‘But we’ve just moved in. Not easy to find a good room in Singapore for this kind of rent,’ Pa said, and so we stayed on.
We stayed put until my baby brother died. And my young heart blamed Uncle Kim Hock’s wife. And why not? She’d bewitched Uncle Kim Hock so she must’ve killed my brother. I was sure of it because of something that I’d seen as a child. It made me stay away from the house after we moved out. My parents too stayed away from Irvine Road, but that was because of the pain of losing their only son in that house. They didn’t go near that house for more than thirty years. I had my own reason for staying away: I truly believed that Uncle Kim Hock’s wife was a witch because of what I’d glimpsed.
One evening I was playing on the stairs as usual, peering through the banisters into the kitchen. An aroma of sizzling beef and onions wafted up the stairs. Uncle Kim Hock, dressed normally in a sleeveless vest and trousers, was holding a frying pan over the stove, frying beefsteak and potatoes for Tommy and Johnny. I could see Tommy. He was carrying his one-year-old sister astride his hips with one hand, and laying the table with the other. Johnny was setting out the glasses. They were all talking excitedly. They loved beefsteak. My mother, being Buddhist, never cooked beef. White-hair Granny was Buddhist. She would never touch the meat. Yet Uncle Kim Hock and Gek Sim often cooked beef for their dinner. I think that was their way of making sure that White-hair Granny would keep away from them.
Anyway, that evening I saw Gek Sim come out of the bathroom with her hair dripping wet. She was wearing her black sarong, knotted below her armpits. She walked over to the stove. Steam rose from the black pot when she lifted the lid. I gasped when she plunged her hand into the steaming pot. She raced into the dark hallway towards the stairs and me, holding a ball of steaming white rice in her hand! She shot me a piercing look. I bolted up the stairs and locked our bedroom door. ‘What’s going on?’ Mother asked. I didn’t want to tell her. But that same night I had nightmares and my baby brother cried all night. He was running a high fever.
The next morning Mother rushed him to the doctor’s. My baby brother was warded in the hospital that same day. He died the next day. One month later we moved out of 61 Irvine Road. In my childish heart I knew I should have been the one to die. Gek Sim’s evil look had shot past me and hit my baby brother. He was killed because of me. This was the guilt I carried as a child, and suppressed as an adult. So now you see why I had to visit the house in Irvine Road when I was studying psychology and counselling. I had to exorcise my guilt. Part of our training.
‘Anyway we stopped going to the house when the witch was alive,’ Uncle Kim Hock’s sister said. ‘Bad luck to meet her and get a tongue lashing for nothing. Our mother died of heartbreak, I tell you. I swear it. Not only did her hair turn white but her heart broke. That witch kept a spirit child that ate away our mother’s heart. People said she hid it behind the door—the door in the hallway.’
My heart jumped when I heard that.
‘Tell me more,’ I pressed her.
‘That spirit child helped Gek Sim to win back the money she’d lost in the gaming houses. Oh yes, that Gek Sim was a gambler. Very addicted, I tell you. Had to gamble every day. Lost money like water through the fingers. That’s why my brother never grew rich. She kept a spirit child behind that door to help her win back her money. But she got to feed it. Timing was very important. It had to be fed before sunset, the twilight hour just before dark. And she must be the one to feed the spirit. No one else could do it. But that evening, before she died, she came home late. She’d won a big sum of money. Several thousands, people said. Her biggest win. She was so happy. She took the whole family out to celebrate. That very night she collapsed and died. The spirit child was so hungry that it ate her instead.’
No, no, no, I don’t believe the story. That was what Uncle Kim Hock’s sister told me. But I didn’t know what to think, frankly. Of course, I didn’t want to believe a word about this spirit child thing. To change the subject, I asked her about Uncle Kim Hock.
‘Kim Hock? He’s one of a kind! After his wife’s death we urged him to sell off the house. Two deaths in two days so close together, it’s not good. Bad luck. Sell the house. Bad feng shui. Bad air. We tried to advise him but my brother did nothing. Very difficult talking to him. He just sat there. No spirit left after the witch’s death. We expected him to be … I don’t know what we expected him to do. But he was empty. Like he’d lost his soul. We stopped visiting him after some time. No point. He just sat there. Wouldn’t say a word. Later we found out that he’d sent Johnny to a boarding school overseas. The one run by the Christian Brothers. Tommy was sent to Boys’ Town. He works as a carpenter now. They’re all married and working, his children. But Kim Hock, he continued to cycle to work until he retired. Paying off the witch’s debts, no doubt.’
