by Hsu-Ming Teo
Singapore was no longer Syonan, and all the Lim and Tan children were renamed by Madam Tan, who insisted that English names and English education would be the route to advancement and prosperity in postwar Singapore now that the British had returned. My mother, now four years old, was renamed Pandora. Madam Tan had picked the name from a Reader’s Digest condensed book of Greek and Roman myths. She had not understood the stories, only recognised the names. The other girls were renamed Lida, Daphne and Persephone or, as they pronounced it, Percy-phone. The boys were renamed Donald and Winston by the local Anglican priest.
About a year after Donald and Por-Por reappeared, Pandora sat in the kitchen of the great mansion and spooned rice porridge, salted duck’s egg and dried anchovies into her mouth, smearing her upper lip with a gooey white moustache. Exciting events were happening upstairs in Madam Tan’s room, and all the relatives, neighbours and their maids were rushing about. But she had been banished by Mei Ling, whom she knew as ‘Auntie’, to the kitchen, with only Por-Por and the other maids for company.
‘Is Mama having a baby?’ she asked Por-Por idiotically, knowing the answer already.
Por-Por looked at the pretty child dressed in a white silk pantsuit, her hair tied up with drooping pinks bows in slipping bunches over her ears. She glanced at the jade studs in Pandora’s ears and the gold anklet flopping onto the red wooden clog. She touched her own fuzzy hair, still growing back. She felt spiteful and wanted to make the little girl cry.
‘Stupid girl. Madam Tan is not your mother. She is having another baby and then she won’t want you anymore,’ Por-Por said.
The child blinked and stared at her, slowly spooning more porridge into her small mouth.
‘Are you deaf, dummy? Are you stupid? Did you hear what I said? Madam Tan is not your mother.’
Still the child said nothing. She thought about the woman lying in the bed upstairs, pictured her in her usual attire: glamorous and exotic in a finely embroidered red silk top with ivory buttons, black silk trousers, gold necklace with a jade pendant of a dragon breathing fire from her neck, new jade bangle around her deformed left wrist, heavy gold rings that could cut your face when she slapped you for being naughty.
‘Don’t you know that your Auntie Mei Ling is your real mother?’ Por-Por said, watching Pandora closely. The child blinked hard at her but said nothing. ‘Madam Tan took pity on her sister and adopted you because she already had two sons. Don’t know why she wanted a daughter. Girls are useless. A woman needs sons. Your real mother didn’t want you and now that Madam Tan has a new baby, maybe even a daughter, she won’t want you anymore. Nobody wants you, rubbish girl.’
The child began to cry at last and Por-Por smiled, satisfied. She patted Pandora’s head. ‘Never mind. Don’t cry or you will look ugly and nobody will want to marry you when you grow up.’
She fished out a handkerchief and held it over Pandora’s nose for her to blow. ‘You’re a pretty girl, Pan-Pan. Maybe I’ll look after you if you’re a good and obedient girl. You can be my foster daughter and I’ll take care of you. How would you like that, uh?’
Pandora did not answer. Please gods, she prayed to unknown deities, please let her have another boy.
Madam Tan had a baby girl after all.
THE MELODRAMA OF LIFE AND LIMS
Soon after Por-Por’s revelation, Pandora was summoned before Madam Tan one morning. She looked at the whimpering baby in Madam Tan’s arms, mouth like a fish sucking fretfully at Madam Tan’s swollen veined breast. Madam Tan told her that she would be going to stay with Mei Ling for a while.
‘If you’re a good girl and respect your elders and behave properly, then people will love you,’ Madam Tan said. She pulled the baby away from her nipple and gave her to one of the bond maids. Then she undid the rest of the buttons on her blouse and took it off. She lay down on a woven bamboo mat. A bond maid started massaging her back, pummelling the bunched flesh under the skin with tight fists until the knots of muscle were tenderised and loosened.
‘I don’t want to go,’ Pandora said.
‘You can play with your sisters. Four of you together. Imagine that!’
‘I don’t want to play with them. I want to play here.’
‘One of the servants will pack your clothes and toys and take you over to your mother’s house this afternoon.’
