Kampong Spirit

by Josephine Chia

  It was through schools like those in our village that the communists spelled out their mission to overthrow the Colonial government. In our innocence, the village children and I spied on the school. The lessons were carried out in a sing-song manner with lots of rote learning, where the pupils repeated again and again what the teacher taught. If the teacher was male, he’d wear a short-sleeved white shirt with navy-blue trousers. If the teacher was female, she’d wear a cheongsam, and her face was severely framed with a straight page-boy haircut.

  “Why fight for them?” the communists had mooted to impressionable teenagers who were on the cusp of being drafted into National Service the previous year. “Where were they in our country’s time of need? They deserted us and let the Japanese walk in. Isn’t it time that we threw the British out?”

  But of course, I was too little to know anything of the social unrest or political stirrings. All I knew was, I was not comfortable with the strange-sounding Mandarin language. I was comfortable with Malay and our Baba patois, which was Malay mixed or champur with Hokkien and Teochew. Like all children, my only concern was for my own welfare in my own little world.

  Despite the fact that my family had difficulty getting our quota of food and vitamins for each day, I had a luxuriant head of hair like my mother. But unlike my mother’s, mine was so straight it sprung out from my head like a stiff broomstick, the kind of broomstick which we used to make from the spine of coconut leaves, called sapu lidi. We collected bunches of coconut leaves, then shaved the green parts of the leaf until only the spine remained. The spines were dried in the sun until they browned, when we tied them together with jute strings to make a broom. It was perfect for sweeping up sandy yards, like those at the back of our attap house where banana, papaya and angsana trees grew. But when my hair grew long, it softened and when plaited, it was manageable. There was so much of it, hanging like a black curtain down my back and I became so proud of it. But Pride goeth before a fall. I am sure you have heard the saying. It was my first big lesson in life.

  One of my most pleasurable memories is of my mother combing my long hair. When the sun beat down mercilessly, our zinc roofed kitchen became a sweltering oven, so we would cool ourselves by sitting on the threshold of our house trying to catch the breeze that passed. I usually sat in the cradle of her knees and she would run a multi-toothed comb again and again through my hair till it shone. The lorongs or passages between the rows of houses were so narrow that if you stretched your legs out, you could touch the legs of the neighbours sitting opposite on their threshold.

  “Ei Nonya,” Mak Ahyee, our neighbour asked. She like everyone in the village, addressed my mother with the Peranakan term for a lady, nonya. “What oil do you use for her hair?”

  “Coconut milk. Freshly squeezed from grated coconut,” Mak said. “I put it on her head and allow it to soak through into the hair for an hour to condition it.”

  “So beautiful. So beautiful!”

  Mak deftly plaited my hair into two thick plaits. And then I went off to play with the rest of the kampong children. We were an assortment of Malay, Indian, Punjabi, Eurasian and Chinese young people of various ages. Many of the children were not educated, so our common language was Malay.

  “Hari ini kita main chapteh. Today we’ll play chapteh,” Abu said. He was the elder bother of my friend, Fatima. He was only twelve but always styled himself the leader. If my big brothers were at home, they took the part. But Abu had a certain je ne sais quoi that made him a natural leader.

  Some people could afford store-bought chaptehs with a thick rubber base and plumes of colourful feathers. But we hardly ever bought toys from stores. If we were lucky, the English families living at the top of the hill at Atas Bukit (literally meaning on-top-of-hill) would throw out their children’s unwanted toys. Sometimes they were broken, other times, just a little bit damaged and if we were extremely lucky, only because they were old. Their rubbish bins became our treasure troves. Sometimes we even salvaged uneaten food from them: a half-eaten banana or apple, left-over cake, boiled sweets which had melted into their wrappers. But English children did not play chapteh. So we had to learn to make our own. With a flourish, Abu produced one that he had made.

  “Wah!!!” All the children exclaimed at its magnificence.

  He had cut rubber circles from disused car-tyres and nailed them together. On the spikes of the nails, he had impaled several feathers. The feathers looked fresh, as if they had just been plucked recently from a chicken or duck, and perhaps one from a mynah bird. Abu was not opposed to pursuing a chicken to pluck its feathers. I could imagine him chasing the distraught chicken as it clucked and raced around in mindless circles out of sheer panic. Round the base of the quills, he had strapped jute string to hold everything together.

