by Ming Cher
“Come on! Come on!” Ah Seow stood up and clapped. “Quick hands make a move before betting close! Before betting close!” From the independent group, some people shouted, “Five cents!” while others, “Ten cents!” The referees stood up to collect the bets, which totalled nine dollars, issued receipts, and pushed the balance of three dollars back to Chai.
Referee San rang a bell. Referee Seow signalled, “Start!” with a chopping motion above the white block of wood.
Both chiefs directed their spiders towards the block with a gentle flick to the tails. The spiders jumped on and faced each other. Kwang’s spider had spots and stripes of a silvery deep purple, Chai’s was a silvery dark turquoise. At the sight of each other, both wrestling spiders stretched their arms out wide, their heads down and their bodies up, and their two fangs curved inwards, as if to say, “Get out of my way or else!”
After a furious stare at each other, they charged and war-danced, moving forwards and backwards, their arms apart. Purple shifted a step backwards, Turquoise moved a step forwards; Purple moved forwards, Turquoise moved backwards. Both shifted forwards and backwards in hypnotic slow motion, trying to tempt the other into making a mistake. Purple held his ground, Turquoise attacked. Purple counterattacked, clashing and hammering in a teeth-grinding and face-butting engagement with their bodies pressed low to the block. Then, in a sudden switch of action faster than the eyes could follow, the warriors in their shiny armour stood up on hind legs at an angle of forty-five degrees to lock jaws, their arms and legs pounding at each other at a vibrating speed, going faster and faster in the battle of strength. Seconds after, both tumbled down, crumbling on top of each other, then burst apart to struggle up to dance and clash again. Each time they separated and came together again, spider boys called it one round. This pattern happened only in a good fight. After three rounds, Chai’s Turquoise ran away with an injured leg, and Kwang’s team roared, joyfully clapping their hands for the first goal scored.
An hour had passed in five matches. Kwang’s team had lost only one match, and their capital had tripled. The independent party had also won a lot of money. At the opening of the sixth match, Chai’s thick stack of dollars and coins were all gone. He did not bother to comb his hair any more, but simply swept the sweat from his forehead with his hands, which he then wiped on his shorts, and fumbled to unzip his back pocket to take out a wad of ten-dollar notes from his wallet. He banged the money hard on the table.
“Monkey Boy!” he yelled, calling Kwang by his nickname for the first time. “Today is the day for you to take revenge, got the guts, do me a favour! Bet bigger!” He stuck a cigarette between his lips.
The crowd turned silent.
“What do you want!” Kwang suddenly slammed his hand on the plywood, harder than Chai did, and stood up to face his opponent, like a spider ready for a fight.
“Go back! Go back!” Kim intervened, holding out her hands against their chests. “Like that! I want to go home now!”
Kwang calmed down; Chai calmed down. The referees reset the stage.
Chai took up his crispy red notes, straightened them and fanned them out like cards in his hand, and tried to compose himself. “More than one hundred here.” He spread the bills on the table. “If you have enough guts—take it and eat.” Then he took out his sixth spider, a dark blue one.
Kwang lowered his head to think for a while, then said quietly, “Okay lah. Referees, count his money.” He removed the rubber band around his mother’s forty dollars in his pocket—food money for a month—and tossed it onto the table. “Referee,” he said tersely to San. “If our pool money is not enough, add this for me in the public bet records.” Next he took out his best spider, a dark purple one.
In the sixth match, the two great spiders did not let anybody down. They fought from crawling position to standing and lockjaw, they tumbled and crumbled together, broke loose, war danced, clashed again, and crumbled and broke loose all over. Vigorously they fought: one round, two rounds, three rounds… not until they got to the sixth round were they both tired, but like great warriors, they fought on, captivating everybody.
The smell of dripping sweat in the afternoon heat intensified the excitement. Only the referees remained calm. Ah Seow also felt excited by the girls in the front rows, and he caught San stealing a look at his sister’s nipples, visible through her thin tee-shirt, which was now soaking wet from perspiration. Kim gripped Kwang’s hand so tightly, her fingernails bit into his flesh; he couldn’t feel the pain, he clenched his teeth to watch his mother’s food money being held at ransom.
