The Man Who Wore His Wife's Sarong

by Suchen Christine Lim

  ‘My foot he was! He married a strange kettle of fish. Out in the Far East on that little tropical island conquered by the Japs because those fools had the battery guns facing the wrong direction. Out there, old Marley married a Chinese writer.’

  ‘You don’t say!’

  I walked up to them and flashed my father’s name card. The two old coots almost fell off their barstools in Heathrow Airport.

  ‘Cripes! Are you a member of the family?’

  ‘I’m Mah-Li’s daughter.’

  I might as well set them right about my parents. My mother is the Chinese writer, I tell them, but she writes in English. She left my father, Mah-Li O’Connor, years ago. There’s no Scrooge in my father’s company. He invented that when he started the company with my mother’s savings. Why that name, you might ask? Because my father believed that his name, Mah-Li, was the Chinese version of the Irish name Marley. He had read Charles Dickens in school, and had been colonised by his English Literature teacher. As you can tell from his name, my father was what the racist Chinese in Singapore used to call chap cheng or mixed blood. He was half Chinese, but his Irish side disappeared when his father left his mother and returned to Ireland for good. His maternal grandmother gave him the name Mah-Li, (horse’s strength), when he was born. Admittedly it was not an elegant name but a necessary one. My father was a sickly child. The Taoist priest said that he needed the strength of a horse to survive—loong-ma qin shen (dragon-horse vitality). It was something that my father turned to his advantage later in life. His business cards read: marley o’connor in English on one side, and mah-li o’connor in Chinese on the other. Sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t his name that gave him his troubled personality: Mah-Li, horse’s strength, a name that only a peasant would give to his child. My father, the workhorse, worked himself to death. I’m flying home for the funeral.

  Mother and Leonard will be waiting for me at Changi Airport. Waiting and reading—the two things I remember most about my childhood. I did a lot of reading then and still do, mostly legal books now. In my closet is a stack of Dr Seuss’ books, grey and worn with use. I don’t look at them any more. They are of no use to me. I should have given them away to some poor child except that inside each book my father had written, For my darling daughter, Michelle. Every year Leonard and I received a book from him for our birthday and Christmas. No money for child maintenance, just two books each year. My father was absolutely right when he told the divorce judge that Scrooge was not my mother’s name and therefore she didn’t own half of the company, Mah-Li & Scrooge.

  My mother sobbed and raged. I can still see myself, a girl of ten, holding Leonard’s hand. He’s five, tired and irritable. We are waiting for our father. He is late again. He’s always late. Sometimes hours late. Leonard is being tiresome again. He keeps pulling his hand away from me. He cries, so I smack him. And he cries harder. He’s tired and hungry. It’s eight o’clock. He wants his dinner. We’ve been waiting since two o’clock this afternoon. At such times I hated both my parents.

  We spent weekends with my father and stayed every Saturday night in his apartment. The routine seldom changed. After dinner, while he worked on his computer, Leonard and I watched tv. Sometimes Marilyn, my father’s Filipino maid, played with us. When I was ten, I didn’t think it unusual that my father could afford a maid yet he couldn’t afford to pay child maintenance. When Leonard went to bed, I stayed up to read or watched the late night movie on tv. Sometimes my father sat next to me, eating a bowl of ice cream.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ he asked.

  I nodded but kept my eyes on the tv.

  On Sundays he would take us to church. He was very insistent on that.

  ‘Your mother is a heathen and writes rubbish.’

  His opinions and pronouncements on Mother are popping into my head above the roar of the plane. I close my eyes and try to nap.

  ‘Charles Dickens is the author for me. I make it a point not to read anything by a Singapore writer.’

  My father waited for me to take his bait. Mother’s third book had just been published. But I smiled. No comment. I’m just a lawyer. Who am I to stop a man from making a fool of himself? He used to hold forth and harangue Mother about how English should be taught in school, especially after Mother’s friends had visited us.

  ‘Call yourselves English teachers? Your colleagues couldn’t even string a sentence together. Do they speak like this in class?’

  ‘No, lah! Only among ourselves we speak like this.’

