“Oh isn’t it nice to be so rich?” Fatima said.
“Look at that! Men and women mixing and chatting together as if they were equals!” Parvathi said with incredulity.
There was an obvious inequality amongst the village folks between men and women, and particularly for Parvathi’s people, who were Indian. Gender roles were more marked in our day.
The day after the English parties was a feast day for us.
When I was only five, Third Elder Brother taught me how to scour their rubbish bins safely to find our treasures. Now that I was nine, I was already an expert, making sure not to plunge my arm into the bins but to slowly pick up each item layer by layer, in case there was broken glass or dangerous things like knives hidden amongst the rubbish. The day after the parties lots of uneaten food was thrown out. Of course some food items were unsalvageable, but food like cakes could survive if left in tins or wrapped well in baking paper. Fruits and vegetables like apples and carrots, luxury items for us, were also hardy enough to survive being chucked into bins. Hunger meant that you could not afford to be proud. The positive aspect about being deprived is that everything you get is a bonus. So getting even ordinary or small things can make you joyously happy.
“Be careful of the Alsatian!” Third Brother warned me.
Now that I was older, he was confident enough to let me go on my own. One of the English families kept an Alsatian dog, which guarded the premises vigilantly, and it nearly bit off my arm once when I tried to steal its lunch – a huge steak.
My friends and I came back from this particular round of scavenging with a whole packet of boiled sweets, fairy cakes still in their waxed-paper cups and a train set with some carriages broken. But my prize was an Enid Blyton book, Five Run Away Together from her Famous Five series, complete with illustrations. It was slightly the worse for wear, but I did not care. I enjoyed the stories in Enid Blyton’s books and dreamt about the kind of life she talked about and the privileges the children in her books had. It was my dream to go and live in England where I would always have food to eat. Now that I was in school, I could actually read the words in the books, whereas earlier I could only look at the pictures. I was overjoyed to be educated. It was the unexpected fulfilment of a dream.
“Will you read it to me?” Parvathi said, wistfully.
She was tall and beautiful, four years older than me. Despite her family’s poverty, her hair was silky and luxuriant, and her eyes, ringed with kohl, were large and black. Parvathi had never been to school. Since she started menstruating, her father, who was nearly always drunk, kept on threatening to marry her off to an older man. As she was the eldest child in the family, she had to go out to work so that she could help bring in money to buy food for the family and medicine for her younger brother, who suffered from fits. Many village children had to work to help their families. I sold the nonya kuih and nasi lemak my mother made, to get money for me to go to school. Other children helped out at food-stalls, collecting bowls and plates after customers had finished with them; some washed other people’s clothes, worked in shops, sweeping floors, some at the rattan factory, weaving baskets or mats. Parvathi worked at the paper factory in the village, folding squares of paper into envelopes. The process had not been mechanised yet. The crisp new paper was so sharp that it often cut her hands in many places.
“I wish we could run away together,” she said when I read her the story. “Then we can have an adventure and I won’t be forced to marry.”
Many uneducated girls in the kampong were still subjected to arranged marriages. As soon as they became teenagers, their fates were sealed. That was why I was so grateful that my mother had fought for me to attend school. Otherwise my fate would have been like theirs – although my father still threatened to marry me off as soon as I was eligible. But like Parvathi, I had planned to run away if my father forced me to marry. Except that I did not want to hurt my precious mother.
“What are ham rolls?” Fatima asked when she heard that Julian, Dick and Anne, the English children in the story, ate ham rolls and drank ginger beer. She was a Muslim and proclaimed that she would never drink an alcoholic drink like ginger beer and weren’t Western children liberal to be drinking beer at their age? She, like Parvathi did not go to school.
Of course I hadn’t a clue either but I did not want to look stupid.
“Some kind of meat,” I said. “Hmm, chicken is from hens, beef from cows, so ham must be from hamsters.”
“What is a hamster?” Fatima wanted to know.