At the seventh round, the spiders no longer war danced; they crawled to meet each other, clashing tiredly at a reduced speed and in a flat position. With a heave, Kwang’s spider tossed the Dark Blue of Chai into a back flip, and the latter scrambled up with a giddy look and ran for its life. The winning audience roared with relief; the losers gasped into silence, pained by the loss.
Kwang took his prized spider in his palm and spat out some saliva for it to drink. Ah Seow’s hand was shaking as he counted the dollars. San put away the defeated spider tenderly. Chai lit up a smoke and combed his hair slowly to compose himself. “Monkey Boy,” he put up a brave face, “today is your day, your money. You clean me out.”
Kwang replied, “I give you a return match anytime you want.”
“Chai!” the talkative girl called out in a sympathetic voice. “Chai! Where are you going?”
Chai did not reply. He rode off on his bicycle with his familiar spider bag on his shoulder, hanging his head and refusing to look at the equally sad faces of his team members. Chai’s team drifted away in separate directions with their own spider futures in their minds.
Kwang’s team walked in unity to celebrate at an open-house party at his mother’s place. Some independents joined them.
San and Ah Seow stayed back to divide up their referee’s five percent commission on the day’s betting turnover and packed up the spider gear. “Lucky,” San said, “I took my father’s hint and bet on your side behind Chai’s back.”
“Not easy to make Chai’s money,” Ah Seow replied.
5
Chinatown Yeow
CHAI WENT HOME, trying to decide between selling his bicycle and stealing money from his grandmother. Finally, he decided to see Chinatown Yeow for a loan.
Smiling-face Yeow was from Penang. He had been born on a grassy grave when his mother suddenly went into labour while walking past a cemetery. His parents had disappeared during the Japanese Occupation. An aunt who brought him up died when he was seven years old. After her death, he joined the boys in the streets who had survived the war, scraping for food and getting bullied in the beginning.
When he was nine years old, he saw a snatch thief doing a hit-and-run job. He told one of the older boys, “We can do the same thing.”
“We’re too small,” the older boy said. “Can’t run fast enough.”
“Help me talk to the bigger boys lah,” Yeow insisted.
A bigger boy said, “I can do the running, what can you do?”
“Spy on rich people,” he replied.
More talking quickly turned into action. The first successful job inspired the other boys to follow suit. Although some were caught, the boys rapidly learned to be more proficient: how to exchange information, who to trust, how to keep their mouth shut, and even how to dress well to surprise victims in a change of tactics.
When Yeow tossed restlessly in his bed about before sleep, he enjoyed recalling the faces of victims screaming for help as his mates smilingly ran away with the loot. He bitterly resented the fate of his kind, who had to contend daily with scraps, unfair dividends, bullying, jealousy and division. It was like in a movie. The whole show played again and again in his mind, making him resolve to avoid conflict, to sort the good and bad behind a smiling face, which helped him do better than the rest. His survival instincts enabled him to know his own strengths and weaknesses.
Privately, he was a lone w
olf. He dug into his past to find the future. Each time he heard the voices of old women hawking noodles—“Chee cheong fan! Chee cheong fan!”—late into the night, he knew they were hauling two heavy buckets of rice noodle rolls on each end of a bamboo pole on their shoulders, and he was reminded of his dead aunt who sold the same food in the same way. It choked him up, and filled him with ambition. He developed a good photographic memory from spying on people and places. Yeow’s spying skills were superb and he supplied his information to his best snatchers.
Four years of spying later, Yeow was thirteen years old and much taller. “Why don’t you do a bigger job?” he asked an old-time snatcher who had graduated from street life to become a member of the Siew Jee Ho secret society, but still had the snatch-theft habit.
“No opening, you have any?” the old-timer replied. “Anything happens not your problem. Tell me, I give you a fair cut.”
“I trust you. You are the quickest,” Yeow smiled at the twenty-year-old, who had failed only twice in his seven-year career.
“Talk it out lah, Smiling Boy,” he winked, putting an arm round Yeow’s shoulder.
