he was late for a dental check-up. The dentist kept strict appointment times. He is not certain whether he should consider himself lucky for not having to worry about paying the next month’s mortgage, or pathetic for not having a job to stress him out. In London, it would be called bohemian. In Singapore, he’s a bum who lives off his father’s fat. He has been unemployed not for want of trying, but he can’t bring himself to work for a transglobal company, helping to achieve world hegemony of a facile brand that does not make a smidgen of difference to anyone’s lives except the shareholders’. The small companies are outright mean and prefer foreign labour anyway. Anything smaller than that his father had forbidden, as he deemed it beneath his son. Pa would have fallen into a paroxysm if he had seen me painting houses and mowing lawns in London, Yang thinks, smiling to himself. He orders another drink.
“Hi.” Lim Siew Kian emerges from behind him. He pats Yang on the shoulder as if they are old friends.
“Hi. A beer? It’s on me.” Yang empties his glass and orders a Carlsberg for the inspector and a Bailey’s Irish cream for himself.
“You’re in high spirits,” the inspector says.
“Disgusting, isn’t it? To be jolly so soon after my father died.”
“Where were you between 4pm and 10pm that night?”
“Right here.”
“Was anybody with you at that time?”
“These people here, more or less.”
“Mr Chow, I hope you understand, for the investigation, we need to dig into the history of the family, including each member’s medical background.”
Yang turns a shade paler than the Bailey’s. “I hope our family doctor has given you his full co-operation.”
“I’ve learnt you have been seeing a psychiatrist since your days in the UK. You have been on anti-depressant medication on and off…”
“So?” He puts down his glass but refuses to look at the inspector.
“It would have been easy for you to obtain the drugs that killed your father.”
“I thought the CID was saying it was suicide?”
“That’s one possibility. Even then, he would still have needed someone to get those drugs for him.”
“My father had a whole army of people at his disposal. He could build a neutron bomb if he wanted to.”
“Until he got into trouble and was stripped of all his powers. The CPIB put him under surveillance. He had no way of securing those drugs on his own without being found out.”
“So you think I got them for him? Why would I do that? What, like euthanasia?”
“To inherit his vast estate.” The inspector fixes his eyes on Yang’s finely-sculpted features.
Yang shutters his heavy eyelids. “You’re crazy.”
The inspector smiles and puts his arm on Yang’s shoulder. “You know I’m playing the devil’s advocate.” Seeing Yang is neither amused nor upset, he removes his arm. “Do you know who gave him the drugs?”
“If I knew, I would have told the police.”
“Maybe you were angry with the CPIB and wanted to put the blame on them?”
“Have they done something I should be angry about?”
“I’ve heard from your brother about how your father was treated during the interrogation.”
Yang orders another beer. He drinks like someone who has fallen out with life. He peers at the yellow fizzy liquid between his hands. He wonders if the water they poured on his father’s stripped-down body was as cold as his beer. The effect must have been colder, he is sure, under the full blast of the air-conditioner, verbal abuse and undisguised threats from the interrogators.
“I suppose they had to use some measure of psychological pressure,” Yang says, without looking at the inspector.
“Do you know if your father suffered from depression during the interrogation?”
“Most probably.”
“But your father must have had far worse experiences in his younger days.”
Yang remembers his father’s moving rendition of how he had fought the British with the communists both within and outside of jail. His father claimed to have the same commitment of the communists against colonialism but not their zeal to turn the country red. Chow Sze Teck was too pragmatic to think the British would let Singapore fall into the hands of the Malayan Communist Party. With China under Mao and the conflict in Indochina, the domino theory had infected the capitalist West. The Americans were sending bombs to Vietnam, and foreign aid money to Thailand. The least the Brits could do was to hand power over to right-minded people before they left their colonies.
Time did not dull his memory. Chow had often told his younger son how he had met Lim Min Tong and the other freedom fighters when he joined the bus workers’ union as its executive secretary. His Chinese education and several years as a factory supervisor made him a suitable union stalwart. Under the tutelage of Lim, the “boycott Britain” catchcry kindled a flame in Chow’s youthful heart. In his old age, Chow would allude to Lim as his mentor, and Yang would detect inconsolable regret in his father’s reminiscence of Lim’s untimely demise.