“A kind of animal-lah!” I said exasperated, not wanting to show my lack of knowledge. “The kind of animal that lives in England, obviously! Don’t ask stupid questions-lah! Wouldn’t it be good if we were boys rather than girls. Women don’t seem to have fun in life. Look at our mothers, they work day and night, feed the families, wash clothes, have babies. I want to be a tomboy like George. Then I won’t have to always listen to and obey my father and brothers. I want to think for myself. Have all kinds of adventures. Maybe I should be called Jo instead of Phine so that I’ll sound more like a boy.”
“The trouble with you,” Parvathi said with a wisdom beyond her years, “Is that you don’t know who you want to be. Girl or boy. Chinese or Malay.”
“Ya-lah you!” Fatima said. “No wonder the kids in your school call you OCBC.”
There was a bank in Singapore called the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, or OCBC in short. So some cruel kids in school played on the initials of the bank to make fun of Peranakans.
They jeered, “Orang Cina Bukan Cina.” The words translated as Chinese person, not Chinese.
My friends were right, I was undergoing an identity crisis. I wanted to belong. When you belong you are part of a whole. When you don’t belong, you are an outsider. Whether other Peranakans felt this dichotomy of identity or not, I was not sure. Perhaps it was just my own personal angst. I had a Chinese surname, celebrated the Chinese New Year but I did not look Chinese or speak Chinese. Our family did speak some Hokkien and Teochew, but not Mandarin. Sadly, though deep brown, I did not look quite Malay either. I would like to have had their more pronounced facial features, larger eyes with proper eyelids, better noses and high cheekbones. I felt like I was in no man’s land.
“Okay-lah,” I said decisively. “I want to be a boy. And I want to be Malay. From now on, call me Osman! Or maybe a Malay girl, Salimah.”
“You see what I mean?” Parvathi said. “You don’t know what you want!”
The girls giggled till their sides hurt. When the laughter stopped, Parvathi went quiet, her face thoughtful. A cloud of sadness swept over her face. Then she lashed out in a harsh voice.
“Aiiyah! Crazy idea! Do you really think women can choose to be what they want to be? Look at the women in this village. Do you think they choose to be here, in these circumstances? Choice for women is a fantasy!”
“Come on,” I said. “We can still pretend! Or hope.”
“Let us go and watch the men prepare their birds for the Perkutut of South East Asia Competition,” Fatima said, trying to defuse the situation.
A perkutut is the generic name for burong merbok, an Asian kind of dove. Burong is Malay for a bird. There was an annual competition to find the bird which sang the sweetest. Training birds to sing was our kampong men’s favourite pastime. Likewise in other kampongs. It was a pastoral activity. The majority of the men were Malay. Malays had a marvellous yen for creativity and were very much in touch with their softer side. They were known to maintain beautiful homes despite their material lack. To them, it was not a waste of time to admire birds and train them to sing.
My mother constantly told me, “You are never too poor to not be clean or not be creative.”
“Yes, let’s,” said Parvathi. “The beautiful singing will cheer me up.”
We found the men underneath the huge canopy of the banyan tree which gave them shade from the hot sun. The tropical fig tree had aerial roots that were so firm they looked as if t
hey were propping up the tree. Long strands of thick vines grew down from the branches, the type that I imagined the body-builder Johnny Weissmuller swung from in his role as Tarzan in the films. The tree’s leaves were large and elliptical, silky and deep green. Many of these trees loved being by the water so the moist banks of our Kallang River were most suitable for their growth.
My friends and I gasped in amazement at the forest of hanging wooden bird-cages, hoisted on tall poles, with a bird or two in each of them. The men, who were mostly bare-chested or in singlets and sarongs or drawstring shorts, were sitting, watching or coaxing their bird to sing by whistling. The scene was idyllic, a sense of peace prevailed, the birdsong generating an aura of tranquillity. The birds sang in different keys, creating a sweet symphony of sound. It was a rural delight.