  “The rule is,” he pronounced authoritatively. “You can only kick it with the sole of your foot. Otherwise you are out! The person who keeps it in the air longest with the most number of kicks wins.”

  “Can I use my left foot?” One of the other boys asked.

  Village children hardly ever wore any footwear. If we had to visit the filthy outhouses, we would put on our wooden clogs, called char kiak in Hokkien, terompah in Malay. They were the must-have items in kampongs. The stocky char kiaks were usually made with an inch or more thickness, so you felt taller when you were wearing them. It was the platform footwear of the fifties. They were very functional, as they served the purpose of keeping feet dry and clean when traversing puddles and fly-riddled cow-pats, which were numerous in the villages. There was a char kiak shop in our village where the craftsmen shaved wooden blocks by hand to fashion them into clogs. If you passed the shop, you could smell the aromatic smell of fresh wood and see wood shavings on the dirt floor, plus stacks of unvarnished clogs waiting to be painted. Char kiaks came in bright colours like red and yellow, with matching coloured plastic straps. When you walked in them on a cement or concrete street or floor, the clogs made a characteristic sound, clok, clok clok; hence its English onomatopoeic name. You could never creep up on someone undetected! When rubber flip-flops came into fashion, people opted for them because they were less cumbersome and less noisy.

  “Left foot. Right foot. I don’t care. As long as it’s your tapak kaki. The sole of your foot.” Abu emphasised.

  I was one of the few girls who joined in games with the boys. I was a boy at heart, even at that young age, wanting to do adventurous things, wanting not to be restricted to activities merely of my gender. Because I was so little, they humoured me and allowed me to play. But I kicked up sand and dust and even more dust while they laughed at my futile attempts.

  But I enjoyed playing with the girls too. Although Fatima and I got on well, my best friend was really Parvathi, an Indian girl three years older than myself. We loved masak-masak – the word literally meant cooking but it was a game of make-believe, pretending that we were grown-up women making a home, cooking, having babies. But sadly, Parvathi never made it to womanhood, nor had a real baby. I have told her story, which contains a vital lesson, in the chapter “Dying to be Free.”

  Our pretend-babies were fashioned out of old rags or straw. Some of our babies were handicapped, lacking an eye or a limb; they were the dolls we rescued from the bins at Atas Bukit. But we took care of them; we bathed, dressed and fed them. We were training to be real mothers, never rejecting our children no matter what condition they were in. Engrossed in making cakes from mud and drinks from drain-water, our clothes became dirty, our hair and faces matted with dirt. Sometimes in digging around in the sand, we encountered squiggly earth-worms and we squealed in fright. The boys were amused but usually took these from us to use them as bait to catch fish or belot, eels, in the river or mud-banks. The main river that ran through Kampong Potong Pasir – the Kallang River. – used to be much broader than it is today, with water swelling during the monsoon periods, flooding its banks. Eels made their homes in its moist banks. Since many kampong folk could not afford to buy food, th
ey had to find it in the countryside: eels, fish from the river, birds’ eggs, ubi kayu or tapioca and coconut that grew in the wilderness.

  A good Peranakan cook like my mother could make delicious meals out of most things. Peranakan girls were taught to cook at an early age. Mak’s best eel dish was cooked in rempah, a rich but dry curry paste. She would cut the eel into slices, marinate them with turmeric and chilli powder, then fry each piece. This took away the sliminess that was often associated with fresh eels. Then she pounded fresh chillies, onions, garlic, ginger, coriander and cumin seeds in her batu lesong or rolled them on her granite batu gilling to make them into a thick paste. She would sauté the curry paste in the kwali over the coal fire till the fragrance filled the air and made our mouths water. She’d squeeze milk out of a coconut but used only the first press called pati-santan and added this to the thick curry. Then she’d slip the cooked eels into this sauce and allow the sauce to thicken and coat the eel slices. Eaten with boiled rice, this was absolutely delicious and was a feast for us!

  Of course, playing in the sand, we picked up germs. And other things too. But we were never very concerned about things like that. Well, I was not concerned. Not until my scalp started to itch. I scratched and scratched and scratched.

  “Stop scratching your head. All your hair will fall out!” Mak admonished.

