The Catherine Lim Collection

by Catherine Lim

  Ah Han Chare fell ill shortly after, and the town was gripped with tense expectation. The coffin had called again, impatient to have an occupant after the long years of waiting, and now it was the mistress of the household herself. I remember the anxiety communicated to us children, for we did not venture near the coffin any more, nor look at the old man whose stubborn refusal to answer the coffin knockings resulted in the tragic deaths of others.

  A priest from the town temple was called in to appease the coffin and persuade it to end its persistent calls, for the knockings had persisted for several nights. Ah Han Chare lay in a stupor, surrounded by weeping children and relatives.

  “Ah Han! Ah Han!” came the whimperings from the old man, hungry and terrified, for in the days of confusion following her sudden illness, he had neither been washed nor fed. Nobody heard him.

  On the fourth day, a child ran in to announce: “He’s dead! He’s dead! I saw him myself! He’s all stiff and there are ants in his eyes too!” They went to see, and true enough, he was dead, fallen on his side, his thin legs doubled up under him.

  They rejoiced to see Ah Han Chare out of danger. She was able to sit up in bed and take a bowl of porridge. The knockings ceased, the old man was laid in the coffin and buried next to his wife, who had died 30 years earlier.

  Ah Han Chare, when it was all over, was able to speak about the coffin knockings as if they had been everyday occurrences, it being part of her exuberant nature to be able to weave the coffin incidents into the ribald tales she invariably carried away with her after the wedding festivities that she organized with much zest. But her popularity as matchmaker and bridal helper declined sharply, for she became connected with coffin knocks, and few were prepared to risk the taint of death in a house of marriage.

  A Boy named Ah Mooi

  I was so used to calling my playmate ‘Ah Mooi’ that it took me years to realize that ‘Ah Mooi’ was really a name suitable for girls. But by then it was too late to ask him why, for the expansiveness of childhood had narrowed into the awkward tentativeness of adolescence. And the tiny gold earring that his mother made him wear on his left ear – that had never struck me as odd.

  I don’t suppose he is called Ah Mooi now – his real name translates into something like Prosperous Dragon-Lord – or wears the gold earring. I wonder whether he remembers the story of the time when the devils, in their insane jealousy, nearly caused his death?

  His mother, frantic with fear, had consulted the temple medium who immediately went into a trance and said that the devils would stop tormenting the baby boy only if they could be deceived into believing that he was not a male child.

  Male children, treasured by their parents and grandparents and doted on, were objects of intense jealousy of the evil spirits; female children, being considerably less valued, were left alone. So Prosperous Dragon-Lord from that day was called Ah Mooi. To make doubly sure that the spirits would be deceived into believing that he was a common, useless female child, his mother had made him wear the gold earring on one ear.

  The deception must have been totally successful, for Ah Mooi grew up strong and sturdy and was seldom ill. I remember that as a very small child, he sweated under a multitude of vests, shirts and a jacket but was allowed to run bare-bottomed. And it was in later years that I wondered at the stupidity of fiends who could be deceived into believing he was female when there was such explicit proof to the contrary. Ah Mooi had four older sisters. The girls were nothing in the eyes of his parents and grandparents; he was everything, being a male child.

  Throughout his childhood, he was protected, with ferocious dedication by the whole household, against the evil spirits which were everywhere. One of his sisters, a talkative feather-brained girl, once made a comment on his plumpness and healthy appetite as she was watching him being fed. She was immediately slapped across the mouth and warned that any more such foolish invitation of the jealous spirits to come and harm the child would entail a punishment even more severe. Fortunately for her, Ah Mooi did not fall ill after that or lose his appetite, and she was never again guilty of the folly of openly praising her baby brother.

  Ah Mooi fell near a large stone in a piece of waste ground that the servant girl had taken him to; when he had a fever the next day, the servant girl was dismissed and Lau Ah Sim, a pious old woman in

  the neighbourhood, was called upon to conduct the propitiatory ritual at the spot where Ah Mooi had fallen.

