Spider Boys

by Ming Cher

  SPIDER BOYS

  First Singaporean Edition

  MING CHER

  Copyright © 2012 by Ming Cher

  Introduction copyright © 2012 by Robert Yeo

  All rights reserved.

  Published in Singapore by Epigram Books.

  www.epigrambooks.sg

  Spider Boys was first published by

  William Morrow & Company, New York,

  and Penguin Books New Zealand in 1995.

  Cover design by Stefany

  Cover illustration © 2012 by Hafizah Jainal

  Published with the support of

  National Library Board, Singapore

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Cher, Ming, 1947-

  Spider boys / Ming Cher.

  – Singapore : Epigram Books, 2012.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-981-07-2687-4 (pbk.)

  ISBN : 978-981-07-3679-8 (epub)

  1. Gangs – Singapore – Fiction. 2. Boys – Singapore – Fiction.

  3. Street children – Singapore – Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9639.3.C525

  S823 -- dc23 OCN805923421

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to

  actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This edition was re-edited by Jocelyn Lau from the Penguin Books edition.

  First Edition

  This novel is dedicated to my parents, and especially to my son, Marco Ming Cher.

  Introduction

  UNDERSTANDING THE VARIETIES of English used in this revised version is crucial to reading it accurately.

  In the original version of Spider Boys, published by Penguin Auckland in 1995, there is no distinction between the narrator’s voice and the dialogue of the characters. Anyone familiar with the repertoire of Singapore English would pause at reading an excerpt like this:

  Kwang goes to school in the morning session and Ah Seow in the afternoon. When Kim was twelve years old, her mother went to work as a live-in servant, coming home twice a month. Kim runs the housekeeping. Their mothers had big quarrels. But for them business is as usual.

  One night, through the gaps of rough plank walls dividing their bedrooms, Kwang whisper, “Ah Seow, Ah Seow... keep this one for me.” And pass him a spider box.

  “Only one?” Ah Seow took it and report, “There are only two of your other spider left, the rest all sold.”1

  The first paragraph is written in standard English. But in the first sentence of the second paragraph, there is this sentence, “Kwang whisper...” And the next sentence reads, “And pass him a spider box.” The question to ask is, what happened to the tenses governing the words ‘whisper’ and ‘pass’? Given the tenses used in the first paragraph, which legitimately mixes the present and past tenses, the reader would expect the words ‘whispered’ and ‘passed’. Likewise, in the sentence “Ah Seow took it and report”, there is the discrepancy between ‘took’ and ‘report’.

  In her essential study of the Singaporean-Malaysian Novel in English, Different Voices, Rosaly Puthucheary writes, “There is a need to know what English sounds like before it can be represented. This is rather problematic for writers who live away from Singapore.”2 These sentences sum up the mixed linguistic situation of Spider Boys precisely. Although the author Ming Cher, born in Singapore in 1947, spent his early impressionable years as a boy and young man on the island, he subsequently migrated to New Zealand. One blurb in the 1995 version has this to say: “Ming Cher writes only in English he learnt at school and spoke on the streets of Singapore. He is fluent in Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin, Malay, Indonesian and Vietnamese, but in none of these languages does he read or write.”3

  Very likely, his long absence from Singapore and the lack of communication with speakers of Singaporean English led him to recall the Hokkien and Cantonese dialects he spoke and heard in Singapore in the mid-fifties and how they can be represented in a ‘low’ variety of English.

  Language apart, there are merits in the novel which warrant this new version, and the rest of this introduction deals with them. This work recreates vividly and accurately aspects of colonial Singapore in the mid-fifties: gangs and gang rivalry, fighting spiders, fighting fish, kite flying, adolescent angst, religious observances and superstitions amid working-class poverty. As someone born in 1940, who also flew kites, kept fighting fish and spiders and took part in competitions (though not in the way described in the novel), knew gangsters in my district of Hougang and grew up hearing stories of old wives’ tales, I can testify to the authenticity of the novel.4

