The Hills of Singapore

by Dawn Farnham

  It was inevitable that the sight of the junks would take her mind to the night she had first arrived in the harbour, to the first sight of these strange and majestic masters of the ocean. And to him, of course. He was never far, always occupying a soft corner of her mind, not more than half a thought away. She shook her head and smiled, for she knew she would have to be dead before this desire would ever go away.

  Finally Captain Elliott ordered the anchor to be dropped and Charlotte turned her eyes to the town. Little had changed: the big white mansions along the beach, the hill behind topped with the Governor’s residence and the flagstaff. Fort Fullerton stood at the southern mouth of the river: a fort in name only, for its stone walls were low. Charlotte knew that a flurry of unexpected interest in Singapore had arisen in Calcutta and that funds had been allocated for its defence. This interest, however, had waned as fast as it had arrived and then funds had just as quickly dried up. In consequence, the wall was nothing more than a low embankment and the soldiers’ barracks but a few rather straggling, hastily completed stone buildings.

  The piers, like gapped teeth, projected from behind the godowns of Commercial Square. The Chinese town was hidden behind the octagonal red roof of the market.

  Alexander appeared at her side, full of excitement, pointing to the stream of little skipping sampans and stately tongkangs emerging from the river mouth which lay concealed from view, rushing to do business with every new ship that dropped anchor. The decks of many ships would be crowded, she knew, from early morning to night with tailors, shoemakers, washerwomen and touts for every vice available, either on board or in the town. The Queen was almost instantly surrounded by them, the tongkangs bringing for sale fresh bread, eggs, milk, chickens, ducks, fish, fruit and vegetables, the sampans full of curiosities, all the men and women suing, in piteous voices, for permission to come aboard and making the most prodigious clatter. Alexander, she could see, loved it.

  She told the first mate to allow one of the curiosity sellers on board, for the amusement of the children. As the mate’s head appeared over the side and he raised his hand, the clamour rose to deafening pitch. He pointed and, quick as a flash, the two chosen men had climbed aboard laden with cages of birds, parrots and birds of paradise, small monkeys, lizards, snakes, shells, corals, mats, wood carvings, trinkets and Malay daggers. She quickly ordered a basket of hideous shrunken heads to be removed. Adam was terrified, and the babus clung to him, but Alexander thought it a great joke and laughed. Finally Adam, watching his brother, began to calm down and went up to one of the monkeys. Charlotte sighed and told them there would be no monkeys and no daggers.

  “We shall pay to free the birds and watch them fly away, eh?” she asked them, for she had a horror of such captive things. “And you may pick a pretty shell to keep.”

  Both boys looked pouty-lipped but reluctantly agreed, so long as they could open the cages. Charlotte gave some coins to the wrinkled old Malay, who looked utterly amazed as he watched the birds fly free.

  Captain Elliott came up, waiting, and then told her they had permission to disembark. He ordered the decks cleared.

  The sampan threaded its way skilfully through the anchored ships and turned into the crowded mouth of the river. The narrow entrance was fairly jammed with boats and the boatman gave the most ferocious yells and gesticulations. He was a copper-skinned Kling from the Coramandel Coast in India. He was clad only in a dhoti and chewed his betel, now and then spitting a red stream from his mouth into the river. Kajang-roofed sampans huddled on the low central bank of the river tied to stakes, the naked children frolicking in and out of the water. Adam was quiet, sucking his thumb, but Alexander was taking it all in eagerly.

  From a distance she saw Robert and put up her hand. He waved. Charlotte pointed him out to Alexander and Adam, for they had never met this uncle. She felt on the verge of tears. To see Robert after so long. Four years—it was a lifetime. As she set foot on the steps of the landing stage, he swept her into his arms. His own eyes filled with tears and they held each other tight.

  “Robbie, Robbie, I missed you.”

  Robert could not speak, merely nodded and held her tighter. Then he let her go as the boys came to her side.

  “Ah, my young boys, Alex, Adam, my nephews. It is good to meet you.”