  I had never seen any of these rituals in my life, though I often saw, usually by roadsides, signs that they had taken place – reel candles, joss-sticks and once a small mirror. Lau Ah Sim was always performing them for the neighbourhood children who had fallen ill. In an old, quavering voice, Lau Ah Sim, I was told, chanted prayers to placate the evil spirits and to request that they leave the child in peace.

  Round Ah Mooi’s neck must have been a whole armoury of amulets and charms against these dreadful beings – I remember seeing little metal cylinders and triangular pieces of yellow cloth with some words on them. He also wore a tiger’s claw surrounded by a delicate band of gold and a jade bracelet: these purported to ward off evil influences. Thus securely protected, Ah Mooi went through a healthy childhood, and at some stage, his parents must have felt that he had passed the danger period and could now afford to doff name, gold earring and amulets.

  Although mere females, Ah Mooi’s sisters must have been valued enough for their parents not to want to take any chances with the evil spirits, for they were given such names as ‘Bad Smell’, ‘Pig’, and ‘Dumb’, although their registered names were redolent of the best of oriental virtues and treasures.

  One of them – I think it was Bad Smell – was often sickly as a child. The reason was that her destiny and her mother’s were ill-matched; in fact, they clashed violently. So Bad Smell had to call her mother ‘Aunt’ and her father ‘Uncle’, and once again, evil forces were deceived and their work undone.

  What did they look like – these much feared spirits that infested the air, the trees, grassy mounds, stones and every cranny of the house? I had never thought much about their appearances until I saw a mirror hanging over the doorway of a relative’s house and was told that it was there to keep the evil spirits away. Thus the fiend, upon reaching the doorway, would not fail to see its reflection in the mirror, and be so alarmed by its own grotesque appearance that it would immediately disappear from the premises.

  I thought that this was an extremely clever plan to get rid of evil spirits and, for a while, my imagination dwelt long on the image of a hairy, large-eyed creature with fangs (an impression derived solely from the cheap comic books that I was beginning to devour) sailing through the air and suddenly stopping short in front of the mirror above the doorway, staring incredulously at the ugly visage, and then making a quick about-turn with a howl of anguish.

  Ah Mooi survived the evil; Ah Khoon did not.

  Like Ah Mooi, Ah Khoon was the longed-for male child after several daughters. His mother, despised by her mother-in-law for being able to bring forth only female children, swore to the Nine Deities that if she had a male child, she would go to the temple for the Feast of the Nine Deities every year and show her gratitude by fasting and taking part in the tongue-skewing ceremony.

  Ah Khoon was born a sickly, puny baby, not expected to live. But his mother, her confinement hardly over, went to the temple to offer prayers and gifts of gratitude to the Nine Deities. That was the cause often brought up to account for the poor health of the child and his eventual sad end, for she was still in her confinement and therefore impure when she went before the presence of the Nine Deities. She should never have committed the sacrilege. That negated all future acts of propitiation, so it was useless for her to have taken part in the tongue-skewing ceremony. She was the first woman in the town’s history to do so; the deities were probably not pleased, for she developed ulcers on her tongue when there should have been no skewer mark.

  Desperate when Ah Khoon developed asthma,
she consulted a temple medium who prescribed herbal cures that probably contained a high percentage of arsenic. For years Ah Khoon was given this herbal mixture over which the temple medium always chanted prayers before he sold it in packets to Ah Khoon’s mother.

  One morning the boy was found dead, and his mother, overcome with grief, unleashed a torrent of abuse at the deities who had played her out so cruelly. She was stopped by the scandalized relatives who feared more harm would come to the unfortunate family.

  Ah Mooi’s mother, who generously rendered help during those trying days, was secretly convinced that had Ah Khoon’s mother taken the simple precaution of changing his name to a girl’s instead of doing those useless, crazy things at the Temple of the Nine Deities, he would have lived.