‘I’d like to visit him.’
‘What for? He’s senile now. Lives alone in that house. Refused to go into the old folks’ home. Refused to live with his children. Anyway, they can’t have him. He’s so weird. You’ll know when you see him. His wife put a charm on him years ago. Turned him into a queer. Before that my brother was normal, I tell you. Our brother was normal. And a very obedient and filial son. He used to listen to everything our mother said.’
But I had to visit 61 Irvine Road for reasons of my own.
‘Hello! Hello! Anyone home?’
The front door was not locked. I walked in. The house smelt of dust and mould. It looked the same, just very old with paint peeling off the walls. The hallway was dark even though it was daytime. I heard music in the kitchen. Entering the kitchen was like entering a time warp. Everything was as I remembered it thirty years before.
Uncle Kim Hock was stooped over the ironing board. Thin and gaunt, his hair was completely white. He must have been seventy-eight or more. Even though it was daytime, he had switched on the light: a naked bulb attached to the end of an old electric cord which hung down from the ceiling. He was ironing a pink blouse under the light. On the table was a pile of clothes.
‘Ah, so you’ve finally come, Sayang. Sit down. Sit down.’
He gave me a vacant smile, revealing teeth yellow from years of nicotine.
I sat on a chair. Come to think of it, I must have sat on the same chair that Gek Sim sat on each night when she watched him do the ironing. That would explain why he thought I was his wife. He’d called me sayang which means ‘darling’ or ‘beloved’. He pushed a box of cigarettes towards me.
‘As I was saying, Mama was fuming mad this morning. “Mama,” I said, “you let me be. You didn’t mind the frills and lace when it suited you. What’s wrong with a bit of pink lace?” Ha-ha! You should’ve seen her face. Poor Mama!’
He put down his iron, took a cigarette out of the box and put it in his mouth.
‘Want a smoke?’
I shook my head.
‘Sayang, you tried, didn’t you? Tried every trick of Eve. Still nothing happened. Your belly still flat as a pancake. Man and wife. More than two years and still so flat. I know, I know. You suffered. Yes, yes, my old lady was terrible, horrible, insufferable. A Nonya shrew. Ha!’
A sly smile crept up his face and the wrinkles creased around his sunken lips as he looked expectantly at me. I think he was expecting me to applaud.
‘Termagant, deity of violent tempers. Did you pray to her? Mama’s eyes followed us like a hawk. Like your belly would swell if she looked hard enough. Ha-ha! Poor Mama. She dragged me to temples, consulted a Malay bomoh, a Chinese tangki. My god! Those mediums even got her praying to a parrot in a cage. They told her, “Your son’s bewitched.” My foot! Bewitched!’ He chuckled.
He flicked the ash from his cigarette, stuck it back between his lips and pulled a bright pink blouse out of the pile on the table. He flattened and smoothed its creases on the ironing board.
‘Always a careful ironer, I am. Fussy about my clothes, you can say. “Wear red. Rub him down there with a hard-boiled egg. Give him black chicken herbal
soups with lots of ginseng. Good for the manhood, you know. Take a rose water bath.” Mama and her silly friends were teaching you to seduce me, weren’t they? Poor thing. No wonder you became ill. I became ill. And Mama wailed. I know, I know. She blamed you. Called you names. Wailed that she pawned her jewellery to pay for our wedding but got back nothing. But she was the one who wanted the wedding. Not me. Lucky we gave her grandsons in the end, didn’t we?’
He held up the pink blouse and turned to me.
‘And lucky you like pink too,’ he chuckled. ‘Oops-a-daisy! Strong wind today. Monsoon season. Storm coming tonight. That’s what the radio man said this morning. Storm tonight.’
Carefully he pressed the hot iron onto the pink blouse.
