by Hsu-Ming Teo
Donald Duck and Wendy Wu emerged from the trishaw, giggling and straightening their clothes. Winston tossed his third cigarette into the river and followed them back to Wendy Wu’s flat in Chinatown. After dropping her off, Donald Duck disappeared into a small shop and emerged a few moments later carrying a cage with a hissing cat tied to the bars with a piece of raffia. He flung his dark grey coat over it and began to wind his way north towards the wealthier neighbourhoods. In a back alley, he uncovered the cage and opened the spring-door. The mystery of his meat supply was solved. He was using a cat on heat to entice tomcats—both feral and pedigreed—into the cage. He then slaughtered the tomcats, skinned them, chopped them up, arranged them attractively on a tray and brought them to the hawker to be barbecued with garlic, ginger and soy sauce.
Winston tried to edge his way into the Business, but he had no acumen. Stupidly, in typical Winston fashion, he approached Donald Duck’s supplier of cats on heat. A few days later Daphne and Percy-phone dabbed Mercurochrome on Winston’s wounds and bandaged his ribs, but he still required three stitches to his left temple where the skin had split open and a lot of blood had gushed out.
‘Tell anyone and you’ll be swimming with the fish,’ Donald Duck told him toughly, cocky in his aggression.
Eventually Mei Ling found out about Donald Duck’s Business ventures. Por-Por came across Donald Duck and Pandora on one of her afternoons off. She was buying straw brooms in Bugis Street market. She heard Pandora long before she saw her, an unmelodious squawking of a vulgar Chinese song. One glance at Donald Duck, Pandora’s painted face and the ‘uncles’ was enough to send Por-Por racing towards them, upraised broom in hand. She chased Donald Duck through the hawker centre like a demented witch, calling out, ‘Stupid boy! Arsehole! I’m going to chop off your fucking prick and fry it in hot chilli!’
They slipped in and out of food stalls and knocked over rickety tables laden with steaming soups and curries. They kicked over aluminium stools and left outraged diners in their wake. Finally, Donald Duck ran into the stinking darkness of the wet market. Por-Por ran in after him. Her wooden clogs slipped on the slimy entrails of a recently butchered rooster. She skidded, clawed the air frantically and smashed down onto the mucky concrete floor, dislocating her hip, jarring her elbow painfully and staining her clothes with blood and gore. Donald Duck ran out of the market and lost himself in the narrow streets.
But when he came home that night, Mei Ling was waiting up for him. She held no bamboo cane in her hand. He was too old to be walloped, too big even to attempt it. Instead, she tossed his things at him, stood on tiptoe and, catching hold of his left ear, twisted it hard. You’ve broken my heart, she told him with typical Lim melodrama. She threw him out of the house and forbade him to come home until he had repented of his evil ways and changed for the better.
She couldn’t find it in her to disown him. When he got married to Miss Telecom nearly a year later, she welcomed him back to her house with a wide smile and proudly displayed to the neighbours the matt black and white photographs of her eldest son’s wedding. They were a beautiful couple, the tall man in the dark suit and the bride in her novel white wedding gown, for Wendy Wu’s family was Catholic and they’d had a western wedding. For weeks after, Mei Ling would take out the photographs and stroke them lovingly until they were smudged with fingerprints. She bullied her husband into letting the newlywed couple inhabit the master bedroom until they had enough money to move into a home of their own. She and the shopkeeper moved into the small dark room between the kitchen and the shop, while each night the other two boys carried their canvas beds with resignation into the shop and set them up there. What Donald Duck had done to Pandora was easily forgotten.
‘Mei Ling was never a mother to us, but nothing could shake her devotion to Donald Duck,’ Percy-phone often said years later. ‘He was, after all, her first-born child, and a male at that. Boys are good, girls are not. Some things you learn early on in life, and then you just learn to live with it.’
QUEEN OF THE KITCHEN
Por-Por was dying. The Lim children squeezed hours of morbid entertainment out of the melodrama of her slow death. The winces of pain followed by sighs of suffering. The disbelief in her suddenly discovered, imminent death. The angry, panicky denials. The bursts of frantic, futile activity. The pleas and prayers that were tossed up desperately to the gods, only to come smashing down on the broken cement yard that was her domain. This was a new development in the soap opera of their lives and they loved it.