One of the men was Pak Awang. People say that when Pak Awang’s mother was giving birth to him at home, he slipped from her hold in a slippery trail of blood and body fluids right onto the cement floor, knocking his head before the midwife could rescue him. The incident caused Pak Awang to act in a different way from other people. He was in his fifties then, yet had the innocence of a young child. Luckily he was well looked after by his siblings and one of his younger brothers, Hassim, was there with him. It was lovely to watch Pak Awang whistling and coaxing his birds to sing.
“Burong nyanyi! Burong nyanyi! Bird singing! Bird singing!” Pak Awang repeated with simplicity, complete concentration on his face.
“Abang Hassim,” Fatima addressed Pak Awang’s brother with the polite Malay honorific abang, Elder Brother. “Where will the competition be held? And when?”
“The bird singing contest will be held in May at Buona Vista.” Hassim said. “There’ll be hundreds of entries from all over Malaya, Indonesia and Sarawak. Three winners will win the silver cups. The birds will be judged on the clarity, sweetness and strength of voice. That’s what Awang is doing, training his birds to exercise their vocal chords. He may not be good at anything else but in this he seems to do well.”
Buona Vista was in the West of our island, a short distance away from Pasir Panjang with its golden sandy beaches and attap houses on wooden stilts. Nearby, the British army had its barracks. Buona Vista was chosen for the competition for its setting of beautiful woodland, majestic rain-forest trees and flame-of-the forest trees, with their spectacular crown of brilliant red flowers.
“His eyes are shining!” I said.
“Yes, this is what makes him most happy. It gives him a sense of identity,” Hassim said. “That’s why I bought him the birds so that he has a purpose to his life.”
“You’re a special brother,” Parvathi said.
“No, not me,” Hassim shook his head and pointed to Awang. “He’s the one who is special.”
“I need someone like him to rescue me from my fate,” Parvathi clutched my arm and whispered to me.
In our adolescence, we had talked about our dream to be rescued by some knight-in-shining armour, a concept I picked up from reading the books discarded by the English families. But it was a faraway dream. Parvathi’s tragedy awaited her. She had no opportunity to marry for love. I too felt her sorrow. Women seemed helpless in the face of destiny. Parvathi was doomed. All her father cared about was easing his own burden by marrying her off as soon as he was able to.
My father often said to me, “I shall marry you off at seventeen! Then you can be a burden to your husband, no need to waste more rice and money on you.”
My father, and Parvathi’s father, often used words that cut into our psyche. They said things which made us feel unwanted and unloved. To our fathers, we were chattel, to be traded or sold. But Ah Tetia’s moods swung like a pendulum. Sometimes he could be so nice, cooking breakfast for the family or bringing home a packet of Hokkien-Mee noodles. The upeh, the bark from the Betel-Nut Palm helped to keep the noodles warm and moist all the way home, and its woody fragrance flavoured the noodles in a special way. Usually his mood was buoyant when he got his wages from the firm he worked for, or when he was carrying weights in the sandy yard with Rajah and Salleh. That morning, they were discussing Singapore’s hopes in weight-lifting at the Olympic Games.
“Tan Howe Liang is going to the Olympics to try for a medal,” My father informed Rajah and Salleh, who could not read the newspaper.
Tan Howe Liang was Singapore’s weight-lifter. He had won a gold medal at the British Games in 1958. This year the Olympic Games were to be held in Rome.
“Maybe got a chance,” Salleh said.
“Aiiyoh! Very hard-lah!” Rajah said. “He has to compete with Westerners! Like the Johnny Weissmuller type. How can he win?”
Pessimism hung like a pall over our country as well. Our new country was wrestling with its sense of identity. We were toddlers in nation building, not yet steady on our feet, self-governing but not yet totally free. The elation of the previous year when the PAP came to power was darkened now by problems. There was a shortage of food, housing and jobs. The story that dominated the Straits Times newspaper was that of Mr Tan Kok Thuan, who was forced to give away his six children aged five to sixteen because he could not afford to feed them.