  ‘Stop that! Don’t bring the lah and walau into my house. I don’t want Leonard and Michelle to pick up these expressions from you. You’re an English language teacher. You should be a model of good speech. But you speak such rubbish.’

  Mother was silent in those days. Was she cowed by his ‘near native’ English? Was that why she turned to writing? Because her spoken English could never measure up to my father’s standard? He used to send me long emails about Mother when I was studying overseas. After reading them, I pressed delete.

  ‘Brain haemorrhage, very sudden.’

  Leonard sounds matter of fact when he tells me about the nature of our father’s death. We are walking out of Changi Airport. I’m holding Mother’s hand. She is glad to see me. I have not been home for four years.

  ‘By the time his wife found him he was brain dead,’ Mother adds. ‘But they kept him on the machine for a few hours to make sure.’

  ‘You were there?’

  ‘Leonard wanted me there.’

  I look at her but her face gives nothing away. Leonard is taking me straightaway to Singapore Casket. Mother is coming with us. I’m surprised, but I don’t show it. I wouldn’t go if I were her. By the time we reach the funeral parlour it is one o’clock in the morning. The place is deserted.

  ‘Christmas Eve,’ Leonard says. ‘People are at midnight mass. Auntie Joan herself wanted to go.’

  Auntie Joan is our father’s wife. She will get everything he owned now. My mother will get nothing, even though it was her money that started the company. Leonard hands me a packet of fruit juice. I poke a straw into it and drink thirstily. On the table, covered with a white tablecloth, are plates of groundnuts and sweets and several lengths of red thread.

  ‘Take a red thread when we go home later. Your grandma is still alive,’ Mother says. ‘A red thread, symbol of blood, of life, the red that links us, the living.’

  Mother walks towards the casket in the middle of the room. I hold back, unsure of what I ought to do. Leonard stands beside me. We watch our mother, two children watching over her as she gazes down at the man she has not seen or spoken to for more than twenty years. She is dry-eyed.

  ‘Why did you marry him, Mum?’

  It is two in the morning when this question pops out of Leonard’s mouth. There are just the three of us with my father’s body. Leonard is standing on one side of Mother and I on the other side. We have sandwiched her between us—something we did throughout our childhood to shield her from my father’s barbs. But now she takes our hands in her own, her two children, her sweet children, who want so much to protect her. She leads us to our father’s casket. She bows her head. In death do us part, but here we are, the four of us, together at last after twenty years. A sudden intake of air rushes through me. My throat constricts. I try to breathe, but a sob escapes. Mother puts her arm around me.

  ‘Your dad and I were very idealistic. We wanted to marry and volunteer to serve in a Third World country. But things didn’t turn out that way. Life’s like that, isn’t it? He started a business, went to Ireland. Then things changed. He wanted to make his first million before thirty.’

  ‘Half his company should be yours, Mum,’ I say.

  But she gives no sign that she has heard. And yet her phrase ‘not a cent, not a single cent did he give’ was a constant refrain in my teenage years when she taught during the day and wrote late into the night. We didn’t lack anything except … except joy, perhaps. Mother wrote her books while we st
udied. She would rather write than press our father or sue him for the child maintenance money. ‘If I spend my time suing your father, I won’t have the time and energy to write.’ Hell, I remember thinking, she puts her writing first, before us. She should have sued the pants off him. I was a litigation lawyer even in my teens.

  ‘He looks okay, doesn’t he? Like he’s asleep,’ she says.

  ‘The mortician did a good job,’ Leonard adds.

  I look from one to the other. Nothing they say makes sense.

  ‘Dad donated his body to science. We found that out only at the hospital.’

  ‘Is that why they kept him on the life-support machine?’

  ‘Ya, to keep him till they could get a team of surgeons to operate on him.’

  ‘What did they take from him?’

  ‘The cornea of his eyes, all his skin, the heart, the liver and other things. I can’t remember. We were in a daze. We had to say goodbye to Dad in hospital because after that …’

  Leonard points to the casket.

  ‘That’s why it’s closed up, sealed,’ he says.

  The casket is completely sealed, unlike at other wakes where the body of the dear departed lies in an open casket until the day of the funeral. In Dad’s case only his face is visible through the glass.

