‘But if Mr Davies is fair,’ I said, ‘shouldn’t he already know and not need the judge to tell him?’
Pa’s face spread into a wide grin. It was the first time he’d looked at me that way since I had disappointed him. ‘You’re absolutely right,’ he said. ‘Next time I see him I’ll tell him that.’ And then he opened one of his pink-ribboned files, picked up his pen and got down to some work. But the smile was on his lips for ages.
12
After the army’s foray into the hills the guerrillas kept their distance from Papan. From Minum’s visits I knew they were still up there somewhere, and that Japanese attempts to drive them out had been unsuccessful. How infuriating our new masters must have found them! An irritating rash on the surface of their occupation, the nature of which they could not determine, the remedy unknown.
Minum did not offer any information about the battle or if there were casualties, and again I was disinclined to ask on the basis that the less I knew the harder it would be for the Japanese, should they ever get around to interrogating me, to link me with them. I did gather, however, that there was more than one camp up there, more than one place for the guerrillas to find refuge, or should I say ‘freedom’, as Minum was given to describe it.
Now that the town was under a cloud as far as the Japanese were concerned, their surveillance in our area was stepped up. Neglected for so long, Papan must have been marked as a black spot, because the lorries packed with soldiers began to make repeated early morning calls. On three occasions over just a matter of a couple of weeks the occupants of the entire town were lined up in the street, searched, questioned and screened, while every building was turned inside out. The personal screening took all morning each time, and if they had restricted themselves to their task, without the totally unnecessary physical and verbal abuse and uncivilised behaviour, it could have been accomplished in a fraction of the time. The property search took even longer. The rest of the day and night was then spent putting our houses back in order, but they did not appear to find anything worthwhile for their trouble.
The swoop into the hills was also repeated, this time by nearly twice as many men. Again we heard sporadic exchanges of gunfire, although not the intense sound of battle as before. The guerrillas must have been better prepared this time. Two days after this incident Shorty paid me a visit for the first time in many weeks. He said that he and Bintang (he did not refer to him by name, but I knew to whom he was referring) were concerned for my safety. The Japanese knew there was a doctor or someone with access to medical supplies helping them. They naturally suspected it would be a man, and Chinese at that, but he felt it was just a matter of time before their investigation was narrowed down and led them to me. After the house searches they were already aware that I kept a supply of medicines in the clinic. It was not just myself in danger, he said, but anyone involved with me. It was safer for us all – my baby, Ah Ming, Mrs Tay and her family – to join them in their camp. Bintang had issued an order for a day to be set aside when the entire regiment would occupy the town, and move my clinic holus bolus into the hills. It was the first time I became aware that Bintang was actually the man in charge.
I told him to thank Bintang, that I was grateful for his concern, and that I would think about it, although I knew it was clearly impossible. Paris was still a baby, not even one year old, and living in deprived conditions like that, surrounded by disease and danger, I could not see how he could survive. There was no one I could leave him with for such an extended period, and the Japanese would no doubt seek retribution on him in any case. I was not even confident I could survive the conditions myself. Furthermore, such an exercise involving the whole guerrilla regiment, if that indeed is what it was, taking over the town, possibly engaging in a battle in the streets, was fraught with peril. Even should it be successful, as soon as we had escaped into the hills I could well imagine what reprisals the Japanese would visit on the good citizenry of Papan. It was all too much responsibility for me to bear. When Shorty returned two nights later I informed him of my decision to stay. Even with the benefit of the hindsight I now have, there was simply no other answer I could have given him.
One night not long after this exchange Ah Ming answered a knock on the door to be confronted by three Chinese men. At least, she took them all to be Chinese. It soon became obvious that one, the one who loitered in the dark behind the other two and did not lift his face, was not who he made himself out to be. They told Ah Ming that they needed ‘the doctor’. She was immediately alert to the danger as the guerrillas never referred to me as anything other than ‘Missy’, and warned me when she came to fetch me from upstairs. I did not really need to be told. I had never seen these men before. The way they were dressed, their age, the menacing looks on their faces, all contributed to give them away. There was always an aspect of good cheer to my young men, even when suffering. They seemed to exude the optimism of youth and conviction. These three men, anyone could see, were brutes, and almost certainly elements of the Chinese police force the Japanese often employed to infiltrate suspected subversive circles in the community.
The leader said that they were sick and needed medicine. I asked him who they were and said I did not recognise them from the town. I was not authorised to treat patients beyond Papan, I said, and told him they should attend a clinic where they lived. He said that was not possible as they came from ‘the hills’. I said that if that was the case I could not possibly treat them as it was against the law.
The one lurking at the back could no longer contain himself after this. He shouted something at me in Japanese which, if they had expected to entrap me, certainly gave the game away. I said again that I could not give medicines to people I did not know or recognise. ‘You could be bandits, for all I know,’ I said innocently. The Japanese man jumped forward and slapped me across the face so hard that I fell to the floor. Ah Ming rushed to help me and he kicked her in the stomach, screaming at us in Japanese. He pulled a pistol from his pants pocket and held it against my head, continuing all the while with his abuse. I found myself preparing to be shot dead.