  The Legacy

  Ah Hoe Peh was my grandfather’s opium ‘kaki’. A kaki was, in a sense, more than a friend. Without kaki, the pleasures of certain activities such as opium-smoking, durian-eating and mahjong-playing were considerably diminished or rendered impossible. With kaki, it was likely for one to reach the zenith of these pleasures.

  Grandfather, Ah Hoe Peh and some other kaki smoked opium for hours in grandfather’s room or sometimes in Ah Hoe Peh’s room. From the outside, you can hear nothing save the bubbling of the opium liquid in the cups of the bamboo pipes; if you’d peeped inside, you’d have seen the men lugubriously reclining on their mats and inhaling the opium, a languorous look in their eyes. Both men had been smoking opium from their youth. Grandfather, it was rumoured, had spent a large part of grandmother’s dowry to support the habit.

  Ah Hoe Peh did likewise with his wife’s jewels, and when these were gone, he had managed to beg or borrow, for the profits from his small dry-goods business were barely sufficient to bring up his four sons.

  All the boys went to school; it was to the credit of Ah Hoe Chim that she never allowed her sons to go hungry, or be humiliated in school because they could not pay their school fees. As for herself, she ate plain rice with warm water, sometimes a few pieces of vegetable. For a time, she helped grandmother sew beaded bridal slippers for a small payment.

  Ah Hoe Chim, thin and dry as a stick, outlived her husband by many years, but never enjoyed the rich legacy that he had promised to leave (but which in fact he did, according to his sons, who were only too willing to indulge their father’s expensive habit once they had started working and bringing money home).

  “I’m leaving a rich legacy, you’ll see,” Ah Hoe Peh had said time and again, “and it will be more than Soon Huat’s rubber and coconut plantations and shophouses,” alluding to the enormous wealth that the town’s only millionaire had left behind for innumerable wives, children and grandchildren to squabble over.

  Ah Hoe Chim clucked her tongue with impatience and skepticism; she always did when her husband spoke of the legacy. But she was not a quarrelsome woman and said nothing, preferring to spend her time and energy supervising her sons while they were doing their homework by the light of the oil-lamp, and knocking her knuckles on their heads if she thought they were wasting their time. Never educated herself, she believed wholeheartedly in the value of education and would soundly discipline any child if he got a bad report from school. When she caught them listening to their father’s idle tales, she shooed them back to their books, to which they would return with wry faces.

  “I’m leaving my sons, and my sons’ sons a rich legacy,” said Ah Hoe Peh. When the doctor diagnosed his disease as terminal cancer of the stomach, he became more urgent about this promise and the means to ensure that it was fulfilled. He had to give up his opium in the last weeks before his death; surprisingly, there was little pain in spite of the ravages of the disease, due, according to his sons, to the numbing effects of the opium over the years. Wasted to a skeleton, but urged on by his anxiety to keep his promise of leaving behind a rich legacy – an urge that was daily becoming stronger with the approach of death – he managed to drag himself to consult the temple medium.

  “At what time will I die?” he wanted to know. The medium assured him it would be very early in the morning, well before the first meal of the day. But he was not satisfied. He wanted to be certain that, it would not be in the evening, when all three meals of the clay would have been eaten, when therefore no legacy would be left. For a man would have eaten up everything and left nothing for his sons, and his sons’ sons. A considerate man had to die in the morning, never in the evening.

  Ah Hoe Peh went into his death throes in the evening, his wife and sons gathered around him and watched as he struggled to make it to the morning. The death rattle was already in his throat; his eyes were already unseeing, but still Ah Hoe Peh fought to stave off death, to keep it at bay till the clock strike and announce the hour of dawn. As the first faint cock-crow quavered in the cold night air and reached the dying man’s ears, he smiled at his triumph and the bequeathing of a legacy that would be enduring.