  A common feature of the gangs who were members of Chinese triads is that they were organised around hobbies like spider fighting (on which they could bet and make money), or according to districts they lived in (Chinatown or Bukit Ho Swee), or according to the Chinese dialects they spoke. The boys and their girls and families would speak Cantonese in Chinatown and Hokkien in Bukit Ho Swee. Hokkien was the lingua franca across dialects. It was usual practice for there to be ‘honour among thieves’ as part of a basic morality, despite the violence. They observed bonds and thus, despite fierce rivalry, Kwang and Chai managed to patch up, and later, Kwang and Yeow. As well, in this excerpt, hero-worship, a common trait among adolescents, is apparent:

  I have been even farther—up to Changi! Everywhere is the same at this time. Wait for the kite season to finish in another month and then it will pick up.” Their friendship was united, like it was in the old times.

  Kwang was quiet as they joined the gathering of spider boys crowding around Ah Seow’s new hero. When they arrived, the spider boys all stood up to make way for their reunion. They all cherished the night, especially Yeow, who quietly rubbed his hands with satisfaction.5

  Old beliefs in traditional Chinese medicine also flourished. Thus Kwang, who stepped on a rusty nail and developed tetanus, recovered through herbal ministration (see pages 106–108).

  Two other features are worth mentioning, namely the climactic contest of spiders and the thriller element. The build-up to what was to become the Spider Olympics is believably presented as an exaggeration, heroics common to impressionable boys living in spare, colonial Singapore. Boys would like to be men, to have adult identity that enables them to be part of social groups, to gamble like men and have money to throw around at girls and whores. There are many competitors, referees, rounds leading to a final, unexpected victories and defeats and a fight to the bitter end. Towards the climax, the spiders became identified with their owners and the areas they represented: “Although Kwang had no left arm, and Jurong was by now limping on only five legs, the two tired spiders war danced for a record thirty seconds before they jumped at each other...”6 All this is narrated without a touch of irony, but the alert reader cannot but be aware that at the end, the losing spider tumbled “down the bottle-crate cliff. In their rush to get a close look, the roaring crowd kicked down the stadium.”7

  The thriller element is in the rivalry between the two leaders, Kwang of Bukit Ho Swee and Yeow of Chinatown, not only for the title of the ‘king’ of the spider boys but also for the love of Kim, their common love interest. The bond between them is temporarily shattered when the more experienced Yeow wins over Kim. Yeow is captured by rival gangs in Penang; he is badly hurt, but survives. Kwang spies on Yeow when he visits a well-heeled prostitute, but the expected stand-off is aborted, the rivals make up and the novel ends happily. In this sense, it is a gangster novel.

  The writer of fiction who writes in English but whose characters do not speak English faces several problems in presenting them. One way out of the problem is for him to have his narrator use a standard
ised English while his characters speak a variety of non-standard Englishes. The narrator is impelled to create, in dialogue which is spoken, authentic speech, or—more accurately—speeches, if the characters belong to different dialects. This difference has to be addressed and one way is to use the idiom peculiar to the language to be presented.

  Thus, in this exchange which would have taken place in colloquial Cantonese, there is a reference to ‘water’ to mean ‘money’:

  “Something worth thinking,” Lame Leg said, impressed by the large amount of cash. “The water on the table is not small. That smooth guy is easy with it.” He used the Cantonese idiom, ‘water’, for money.

  “I know what you mean,” the chief replied. “But we don’t sell the rules. All our brothers have to get the facts straight.”

  “Sure, but nothing will change. Better to bleed the water before we bleed his blood.”8

  Sometimes, the original Chinese idiom is retained to convey the force of the original, or because the phrase cannot be accurately translated, or it has become embedded in the lexicon of Singaporean English. Take this paragraph, for instance:

  The boy with many sisters returned, lots of girls following behind him. The two referees now urged everyone to draw a coloured satay stick from a tin to determine their viewing position. “Tew chiam! Tew chiam! Red in front! Blue, white, green follow behind!” Nearly two hundred boys and girls jostled their way into the arena.9

  The Hokkien phrase ‘tew chiam’ means ‘draw lots’ in English. There is another usage of this phrase on page 182.