  Alex held out his hand, and Robert grinned and shook it, then bent and picked up Adam into his arms. Adam was a shy boy and looked terrified and set up a loud wail. Robert laughed and released him but instantly took up both boys’ hands and set off along the quay, in front of the Court House, still easily the most elegant building in the town, to the carriage waiting for them where High Street met the river.

  Before she followed him, Charlotte turned and gazed over the crowded little river to the Chinese town and the cavernous godown of Baba Tan, one of the richest merchants of Singapore and Zhen’s father-in-law.

  4

  Zhen stepped up over the hewn log which barred the entrance to the Thien Hock Keng temple and out into the muddy street, walking along the bay towards the market. He had given thanks for this day at the altar of Guan Di, the God of War and of Good Fortune, the patron deity of the kongsi. The rain, which had been light, now began to fall heavily, and he took shelter in the crowded porch of the Fuk Tak Chi temple, watching the storm lash the bay to invisibility. He was in no hurry. He still had half an hour before a meeting with his father-in-law, Baba Tan, at the offices of McKendrick and Shaw, Law Agents, on Commercial Square. Today they would sign the purchase agreement for a new steamship, his steamship for his company, made in a country far away. He touched the chop seal in his pocket, the seal with which he would sign all documents. He gripped it tight.

  Tan owned sailing ships, junks and hybrid Siamese vessels which flew the British flag in the China trade but Zhen wanted steam to power his ship. It was the future, he was sure of it, and his father-in-law had put faith in him and advanced him credit. This ship was like a dream, the first in a fleet which promised the great wealth he wanted. He had entered into this business with his brother-in-law, Ang Choon, a shipowner in Bangkok, who had taken Tan’s fourth daughter as his second wife. Ang’s first wife was a daughter of the richest baba in Siam who owned rice mills, and his ship would be added to Ang’s for the voluminous and profitable rice trade in the region.

  He had been invited to represent his father-in-law on the committee for the construction of the new building for the Chongwen Ge, the first Chinese school in Singapore, which was being established on the grounds of the Thien Hock Keng temple. It was a great honour and revealed in what esteem he was beginning to be held in this town. To have come so far from so little—only Singapore could have done this.

  The rain stopped abruptly, and to calm his mind and his excitement, he walked slowly along Telok Ayer Street, crossed Market Street into Malacca Street and emerged behind the godowns of the Square onto the piers.

  The water of the bay, an intense blue, mirrored the sky. He never tired of this view, the ships dotting the bay, the constant movement of boats carrying goods to and fro, the hundreds of coolies in perpetual motion, loading and unloading. He thought briefly of Bukit Jagoh at Telok Belangah, the land for the house he would build one day, and of his own arrival in Singapore. Then he had been one of the lowliest of men, like those he saw before him now. His education, this precious ability to read and write, had separated him from thousands of others however, and he had been selected, as had his friend Qian, for marriage into the family of a rich Peranakan merchant house. This marriage to Baba Tan’s daughter had changed everything and even now he could not always believe it.

  He was not like many of the Chinese who came here, temporary, desperate to make money and return home as quickly as possible. He had noticed the real difference between the Teochew and the Hokkien. The Teochews always moaned on about home and going back, but the Hokkien, like him, were quick and adaptable. He loved Singapore. He called it that now, like the English, not Si Lat Po, the Chinese name. These white
men were not “foreign devils”. They were quick and clever and built amazing things, like steamships and machines that fixed your image. He admired this phenomenal capacity for invention. Everything wise and true and old was Chinese but everything new, everything useful for commerce, came from the West.

  He had been in Singapore just one year when the East India Company’s ship, Nemesis, had arrived into the harbour. When the flag was hoisted on the staff, almost every single person had left the town and crowded the seashore. The arrival had been awaited with incredible anticipation, for she was the first iron steamship to round the Cape: a ship made of iron, two-masted, with a paddle propeller amidships—a gunship bound for war in China. Zhen had disliked what the ship was doing, but he had never seen anything like her. He could not understand how she stayed afloat and even the Chinese merchants had talked about it for weeks. Since then she had been many times in Singapore, for she patrolled the waters of the Indian Ocean and every time he saw her, he watched her greedily.