Pandora knew then that she would not be returning as a daughter of the Tan household. Madam Tan had referred to Mei Ling as ‘your mother’ for the first time.
‘Mama, don’t make me go,’ she said. ‘Please.’
‘You’re a good girl, Pan-Pan,’ Madam Tan said. ‘So pretty. If you are good and obedient you will find a rich husband to marry you when you grow up.’
She waited until the servant had finished rubbing liniment into her tense neck, then she sat up and shrugged on her silk top. She looked at Pandora and smiled, beckoning her forward. She tilted her head, graciously offering up one cheek. ‘You can give me a kiss, Pan-Pan. I have some sweet plums and a red packet for you. It has two gold coins in it! And I shall give you a pretty gold bracelet that you can wear around your wrist.’
After lunch one of the bond maids packed Pandora’s silk samfoos into a suitcase and put all her toys into another. When this was done she got the gardener to call for a trishaw. She helped the child into the seat and climbed in beside her. After giving directions to the trishaw cyclist, she settled back to enjoy the ride, knowing that she would have to walk back to the mansion in the wet afternoon heat.
‘You will like living with your real mother, Pan-Pan,’ the bond maid told the child comfortingly. ‘There will be lots of children to play with.’
‘Will there be boys?’ Pandora asked.
‘Lots of them,’ the bond maid assured her. ‘Your mother has been very lucky. She has three sons to carry on the family name. Your brothers Ah-Donald and Ah-Winston are older than you, and now you have your baby brother Henly to look after.’
Pandora thought about Madam Tan’s large, quiet house with the green-tiled roof and the painted terracotta dragons guarding each apex. She thought about the cool marble floors that reflected her foreshortened running figure back to her. There were the inlaid pearl screens, the carved rosewood and gold-embroidered satin furniture, the antique Chinese vases, jade carvings and fragrant sandalwood jewellery boxes. The opulent room where the ancestors were worshipped and placated at the gilt altar, and the fat red columns surrounding the fish pond where expensive Japanese carp flashed red and gold as they darted among succulent lily pads.
Then she thought about the men in Madam Tan’s household. She remembered the clogging opium fumes from Mr Tan’s private rooms, where he smoked the war away. She thought of how she had to serve him thick black tea and hot rice buns stuffed with pork in the morning to show him that she was a humble, filial daughter. She would look up into those yellow eyes cracked with threads of red capillaries, stare at the pouches of mottled flesh under the lower lids. She thought of his wandering, groping, pinching fingers, his brown tea-stained teeth, his stinking breath pungent with stale opium smoke. Good girl, good little girl, he muttered each morning as he hauled her onto his knee and fondled her with his right hand while holding his pork bun in his left. He took great, hungry bites of bread and warm white crumbs snowed down onto her silk suit to fall inside her panties.
She also remembered the bed she’d had in her room upstairs, and she thought of how her two foster brothers would sometimes sneak into her room during the night and snuggle up to her tightly, one on either side. They would rub themselves against her small body and snigger. She learned to squeeze her eyes tightly shut and lie perfectly still. If she complained, one of them would pinch her with long, powerful fingers. He would pull her halfway down the bed while the other brother farted into her face, giggling hysterically. They were boys—the little masters of the house—so they could do anything, get away with everything.
The trishaw stopped. The bond maid got out and haggled over the price,
then she pulled Pandora out of the seat, grumbling about being cheated by thieving trishaw-men while the cyclist cleared his throat loudly and spat into the red dust near her feet. The bond maid jumped back with a startled exclamation and screamed curses after the cyclist as he pedalled away. Grasping Pandora by her chubby hand, she knocked on the back door. Por-Por opened it, smiling widely.
The servants chatted for a while, exchanging extravagant compliments, uncertain of the exact hierarchy of their status. Por-Por was a servant, free to come, go and marry as she wished, but she was attached to a poor terrace household in the city slums. The bond maid, on the other hand, was to all extents and purposes a slave attached to an important and wealthy household, and she could only marry if her mistress consented to the arrangement. To complicate matters, the mistresses of both households were sisters and Madam Tan was the younger of the two, so Madam Lim had the advantage of seniority. Eventually, however, sufficient ‘face’ was given and the exchange of gossip exhausted. Por-Por took Pandora’s suitcase, led her into the cracked courtyard and closed and bolted the new wooden door that had replaced the one the Japanese soldiers had kicked in five years before.