  ‘Shall we say a prayer for your father’s soul?’

  The three of us hold hands.

  ‘It’s Christmas Eve. Be generous, Michelle. He was a generous man in the end, your dad. I didn’t expect him to donate all his organs away. I guess it’s something you two can be proud of. People don’t do such things in Singapore. In death, your father was the giving man I once loved.’

  Leonard and I look at each other above our mother’s bowed head. We must have thought of it at the same time. Mah-Li & Scrooge. Our father was Scrooge, after all. Generous in the end.

  14

  The Lies That Build a Marriage

  ‘Bring me a face towel, pleeease, somebody! This heat is killing meee.’

  Mei plonked herself on the sofa next to me. She liked to act as though she was my mother’s spoilt younger sister and part of our family. But she wasn’t. She was Mother’s prized lodger and the major source of her income. Desperate for money, my enterprising mother had rented out one of our three bedrooms to Miss Pak Mei, or White Beauty in Cantonese. She was a dance hostess at the Golden Swallow Cabaret.

  The first thing that Mother did when Mei came to live with us was to tell me to address Miss Pak as Auntie Mei.

  ‘And don’t give me that look, I’m telling you,’ she warned. ‘I’m not running a guesthouse. I’m just letting out one room. Your father gives me peanuts each month. If he wants to eat well, drive a car and sleep in an air-con room, I’ve got to rent out to people like Miss Pak. Who else can pay me six hundred a month for board and lodging, eh?’

  This was in the Sixties when I was fourteen and fifty dollars could buy enough food to last a family for a week. Mei’s six hundred each month paid for Fah Chay, our amah, who did all the housework including making Mei’s bed and tidying her room. Mei seldom woke up before noon. And because Mei paid Mother so handsomely, my mother didn’t have to lift a finger to do any housework except to look after my precious younger brother, Boy Boy. Yet if you had heard my mother talk, you would’ve thought she was carrying a huge burden on her back. What annoyed me most was her constant worrying about money. She quarrelled with my father over money all the time.

  My father was an irresponsible man. He had a car, a chauffeur and his own business. What business it was wasn’t clear to me, but he was his own boss. So I couldn’t understand why he didn’t have enough money to pay our landlord, or why we had to live in a big house and then rent out a room to a dance hostess. As parents, they weren’t the least bit concerned about the influence such a woman would have on me. Nor what our neighbours would think. They were laid-back parents. It didn’t bother them, but it bothered me.

  ‘If you want to follow blindly and become a dance hostess, I can’t stop you. I sent you to a good school. My job’s done. The rest is up to you. My own mother didn’t even care whether I went to school or not. She had thirteen children. No time for any child. You don’t know how lucky you are.’

  Typical parent blather.

  Our two-storey house was semidetached with a large garden. Our landlord was said to be rich but the old man, who walked with an obsequious stoop, behaved like a beggar. My father, on the other hand, acted as though he were a tycoon even though he couldn’t pay his rent on time. When the landlord came to the house on the first of each month to collect his rent, my father would keep him waiting at the gate. Sometimes for two or three hours. We were not allowed to let him in.

  ‘Who asked him to come so early? It’s only seven. I’m not awake yet,’ he retorted when Mother tried to pull him out of bed. ‘I didn’t go to the bank yesterday. Tell him to come back tomorrow.’

  The following morning the old man would arrive promptly at seven. Again he was made to wait outside our gate. Our neighbours could see him, seated hunched on the stone bench, waiting outside the house he owned. But my father stayed in bed till ten or eleven o’clock. If he had the money that day, he would come down the stairs like a grand lord, hand the money to Mother who would then run out to pay the poor man. If he didn’t have the money for the rent that day, my father would stride down the stairs as if he was late for a very important meeting, get into his car, slam the door and tell the chauffeur to drive off. Immediately after that, my poor mother would invite our landlord into the house, out of the hot sun, offer him coffee and breakfast and plead with him to be patient.

  Yes, our landlord was a doormat. I couldn’t understand why he accepted such shit from my father, and said so one day.

