Kampong Spirit

by Josephine Chia

  My aunt and uncle had two daughters, Mary, who was the same age as me, and her sister, Janet, who was three years younger; and the youngest was a boy. As Mary and I were only months apart, I was constantly compared to her.

  “Look at Mary, she’s so white and pretty. How come you’re so black? So ugly! No one will marry you!” My father said.

  I can recall the young Mary clearly, with her fair skin and up-turned nose, which sniffed at conditions in our kampong when she was forced to visit at Chinese New Year. She and Janet would be in beautiful Metro-bought dresses. Metro was our local department store in the High Street, but my family could not afford any items from there. My cousins wore shiny black patent shoes and lacy socks. They were so conscious of catching something that they refused to take their shoes off. Instead they walked into our attap-hut with their shoes on. It was taboo on normal days to wear shoes in the house, and it was worse on Chinese New Year Day. But despite their father’s cajoling, they refused to take their shoes off. My aunt never visited us as she too could not bear to visit our village. I knew that my mother was pained by her attitude.

  “I’ve got some money from chap ji ki,” Mak said. Like most women in the village, she indulged in a bit of gambling with the prospect of winning a windfall. The harmless gambling gave hope when circumstances were dire. The other money-accruing device that villagers indulged in was their contribution to tontine, or senoman in Malay. The latter was a kind of communal saving scheme, each person in the scheme taking turns to collect the entire pool of money when their need was paramount.

  “We’ll do something nice to your hair, shall we? Wouldn’t it be good for your cousins to see we can afford to have your hair permed?”

  Maybe she was also trying to make amends for cutting off my long, beautiful hair. Though this was a new technology, permanent waves were becoming fashionable. European women magazines featured beautiful ladies with curly hair, some even blonde or brunette. Black and white films, with a cute little American called Shirley Temple who had dimples and gorgeous ringlets, were popular. All the village kids, myself included, could not wait for the Film-Man to bring us a Shirley Temple film. He would screen it outdoors whilst we sat on make-shift wooden benches. Every little girl wanted to have Shirley Temple’s dimples and soft curls. Little girls believed that they could get dimples if they stuck their finger into their cheeks. So you could spy children in the village spending hours poking their fingers into their cheeks! I was lucky to be born with dimples in both cheeks, but my hair was straight and rigid. As it happened, a salon had opened just on the outskirts of Kampong Potong Pasir. Mak herself always had her hair long and straight, tied up in a bun like most Peranakan and Malay women. But she wanted me to be modern. Like many mothers, she liked to treat me like her doll. I was her eldest living daughter, her other daughters had died before I was born. My sister, who was two years younger than me could not have her hair waved yet. I thought of myself looking pretty like Shirley Temple and I was excited by Mak’s suggestion.

  The acrid smell of ammonia hit me as we entered the small salon. There were tall mirrors on one side of the room and women sitting in chairs, wrapped in black capes. There were posters of the beautiful Chinese actresses Lin Dai and Huang Li Li, their complexions as white as porcelain, considered by the Chinese to be the epitome of beauty. That was why I was always considered ugly as I was too black. Mak spoke to the hairdresser, her voice low and sweet as it always was.

  “I’ll be back later to pick you up,” she said to me reassuringly.

  I was made to sit on a high stool, my legs dangling off the floor.

  The hairdresser talked above my head to the other ladies as she worked with my short hair, soaking it with the permanent wave lotion. It smelled foul and I nearly retched. It was worse than the kerosene Mak had used. I was beginning to regret having my hair permed. To console myself, I made myself think of sweet Shirley Temple and how I was going to look like her. The hairdresser took each section of my hair and curled it round a metal rod which was attached to a wire. By the time she was finished, I was like Medusa, snakes of electrical cable emerging from my head. The weight of it was immeasurable. It made my neck ache and gave me a severe headache. To my horror, the hairdresser switched on the power and the rods grew hotter and hotter – my face felt like it was slowly being cooked. The heat burned through my scalp. This was what it would have felt like if someone had indeed thrown a lighted match my way when my head was doused with kerosene! But it was not the lice which were roasting, it was me! I hugged myself so as not to cry.