  The two examples quoted above, from Cantonese and Hokkien, demonstrate the language choices made in this novel. It is worthwhile to quote, again, Rosaly Puthucheary, who was mentioned at the beginning of this essay. She writes, “The most important challenge facing the writers of novels about Singapore and Malaysia in English is, therefore, the artistic representation of the person speaking... The main task that faces the novelist from this region is how to represent the various languages of everyday speech that he encounters in his multilingual environment.”10

  I hope enough has been said about the linguistic choices facing the writer in English who presents non-English-speaking situations and places, enough for the reader to move on to focus on other fictional characteristics.

  Robert Yeo, August 2012

  Robert Yeo, born 1940, kept spiders and fighting fish and flew kites as a boy growing up in a kampung. His latest book is The Best of Robert Yeo (Epigram Books, 2012), which collects his poems to date. He has published several books of poetry and plays, and edited many anthologies of Singaporean writing. The opera, entitled Fences, for which he wrote the libretto to music by John Sharpley, was successfully staged in August 2012 in Singapore.

  NOTES:

  1. Ming Cher. Auckland, New Zealand: Penguin, 1955, 3.

  2. Rosaly Puthucheary. Different Voices: The Singaporean/Malaysian Novel. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009, 288.

  3. Ming Cher. 1995. Blurb.

  4. Robert Yeo. Routes: A Singaporean Memoir 1940–75. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2011, 25.

  5. Ming Cher. Spider Boys. Singapore: Epigram Books, 2012, 97.

  6. Ibid. 189.

  7. Ibid. 190.

  8. Ibid. 134.

  9. Ibid. 45.

  10. Puthucheary. 17–18.

  Characters

  Kwang (also known as Shark Head and Monkey Boy)—Son

  of Pau Shen (deceased) and Yee; leader of spider boys

  Kim (Swee Kim)—Daughter of Ah Hock

  Ah Seow (Tain Seng)—Kwang’s deputy; brother of Kim

  Pau Shen (kung fu man)—Kwang’s father (deceased)

  Yee—Kwang’s mother

  Ah Hock—Kim’s father

  Chai—Son of Big Head; Kwang’s spider rival

  Chinatown Yeow (also known as Smiling Boy)—Leader of Chinatown street boys

  San—Chai’s deputy; son of Wong

  No Nose—Village kite-maker

  Blind Man—Village storyteller

  Wong—Village calligrapher and letter writer; San’s father

  Big Head—Gambling den operator; Chai’s father

  Ah Paw—Chai’s grandmother

  Big Mole—Orphaned Chinatown girl; protector of Sachee

  Sachee—Orphaned Chinatown boy; spy for Yeow

  Ah Sou (also known as Cigarette Woman)—Yeow’s adoptive mother (godmother)

  Cheong Pak—Ah Sou’s husband; Yeow’s adoptive father (godfather)

  Ng Koo—Rich widow; high-class brothel owner

  Shoot Bird—Merchant; initiator of Spider Olympic Games

  Hong—Burglar; former spider boy

  SPIDER BOYS

  Singapore

  1955

  1

  Mother’s Rule

  THE WRESTLING SPIDER is a nomadic hunter that lives between closely sandwiched leaves. Its body, which is the shape and size of a grain of rice, is black and covered with iridescent spots and stripes—dark green, turquoise, blue, red, even purple. Its head is about half the length of a grain of rice and broader. The female spider has a black face; the male has a white face and a slimmer body, as well as longer legs and ‘arms’, as well as a needly point at its rear end, which makes it look like a scorpion. The male spider is like a jealous sex maniac that cannot resist the sight of a female. It gets mad at its fellow males and does a war dance before it fights. It jumps as quickly as a ping-pong ball when caught fresh. ‘Spider boys’ all over Singapore called these fighting spiders ‘Panther Tigers’, and caught them to keep as pets or for betting on and selling.

  Kwang had been fascinated by wrestling spiders since he could walk and talk. He and Kim had grown up like sweethearts in the house with the bamboo balcony, which their fathers had built together.