Nothing exciting had happened for years. Not since Donald Duck went into another of his shady Business ventures, acquired a wealth as mysterious as it was substantial, and moved himself and Wendy out of the dilapidated tenement into a new apartment along the Tiong Bahru Road. Business and Wendy kept him busy; he rarely visited anymore. Winston and Daphne were busy courting and being courted. That left Percy-phone and Pandora to keep each other company, for Henly—a loner all his life—had little to do with them.
Pandora led a schizophrenic life throughout her school years. She was a dutiful Chinese daughter at home and an absurd lampoon of an English schoolgirl outside. Because of Madam Tan’s fervour for all things British after the Japanese occupation, the Lim girls were sent to an Anglican school for Chinese girls. Here they were taught to play hockey, indoctrinated with stirring choruses of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and given elocution lessons which helped them to efface the local Singlish patois under a borrowed veneer of pseudo-BBC English.
The Chinese principal was an ardent imperialist; one of the successes of the colonising and Christianising missions organised by those formidably intrepid English spinsters who had come out to the colonies and found a purpose in their lives by leading the Girl Guides. Coming from a wealthy Chinese family that traded in silk from Shantung and Thailand, Miss Liu had been sent to England to study English literature at University College, London. During her four years there, she called herself Doris and picked up a BBC accent, which she carefully cultivated and maintained all her life to the point of caricature. The accent and the London university background—not quite Oxbridge but sufficiently impressive in Anglophilic Singapore—could have been her passport to a prominent position in many newly developing Singaporean businesses which sought English-educated graduates to interact with their British trading counterparts. But the Girl Guides exerted a strong influence on Doris Liu long after she left their uniformed ranks, and she had decided to dedicate her life to teaching.
She became the principal of the Anglican Chinese girls’ school and did her best to transform it into St Clair’s or Malory Towers, with herself as the wise, benevolent headmistress lending an understanding ear, meting out justice and instilling the proper ‘tone’ into the school. The pay was meagre but she was independently wealthy. All she required was regular correspondence with Queen Mary’s—and, later, Queen Elizabeth’s—personal secretary. Each year she informed the Queen, via her assistant, of the various sporting and swimming carnivals, musical evenings and Shakespeare performances with which she tried to uplift the cultural tone of these colonial Chinese girls. The Queen was told that the school had started a Girl Guides’ association and that a team had gone camping along one of the east coast beaches and had learnt to recognise important constellations on this trip. (Years later Pandora tried to point them out to her children but the sky looked different in Sydney; all she could make out was the Southern Cross and Orion’s belt.)
The Queen received Christmas and Easter cards, and effusive wishes on her official birthday. In return, Miss Liu received each year an official Christmas card from Buckingham Palace and a brief, civilised letter written by the Queen’s secretary. She read them out with quivering pride to the assembly of schoolgirls, shuffling and wilting in the equatorial humidity. It was enough to keep the colonials happy; enough to keep Pandora an ardent royalist, a Princess Diana watcher, a women’s magazine devourer on the side of God, the Queen and Bruce Ruxton until the day she died.
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sp; In other ways those Singaporean schoolgirls tried to transform their Chinese beings into English souls. To be English was to live in a world of Enid Blyton books where young middle-class children underwent all manner of predictable adventures, demonstrated their resourcefulness and constantly outwitted dimmer working-class adults. They told each other to ‘buck up’, exclaimed ‘I say, how super!’ in Singaporean accents and did their British best to be Bricks. They formed Secret Seven clubs, played at being thFamous Five, and talked about midnight feasts with ginger beer, potted meat, tinned sardines, exotic tinned pineapple and ham sandwiches. Then they went to the school canteen and bought lunches of spicy laksa or mee goreng and slurped them up with chopsticks and ceramic soup spoons.