All the Lim children, except Donald, were ranged in order of age in the courtyard: Lida, Winston, Daphne and Percy-phone. Eldest Sister, Second Brother, Second Sister, and Third Sister. Donald Duck, Eldest Brother, had moved out to share a rat’s nest apartment with friends in Chinatown. Little Henly (or Henry, depending on who was pronouncing his name) was nowhere to be seen. The Lim children stared at Pandora curiously, insolently, and whispered among themselves. Daphne giggled because she was a giggler. Then Winston stepped forward with a big grin on his face.
‘Welcome home, Youngest Sister,’ he said. He grabbed her hand and pressed something into her palm, stepping back quickly.
Pandora felt the pulse of a scaly wriggle. She opened her hand and screamed when she saw the slime-green gecko blinking up at her. She dropped the reptile and thrust her hands behind her back as Winston slapped his thigh, doubled over with laughter. He glanced around slyly at his siblings to see whether they were sharing the joke. He felt piqued that their smiles were merely lukewarm. Lida looked bored. He wanted to get Lida’s attention, make her laugh. He ran to Pandora and pinched her hard on her forearm, howling with hilarity when she squealed and her eyes spurted tears.
‘Welcome home, Youngest Sister,’ he gasped again between gusts of exaggerated mirth.
Pandora was born to be a victim and everybody knew this. She had already been rejected by the Tan household, easily replaced by Madam Tan’s baby girl. Now she was terrified that the Lims would not want her either. She set out to make herself indispensable. She helped Por-Por around the kitchen, slicing ginger, chopping chillies, mincing garlic, nipping the straggly brown ends off small hills of bean sprouts. She washed her father’s and brothers’ clothes, hosed and scrubbed clean the bathroom and outhouse after they left it soiled. Excess flesh melted off her frame until her silk samfoos no longer fitted her. Mei Ling packed them away and she never saw them again. She wore Daphne’s hand-me-downs and was embarrassing in her gratitude.
Later, she tended the shop whenever her father wanted to take a mid-afternoon nap upstairs, and she got caned for items that subsequently went missing because the other children had stolen them. Loyally, she kept silent. She needed to be needed, and plain-looking, thick-headed Percy-phone was the only member of the family who really needed her. She did Percy-phone’s homework and defended her elder sister against Winston’s taunts and tricks. In return Percy-phone accepted her into the family and gave her unconditional love and friendship all her life.
She never got to know her eldest sister very well, for Lida left the terrace house shortly after Pandora returned. She had become the mistress of a rich man and she moved into his house along River Valley Road.
‘Lida was a real character, one of a kind,’ Percy-phone would reminisce many years later, half-admiringly, half-disapprovingly. ‘Real beautiful and real smart, but very wild. Remember the jewellery she used to come home with? She flaunted them in front of our mother. Mr Fu was besotted with her, the dirty old man. She used to take Pan and me to see the Chinese opera and wayang shows once in a while. Then afterwards she’d buy us some ice-cream from Cold Storage. Only the white people—the ang mohs—or very rich Chinese people shopped at Cold Storage during those days. We used to pass by the supermarket and look inside, but we didn’t dare to enter because it was an ang moh supermarket. But Lida was very daring and she would go anywhere. That girl had no shame. She got bored with Mr Fu after a while and, after her first abortion, she ran away with Tom the English Sailor from Newcastle-upon-Tyne.’
For Pandora and Percy-phone, Eldest Sister Lida remained an exotic character in a melodramatic Chinese opera; a glamorous figure for whom the rules of respectability did not apply. During their childhood she had staged before the family—before the whole neighbourhood, in fact—emotional tantrums, tragic posturings, loudly screamed accusations of neglect and misunderstanding, and thrilling scandals. Before any household in the neighbourhood had scraped together enough money to buy a black and white television set to watch the soap operas from Hong Kong, the neighbours lived vicariously through Lida Lim’s life. Arch-enemies became grudging and wary friends as they sipped tea, clicked mahjong tiles and exchanged the latest gossip about poor Madam Lim’s intractable eldest daughter. Lida Lim became the bonding agent, not only of the Lim family, but of the entire neighbourhood. Huddled next to each other in bed, Daphne, Percy-phone and Pandora learned to become siblings through the exchange of awed whispers about Eldest Sister.