“All the rich women go to the Poh Heng goldsmith shop, the boss is a woman, very very rich. I know how many times she goes to the bank in a week. Two times!” Yeow gestured with two fingers. “She drives to the bank from her big house in a quiet place. Catch her at her own doorstep… you know what I mean.”
“That is easy!” The old-timer snapped his fingers and offered a thirty-percent commission. “Three cut for you. You do the lookout, okay?”
“Talk at the seaside lah,” Yeow smiled. “More quiet! I like the breeze.” The two drew out their plans on the sandy beach.
That snatch theft was reported in the newspapers; the woman’s loss was more than twenty thousand dollars. But his counterpart disappeared with the money. From that day, Yeow was bitter and could not sleep, and kept asking himself, “What else can I be? I cannot read. I cannot write. No real friends. Nothing! If I am like that all the time, I might as well die! Where’s my guts?” Every night, he woke from his nightmares and blinked, replaying the movies of his life, a growing and hungry lone wolf tortured by a new voice for vengeance.
Then Yeow remembered the old-timer talking about the nightclubs and bar girls of Kuala Lumpur. He also remembered the popular saying in secret societies, “Nobody is born brave. If you want to come out to roam, you must be daring.” He started to jog to build his stamina. Within a few months, he had executed a case, alone, netting a few hundred dollars. Without telling anybody and carrying only a few pieces of clothing in a shoulder bag, he caught a ferry and a train on a four-hundred-kilometre trip to Kuala Lumpur. It was his first time out of the country. Too young to check into a hotel, which required an identity card, he slept in Bukit Bintang Park on starry nights and on the benches of the Kuala Lumpur Railway Station on cloudy nights. In the mornings, he mapped out the new environment with his photographic mind.
With the man’s habits in mind and with the skill of a good spy, Yeow scouted around popular food streets in the afternoons and evenings, and watched outside the bars and nightclubs at night. Finally, at Batu Road, he saw the man eating expensive food. Yeow tailed him to his flat, then patiently studied his daily routines from a safe distance. He saw him going to the bars on the main streets of Bukit Bintang and bringing home a different bar girl almost every night. One night, Yeow saw him stagger out of the bar after closing time, drunk and alone. “So you can’t fuck every night?” Yeow smiled bitterly and ran ahead of him.
It was near midnight. Yeow climbed into his enemy’s flat on the second floor via the vertical water pipes close to the balcony, then hid under his bed and waited. The moment he heard the key unlock the door, he steadied his nerves, holding a bearing scraper against his chest and chanting like a man in a trance, “It’s either you or me… either you or me.” When the drunken guy started snoring, Yeow crawled out, looked at his former partner and thought bitterly, “I waited and waited for this chance… you eat me, I eat you!” He screamed inwardly and plunged the twenty-centimetre blade right through the man’s chest with both his hands. The man jerked awake, grabbing his chest, his eyes and mouth now wide open. “Can you recognise me?” Yeow said softly, watching him die, watching his tongue shortening into the throat of his open mouth.
Yeow breathed heavily after his first taste of ‘revenge is sweet’, the new sensation of a cold-blooded rawness hardening him. Leaving the bearing scraper on the dead man’s chest, he switched on the light and searched the drawers of the dressing table, but found no money. Undeterred, he studied the dressing table again, then pulled out the bottom drawer completely and discovered a false bottom containing half of the original theft money in a plastic bag. He took the cash and left the flat quietly, then caught the midnight train back to Singapore.
• • •
In Singapore, Yeow buried his money and walked aimlessly in the streets of Chinatown, searching for a job that could give him a place to stay, even if it did not pay a salary. Nobody wanted him. Rejected everywhere and having to sleep on the streets again made him angry and depressed. He was a stranger in a new land. The new experience of utter loneliness was the worst; his mind whirled with questions. The bottomless pit of depression yawned before him and it led him to join the street boys of Chinatown, who numbered much more than in Penang. Yeow’s blood flowed with a hot new vision and the toughened guts of a boy who had six years of street life behind him and had just killed a man. With a smiling face, money and good communication skills, Yeow had, within a few years, arranged a unity among the hitherto leaderless street boys by organising them into a spying network. He capitalised on information of all kinds under his new identity, becoming increasingly proficient as the master and purveyor of information.
