Kampong Spirit

by Josephine Chia

  “Sure got chance one, this time,” Salleh said with enthusiasm. “He’s so determined and has trained so hard...”

  “He’s definitely going for gold...” Rajah said.

  I was going for gold too in a different way. I was going to school! It was so precious I could hardly believe it was coming true.

  My mother, who had no education and no ability to read English signs, asked many schools to take me in mid-term. She was refused by several convent schools. Eventually she met a kind principal of a Government School, who admitted me for the second term of the academic year. She was Miss De Souza of Cedar Girls Primary School, whom I considered to be my first guardian angel, for giving me a start to a new life.)

  Cedar School was beyond the scenic Alkaff Gardens in Sennett Estate, a smart housing development across the road from our village. Upper Serangoon Road, a tarmac road compared to the sandy one in our village, divided us like a boundary between the poor and rich; our village was a shantytown of wooden huts with attap roofs, whilst the houses in Sennett Estate were made of bricks and concrete and had flush toilets and electricity. The disparity was great.

  “We have to go to Bras Basah Road to buy books for you,” Mak said.

  Two years previously, my father had taken my mother and me out for our joint birthday treat in town, since my mother and I shared the same month for our birthdays. I remembered the name Bras Basah Road because Ah Tetia had told me the story of how it had got its name. (See Chapter on Clarion Call of Hope). The words were supposedly a corruption of the Malay words, beras basah, wet rice. Beras was uncooked rice grains. As rice was a staple food in the region, the indigenous Malays had several words for rice; padi meaning rice on stalks in the field, nasi meaning cooked rice, nasi bubur meaning rice cooked into a gruel.

  The wooden shophouses along Bras Basah road were a contrast to the concrete magnificence of the curved white facade of St. Joseph’s Institution. It was a Catholic school for boys and it looked rather posh. The school faced the sprawling grounds of The Good Shepherd, the largest Roman Catholic cathedral in Singapore. The cathedral had a splendid spire and was a beautiful building styled after one of the churches in London, the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. It was hard to picture The Good Shepherd in its original state in 1832 when it had been made of wood and had an attap roof, like our kampong houses.

  On the way to town, the skies had opened up and now the rain was lashing us from all sides as we disembarked from the Singapore Traction Company (STC) bus. Luckily my mother had the foresight to bring an umbrella, and we hugged closely underneath the waxed-paper umbrella with its wooden spokes, as we dashed to the five-foot-way for respite. Some people credited modern Singapore’s British founder, Sir Stamford Raffles, with the idea of creating these open corridors under the first floor of a building to shield people from the tropical sun and the onslaught of heavy rain. Others credited Alexander Laurie Johnston for its design. He had been a prominent merchant who came to Singapore in 1852. Whoever gave birth to the concept, he was ingenious. All newly erected buildings had to provide this mode of shelter. As the width of these passage-ways was approximately five feet, they came to be called five-foot-way, and this came to characterise the architecture of shophouses.

  “Oh, the rain is so heavy!” my mother said. “I hope your father and brothers remember to put out the pails and tins to catch the leaks.”

  When first weaved for our kampong roofs, attap was fresh, newly dried palm fronds. But continual exposure to the hot sun made them dry and brittle. Designed so that the breeze could lift them and let air into the houses to cool them, this very action sometimes caused damage to already brittle leaves. The birds foraged for food too, breaking the dry attap with their weight. As our houses did not have any ceiling, the holes would let the rain fall directly into the houses. As soon as thunder clapped, there was the usual scuttling to collect pails or kerosene tins to put under the gaps in the attap. This was what Mak was referring to.

  “Don’t have much money so must buy second-hand books,” Mak said.

  “It’s okay, Mak. I don’t mind. I don’t mind,” I said, trying to reassure her.

