Kampong Spirit

by Josephine Chia

  So the national day parade was cancelled.

  “It’s a bad omen for the country, “Ah Gu said.

  Ah Tetia’s friend was one of those who seemed to thrive on dramatising misfortune, like a black fly feeding on a cow-pat.

  “You think that’s bad,” my father said with some annoyance, proffering the newspaper. “Look at this. The island of Ceylon is appointing Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike as prime minister. She will be the world’s first female head of state. What the hell does a woman know about governing a country? She should just stay at home and look after the children!”

  My father’s chauvinistic attitude was not uncommon amongst men of his time. But despite male opposition and disapproval, the tide had invariably turned. All over the world, women were coming into the forefront of society. In Singapore, the breaking news was the appointment of a local female director, Mrs Hedwig Anuar, to be in charge of the new Raffles National Library which was built in red brick on Stamford Road. A graduate of the University of Malaya and also educated in London, she was a petite, attractive and intelligent woman who was unafraid to speak out. She gave local women a new sense of identity. We admired her.

  Mrs Anuar was instrumental for much of the change in reading habits. She wanted to make reading accessible to everyone, particularly those who could not afford to buy books. She took books and the library to the poor with her mobile libraries. When the first cream-coloured van with the words Mobile Children’s Library written on its side panel trundled down our village, we hailed it like it was some kind of messiah. The driver of the mobile library had to negotiate the potholes in our sandy kampong road. We watched with interest and worry as the van waddled from side to side in its journey to its berth. Thankfully the driver was skilful and he managed to get it parked on the concrete badminton court next to our community centre, which had the only bit of hard surface where it could stand on solid ground. The library assistant threw open the back doors and it was as if a new universe was being opened to us. Lined on either side of the inside of the van were shelves and shelves of books.

  “Wah!!” Everyone exclaimed, impressed by the van’s contents.

  For people consumed by the idea of basic survival, a book was an item of luxury which they could ill-afford. For the majority of us, to own a book for leisure purposes was an impossible dream. So we queued dutifully to take our turn to walk up the steps into the library. My entry into it was as magical as stepping into a fantasy kingdom. When my mother had taken me to Bras Basah Road to buy my school-books, I had fallen in love with the touch and smell of books in the bookshops – and now I fell in love all over again, but with a greater impact, like a thousand volts shooting through me as I stood there inside the van, surrounded by precious books! The scent was intoxicating. The library was an Aladdin’s Cave of treasures, unexplored worlds, places and people crammed into the pages. I wondered what the Raffles Library on Stamford Road must be like with its thousands of books. I hoped to visit it one day. I felt overwhelmed that it was our new government that was providing all these books for free. During the political campaign the previous year, PAP had promised that they would make our lives better. And they had kept their promise. We could escape from the dreariness of our lives through myths, fables and fairy tales. I took out another Enid Blyton book for myself and a large picture book for my mother.

  “Ah Phine,” she said. “Tell me where this place is. Read to me. I didn’t send you to school for nothing.”

  And so began my life-long habit of reading to her – books, magazines and newspapers. She had a voracious appetite. And so too began my life-long fascination and love-affair with English words, the way they were used and their subtleness of expression. I was amazed at how a squiggle of printed words on a page could influence the way I thought or felt.

  “Okay,” Pak Osman said. “Make sure that you are all ready to help build the road. The Municipal is delivering the sand and gravel as promised and we have to spread it over our potholes. Don’t wear your best clothes when you turn up!”

  The new government was fulfilling yet another of its rally promises. They were true to their words about helping to improve our lives. Our village people were touched that they had not forgotten their promise. Most politicians make all sorts of promises during their campaigns, but once elected, they seem to forget or choose to forget what they had promised. But the PAP didn’t. They were going to help us repair Jalan Potong Pasir. The word, Jalan could refer to the Malay verb walk or the noun road – more specifically, a village road; its usage in context determined its meaning. A city road which is tarmacked is often known as jalan raya. Huge potholes meant that it was difficult to navigate our road; taxis charged more to come into our village. So we were overjoyed. Truckloads of sand and gravel arrived at our kampong. As usual Pak Osman took charge of harnessing the labour force, as he did in 1957 when our village was plagued by the tyrant Ular Sawa python.