  For years, his family spoke about the old man’s heroic efforts to stay alive till the moment when the fulfilment of his promise could be assured. His sons later made good. One of them is a millionaire, and his millions, he says with profound gratitude, are the three meals of the day that were selflessly left uneaten.

  The Story of Father Monet

  Were they ghosts? Had I actually seen ghosts?

  Indian labourers, someone had ventured – perhaps an Indian labourer and his wife hacking grass beside the church. But they were not Indian, I insisted. The man was definitely a European, dressed like a priest, and the woman was Chinese. A trick of the imagination; someone else had proffered the stereotypical explanation for ghosts. But it could not be, I countered, for at that time I had no knowledge whatsoever of the French priest and the Chinese woman who was one of his parishioners. It was only later that I came to hear of it. It would have been the rarest of coincidences for my imagination to have given birth to three such characters – the man, the woman and the baby in the bundle she was carrying – that coincided in every detail with the characters of that tragedy which took place years before I was born.

  I have been puzzling over this since and have come to the conclusion that the three I saw that day were ghosts. Some people also claimed to have seen them, sometimes together, sometimes separately. The one who had seen them most often, it was rumoured, was the Chinese woman’s husband, who lived a year after his wife and who was plagued with bad dreams almost to the very last day of his life. He was the cause of all the suffering, it was said, and it was fitting that he should die in an agony of madness and fear for his terrible injustice.

  Nobody seemed to remember their names, so they shall be given fictitious ones.

  Father Monet was a Catholic priest from France, possibly one of the first to be sent to this part of the world. He was an active, dedicated man of God who quickly settled down to his new life in the new country and almost immediately began looking around for converts. Coupled with his aggressive missionary zeal, however, was a warm humanity and an instinctive understanding of people that quickly won him the trust of many. He mastered Hokkien after only a few months, and spent much time among his parishioners, preaching to them, saying the rosary with them or simply being a willing listener. He was a handsome man, tall and fair-skinned, with a dark luxuriant beard and light blue eyes which exuded a natural warmth.

  The Lai family always welcomed Father Monet into their home to talk to them or share a meal with them. They were devout Catholics; they boasted of being third-generation Catholics, and their forebears had been among the first to be converted by missionaries in China.

  The elder Lai had a thriving wholesale business in rice, coffee powder and certain brands of milk powder. It would eventually be inherited by his son, a young man of about 25. The younger Lai was a hard-working, intelligent man, but given to bouts of sullen temper and depression. His parents easily diagnosed the cause to be the want of a wife and, trusting Father Monet’s judgment more than the town matchmaker’s, enjoined him to look for a wife for t
heir son.

  The request had a very specific object: The family knew that Father Monet was in the habit of visiting another Catholic family, comprising a humble tailor, his wife and their very beautiful and shy daughter who had been given the name Mary Anna Joseph at baptism. The elder Lai and his wife had decided upon Mary for their daughter-in-law. Their son appeared not to protest when she was mentioned, and that was encouragement enough for the elderly couple, who had despaired of ever finding a bride acceptable to their sullen, silent, hot-tempered son.

  Father Monet dutifully approached Mary’s parents who, in their simplicity and humility, expressed immense gratitude and hoped the marriage would take place as soon as possible. But as for Mary, Father Monet could get neither word nor look from her to indicate her true feelings. Her face retained the very serene, placid expression it always wore; her lips remained shut when Father Monet asked, “And what about you, Mary? What do you say to the offer?”

  Mary continued to pour out the tea for Father Monet, her eyes modestly lowered. She served him some rice cakes, but all that time not a word escaped her lips.

  Father Monet paused between mouthfuls, looked at her and asked, “Are you not happy, Mary? Lai is a good man and a devout Catholic. He will make you a good husband.”

  Looking at her closely for the first time, the priest was startled by her loveliness, a loveliness all the more striking for its lack of adornment. The girl wore her hair severely pulled back from her face and coiled at the back; her dress was always the modest long-sleeved samfu, in colours that were surely too drab for her vibrant and blooming youthful beauty.