  It was already a miracle to be going to school. I was prepared to put up with the small inconvenience of hand-me-down books which may be somewhat dog-eared, or have doodles and notes squiggled in the margins of their pages, or sentences underlined. Never had I been so filled with utter joy as on that first day of buying books. The shops, manned mostly by Indians, were an Aladdin’s Cave of stationery and magazines; books piled everywhere, on tables and shelves and on the floor. Huge stacks of books towered over me and their smell was so intoxicating; especially the new books which had such a pristine and woody scent. When no one was looking, I fanned the pages of a new book in my face. Its scent became an addiction I never could be weaned from. I was a child, mesmerised, fingering all the different titles and front covers. Some of the books were so old that their pages were yellowed and curled. Pressed amongst some ancient pages were tiny silver-fish, dried and loose. Yet the books had not lost their beauty or allure for me, for within them were worlds I had not fathomed, people I had not met, places I had not been to. My mother was armed with a book-list from the principal that she could not read. Yet she wanted me to be able to read; persevered so that I could read. It was one of her greatest gifts to me.

  “I want you to have a life I could not have,” she said.

  I am eternally indebted.

  Ah Gu, my father’s buddy, with whom he discussed politics, barged into our house unannounced when we were sitting in the kitchen having our dinner. His parents must have been perceptive to name him after a cow, or in his case, a bull.

  “We’ve got it!” He said. “Lim Yew Hock’s delegation to London has been successful. We are getting self-government. I heard it on the news on Rediffusion!”

  “Do you want something to eat?” my father said, with typical Asian politeness but at the same time knowing that another addition to dinner would strain our meagre resources. “So Harold Macmillan had fulfilled his promise.”

  The British Prime Minister had stopped over in Singapore earlier in the year and when questioned on the subject of self-government, he had said, “We will not go back on our word.”

  “No need. No need. I’ve eaten.”

  My father smiled with relief and offered him an F&N Orange drink.

  “Yes,” Ah Gu said. “This is a start. The British will still have control over foreign affairs and defence, but at least we can run our own country. Not quite independence, but not far from it. We will become the State of Singapore and no longer a colony.”

  “Looks like our whole country is going for gold...” Ah Tetia said, using the sporting metaphor.

  There was a renewed air of anticipation in the country. Suddenly there was hope for a different future, one where we were ruled by our own people. Hope was a jewel for the spirit. Without hope, people would give up. In an individual way, weightlifter Tan Howe Liang too had lived in hope. He was prepared to work hard at his sport and was unafraid to dream. Someone once said, “Without dreams, life is a winged bird that cannot fly.” The country was in suspense during the period of the British Empire Games and it rejoiced when Tan Howe Liang finally fulfilled his dream. He came home from the Games with a Gold Medal – the first for Singapore. But he was not ready to rest on his laurels. He was not finished. He was planning to participate in the Olympics in 1960. Singapore too was not finished – it was striving for its own identity and going for gold in its nationhood.

  ONE OF THE most memorable delights of kampong life was its sense of community and friendliness. Neighbours talked to each other, and confided and communicated. And when the need arose, people pulled their weight together, shared and did things together. Like the time when the python reared its ugly head and the villagers got together to capture and kill it. The Malays have a wonderful expression for this heart-warming togetherness – gotong royong; normally translated as mutual assistance. It wa
s a means of helping each other without any ulterior personal motive, but for the good of the community.

  This spirit of togetherness and community was encouraged by the fact that doors in the village were often kept open and people tended to live outdoors, which meant that they knew each other and thus made this attitude possible. There was a kind of mutual trust. Perhaps also, people seemed more laid back in the kampong, not harassed by deadlines and the acquisition of material things. They did not possess the attitude that others should be blamed for their misfortune. Sure, the kampong folks could always do with more money and better living conditions, but they dealt with their deprivations with a kind of nobility and lived each day for the joys that the new day brought.

  “Money is a currency that allows you to buy things,” Mak said. “Having it does not always make you happy. True wealth is when you have equanimity and joy of spirit.”