  It was heartening to see the spirit of the villagers, men, women and children who turned out to help. Malay, Chinese, Peranakans, Indians and Eurasians. People came with spades, changkols and whatever could be used to dig and even out the road with the sand and gravel provided. My parents, brothers and I went along too. Even Pak Awang came, accompanied by his ever-vigilant brother, to help in the road-building.

  “Saya pun mahu tolong,” Pak Awang insisted. “I too want to help.”

  So his brother Hassim let him scoop the sand. The sand was brought out of the trucks by the samsui women who carried the sand in wicker baskets on their heads. This special breed of women, mostly spinsters from mainland China, was robust and uncomplaining. The women wore their characteristic dark blue samfoos and red square hats. Then we dug and filled the numerous potholes with gravel and poured sand all over the village road. We stamped our feet to flatten the fill. The dust flew, making us cough, and our clothes were coated with fine sand-dust, making them grubby, but we were happy as it meant that we would not have any more potholes for a while and the mobile library could navigate its way more safely. Old men and women brought drinks for those who laboured. Hawkers plied their trade alongside, supplying us with snacks and food as we worked. One of my favourites was steamed chick peas, called kachang kuda in Malay, in chilli sauce, sold by the kachang puteh man. I had no idea why the kachang or nut was called a horse nut though I understood that the hawker was called after a type of nut he sold, which was white with a glaze of sugar. People sang and laughed as they worked. It was hard physical work but it was also like a festival. The task gave us a sense of identity as a community. This was gotong royong at its best, people working together for a common goal.

  “Look what I’ve found in the library,” Parvathi said excitedly. “These fashion pages are lovely!”

  Parvathi was holding the first ever copy of Her World, an Asian woman’s half-face large on its front page. It was the first national magazine devoted to Asian women, beauty, health, crafts and domestic issues – an innovative idea for our times. Parvathi turned the pages whilst we oohed and ahhed. There were centrespread photos of beautiful models in gorgeous clothes. It was as if the magazine was showing us an ideal world where women could have what they wanted.

  “Alamak! It costs seventy-five cents lah! Who will buy it?” Fatima said.

  “But there are lots of pages with articles and stories and lovely photographs.”

  Yet I understood Fatima’s sentiment. When a packet of nasi lemak or a bowl of noodles cost ten cents, spending seventy-five cents on a magazine seemed frivolous.

  “A magazine just for women? The world is truly changing,” my mother said.

  “Parvathi!” I said as the thought occurred to me. “This shows that women are getting more freedom. We don’t have to be shackled to old ideas anymore. If there can be a woman who runs the national library and another a whole country, there is hope for you.”

  “It’s too late for me,” Parvathi said, melancholia dragging down her cheeks. “Until they bring in a law preventing men from h
aving as many wives as they like, or a law preventing parents from forcing their daughters into marriage, or one which makes parents send their children to school, how can there be hope for people like me? I’m doomed.”

  “You are only thirteen! How can you be doomed?” I said, almost angry that she would give in so easily. “You have to fight injustice! You have to fight your father!”

  “Aiiyah, Phine,” she said, smiling slightly. “You’re still so young...”

  “But you are young too! You are only thirteen...”

  “...I like your enthusiasm. You have fire in your belly. Mine has gone out. What choices do I have without any education? Your mother is so right to persevere and send you to school. Education is your hope to get out of your circumstances and this village.”

  Sadness and lack of opportunity made Parvathi old before her time. Deep inside me, I knew she was right. I could weep for my friend. I was so lucky to have a mother with such foresight. Parvathi’s mother was exactly in the same position as her daughter, uneducated and without choices, not the kind of living that any daughter would want to inherit. Like many men, her husband had other wives and other children. There was no law to protect women like her.