But at home Super Bricks were forgotten as Pandora continued to do her best to uphold the tradition of Chinese filial piety. Every evening she ran tepid water into the grey cement tank in the bathroom for her father’s bath. When he went into the bathroom to splash water over himself with a blue plastic pot, he threw his divested clothes over the top of the corrugated steel door. She collected the clothes, washed them that night and hung them out to dry on the bamboo poles over the courtyard. After his bath, she fetched his brown plastic slippers and knelt down to fit them to his feet as he peered into the small, green-tinged mirror in the corridor and raked his hair into neat, oiled furrows. Por-Por would have cooked dinner by then and it would be waiting, steaming hot, on the round granite table in the courtyard.
‘Papa, come and eat rice,’ she chorused dutifully each night, then trailed after him down into the courtyard where all the family stood around the table, waiting for the shopkeeper to take his place on the most comfortable stool—the only one with a padded seat. He cleared his throat and motioned them to be seated.
Her chopsticks squeezing and gripping like tweezers, Mei Ling plucked up the fattest, choicest morsels of meat and the most tender green vegetables for her husband, laying them deferentially in his rice bowl. If he was in a generous mood he would then transfer some chunks of meat from his bowl to one of his sons’. Henly was a favourite, but Winston often stole from Henly when nobody was looking. One of the daughters would keep a watchful eye on her father’s teacup to ensure that it was constantly filled to the brim with the cheap jasmine tea they drank. Once the shopkeeper had been served, Winston and Henly were given the other medium-sized chunks of meat, leaving scraps of bones and vegetables for the women to fill their rice bowls and stomachs with.
After dinner the shopkeeper retired upstairs to read the Chinese newspapers by the flickering fluorescent light of the goose-necked desk lamp. He did the day’s accounts with deft clicks of the abacus beads. He practised his tai chi, pushing his palms slowly against the weight of the humid air. Then, when he was hungry again, he thrust his head out of the bedroom door to call for his nightly supper of soft-boiled eggs. It was the role of the eldest daughter to prepare the eggs and as each daughter moved out (or ran away with English sailors called Tom), the next in line would take over the nightly duty. Until Percy-phone, that is. She was so abysmally untalented at cooking that the eggs she made were sent back several times because they were undercooked and the albumen was still runny, or overcooked and the yellow yolks had congealed.
Because of the huge wastage that accrued, Pandora took over the nightly preparation of soft-boiled eggs. She took two eggs from the wire basket, plunged them into boiling water and timed them perfectly—just under three minutes. They were then cracked with military precision into an ugly pink-flowered porcelain bowl with a gilt rim. Pandora took great care not to pierce the golden yolks with the jagged edges of the shells. She then dribbled soy sauce over the eggs and dusted the mucilaginous surface with pepper. She set the bowl on a tray and climbed upstairs while the eggs were still hot. She knocked on the bedroom door and was permitted to enter and present them to her father. With both hands. A nightly offering of daughterly love and duty.
Eventually Mei Ling would join the shopkeeper in their bedroom. Percy-phone then did her part of the daughterly chores, bringing up to the bedroom a tray holding two glasses brimming with Guinness. Presented, once again, with both hands. She left them on a table and shuffled out, closing the door softly behind her. Sometimes Winston and Henly joined the two girls upstairs. They listened outside the bedroom door, just to hear the sound of their parents’ voices. Not that the shopkeeper talked much. He had nothing to say. He worked hard in his shop all day, sold the same stuff, saw the same people, led the same monotonous life which satisfied him after the upheaval of the war years. Mei Ling was always chattering about her day, gossiping about the neighbours. The children smirked at the sound of light laughter as Mei Ling set out to amuse and seduce her husband. With both hands. Her wifely duty each night. Laughter subsided into tense silence, punctuated by the occasional creaks of the rattan bed, the slap of skin against skin and the sucking noises of sex.
Por-Por sometimes caught them listening by the door and her bony fingers would then shoot out to grip the nearest ear she could find. She’d haul them downstairs, scolding in a furious undertone: ‘Stupid kids! Dummies! Stinking arses! Wait till I get the cane and whack you hard. Then you’ll know.’