That was the first time in my life I fully expected to die. People say that images of your life rush through your mind at such a time, but I found nothing of the sort. Perhaps destiny was aware that my time was not up, because the only image that impressed itself upon me then was of my baby upstairs alone. If they shot me, I reasoned in that fleeting moment, they would almost certainly shoot Ah Ming, and then who would there be to care for my baby? How long would he be left to lie up there wrapped in his sheets before someone tended to him? Yes, that was the first time, but certainly not the last. I thought my time had come on many occasions in subsequent months, and always the same alarm gripped me – what will become of my baby?
In the event he did not shoot me. He growled through gritted teeth and then struck me with the pistol, and that is the last thing I remember. I woke up some time later with Ah Ming stroking my aching brow with a damp cloth. She told me that the men had left, but not before making a thorough inspection of my medicine cupboard and confiscating a bottle of the precious quinine. I did not see the two Chinese policemen again. But unfortunately I was to see far too much of the growling Japanese fellow.
The next day, while I was in the middle of attending to patients in the clinic, a Malay policeman arrived in a black saloon. I recognised him from Batu Gajah. His name was Ismail and I remembered him as a helpful young man. He removed his cap and told me that I was required to attend the police station in Ipoh and must come with him at once. I had two patients waiting for attention and said that I could not possibly leave before dealing with them. He agreed that I should attend to them first and politely took a seat, waiting patiently as I continued with my work. I assumed it must be some kind of routine inquiry, otherwise surely they would have sent a posse of belligerent Japanese to cart me away promptly and without question. I did not then fully appreciate the Japanese fondness for subterfuge.
13
PARIS
Back in my room at Mrs Carter’s I began to have second thoughts about showing the document to Su-Lin. Surely there was only a couple of hours of reading in the entire ninety-six pages, and yet she was barely a quarter the way through it after nearly a week. The first ‘act’, she said of it, and rather too flippantly, I thought. It was a most unsatisfactory meeting. The place did not help. I was uncomfortable from the first and she was totally at ease, probably aided by the red wine for which she obviously has a taste. I only saw one other woman come through the doors, and yet Su-Lin was right at home, admonishing the staff at every opportunity (who responded with thinly disguised insolence – perhaps the reason for her attitude, although I could not determine which was chicken and which was egg) and offering cold looks to the three men, apparently also lawyers, who stopped to say hello to her over the course of a short evening. With me, her attention drifted continually, her eyes glazing over and focus so evidently unfixed. Perhaps it was the effect of the red wine, for I did not know where she was half the time, but certainly not there with me.
I learned nothing really about her. Being a lawyer, I expect she is trained to listen, to give nothing away. I obliged, and probably too generously, if the eyes are any indication. Historians can’t leave the past alone. Can’t leave the past, some say.
She invited me to attend one of her trials the following week, which sounded interesting. It had been in the news a little while back, she said. It was on the Monday, which suited me as the archives would be closed. It was only one day out of many in a long case, she said, but it was a day that promised to be intriguing. Did I mind going as far as Woolwich? I was not even sure where Woolwich was, except that it was on the river. She said she would send a car for me.
After all that I thought it would probably be churlish of me to ask for the return of my mother’s document.
14
SU-LIN
In spite of my eagerness to return to the meditations of Dr Anna Thumboo, hers was not a story that I could read promptly and without distraction. For one thing there was the Tariq trial set to resume in just a matter of days, and it was certain to begin with a reprimand delivered from the Bench by the formidable Justice Henry. But on top of that there was the document itself. Despite dealing with places and events with one degree of separation from my childhood experience, every page summoned up another chapter in my own story, transporting me through the years like Mr Wells’ time machine.
Each time I picked it up I found myself considering again that first page: ‘Without faith there can be no possible purpose,’ she wrote, and then, like the last testimony of a dying woman, declared that she was stripped of any faith, and yet troubled by that state. Such a declaration is given enough weight on the scale of truth to be accepted as evidence in court. Nemo moriturus praesumitur mentire, as the law books say – a dying person is not presumed to lie. ‘A man will not meet his maker with a lie in his mouth,’ is the common view. Was Dr Anna Thumboo, who was questioning the existence of such a maker in the same breath, immune from that consideration?
If we are to accept what the Jesuits say, that our first seven years define us, then it is hardly surprising that faith has always been something of a hurdle for me. The confusion began well before I turned seven. There were so many different kinds of it in Malaya, people with fervent beliefs in completely different things, and which beliefs led them to conduct their lives every day in such diverse ways.