  Kim—Ah Hock’s daughter—watched as Kwang blew gently at a female spider inside a flat tin box while tapping its butt gently with his thumb, his other four fingers spread out underneath for support. It was to make the spider stay still. Then he let a male spider from another box hop in. At the sight of the female, the male spider raised its arms in a desperate effort to approach, which made the female wriggle hard under Kwang’s thumb, as if pleading with the other creature, “Help me! Help me!”

  “Hey,” Kim said, pointing at the male spider, “can you see, the needle on the spider tail is getting longer. You know why?”

  “Of course! That one is the male, white face. The needle is like my thing, here!” Kwang pulled down his elastic shorts and flipped his penis up and down until it grew larger. “Same like mine, a male part can expand!”

  Kim touched his thing and giggled. He jerked with a shiver.

  Sometimes, Kwang and Kim pretended to be spiders and wrestled together. Sometimes he would ride on top of her, like a male spider. Just before he turned seven, his mother, Yee, gave him his first big whacking for penetrating Kim. Yee told Ah Hock that Kim was also caned by her mother. Ah Hock, a tall and strong coolie, was furious at seeing the cane marks on his daughter’s body and nearly beat his wife, who loved her son, Tain Seng, more. From then on, Kim was free to do whatever she liked.

  Even after his father, Pau Shen the kung fu man, died when he was ten years old, Kwang’s love for wrestling spiders did not die. When his mother was at home, he would pretend to be studying hard, staring into a book and saying any English word that came to mind: “A—boy, C—dog, B—orange!” His mother, who could not read or write, would then look pleased and leave him alone.

  Tain Seng, Kim’s brother, was a year younger and nicknamed Ah Seow (“something wrong in the head”) by all the spider boys in the village, for he would go into fits of psychic hallucinations when he got very nervous. Otherwise, he was brilliant at school and good at the spider business. Tall and handsome, Ah Seow was also Kwang’s spider agent and safeguarded the knowledge of Kwang’s hobby from the fierce Yee.

  Kwang went to school in the morning and Ah Seow attended the afternoon session. When Kim was twelve, her
mother went to work as a live-in servant, coming home twice a month. So Kim ran the housekeeping. Their mothers quarrelled frequently. For the children, the spider business went on as usual.

  One night, through a gap in the rough plank walls dividing their bedrooms, Kwang passed a box to Ah Seow and whispered, “Ah Seow, Ah Seow, keep this one for me.”

  “Only one?” Ah Seow took the spider box. He reported, “There are only two of your other spiders left, the rest all sold.”

  “Don’t talk so loud and so much lah!” Kwang growled. “My mother’s in a bad mood. I wait for you at the usual place before cock crows. Can you wake up earlier?” Kwang was lying underneath a mosquito net on a raised plank floor, which was the bed he shared with his two younger brothers. “You climb over and wake me up lah,” said Ah Seow in the submissive voice he used when Kwang demanded something from him. He had relied on Kwang for protection against the village bullies since he was growing up.

  The next morning, the boys crawled out of their mosquito nets and jumped out of their bedroom windows into the narrow alley between the back of their houses and their neighbour’s wall. Ah Seow clapped away the dust from his clothes and moaned. “So early...!” He rubbed his sleepy eyes on the sleeves of his shirt. He had the spider boxes inside a canvas bag over his shoulder.

  “Don’t talk cock!” Kwang elbowed him. “I tell you something when we get there, run!” He pushed him into a race. They took shortcuts and ran up slopes and passed the backyard of a farmhouse on their way to a small plot of big yam leaves. The morning dew had pooled on the waxy surfaces of the leaves.

  Ah Seow asked breathlessly, “What is the big news?”

  Kwang ignored him and tilted a big leaf back and forth, dreamily watching the larger dewdrops merge with the smaller ones. He was in his own world for a while. “Bring out the spiders,” he ordered. “Bring out the Panther Tigers.” Kwang scratched his lean, shirtless body, which was scarred by mosquito bites and by cane marks from beatings by his mother, who wanted him to stay at home and study hard.