  I think my mother was a living Buddha, if to be a buddha meant someone who was enlightened and acted with non-attachment. She had gone from the material comfort of her parents’ home in Malacca to the dire circumstances of Kampong Potong Pasir. Yet she performed her every task with quiet dignity, despite its abhorrent nature – emptying out the smelly chamber-pots every morning; clearing the cess-pool of slimy washing-up water; picking up the rats’ droppings from our cement floor or yanking out wriggly worms from her screaming children’s bottoms. Poor diet with little nutritional value and eating almost decomposed food caused intestinal worms to grow in bellies, and kampong children had to cope with the terror and torture of the live worms forcing their way out. This was what we had to live with. It was a fate worse than death to us. I cannot begin to tell you what my own experience was like – its memory is enough to give me the shudders. But we survived.

  Mak never let on to the neighbours that she used to have servants to do everything for her, though her natural grace and refinement must have intimated to everybody that she was not of peasant stock. But she chose me to share her stories with, and somehow I must have stored them in the pages of my memory. (Perhaps it was my destiny to be a writer so that I could put her stories in print for her.) The only time one became aware of the possibility of her having had a better life was when the villagers got together to sing and play music. Her musical education and talents surfaced in those moments, because she had the knack of picking up almost any musical instrument to play with ease and virtuosity. In her father’s grand wood-crafted house in the coastal town of Malacca, she had once played the violin and the piano. I imagined her as she was then, young and beautiful, the violin resting on her slim shoulders, her face tilted in keen concentration as she coaxed the haunting melody from the instrument. But the violin, like the piano, was eventually sold for food.

  “Nonya,” Karim said. “Do you want to try the ukulele today?”

  People addressed Peranakan women as nonya. It had been suggested that the term developed from an old Portuguese word, nhonha which may have been a corruption of the word, senhora, to mean a lady. After all, Malacca was the birthplace of many Peranakans, therefore its culture was inevitably influenced by the Portuguese. They had occupied the city for one hundred and thirty years in the 16th century, and they had left their traces. The Dutch wrested control from them in January 1641 and ruled for the next one hundred and eighty four years. Our popular Peranakan crispy rolled crepe, kuih belanda, translated as Dutch cake, was attributed to the latter’s influence.

  At the day’s end, when house-work and labouring were done, our village folk gathered in the sandy yard to share their day, to talk, tell stories, or sing songs. People had to entertain themselves, as technological advances had yet to reach us. The evening’s activity was a rustic kind of soiree. People sat on straw mats, empty wooden crates, stools, or the horizontal lay of coconut palms. The naked dancing flames from hurricane and carbide lamps lit up the darkened evening, sending all sorts of moving shapes around. Cicadas sang their own song quite audibly and merrily. If rain was in the air, even the deep-throated frogs from the nearby river banks and ponds would contribute to the concert, singing in their baritone. Nature had its own magical symphony. But it was a dry March so no rain was imminent, therefore the frogs were sulky and silent. In the hot months, it was not unusual to come upon someone sleeping outdoors all night on their roped charpoy or straw mat. In the yard, banana and papaya trees stood by like straight-backed sentinels, casting tall shadows.

  Karim was a cheerful and able-bodied young man, who usually initiated the temasya or cultural event. He loved music and used it to escape the dreariness of his occupation, that of clearing the filled-buckets from the jambans, or outhouses. The black oval buckets were positioned under the opening of the wooden platform of the outhouses. Rats, cockroaches, centipedes, worms, flies and mosquitoes swarmed around the open buckets. Karim’s job was to drive the Municipal truck from the sewage centre at Kolam Ayer near Kallang to the villages, to pick up the buckets and swap them with clean and empty ones. People tended to joke about the long vehicle he drove, calling it a limousine due to its many compartments for the buckets.

  “Oi, limousine datang! The limousine is here!” Children called out when he turned up in it.