During this time, Singapore was under the control of two law-making groups: the British, who had ruled with guns and wits since 1819, and the triads, Chinese secret societies, who used fists and knives among themselves. In postwar Singapore, all Chinese businesses in every street paid protection money; every street was ‘controlled’ by a gang. Open gang clashes between secret societies happened every day, while rebels within gangs often left to form new gangs. The secret societies used numbers to identify their groups. Number was strength; number was the meaning of their movement. The number was in tune with the times, it was trendy and it had a ‘macho’ appeal for young recruits, who liked to dress up like the Teddy Boys, with skintight pants, and swing to the rock-and-roll or cha-cha of Western music. Many imitated Elvis Presley, who was known to them as ‘King Cat’. The Black and White youth gang wore shirts with collars turned up high; tattoos were changed from dragons and godlike warriors to cowboy girls with big breasts, English letters, or animals like the black panther and snake. Some drew aside their collar to reveal their gang tattoo, while others stroked their nose with two fingers to say, “I am from Two-Four”, or made a zero sign when lighting a match, for Zero-Eight gang. One of Chai’s half brothers belonged to the Two-Four gang, the other belong to the Three-Six-Nine.
Political parties were also sprouting up, like the Alliance Party, Labour Party, Barisan Sosialis, People’s Action Party. Chinese school students frequently rioted, shouting for independence: “Merdeka! Merdeka! Merdeka!” In addition, the Communist movement was gaining ground, supported by the majority of the poor. The British brought in Gurkha soldiers to control the riots, and they also made new laws. Everybody above twelve years old now had to carry an identity card with a photo.
When Chai rode to a popular food stall in Chinatown to locate Yeow, he saw a skinny brown girl with a grape-size mole under her left eye walking with a small but nuggety boy with crew-cut hair, three or four years younger than she was. “Big Mole! Big Mole!” Chai yelled, stopped his bike and pushed it towards them. “Big Mole! Did you see Yeow?”
Big Mole looked at her boy. He shook his head. She stared at the fresh pimples on Chai’s broad face. “I don’t know,” she lied slowl
y, counting Chai’s pimples to avoid his suspicious look. She scratched her fuzzy hair with her scrawny hand.
Big Mole was about Chai’s age. The only girl among the Chinatown street kids, she had been a lost Indonesian child who was found by a prostitute during the Japanese Occupation, just as she began to walk. At around ten years old, she ran away from the brothel. On the other hand, Sachee, which meant ‘small stick’, was brought up on the back of his grandmother—literally: she piggybacked him to beg for a living. When he could walk and talk, they worked together. One day, he found that his grandmother could neither walk nor talk. She was dead. So he begged his own way up until Yeow saw him begging together with Big Mole and decided to take them under his wing. Chai knew the pair well, and he also knew the little boy was Yeow’s favourite spy. “Nah! Sachee,” Chai said briskly, taking out a packet of cigarettes to offer a cigarette, “Have a smoke? Don’t say I have nothing for you.”
Sachee stuck the cigarette on his lips and waved a finger by the cigarette for a light. Chai flinched but lit the cigarette. Sachee blew the smoke into the air. “Big Head Chai, can you spare another ten cents for a cup of coffee?” He flicked away the cigarette ashes like a man.
Chai gave him ten cents, frowning.
“Nah! Yeow is in Santeng, listening to Cheong Pak talk about the news.” Sachee jerked his thumb backwards, towards an uphill area with a plateau at its peak, which was relatively quieter.
Chai wasted no time and rode away with his bicycle bell ringing in the midst of human traffic in packed Chinatown. Continuing to walk hand-in-hand with Sachee, Big Mole asked, “Sachee! Why did you point your finger the other way for Big Head Chai to go for a monkey ride? He will be mad next time he sees us!”
“Why scared? He is not our friend!” Sachee punched his hand. “Do you know he looks down on us? Has money and never gives us anything? Talks to us only when he wants something? I don’t like his bully face.”