  Rajah and Salleh, who carried weights with my father in our sandy backyard, knocked on the wooden posts of our kitchen excitedly. The young men were tall. With their dark brown bodies, they looked like heroes who had strayed from a Shaw Brothers film-set. During the gotong royong event when we were building our kampong road, I had seen how their bare bodies had glistened with sweat as they dug and filled the potholes in our road.

  “Encik Chia! Encik Chia!” they called out to my father. “Have you heard the news-lah? It was on Rediffusion! Tan Howe Liang has achieved his dream! He has just won a silver medal at the Olympics!”

  “Wow!” My father beamed. “He has made us proud. It is our country’s first Olympic medal. The competition is very tough. For us to compete against big-size Westerners is already a huge step forward. To come in second is truly amazing! He will definitely go down in history!”

  But Pak Awang was not so lucky. His birds did not win any prize in the bird-singing competition. He came home with his head bowed, his lips pursed.

  “Tak menang,” He grumbled. “Tak menang. Did not win. Did not win.”

  D.H. LAWRENCE’S INFAMOUS book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was banned in England but managed to slip the net and found its way into Singapore. Published by Penguin, the novel was derided for its explicit depiction of the relationship between the lady of the manor and a gamekeeper. Perhaps it was the novel’s audacity to suggest a transgression of the British class system that offended? The burning question was, was the book as racy as was suggested? Readers in Singapore wanted to find out. After all, forbidden fruits were said to taste better. Fuelled by the fact that it was a banned book, locals flocked to Bras Basah Road, bookshop haven, to buy the book, which cost only a dollar seventy-five. The bookshops sold five hundred copies in two weeks. People read the book with its covers clad in brown paper.

  My father would kill me if he knew that at ten, I was reading romantic novels! To be more precise, Parvathi chose the novels and I read them to her. Half the time, I did not understand the subtle nuances. I simply read the English words. It was my first realisation – one might have the capacity to read but not the capacity to comprehend.

  The books we read furtively were not even remotely close to Lady Chatterley! They were rather tame. Their covers often displayed a Western man and woman staring into each other’s eyes. So I did what all my classmates did, which was to wrap the covers in brown paper. There were romances of doctors and nurses, highwaymen and ladies, and blockbusters by Barbara Cartland and Denise Robbins. Innocent stuff actually – no graphic description was given when there was a mention of a kiss. If anything more than the touch of hands was alluded to, the line would go ************. Or as we mimicked: asterisk, asterisk, asterisk. You had to read in-between the asterisks and use your imagination. Sometimes this was much more wild than what the author might have intended!

  “If only there was someone who could take me away from my fate,” Parvathi said in earnest. “Then I won’t have to marry that pock-marked old man my father wants me to marry! Do you know that the man is twenty years older than me?”

  My Indian friend was fourteen. She still could not read as she had never been to school. Going to school was a luxury and privilege many village children did not have. The romance books were her only escape from a life of work, drudgery and squalor.

  “Your father is crazy! You can’t marry an old man...”

  “Some of us have no choice...,” Parvathi sighed.

  Karim, our village singer and musician started sporting a new hair-style. He used to work as a night-soil man, clearing the buckets from the out-houses, but he was now a fully-fledged musician. In 1959, he had performed at Aneka Ragam Rakyat, People’s Cultural Event, which was a huge celebration held at the Botanic Gardens to commemorate the inauguration of our new government. There he was ‘discovered’, and was offered a full-time job as singer and guitar player in the Great World cabaret on River Valley Road. Now his dark hair was thick with Brylcreem and his forelock was swept down over his forehead.

  “What happened to your Tony Curtis curl?” My Second Elder Brother asked.

  “Aiyyah! That’s out of date, now it’s all Elvis Presley-lah. Are you lonesome tonight? Do you miss me tonight,” he crooned à la Elvis.