  He missed his family, especially his mother and younger brothers, but he did not miss China. Every now and then, when he sipped the red Fukien tea, he thought of his home there, of the mountains and the Taoist monastery where he had learned his disciplines, and of the fourth concubine of the local mandarin who had secretly and lengthily initiated him into the wonders of the flesh. Where was she now? But he did not miss the endless and grinding poverty which lay like a pall over the villages, the corruption of the officials or his father’s opium addiction which had ruined them all.

  The kongsi was all that had saved them from death and he had served it willingly as the hong gun: the red rod, the enforcer, and was loyal to it now. It had made him hard where he was soft from too much fourth concubine. He smiled. Taoism tempered it all and he was a Taoist to the bottom of his soul. And Taoism, the letting be, the unstriving Tao had brought him this fortune, no matter how strange it had been at the beginning entering a Straits Chinese family. They were a good family; his wife was a good wife; he had beautiful daughters and a fortune in prospect in a land where the officials, to his amazement, were not corrupt. In this too, he had learned to admire the British.

  He had begun to understand a little about them as he had learned his English. They were, at least those who ruled here so far, incorruptible. This fact was almost unbelievable. Here, their word was a bond, their code one he admired though he could not quite understand it. He was not naïve; he knew about what the British were doing in China—invasion and forced trade. On one level he felt sorry but on another he could muster no emotion about it. China held no future for him like that which spread before him in Singapore, and he felt a strange and unanticipated loyalty to this place.

  Then, in the midst of these reflections, he saw the ship. He intensified his gaze, uncertain of his own eyes but it was no mistake. Anchored in the bay was the black brig, its topgallant pennants flying in the wind, adorned with a Java panther, the emblem of the Mah Nuk merchant house. This was Xia Lou’s ship, Queen of the South. She was here in Singapore! Blood rushed to his temples and he looked towards the European town.

  He closed his eyes, remembering. He knew she was now a widow. The man she had married was dead. He could not count the number of times he had wished for this during their years of separation. Now that wish was tinged with a sadness not only for her but even for her husband, for he had met this man when Charlotte was in trouble, and had liked him despite their rivalry.

  This musing was quickly overtaken by the thought of her in Singapore, close by, and of their last meeting. She had faced a choice: to stay with her husband and children or to come with him for her trouble had been opium, the dispeller of misery, and he, who hated it, had cured her of it. He remembered every moment spent with her, the hours of love and learning to talk to each other, the endless desire for her, the misery of separation. But, faced with the reality of his marriage, the sheer impossibility of a respectable life together, she had let him go.

  “Then do not come to me again,” he had said, “unless it is forever.”

  He turned away. He had been sure then but now he felt a tenderness, a quivering desire for her. He hardened his heart. They would meet; it was inevitable in such a small town as their social worlds touched. He loved her with all his being but it could not begin again: the hiding, the secrecy. He could not cross any further into her world. To be together, she must accept his way. He walked back to Commercial Square.

  5

  Charlotte had not been a fortnight in Singapore when the invitation from Government House arrived. There was to be a dinner and ball in honour of Sir James Brooke, the Rajah of Sarawak, and Captain Henry Keppel. Captain Keppel’s book The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido for the Suppression of Piracy, which contained extracts of the Rajah’s personal diaries, had been published to feverish interest.

  Charlotte knew that the exploits of the Rajah in these far-flung, pirate-infested seas were viewed in England as prodigious and thrilling, filling the chests of young men with pride and longing and the hearts of young ladies with quivering and romantic passions. The thirst for him had become insatiable. Captain Keppel’s book was in its third printing. The Rajah had been the toast of London, been received by Queen Victoria who had seemingly also fallen under his swashbuckling spell, and been made a knight of her realm.

  Charlotte responded with thanks. She would not miss this event for the world.