  It was a relief when the power was finally turned off and the heavy load was taken off my head. When my hair was released from the rods, it sprang up in all directions as if I had been electrified. The hairdresser was definitely a novice at perming hair! My new hairdo was horrible and I hated it. When my mother came back and saw me, all she said was, “Alamak!”

  The hairdresser looked embarrassed. She whispered something to my mother. But she could not offer any remedies. My hair was so strong that the botched perm stayed petrified till Christmas.

  I sulked as my parents took my sister and me to town to visit my aunt and uncle who lived with Lao Ee, my paternal grandmother. I couldn’t understand why she was addressed in the Teochew term of Old Aunt from the maternal side of the family, but she was worth visiting. Plus the other pleasure I got from visiting them was that I could use their toilet. Even at that age, I had the sheer tenacity and capacity of saving my bowel movement till I got to their flat – which was quite a feat! But I already suffered a severe identity crisis whenever we met my cousins because everyone said how pretty cousin Mary was because she was so white, and I was so ugly because I was so black. Apparently the Chinese have no word for brown or tanned! Now I had to meet them with my hair looking like I had stuck my head in an oven!

  “Oh rambut pendek! Oh short hair. New hairdo, huh?” Lao Ee said kindly.

  Grandmother was always sweet and gentle. She often sneaked a few cents to me when no one was looking. She kept her clothes in moth-balls to protect them, so when Lao Ee hugged me, she always smelled of moth-balls or of the Tiger Balm she used. I was always curious about the hard wooden pillow which she used to rest her head on. Grandmother wore the kebaya panjang like most Peranakan women her age. The kebaya was longer, hence its name, panjang, and was much looser and more comfortable than the short kebaya, so that a less-than-perfect figure could be tastefully disguised. Once her sanggul or chignon was thick and black; and on festive occasions, she would decorate it with ornate hairpins, or chochok sanggul in our language. But these days her small and thin sanggul was a sad reminder of her advanced years. Lao Ee did not make any negative comment about my hair.

  But I was so conscious of my botched perm. I did not want to be seen, so I hid behind my mother’s sarong. I wanted the floor to open and swallow me whole. I’d rather be anywhere than at my cousins’ home. I hung my head in sheer despair, biting my lower lip so that I would not cry. I had to meet my fate.

  When my young cousins saw me, they laughed hysterically.

  TIK-TOK, TIK-TOK. The Mee Man clacked his bamboo clappers together loudly. The sound carried in the rural quietness of our village and roused us from our midday stupor. When the sun poured down its heat from directly overhead, it produced a somnambulistic effect on all of us. Even the chickens stopped their relentless scratching of the sand to dig up earthworms. But at the sound of the wooden clackers, people and domestic animals became alert, heads turned towards the sound, and the dogs’ ears went up like periscopes.

  Generally we hardly heard any mechanical noise, as there was no electricity in Kampong Potong Pasir that would bring in the sound of lawnmowers or refrigerators. Even the drone of motorcars was a rarity, since transport was provided by bicycles, trishaws or bullock carts. But we would get an occasional burst of music from battery radios and the Rediffusion, a cable network that was transmitted via batteries and wires. In the mornings, we awakened to birds singing, cocks c
rowing, dogs barking, whilst men coughed and spat to clear their throats. The sound we heard in the village just as the sun was setting was the sound of the chattering starlings as they flew back to the trees to roost. Hens and ducks would cluck and quack as they settled into the beds of straw in their wooden coops. As darkness fell, there would be sounds of villagers pumping up their hurricane lamps, or the hissing sound of carbide lamps. There was also the clatter of enamel dishes as dinner was served on concrete floors as few villagers owned dining tables. These sounds stay etched in the folds of my memory. But the one sound that remains uppermost in my memory is the sound of the clacking of the noodle-man’s bamboo clackers.