‘D’you remember, Gek? Same strong wind like this. It started to rain that day when I returned from the hospital. You rushed into our bedroom, dumped the clothes on our bed—clothes you’d torn off the washing line. Then you rushed out again. I was in bed. I sat up. Hey, don’t laugh. It’s true. I actually sat up to help you fold the clothes. Then I saw your pink silk blouse. Oh my! So soft and fragrant. And oh, so pink. I lurve pink! Oh, how I lurve the smell of pink. I buried my face in your blouse. I put it on and we did it that night, didn’t we? That’s the night we gave Mama her first grandson.’
He laughed long and loud, and started to put on the pink blouse. A gust blew into the kitchen. The sleeves of his pink blouse flapped about him.
‘Help me with it, Gek.’
I helped him put it on just as the storm broke. The window shutters rattled, and the light bulb swung wildly at the end of its electric cord.
‘Thank you, Sayang. When you gave birth to Tommy, you said his little willie gagged Mama’s mouth. Ha-ha! Twice you gagged her. Tommy and Johnny. Born two years apart. Who said I wasn’t fertile? Aye, Sayang, I’ve missed you.’
‘Uncle Kim Hock!’
‘Huh?’
‘Uncle Kim Hock. It’s me, Molly. I used to live here as a girl.’
He shook his head. When he spoke again, his voice was stern.
‘My sisters sent you. They think I’m a senile faggot. Leave me alone. Go! An old man is entitled to his memories.’
‘Uncle Kim Hock …’
‘Go, go! Please go.’
I walked out of the house. I didn’t know what to think. Then, and only then, I remembered. Die, lah! I’d forgotten to say goodbye to my brother’s spirit. And that was why I’d gone to the house in the first place. So the next morning I returned to 61 Irvine Road.
‘Uncle Kim Hock! Hellooo! Can I come in?’
Like the day before, I walked straight into the kitchen. I thought I should just let him know that I was back before going upstairs to see our old room and say a prayer for my little brother. And that was where I found him—upstairs in the bedroom that used to be ours. He looked like he was asleep on his bed, still wearing his wife’s pink kebaya blouse that was embroidered with a pattern of white flowers and green leaves, and his wife’s pink and green batik sarong.
I called the police on my mobile phone and then I phoned his sister.
This is another reason why our whole family went to Uncle Kim Hock’s wake and funeral—I was the one who found his body. There was great unhappiness and friction between Uncle Kim Hock’s sons and his three sisters over how he should be dressed for burial. The sisters wanted their brother to be buried dressed in a Western suit. But their two nephews, especially Johnny, were adamant that their father should be buried in the manner in which he’d dressed himself to meet death.
‘A shame,’ the aunts cried. ‘What will people say?’
‘What shame? Our father’s been a good father,’ Johnny yelled at them. ‘He took care of us, educated us. He brought us up after our mother died. He couldn’t choose the soul he brought into this life but he sure could choose the life he lived. It’s nobody’s bloody business how he’s dressed and buried!’
There weren’t many people at the wake, just the family: his three sisters and their families, his two sons and their wives, his four grandchildren and us. We gathered in the front room of 61 Irvine Road. I didn’t know Johnny and Tommy well—we’d not kept in touch—but I liked the way they’d stood up for their father. And that was filial love for a parent who was different from other parents. The two guys didn’t care a hoot about face the way so many of us do. They saw a loving father who did his best for them. I say, judge a man by how his children treat him after his death. Tommy and Johnny loved their father.
Ya, ya, I know. People said their mother was a witch. And I did see what she did with that ball of rice. But I was an impressionable child of six, filled with tales of witches and black magic. Can you really trust the memory of a six year old? Or what others say, especially those who didn’t like Kim Hock’s wife? And if you think about it, Uncle Kim Hock loved his wife and she him. Not in the way the world expected. Not in the way Uncle Kim Hock’s mother and sisters had expected. But it was love nevertheless. The love that accepted him for who he was. I can’t claim to know him well. I can’t claim to know his wife. She was the dreaded landlady in my childhood, the witch. But she was the mother of Tommy and Johnny, and the grandma of their four children. Witch or no witch, she must have taught them something about love. They didn’t judge their father, why should we?
And was there a spirit child behind the door of the hallway? If there was, it’s gone. And the world has changed. Singapore has changed.