  But I did not stop. The itching became so intense, I started to cry.

  “Come here!” She said. “Let me look.”

  She let out a yelp.

  “Kutu! Kutu!” She shouted in horror. “Lice! Lice! My God, you’re infested!”

  So she waged war on them. She parted each section of my hair, ferreted out the little mites and squeezed them between her thumb and finger. Each louse departed its mortal life with an explosion of pungent odour. The smell made me want to throw up so I howled some more. Serve me right for being so proud of my beautiful hair!

  We could not afford posh things like Palmolive soap and shampoos then, though we dreamed of their creamy softness when we looked at advertisements in posters and women’s magazines like Her World. But they were beyond our reach. We had to wash our hair and our body with the same Sunlight cake soap that Mak used for washing the clothes. For more stubborn stains, she used a black cake of carbolic soap that smelled foul. She dragged me to our communal bathroom, a rectangular wooden wall with a concrete floor that surrounded a well, the top open to the sky. It never made sense to me to bathe on rainy days when it would do just as well to stand in the rain outside.

  “Sit!” She ordered.

  Mak drew up several buckets of water, careful not to draw up the two catfish that were put down the well to eat up mosquitoes. Fortunately, due to the recent rain, the water was clear. During the dry months, one would draw up thick muddy water. It was not a joy to bathe during that period. Then we would make the trek to a local spring the kampong folks called Pipe Besar. Mak tipped the water into a baldi, a steel oval-shaped bucket with a ridge underfoot. After wetting my hair, she scrubbed and scrubbed my head with the carbolic soap. It hurt.

  “Ow! Ow! Ow!” I went.

  “Keep still! Would you rather keep all these lice in your hair?”

  But even after all her strenuous efforts, the lice still proliferated.

  “Okay no choice now,” Mak said. “It’s the kerosene treatment for you.”

  “Oh, no Mak, please, no!”

  I had seen Mak Ah Yee treat her daughter Ah Yee with the kerosene treatment, and it was awful. The whole scalp was doused with kerosene. It was obviously a folk remedy that must have produced the desired results.

  My mother was a determined lady.

  Kerosene came in a rectangular metal container and it was used to fuel kerosene stoves, although Mak still preferred to cook on her clay stove with coals. When Mak poured some into an enamel mug, its fumes rose to my nostrils. I nearly retched. My mother forced me to sit still and placed a towel around my shoulders. You know what it is like when someone forces something on you, telling you that it is for your own good though you hate every minute of it. That was what it was like, me sitting with my head bowed as she rinsed my whole head of hair with the stuff. It felt yucky and it stank. Where I had scratched my scalp previously, the kerosene made the scalp sting.

  “Sit there for an hour or so,” she said. “The kerosene should murder the lice!”

  I was utterly miserable.

  Even at that tender age, I had a wild imagination. What if someone threw a lighted match in my direction? My head could be set alight like Moses’ burning bush! No divine revelation there, or the voice of God, just me screaming in sheer agony. That would make my mother feel sorry for me. It would certainly roast the little buggers in my hair!

  But my misery was nothing compared to that of families caught in the strikes and riots. Altogether there were 275 strikes in 1955. Every now and again, adults would shout out warnings and the children were ushered indoors in haste. Our wooden windows would be shuttered and doors urgently bolted. We cowered behind our wooden walls and listened to the stampede of rushing feet running past our doors. Trouble-makers and rioters often sought refuge in kampongs because of the maze of lorongs that tended to confuse the uninitiated, like the English policemen. In 1950, when the Maria Hertogh affair caused the Muslims to retaliate against the colonial government, many of the rioters sought refuge in the kampongs. More often than not, the colonial police were reluctant to enter local villages because the rioters or trouble-makers often had their supporters lying in wait in the kampongs. The sympathisers would stand in menacing groups, wielding agrarian weapons of destruction like parangs (machete-looking knives) and cangkuls (hoes). Kampong Tai Seng, near Paya Lebar, was notorious for harbouring rioters, hardened criminals and gangsters.