  She had paid her respects to the Governor and his wife, as decorum decreed, and left her card. She had taken tea with many of her former acquaintances. Evangeline Barbie was still taking care of the priests at the Catholic Parochial House. The army of children of Jose da Silva were still the most populous in the white town. Robert’s wife, Teresa, was a da Silva grandchild from his daughter by his third wife, a Chinese-Portuguese woman he had married in Macau. Da Silva was currently into his seventh marriage, the product of which were his twin daughters Isobel and Isabel, whom Charlotte knew well.

  An invitation to dinner had arrived from Mrs Benjamin Peach Keaseberry, and this she now held in her hand. Benjamin’s first wife had been a close friend. This marriage to Elizabeth had taken place, Charlotte thought, with indecent haste. His first wife was hardly in her grave before the banns had been posted. Benjamin, leader here of the London Missionary Society, was thirty-five and Elizabeth barely seventeen and Charlotte understood, pregnant.

  She put the invitation down. She would go of course. She would not snub Elizabeth. Something had changed in Singapore in the last few years. An insidious and creeping respectability seemed to have taken over the town. Not perhaps a real respectability but the trappings of respectability. But then, she thought, perhaps all so-called respectability is mere sham.

  In 1839 when she had first arrived, a mere twenty years after its establishment, Singapore was a town of men, had always been a town of men. There were few immigrant women of any sort, either white, Chinese or Indian. The Malay and Bugis villages were always filled with families and children for they were the natives of the island and the surrounding regions. It was then a frontier town, wild and not at all respectable. What women there were, were Indian convict women who became wives and companions to the Indian convict men or other Indian men of the transitory sort who came and went with the tide; boatmen, stall holders, buffalo farmers in Serangoon, guards in the godowns sleeping in the verandahs, milk vendors, water suppliers, barbers, tinkers, syces and peons.

  The other Indians, the indispensable Chettiars, the moneylenders, rarely settled here. They came and set up their low desks in Change Alley or Market Street and their sole purpose was to get rich as quickly as possible and depart. The Indians who settled were the Chittys, who came from Kalinga, merchants and traders who married local women, dressed in Malay style and ate Malay food but were staunch Hindoos.

  The local Chinese of the Straits, too, were settlers. They had long inhabited the port towns of the region. Towns like Batavia, Medan, Malacca, Penang and now the youngest, most ambitious of them
all—Singapore. The first sailors and merchants had married local non-Mohammedan women, brought as slaves from Siam, Sumatra, Bali, the far Eastern provinces of the archipelago—for love perhaps, for companionship certainly. When they returned to China, they left these “number two wives” in charge of business until their return on the next monsoon. Their wives in China would have little inkling of this secondary home away from home. Gradually, as years passed, the Chinese men stayed and made families, marrying their daughters and sons amongst themselves. A hybrid culture had sprung up. The men may have forgotten how to speak Chinese; their sons never learned. The language became a mixture of Hokkien mostly, the language of the maritime south of China from where most of these men came, and Malay, the language of the women. They spoke Baba Malay and the men were called babas and the women nonyas.

  These Peranakan families kept their women under tight control and their daughters locked up. They were merchants, clever and quick, who learned the language of the colonial masters and acted as the indispensable go-betweens for the whites and the natives of whatever town they found themselves in. No colonial city in the East could survive without these compradores. They married amongst themselves or, when they needed new blood—men for their daughters—they chose them from amongst the thousands of poor Chinese coolies who flooded into Singapore with every fleet from China.

  No respectable Chinese women came from China to marry. It was forbidden. Women who came were smuggled out and sold to be prostitutes, enslaved by their own fathers who valued only sons, and had too many mouths to feed. Even though this trade was brisk, the number of Chinese girls and women in Singapore was always a tiny percentage of the male population. Life for the enslaved Chinese prostitute was usually short and brutish. She had to serve the thousands of Chinese and Indian coolies, the soldiers of the army stationed in Singapore and the constant stream of sailors who washed up onshore. Death was often preferable, opium suicide common.