‘Adoi, girl! Of course, Singapore has changed. Young men wear their hair long these days. In the 1980s the law was so strict. Men weren’t allowed to keep long hair. These days I’ve even seen some middle-aged Chinese guys sporting ponytails. They wear colours of the rainbow: earrings, nose rings, macham-macham rings on their fingers and toes, silver studs in their tongues. I’ve seen them in our shopping malls. Nobody says such dressing is abnormal. If you live long enough, you’ll see all kinds of things. And that’s progress, lah,’ Mother said.
I guess someone has to take the first step to cross an imaginary border. My line-dancing mother did just that when she became my father’s minor wife. Now I’m not the least bit ashamed of Pa, God rest his soul. He loved Mother but betrayed another for her. Yet we accept that as part of love. And certainly it is love, but only if you’re on the receiving end. Somehow I think that the love between Uncle Kim Hock and Gek Sim was, by far, a greater love than that of my parents. But that’s just my view. Call me unfilial if you like.
5
My Two Mothers
‘Kwai Chee …’
‘What?’
‘Will you come back for dinner? I’m going to …’
I shut the door. Cut her off in mid-sentence. Didn’t bother me that I was rude. I was a teenage pimple on the face of the earth. I wished Yee Ku and Loke Ku hadn’t adopted me. I wished somebody else had. Somebody like Miss Lee or Miss Nazareth.
My two mothers were old enough to be my grandmas. They were already in their sixties when I was fourteen. I can’t remember when I started feeling shame. It probably began when I was six on my first day at school in 1958. The other children had a father and a mother. And I? I had Yee Ku and Loke Ku. Both wore black silk pants and white samfoo tops with a mandarin collar. Both carried black cloth umbrellas. They shaded me from the sun as we stood in the school field with the other children and their parents. The teachers thought they were maidservants sent by my parents who could not come.
That day I discovered that my two mothers were amah jieh, traditional Chinese domestic servants. They belonged to a sisterhood called the Seven Sisters. They left their village in southern China in the 1930s to work as amahs in Singapore. I have a black and white photograph of them. It shows seven women in matching white samfoo tops and black silk pants, standing in a row. It was taken on the day my two mothers prayed to the Seven Sisters in heaven, plaited their queues and vowed never to marry.
The Cantonese word ku means paternal aunt. But it means more than that in my case. I was their adopted daughter,
but I couldn’t call either of them Mother because they were unmarried. Two unmarried women living together were my mothers but I had to call them Aunt or Ku. Now you understand why I was confused and angry as a child.
They named me Kwai Chee or Precious Pearl. When I went to secondary school, I dropped my Chinese name. I called myself Pearl. It sounded more sophisticated in English. I told my classmates that my parents had died. I lied that Yee Ku was my grandmother. She had given up work to bring me up. Loke Ku was our breadwinner. She worked as a live-in maid for a family. She came home once a week to check on us, and once a month she stayed the night and slept in the same bed with Yee Ku. If I needed to buy anything that cost more than ten dollars, I had to ask Loke Ku. If I failed a test, I had to answer to Loke Ku. But if I were punished or if I hurt myself, Yee Ku comforted me.
‘There, there, don’t cry. Big girls don’t cry.’
‘Ah Yee, don’t spoil her. She’s got to learn.’
Loke Ku was the disciplinarian. But I wasn’t spoilt. And I did learn. Not love, but shame. A part of me hung my head. I invited no one home. Not because home was a small rented room above a car workshop in Jalan Besar. More because I felt my family was not normal. I had two mothers instead of one. Mothers I had to each call Aunt. Mothers who were unmarried domestics living together. And in the secret chamber of my secretive heart, I suspected them of being something more. I couldn’t say what it was as a child. It had the faint smell of wrongdoing. Of something that people frowned upon. How did such an idea enter my head when no one had actually said anything to me? Had I picked up things as a child from the whispers among the neighbours downstairs? From the way they looked at me? Or was it from things that one of my secondary school teachers said, like girls should not hold hands or worse?
I don’t know. I don’t know.
I was a confused and angry girl in those days. I was sullen. I studied hard. I buried myself in my books. Not because I enjoyed studying but because I wanted to succeed and leave home. I wanted to get away from the two of them. And I was ashamed of myself for feeling that way.
The Man Who Wore His Wife's Sarong Page 6