  There were no such things as rubber gloves in those days, and Karim had to handle the buckets with his bare hands. It was particularly unpleasant for him when the buckets were overflowing and their handles smeared with faeces. After all, Malays like Peranakans eat food with their fingers! What did Karim use at the end of the day to rid himself of the smell and aura of his job? To keep his spirits up, Karim whistled as he worked, as if what he was doing was an agreeable task. Sometimes the stench was so foul, he would tie a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. Kampong folks considered men like him our unsung heroes because without them doing such menial and thankless jobs, our lives in the village would be hell. The simple, normal process of moving one’s bowel would have been torment. People who lived in houses that had flush toilets could simply not comprehend our daily tribulation.

  For someone whose hands handle such despicable matter, Karim’s hands were unusually delicate and graceful, his fingers long and tapered. He could have been destined for better things, but life deprived him of the right opportunities, for he had no schooling. Education was not the privilege of many kampong folks. I was already eight years old and I had only just started school the previous year, after my mother persuaded my father that she would put me through school selling nonya kuih, Peranakan cakes, and nasi lemak.

  In the kampongs, survival was more important than education. There was hardly enough money to eat, let alone to be schooled. So there were many like Karim, relegated to jobs beneath their true talent or stature. Yet he had such a delightful personality. He may have been poor but he was certainly wealthy according to my mother’s definition, for he had equanimity and joy of spirit. Cheerfully, he handed my mother a ukulele whilst he himself opted for the guitar.

  “Shall we play one of P. Ramlee’s songs? How about Getaran Jiwa?” P. Ramlee, actor, director and singer was 1950s Singapore’s local heart-throb.

  “Oh yes,” my mother said. “I love the lyrics and you’ve got the voice for it.”

  Karim sang the song from P. Ramlee’s film Anatara dua Darjat, or Between two Classes. It was a story about a man who fell in love with a girl from the Malay royal household. The usual star-crossed lovers type of movie which brought tears to people’s eyes. In the song, the couple were likened to rhythm and song. Karim brought out everyone’s feelings with his emotive rendering of the words:

  Tak mungkin hilang, irama dan lagu

  Bagaikan kembang, sentiasa bermadu

  Andai dipisah,lagu dan irama

  Lemah tiada berjiwa, hampa

  Never will (they) vanish, rhythm and song.

  Like blossoms, (they) will linger forever.

  If you separate, the song and the rhythm,

  (They’ll) be weak and soulless, and empty.

  The lyrics carried a deeper meaning for the way
we live – if we do not live in a creative way, our lives will be empty and soulless. Karim sang with feeling because music made his life meaningful. He certainly had an innate talent for music and performance. With a musical instrument in her hand, my mother too was transformed. She went from wife, mother and ordinary housewife to a talented musician in her own right. She often told me how she used to play the piano in grandfather’s big bungalow by the sea in Malacca. So, seeing her with her eyes lowered as she plucked at the strings, her face in rapture, I could imagine what she must have looked like in her previous life, young and beautiful, without a care in the world. It must have been wonderful to live life with the thought that one had the luxury of playing music without worrying about how to find money or food.

  Some of the kids, including Abu, provided the percussion, using upside down baldi, metal pails or empty kerosene tins as their drums. It was not just community time, it was also family time, parents and siblings sitting outdoors in the soft evening light to do something enjoyable together. Karim sang with a sonorous voice and he made tears fall with his rendition of another of P. Ramlee’s song from the film, Ibu Mertua-ku, My Mother-in-Law.

  Everyone applauded when he finished. His singing was followed by two neighbours who recited a pantun, a folk poem, which took the form of a question-and-response style. Everyone was amused by their repartee. Then someone sang a keronchong, a plaintive Malay folk song, singing of heartbreak, loss and pain. Perankans also love the keronchong and would sing it at events. It was a wonderful evening of sharing and laughter. Music seemed to have the capacity to unite people, forging togetherness in a way that surmounted race, colour, creed or social status.