Proximity to perversion cloaked them with fame and attached them to friendships at school; it paved the way for Mei Ling into the houses of the wealthy, whose appetite for delicious morsels of scandal was as great as that of their poorer counterparts. Mei Ling no doubt enjoyed playing the tragic role of the disgraced, lamenting mother to the hilt.
‘Ai-yo, what to do? Always she so stubborn and rebellious. All my children so naughty. Bring me nothing but heartache. Lida won’t listen to me. She brings shame to the whole family but she doesn’t care. I tell her father to beat some sense into her but he won’t do it. Lida, she snatch the stick from his hand and break it into two. What can you do with a girl like that? Bring me so much pain only.’
The final confrontation was played out two years after Pandora was sent home to the Lims. That was when Lida left Mr Fu, who made his chauffeur drive the creamy white Mercedes around to the tumbledown terrace. He eased himself out of the car, an old man dressed in a white suit and a white Panama hat, clothes perfectly coordinated with his car. He rapped on the front door with his cane and Mr Lim ushered him through the shop and into the house, bowing and scraping before him. Mr Fu had come to beg Lida to be his third wife. Such an honour, such a great honour. But it wasn’t to be.
What made it especially humiliating at the time—and farcical afterwards—was that Mr Fu’s first and second wives followed after him and begged Lida to leave their philandering husband, the father of their collective three sons, alone. Mei Ling thought that the position of third wife was as respectable as any her eldest daughter could attain. Anxious to marry Lida off, she strongly urged her daughter to accept Mr Fu’s proposal. But as Por-Por always said, Lida had been born with ‘itchy feet’. She was bored and restless; she wanted to escape Singapore and travel abroad. Illiterate and uneducated because she had grown up during the Japanese occupation and had not been sent to school—no-one thought it worthwhile educating her afterwards since she was a girl and would presumably marry and raise children—she nevertheless wanted to witness first-hand the world that Hollywood had translated for her on the flickering screens of the local cinemas.
Lida refused to marry Mr Fu. She told him and his wives that she had fallen in love with Tom the English Sailor. Mr Fu was too old and too staid for her. Sex with him was one step away from necrophilia. His prick was too flabby and, besides, she could no lo
nger tolerate the discolouration of his teeth from years of chewing tobacco and smoking opium. His breath made her gag and she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of orgasms she’d had with him.
Desperate love raged into hate at this humiliation. Mr Fu and Wives Numbers One and Two marched off to find a medium to curse Lida Lim. When the local Chinese medium refused because she was a friend of Lida’s, they sought out a Malay bomoh to avenge the flippantly delivered insult to the House of Fu. Many years later, when Lida started to go blind from retinitis pigmentosa, all the Lim relatives remembered the Fus’ threat to visit the Malay witch doctor and they were convinced that the steady deterioration of Lida’s eyesight—from night blindness to full blindness—was a result of her careless offence to the Fus. When the same disease emerged in Pandora a few years before her death, they were unshakable in their belief that the bomoh had cursed all the Lims. They spent a fortune trying to undo the curse before they themselves fell prey to it.
On the afternoon that Lida rejected Mr Fu and his wives, a fierce and tear-wrenching screaming match ensued between mother and daughter in the courtyard. Daphne, Percy-phone and Pandora huddled together in the boys’ bedroom next to the kitchen, listening in round-eyed, fearful delight. The neighbours gathered on their balcony overlooking the courtyard to watch the showdown and comment loudly, occasionally shouting down advice to the unheeding protagonists. Nobody was disappointed. Tempests of tears were followed by lightning-hurled accusations of ingratitude, lack of filial piety or mother love and, finally, mutual repudiation of kinship between mother and daughter forever.