  ‘Don’t you be rude,’ Mother chided me. ‘Don’t think our landlord is so pitiful! Poor thing! Appearances deceive. He was a loan shark in his younger days, an illegal moneylender who drove poor people to suicide. His interest rates were exorbitant. He did unspeakable things to those who couldn’t pay back their loans. That’s what people say about him, not I say, ah! These days he’s paying for his ill-gotten wealth. I always believe the wicked will get their due. His wife was murdered. Stabbed outside their house. In front of his very eyes. To this day the killer has not been found. His only son and only daughter, both are mentally retarded. Men! Because of him his whole family suffers. So he acts humble now. Atoning for his crimes.’

  Still, I didn’t think it was right for Father to treat him like that. Fortunately, after Mei moved in, Father could pay the rent on time and the landlord stopped hounding us. So I began to appreciate Mei’s presence in our house. But my father didn’t. He disliked Mei. He took pains to ignore her. I never saw him nor heard him talk to Mei. Not even ‘good morning’ or ‘how are you?’ He pretended he didn’t see her. Yet it was obvious to Mother and me that he noticed all that was going on.

  ‘Aiyah! What shall I dooo?’ Mei moaned.

  My father looked up from his evening papers.

  ‘Should I dress up or not? I don’t know where Wong is taking me tonight.’

  He put his head down again when Mother spoke.

  ‘Can’t you just wear your usual?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t like me to look like a cabaret dancer when we go out.’

  ‘But he knows you work at the Golden Swallow.’

  ‘But my darling’s sooo old-fashioned!’

  ‘Humph!’ My father snorted and buried his head behind the papers again.

  ‘Mr Wong is old-fashioned? Why, he visits bars and nightclubs,’ Mother said.

  ‘Aiyah, he’s old-fashioned only when it’s meee! Not old-fashioned when it’s other wooo-men.’ Mei giggled.

  ‘Doesn’t that mean Uncle Wong cares about you, Auntie Mei?’

  ‘How many times have I told you not to butt in when adults are talking? Run upstairs. Switch on the air-con for Auntie Mei!’ Mother glared at me.

  That was how she pampered her prize lodger. I
had to run errands for Mei whenever she fretted about her boyfriends. And she had dozens. She was an attractive dance hostess. Had a slim waist and hair that reached her shoulders. Many men phoned to ask for her. I met two of them.

  The first one was the boss of the furniture shop where Mei had bought her bedroom suite when she moved in. Like a fly caught in a spider’s web, the poor sod was so besotted that he didn’t charge Mei for the furniture. He even bought her a new air-con unit and paid for its installation. Can you beat that? The good thing was that it saved Mother some money because, as the landlady, she was supposed to have installed an air conditioner in Mei’s room.

  During the two years that Mei lived with us, Mother must have made a considerable sum as her landlady. Take Mr Khoo. He always paid Mother handsomely for a bowl of herbal chicken soup that she cooked specially for him.

  Mr Khoo was an antique dealer who owned a shop in Orchard Road. He was a devout Catholic. Went to mass every Sunday with his family. But he also visited Mei every Saturday after dropping off his wife and daughters at the novena church service in Thomson Road. Mei liked him because he was very generous and he didn’t stay long. He spent less than an hour in her bedroom at each visit, and left punctually at noon to pick up his family. Before he rushed off he would give Fah Chay ten dollars, sometimes twenty, because she had to make Mei’s bed after he had messed it up. Sometimes he even gave me ten dollars when I brought him the soup that Mother had boiled for him.

  ‘A strengthening soup. To build up your manly strength,’ Mother said.

  Mei’s giggles and Mr Khoo’s chuckles puzzled me. I couldn’t see what was so funny about drinking black chicken and ginseng soup. It tasted horrible, but he gave Mother fifty dollars for it each week.

  ‘Such a nice man,’ my mother beamed.

  But Fah Chay took a sterner view of things.

  ‘He can’t buy me with his dollars. I’m not so easily fooled,’ she muttered in the kitchen. ‘The old fox! Very clever to hide things from his wife. Lucky he’s not a Buddhist. Thinks he can use money to pay for cheating on her. The Lord Buddha wouldn’t hear of it.’