In the newspaper report, it was reported that he said, “All I ask is that they should be given a good education and that my wife and I be allowed to visit them.”
It was a story that touched many hearts. A Malay woman came forward and offered to marry off the two elder daughters, one to her son and the other to a cousin.
Our family felt his pain keenly. We too had been in such dire straits that a child had to be given away. I thought about my own brother with sadness, the one whom I did not know, the one who was given away at a time when my father did not have a job. People born to riches will never experience such separation nor know this kind of sorrow. Luckily for Mr Tan, lots of donations came in after the newspaper article so he did not have to give his children away.
The first of June was to be our first national day. A big parade was planned for an all-day celebration. But it rained – and rained. The heavy raindrops dug potholes in our sandy village road and turned clay into a slippery sludge. Though challenging to walk on with flip-flops and shoes, it provided us village children with an opportunity to compete in a made-up game, sliding on the wet mud in our bare feet to see how far we could go without coming to an abrupt halt.
“Look at me!” Abu, Fatima’s brother yelled merrily as he slid down the muddy pathway or lorong, his legs and bare torso completely splashed with mud.
More rain cascaded into our houses through the broken attap roofs. Shouts to get buckets and pails were heard all along our row of terraced houses. Rain drummed loudly into empty pails and kerosene tins, followed by the ‘glug-glug’ sound of water as they filled up. Our longkang, drains, which usually helped with the drainage, could not cope with the heavy rain and started to fill up, and turned into gurgling brooks.
“I have an idea,” said Parvathi. “Let us make paper sampan boats.
A sampan is a traditional Malay wooden sailing craft which fishermen used for going out to sea. Parvathi went away and came back with an armload of old newspapers and scrap paper which she got from the factory where she worked. Deftly, she cut and folded paper as if creating an origami and presented us with her finished result – a little paper boat complete with a sail! We were impressed. So we followed her instructions and other village children joined us.
“I know,” said Abu who had an entrepreneurial streak. “Let’s have a race. Winner gets a boiled sweet.”
So we launched our paper sampan boats and cheered, running alongside the drains as our boats coursed through the swirling water in the longkangs. Like all poorly made craft, some of our boats tumbled and sank – their owners crying out in despair. But some actually survived the white-water roiling of the drains and made it all the way into the big pond.
But the flood waters continued to rise dangerously in our Kallang River, flooding the vegetable farms at Lai Par, the inner sanctum of our k
ampong. Luckily it did not reach our houses, but it brought the smell of rotting vegetables and the stench of manure and faeces. It also destroyed the crops, which meant more hardship for the farmers. Other rivers in the country, like the Bedok, Hougang and Punggol Rivers were also affected, swelling to disproportionate levels. In Punggol, there was an added problem, as the murky waters brought back the Punggol Crocodile. It was reputed to be twenty-five feet long and weighed six hundred pounds, and caused as much fear as the python which had plagued our kampong earlier. The dense vegetation surrounding the banks of the Punggol River gave the reptile places to conceal itself. People panicked. Professional hunters were sent out to capture it. They went armed with shot-guns and busy-bodies from our village went to watch the hunt.
“There it is!” someone shouted.
True enough, the crocodile’s long snout rose above the dull-coloured water exposing its head and beady eyes. Confident that it was safe, the crocodile crawled up onto the river bank on its stubby legs to sun itself. The hunters aimed and fired. But the crocodile’s rough skin was so thick, it acted like armour and the bullets ricocheted off its back, merely tickling it! It was never caught.
The water also rose in the Bukit Timah canal, the huge canal which divided Bukit Timah and Dunearn Road. My father could not go to work as it would be too dangerous for him to cycle in the flood. The rising waters flowed over the canal and hid it from view, so people and cars fell into the canal. The Straits Times had a front page photo of a car floating down the swollen canal like a rudderless boat.
Kampong Spirit Page 11