“Your dossier on my father must have been quite thick.” Yang’s eyes begin to glaze over from the effects of the alcohol.
“The police could track his every movement but not what was going on in his mind.”
Yang’s thoughts drift back to the past. How could an eight-year-old boy understand what was going on then? Pa was involved in some anti-colonial agitation in 1957. All the unions rallied round Lim Min Tong to demand an immediate end to British occupation. Workers, students, trishaw riders and passers-by demonstrated at the Padang in front of City Hall. As the crowd continued to swell in numbers and temper, police vans and army trucks surrounded the cricket ground. A churning, writhing mass of people locked arms and shouted, “Down with British imperialism!” The secret police in plain clothes identified and targeted the union leaders, including Pa. They swooped down on the organisers in the front line, while their truncheon-wielding troops forced back the surging masses. Lim Min Tong and Pa, among many others, were handcuffed and frog-marched to black, window-grilled prison trucks parked on the edge of the Padang. Pa and his comrades were to remain in detention for the next two years.
Yang drains his third Carlsberg. “He was a committed politician.”
“Who?” The inspector seems swept away by his own stream of consciousness.
“I thought we were talking about my father?”
“Yes, of course. Did you see him as a deserter later?”
“People are allowed to change.”
Pa often talked in spectacular detail about his days in prison, how that had drummed up even more support from the people, and how it had shown up the British badly. Don’t know why, thinks Yang, but our forefather from the Qing Dynasty often creeps up in my mind even when I’m not dreaming. Is he trying to tell me something? Blasted, whatever it is, there’s nothing I can do to change anything.
While the martyrs tallied their days on the prison walls, his father had told him, Edward Wee jostled for power against rival parties as rumours of an imminent British withdrawal fil
led the air. Wee jumped on the anti-colonial bandwagon and allied himself with his jailed party members. The middle-class Liberal Party accused Edward Wee of sleeping with the enemy, and bringing chaos to the country. Of course the first half of the allegation was half true. Edward Wee knew too well that Lim Min Tong, with his left-leaning mass support, was his trump card as well as his Achilles heel. In his selective amnesia, Pa never mentioned this but any halfwit could tell that Edward Wee found his strongest ally in Pa, whom he knew to be the most malleable of his party colleagues. He got Pa to talk to Lim, since they both shared a cell. Pa told Lim that, to give the British no pretext for another clampdown on the party when the time came for self-government, they had to run on a non-communist platform.
“He was a silly bugger.” Yang waves to the bartender and orders a Campari and gin.
The inspector draws closer to Yang. “Because?”
“Because.”
To convince their colonial master that they were not consorting with the communists, the wily old fox got Pa to inveigle Lim to sign an undertaking that he would renounce violence as a means to achieve independence, thus implicating Lim of complicity in violent acts. And so it was that in 1959, Edward Wee, on the back of blue-collared votes and hobnobbing with the old chappies, led his party to electoral victory. He was to run the country for the next three decades with Pa as his useful idiot. I had always seen Wee as black and Pa as white, thinks Yang, but that divide has been blurred over the years. Holy blasted Christ, who am I to judge when Pa had been blackened in order to keep me clean? I often worried about the money I received in London from him, but I wasn’t worried enough to reject it. Do I have a right to be outraged now?
“This is how they reward their lap dogs.”
“Do you think your father killed himself in a hara-kiri state of mind?”
The buzzing of whatever three beers, and a Bailey’s Irish cream and Campari and gin add up to reach a crescendo in his head. How can anyone investigate the state of a man’s soul? The day before his death, Pa had talked about the ghosts of the past catching up with him. Yang had thought then that he was talking about his days working with the communists. But maybe he was talking of their opium-addicted great-great-grandfather. Pa had said their Qing ancestor had died under mysterious circumstances. Having amassed a great amount of gold and silver from officialdom, he had three wives and as many concubines. One wintry morning, the third wife, whom he had spent the night with, woke up to find his body blue and cold next to her. No wounds were found on the body. The old bugger must have died of a heart attack, probably triggered by sexual exertion. But to protect the dignity of their own kind, the court found the third wife guilty of murder and promptly executed the unlucky woman. Though Pa had never met his great-grandfather, he had heard the tale from his own father and believed it to be true. And he saw the Qing ghost coming to take him back for muddying their good name.
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