  My own black day came when my mother decided to cut off my long hair. I was too young to appreciate the blackness of what had just taken place in the country, though I was not too young to imbibe the sense of tension that arose from it. The Straits Times reported it for weeks. Adults in our village talked about it for days on end, clustering in the narrow lorongs or under the spread of angsana trees. We followed bus-driver Peng An’s progress in hospital and rejoiced with Ah Moey when her husband finally came home, even though on crutches, his head bandaged. Ah Moey had thought he would not live. But my childish focus did not extend further than myself.

  Mak came toward me like a malevolent creature with her scissors.

  “It’s for your own good,” she said, as I tried to escape her. “Less hair means less kutu!”

  As she snipped, my long hair spiralled downwards to our cement floor. I wept. When I looked in the mirror afterwards and saw my mutilated hair, I howled.

  “You’re so wicked! Wicked! Wicked! Wicked!”

  It is the only recollection I have of saying something nasty to my mother.

  Normally if we said anything rude or nasty, we would get the sumbat sambal belachan treatment. It was a torture worse than hell for us kids. The intense heat and sting of the chilli-padi, the hottest chilli in South East Asia, would make you leap up and down like a crazed monkey. That’s why Peranakans have a saying, macham monyet kena sambal belachan, like a monkey who had eaten prawn-chilli paste. The trouble was that drinking gallons of cold water only made the agony worse! Mak would pound her sambal belachan, or shrimp paste, with hot chilli-padi, and sumbat or stuff it into our mouths so we would never utter any bad words again. The rotan, the cane, was not the only way our parents disciplined us! But this time, she was kinder. She must have felt sorry for my loss as well, because she tried to appease me. She cooked her best bubor kachang, mung beans in coconut milk with pandan leaves. Its fragrant wafting aroma made me forget my distress. It was easy to tempt me.

  On August 20, excitement was in the air.

  “Chepat! Chepat! Come quick!” Abu called out. “Kapal Terbang! Aeroplane!”

  We heard it too, the throbbing engine of the aeroplane flying overhead – as rare a sound and sight as a motor-car c
oming into our village. Children and adults raced out into the open yard to look overhead.

  “It’s going to the new airport at Paya Lebar,” my father, Ah Tetia, said with authority. “The Secretary of State for Colonies, Mr Alan Lennox-Boyd, is officiating at the opening.”

  My father was a bill-collector with a British firm, thus he spoke some English and he pronounced the English name with aplomb. The other villagers looked up at him in awe.

  The Malay word paya meant swamp, and lebar meant wide. Paya Lebar was on the Eastern side of the island and was connected to our village by the Kallang River. My father had taken me past a swamp at Toa Payoh, the Hokkien name meaning the same as Paya Lebar in Malay. I recall the swamp’s sinister look, acres of thick, dark mud, surrounded by mangrove trees with their aerial roots, which in the half-light looked like monsters stretching out arms and long fingers. Deep-throated frogs burped sonorously across the eerie landscape. To build the new airport to replace Kallang Airport, the villages surrounding the swamp were relocated to the North of the island. As the villagers were mostly Chinese who raised pigs that were taboo to Malays, those villages were called Chinese Kampongs.

  “If you are good,” Ah Tetia said to me. “I will take you to the airport to see the new passenger terminal.”

  Indeed, he did fulfil his promise. I had such complex and mixed feelings about my father. He could be so volatile and bad-tempered. Yet I have stored wonderful memories of his tenderness.

  That same year, my father’s fourth younger brother and his wife, who lived in Petain Road near the city, invited us to their home for Christmas. Fourth Uncle had to be addressed as Si Chik, and Fourth Aunty had to be called Si Sim. This manner of calling was very precise, so even a stranger could decipher the exact relationship of the person being addressed to the person making the address, which side of the family the uncle and aunt were from and which rung they occupied in the family; not like the modern Uncle and Aunty people use these days. In my perception, Si Chik and Si Sim were rich, as they lived in the city in an apartment block, which had running water and electricity. It was a treat to visit them as we could use their toilet, which was clean and not smelly, unlike our jambans or outhouses. Plus it had a flush system. It seemed like magic to me that when you pulled a chain, water sluiced out to wash your mess away. To wipe their bottoms, they had a roll of loo-paper, white, soft and clean, compared to the squares of newspaper we had to use. When caught in the rain whilst queuing to use our outhouses, our newspaper squares would get soggy and when we wiped our bottoms, the newsprint would come off and smear our bottoms with black ink!