You only had to take the matter of the Supreme Being (or Beings). The Malays were supposed to believe in just one, although at the same time they were reluctant to completely disown their old animistic gods from the time before they were introduced to Islam. The Indians had so many gods they could believe in a different one every day of the month. The Chinese had quite a pantheon of their own, except if they were Christian when they had only one (but certainly not the Malay one) or if they were Buddhist when they had none at all. I had heard so many names for God by the time I was seven and my life therefore defined in the Jesuit sense, that I could never be certain who was actually responsible for me being in the world in the first place. And the only way to find out such things was to ask questions. This went to the heart of most of my imagined problems as hardly anyone was prepared to listen, let alone give an answer that made sense.
My father was the one person who was in the habit of answering my relentless inquiries. I could ask my mother about certain practical matters, such as my duties around the house, and occasionally my sisters might listen if it was a chance to show me how much smarter than me they were. However, questions I really wanted answered, such as things I did not understand about my father’s work, or why we Chinese needed to have so many gods when the nuns at the convent were convinced that one was sufficient, Mei and Li merely treated like it was a chance for a good laugh. Ah Mun Cheir did not seem to know much about anything other than cooking or marketing, apart from her manifold superstitions of course, and when it came to my teachers, not only would they not answer my questions, they would not even allow them to be asked.
Confucius, while not actually a god, was said to be the greatest of all teachers and as far as he was concerned you learned by listening and not by asking questions. Personally, I was never convinced about Confucius being the greatest teacher. My father once showed me a picture of a man riding backwards on a donkey and he said it was Lao Tzu and he was the greatest teacher. I didn’t know what Lao Tzu’s position was on the subject of asking questions, but Pa said he taught that nothing exists unless the opposite exists, like yin and yang, everything in balance. That being the case, if you were able to ask Lao Tzu a question, and it was ‘What is day?’, his answer would be ‘Not night’. Which would only have me asking another one, ‘What is night?’, and him no doubt answering ‘Not day’. It seemed obvious to me that you could go on asking such questions forever and never receive a satisfactory answer, so why ask a question in the first place? Which returned me to Confucius.
My teacher at the convent that year was Miss Mak, and she was a fierce woman. She was never without a long wooden ruler, which she used to particular effect, poking and prodding at us, sometimes even to whack us around the legs when she was particularly cross. Failure to learn usually resulted in her becoming particularly cross. As Miss Mak was Chinese, the way we learned was the Confucian way, which was by rote – listening to what she said, copying from the blackboard, studying our books. If we did not understand after all that, she would get cross and tell us again, but we were not to ask questions. Many times I remember her filling the blackboard with notes about Vasco da Gama or Ferdinand Magellan or some other person with an unfathomable name, and we were expected to learn it word for word by the next day. Not think about it, just learn it. On those days I had so many questions that went unasked, and Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan are still names I prefer not to think about.
Mr Ho, my Chinese tutor, was never cross, never poked or prodded, never even raised his voice. But he still refused to listen to questions. The first time I asked him one was during my very first lesson when he told me the opening three words of the Three Character Classic.
‘What does yahn ji chor mean?’ I asked.
‘No questions,’ he said, ‘just learn.’ And then the mantra: ‘First the eye, then the ear, then the hand. Only after that the brain, but not until you learn two hundred words. Maybe then one day even the heart. You are not ready to understand the eternal truth.’
‘What is the eternal truth?’ I said, and with that all I was doing was demonstrating that I was not listening. He said the whole thing all over again, in exactly the same voice, like a recording.
Kept in my place as I was by all this Confucian discipline, it came as a surprise to me when one day everyone seemed suddenly willing to provide me with answers. The first surprise was when I went with Ah Mun Cheir to the market. Ah Mun Cheir was about the most mystifying person of all. I knew her as well as I knew my mother, which stands to reason as I
had known her just as long and spent even more time in her company. But whereas with my mother I had learned to recognise her moods and her emotions, and therefore knew why she was saying something and could anticipate where such a frame of mind might perhaps lead her, Ah Mun Cheir had no moods or emotions and often I never knew where she would go next. When you have lived as a servant your entire life it stands to reason that moods and emotions are simply unaffordable.
As far as I could tell, what Ah Mun Cheir knew about the earthly world was contained by our four walls, the wet market and the Lam Looking Bazaar, but she did know an awful lot about cooking. She could make something out of nothing, and that something would be the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. Such as paku choy, which was a spicy salad she made from the young tips of jungle ferns that grew wild along Gopeng Road. Or the delightfully fragrant tea she made from frangipani leaves she dried in the sun and sweetened with palm sugar. Or like bak yew pok, which were fried lard crusts. Every month she bought a big slab of pork fat from the market, which she then diced up into small cubes and rendered into cooking fat. When she had finished there would be many small crunchy bits in the bottom of the pan that refused to be rendered, and these were the fried lard crusts – useless, one would think. But of course there is no such thing as a useless bit of a pig to the Chinese. She took these crunchy bits and cooked them up with chillies, bean paste, shallots, garlic, sugar and a sour little fruit called blimbing, and then spread it on our sandwiches for school, and this was just … well, how do you describe something so heavenly that simply carrying your bag into a classroom made everyone sniff the air and gather around you and want to be your best friend until lunchtime?
The Heart Radical Page 9