When the Lim children were in their teens, such occasions became rare because Mei Ling had become addicted to mahjong. Singapore began to prosper during the 1950s and the shopkeeper’s business thrived. He squirrelled away his money, spending nothing on himself and his children except for new clothes and shoes every Chinese New Year. In the habitual austerity of his life, however, Mei Ling was his one great indulgence. After his authority and right of access to her body had been established in the early days of their marriage, he had gradually relaxed his autocratic treatment of her. They even became friends. As long as sex was readily available, there was little he would not do for her. Once a month he went to the local goldsmith’s shop with her and she came back decked with twenty-two carat gold chains, bracelets, charms, bangles and earrings. These she slowly gambled away. Bored with her life, she stimulated herself by mainlining with mahjong.
He was powerless to punish her, for as he grew older and more reclusive, he came to depend heavily on her for human contact. Need made him weak, and this she realised quickly. Sex was a bargaining chip she used to cover her losses at the mahjong table. He mortgaged the tenement, paid her debts, and never questioned her fidelity. Simply didn’t want to know anything as long as she came home each night and talked to him before they went to bed and made love.
So absorbed were they in each other, in Mei Ling’s need to gamble and his need for her body, that they didn’t realise for a long time that Por-Por was ill. Percy-phone and Pandora were the first to notice the deviations in Por-Por’s normally rigid and unchanging schedule. During their school holidays, Por-Por often took them with her to the servants’ club when she had a day off. These gloomy pigeonholes for domestic servants were squeezed into the ramshackle buildings in Chinatown above shops selling bolts of cheap, brightly patterned cotton cloth, dark green waxed paper umbrellas, gold and silver jewellery, spices, herbs and medicines, padlocks, firecrackers, red lanterns, scrolls of calligraphy, cheap porcelain statues of Chinese gods, joss sticks, wooden clogs, tea, Wrigley’s chewing gum, and Chinese comics and pornographic magazines from Hong Kong. The rooms above were partitioned by bead curtains, flimsy bamboo screens, panels of cheap wood, scavenged sheets of corrugated iron, or grubby net curtains. They were rented out by some sort of servants’ union to provide leisure space for servants on their free days. Por-Por brought Percy-phone and Pandora there even when they were in their teens because they never went anywhere with their mother and she felt sorry for them. While she and her friends played mahjong, drank tea and gossiped, she left the girls to leaf through magazines with glossy photographs of pouty-lipped Hong Kong film stars with big breasts and hard brown nipples, or to follow the histrionic adventures of Chinese heroines in comic books filched from the shop downstairs.
Then one afternoon, instead of go
ing to the servants’ club, Por-Por took them to the Thian Hock Kheng Temple between Amoy and Telok Ayer streets. The girls stood in front of the bright red railings, stared uncertainly at the colourful dragons dancing over the ridge of the green roof, and thought of their religious lessons at school and the missionary’s rantings against Buddhism and ancestor worship.
‘Why are you standing there? Are you girls stupid or something?’ Por-Por demanded. ‘Come inside and pray to Ma-Chu-Po or I’ll knock your heads together.’
They followed her inside and bought joss sticks and oil from one of the monks.
‘Om nee tor phat,’ he said, inclining his shaved head benevolently. Por-Por beckoned him aside and spoke to him. She pulled some dollar notes out of her small red silk purse and thrust them at him. He nodded again and went to the main altar. He took a smooth cylindrical wooden stick and began to hit the wooden nah mor drum with it, chanting and praying to the heartbeat of the tap-tap-tapping stick.
Por-Por made the girls kneel in front of an altar laden with oranges. They offered oil, lit the joss sticks and, clasping the smoking sticks in both hands, began the slow, fluid, seesawing prayer motions of the upper body, bending in supplication and rising again. They knelt there until the prickle of pins and needles in their knees ceased and all feeling in their legs grew numb. Joss stick after joss stick was lit to smoulder away in the small brass urns in front of the altar. Finally Por-Por allowed them to get up and hobble away painfully.
‘What were we praying for, Por-Por?’
For a moment she looked as though she might tell them. Then, ‘For prosperity, happiness and longevity, of course, stupid girls. What else does anyone pray for?’