  The American singer was said to gyrate with his hips and was considered obscene by some. Compared to him, people found the British singer, Cliff Richards, more acceptable, as he looked more like the boy-next-door. However, Elvis’ voice was creamy and seductive, so his songs were still a big hit on Rediffusion.

  Eldest brother had used part of his teacher’s salary to have the cable radio installed in our house. It was our village’s first step into modernity.

  Next to books, listening to the Rediffusion was the second great delight. It opened up other new worlds to us. We heard what was taking place around the country through the news, enjoyed listening to the disembodied voices coming into our home bringing in all sorts of information, all sort of music. Elvis, Cliff Richards, Frank Sinatra and local singers like my idol, P. Ramlee, Anneke Gronlo and Susan Lim entered our homes to entertain us. But not everyone in the kampong could afford a Rediffusion, so many of the kampong neighbours came to sit in our house when the news came on. Our house became like a community centre. Then for the first time, we heard the voice of Tunku Abdul Rahman, Prime Minster of Malaya, who urged Singapore to merge with Malaya to become one big nation.

  “...We have to make Malaya our one and only home.”

  “He means that he does not want Singapore to identify with the Chinese communists,” Ah Gu, who was also listening, elaborated profoundly. “He is cautioning us. With more Chinese than Malays amongst us, he’s afraid we might become a Little China.”

  Ah Gu, if you recall, was my father’s friend, who popped by on a daily basis to discuss politics with him.

  “The idea makes sense,” Krishnan our Indian next door neighbour, said. He rarely joined in the kampong activities, but the Rediffusion had attracted him, and like my father, he was one of the rare educated men in the village. “Singapore was part of the Straits Settlements and part of Malaya as far back as we can remember. Yet the British gave them independence in 1957 and not us, so suddenly we were left out. Merger with Malaya would make us part of the same whole again.”

  “True, true,” Pak Osman said. “I felt like a limb was cut off when we separated from the Federated Malay States...”

  “We’re so close geographically, it does not make any sense for us to be separate nations...” My father said.

  Our own Prime Minster came on air, “...the solution to Singapore’s future lay in a Common Market and merger with the Federation...”

  We liked Mr Lee Kuan Yew as he had personally visited our village during the elections, and we felt as if
he was our own hero. We were convinced that he truly wanted to improve our lives – and he had done so, first the filling up of pot-holes in our village road, and then the Mobile Library, which brought us books.

  The topic of the merger was hotly discussed amongst the menfolk.

  My mother and the other womenfolk provided them with snacks like apok-apok, our Peranakan kueh dada and the bandung drink made out of Rose Syrup and evaporated Carnation milk whilst they themselves clustered in the kitchen, sitting on the hard concrete floor, to talk about the price of food, the difficulty of bringing up water from the well during the drought, and naughty children.

  The burning question was – do we or do we not merge with the Federation of Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak to become an integrated nation? But this issue was not the only hot topic of discussion. The weather was too. It had been a very, very hot March, stretching into a sultry April. The white sun bore down relentlessly. Clothes hung on lines dried quickly, the home-starched bed-sheets became stiff like paper, and the attap on the roofs became dry and crusty. We had only one well which served the entire village, and this too was fast drying up. The catfish kept at the bottom to eat up the mosquitoes became so thirsty and lacking in oxygen that they died and floated belly-up on the muddy bit of water that was left. The stand-pipe was at least a quarter of a mile away and its water was regulated so that it was used only for drinking water. But the reservoirs were drying up too, so the water that ran came out of the pipe was slowly reduced to a brown trickle.

  We prayed for rain.

  Normally the frogs in the ponds would croak and croak and the villagers believed that they were calling for rain. But now, even the frogs were sullen and silent. Even Nenek Boyan, who was supposed to have descended from the tribal batak people and was reputed to practise witchcraft could not persuade them to croak. So she suggested a different solution.