  Tik-Tok, Tik-Tok. The sound was a clarion call of hope for the hungry, for we knew that Ah Seng’s noodles were the best. Ah Seng, dressed in his singlet and shorts, peddled his noodles in a tricycle cart, which was loaded with a boiling cauldron of soup. In the cart were Chinese white bowls with their dark blue design, chopsticks and a variety of noodles with ingredients like pork slices and fish cakes. He even carried several low wooden stools so that his customers could sit by his travelling stall. When business was good, he might give a young child the job of clapping the bamboo clappers to herald his coming. Its clapping was associated with delicious food and roused people from inertia and whetted their appetites. The child also helped him retrieve his noodle-bowls after customers had finished their meal. There was no talk of child labour or exploitation during those years; if parents could not afford to send their child to school, it meant the child had to work for a living.

  “Mee Tng, ten cents! Tah Mee, fifteen cents!” he called out in Teochew.

  Dried noodles cost an extra five cents due to the extra chilli sambal paste and tomato sauce that was used. The taste and success of a Mee Pok Tah hinges largely on the quality of this sauce. Ah Seng’s Mee Pok Tah, Dried Wheat Noodles, were renowned. It was rumoured that as a young boy himself, he had clapped bamboo clackers for Tang Joon Teo, founder of Lau Dai Hua Noodles and had picked up the secrets of Mr Tang’s Teochew Minced Pork Mee Pok Tah. Mr Tang had plied his trade at the Hill Street hawker centre. In those days, the centre was simply a collection of itinerant hawkers who came together with their mobile stalls. They were not housed in any building and they all sat outdoors. Hill Street was not far from the Singapore River, so the food centre had the benefit of a riverside ambience. A story that went round was that Mr Tang was saved by the popularity of his noodles. Apparently during the Japanese occupation, many of Mr Tang’s customers were Japanese officers who loved his noodles. Mr Tang had been randomly selected to be executed by the Kempetai, the Japanese Military Police. Luckily before the execution could take place, one of the officers who patronised his stall recognised him and managed to get a reprieve for him.

  Ah Seng parked his cart under the shade of a sprawling banyan tree so that his customers were out of the glare and burn of the tropical sun.

  Like Pavlov’s dog, conditioned to react to a bell ringing, I salivated every time I heard the tik-tok, tik-tok. Chinese village children, as well as Peranakan ones like myself, ran out of our houses just to see him. Eyes opened wide at the sight of steam rising from his aluminium cauldron. Our lips smacked at its delicious aroma of stewed pork bones. The Malay children would watch from afar; for them, the smell of pork was anathema. Most times my brothers and I watched with envy as customers lined up to be served, our stomachs gurgling and grumbling.

  “Not today. Maybe tomorrow,” Mak said, regret in her voice.

  Then I would stick my thumb in my mouth and suck on it instead.

  The sights and sounds of a rural community certainly differed from those of a city. Though our kampong was hardly more than ten miles away from High Street, which was the heart of town, we were an emotional ocean apart. The High Street was the first proper road in Singapore, having been the first to be sealed with tarmac. In 1821, the British cleared the thick undergrowth from the foothills of Fort Canning right down to the sea, which used to be on the edge of the Singapore Cricket Club until the land reclamation of 1890. The seafront promenade called the Esplanade was created with Victorian-style concrete balustrades similar to those found in the seaside town of Brighton in East Sussex, England; except that here the walk-way was lined with fan-palm trees which swayed languidly in the incoming sea-breeze. The main feature of the Esplanade Park was a beautiful fountain, its water cascading down and cooling those standing around it. The promenade was where the British and locals loved to walk in the balmy evenings to take in the sea air. In Malay, we called this makan angin, literally to eat (the) wind. When Queen Elizabeth ascended the British throne in 1953, it was renamed Queen Elizabeth Walk in her honour.

  The High Street was the shopping paradise for the rich. It was the trading ground for Northern Indian settlers who ran their retail businesses and small department stores in the two-storey shophouses, supplying French lace to the expatriates, as well as clothes, fabrics and jewellery. The Europeans could have their suits and dresses tailored in silk and linen. Of course there was the Metro, a local department store. Across the Singapore River at Raffles Place was Robinson’s, a luxury department store which first opened its doors in 1858.

  “I’ll treat you to a trip to town for your birthday,” my father said to Mak.

  My mother’s birthday, like mine, was in March. Hers was on the 3rd and mine was on the 18th. Mak was about to turn forty-one, yet she looked as slim and beautiful as ever, always elegant in her sarong kebaya. It was rare for Ah Tetia to make any romantic gestures, so when he did, it meant he was amorous. There were only two beds in our attap-hut, one which he slept in with my elder brothers and the other was for my mother, who slept with us girls. How he managed to assuage his desire thereby spawning more children was a mystery to me. (Two sisters and one brother were born after me.)

  “Oh, that will be so lovely! Can I bring Ah Phine? It’s also going to be her birthday.”

  “Ya, why not? She has brought me good luck. I had a pay rise the day she was born and we were able to move from that wretched hut to this place. At least we don’t have to smell the jambans anymore.”

  My parents’ first home in Kampong Potong Pasir was a small wooden cubicle with a mud-packed floor. They slept on a platform bed with the boys. The worst thing was its location right in front of the communal outhouses. They could not escape the sickening stench when the buckets filled up and the wind blew in their direction. Having meals when the smell was strong made it hard for them to swallow their food. But we still used the same outhouses, as they were the only ones available in the village, just two cubicles for so many in the village! They were the bane of my young life. I loathed their vile odour. Mosquitoes, cockroaches, lizards, centipedes and rats treated the place as their food source and recreational ground. So, when I had to answer the call of nature, I trembled with fear that the cockroaches might run over my feet or that the rats might nip my exposed bare bottom. These childhood fears became my nightmares. My mother was very understanding and would always wait for me outside the wooden cubicles in case I needed her. At night, she permitted me to use the chamber-pot so that I did not have to face the black, bristly rats in the dark.

  “One day all this will pass,” she tried to assure me.

  Her optimism about a better existence was my beacon of hope.

  “The boys can look after each other,” my father said. “You can leave Agatha with the neighbour. We’ll walk down the High Street for you to look into the shops, maybe even Robinson’s. Then we’ll walk down the Esplanade and eat satay on Beach Road.”

  Agatha was three; two years younger than I was.

  I was so excited. Going into town was very special indeed. For us it was almost like going to a foreign country. Window-shopping was the best we could afford.

  Watching my mother getting ready to go on an outing was a treat in itself. She selected a different kind of kebaya than the type she wore at home to do housework, normally fastened with safety pins. She chose one made of
voile with pretty peonies and a phoenix that she had embroidered by hand. The material was see-through, so she wore a cotton chemise underneath. This was the main difference between a Peranakan kebaya and a Malay one. The Malays tended to match their kebaya in the same batik material as their sarong. Also the front panels of their kebaya were cut horizontally across the hip rather than tapered like the Peranakan kebaya.

  Kebayas originated as an Arabic long tunic then evolved into its present shape and length, moulding itself around the curves of the female body. The Peranakans’ design was influenced by the Dutch in Malacca and Indonesia who added lace and embroidery to the kebaya. Dutch women had adapted their own long blouse to make it into an embroidered cotton tunic to suit the sweltering tropical climate of South East Asia. Malacca was a sea-port, which was an important stopover from ships from the West. The West also came to the East for tea, opium and spices like nutmeg and cloves. So it was inevitable that the Western powers fought to dominate it and to control the Straits of Malacca. First it was the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the British. The Dutch held control in Malacca for one hundred and eighty four years, from 1641 to 1825.