Love and Vertigo

by Hsu-Ming Teo

  There were no more trips to the servants’ club after that visit to the temple. No more surreptitious peeks at girlie magazines. No more awed gasps at the huge melon breasts of glamorous Chinese films stars and resigned glances at the small bumps on their own adolescent chests. No more stories about Chinese princesses dressed as peasants who went on long journeys through the mountainous countryside to escape cruel stepmothers; who fell into the evil hands of lascivious warlords; who were rescued by princes—similarly in disguise—on unspecified pilgrimages. No more stolen packets of foil-wrapped spearmint gum. No more casual gifts of watermelon seeds and roasted peanuts from the other servants in the club.

  Por-Por’s days off were spent trudging from one temple to another all over the city. When she had exhausted all the Chinese temples, the churches and cathedrals followed: Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, the white wedding cake of St Andrew’s Cathedral, even the Armenian church of St Gregory the Illuminator. Often they would not be allowed to enter the Christian cathedrals, so they stood outside and prayed. Por-Por wouldn’t set foot inside a mosque or a Hindu temple. She despised the Indians and hated the Malays because, during the Japanese occupation, the Chinese had been singled out for the most brutal treatment while a few Indians and Malays had served in Syonan institutions. The deep distrust she had of them was extended to their gods. In between visits to grand temples and cathedrals—working on the premise that the more opulent the building, the greater the power of the gods therein—they visited Chinese herbalists, acupuncturists and mediums.

  Neither Percy-phone nor Pandora knew what was wrong with Por-Por. On each visit, they prayed for prosperity, happiness and longevity. They sighed and groaned with her and enjoyed their religious tour of the city’s temples. They never mentioned these trips to their parents because thesimply didn’t think of it. ‘Papa, come and eat rice’, ‘Mama, here is my school report’—that was the extent of their conversation with their parents. The shopkeeper had always reserved his words for Mei Ling, and she in turn spoke to them through the ubiquitous bamboo cane. Gradually, Percy-phone and Pandora took over all of Por-Por’s chores around the house: the cooking, cleaning, scrubbing, scouring, sweeping, laundry and shopping.

  One day, fifteen months after the temple visits had started, Por-Por sat listlessly on a wooden stool in a corner of the kitchen with a red plastic bucket beside her, saving her energy to retch and spit, listening to Nat King Cole demanding back those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer on the transistor radio. Mei Ling stepped into the kitchen and suddenly seemed to notice that Por-Por had shrunk. Folds of slack skin sagged off her bird bones. Her glossy black hair had turned grey and limp. Her eyes looked like those of a dead fish: flat and filmed over, with hummocks of loose flesh underneath. She shambled. She was old. She was sick.

  ‘What’s wrong with you? Ai-yah, why you didn’t say anything?’ Mei Ling cried out in an access of acute remorse. The white doctor was summoned, despite the expense and, after examining Por-Por, he showed the women the baggy flaps of Por-Por’s breasts. Percy-phone and Pandora stared in fascinated loathing, mentally comparing the full ripe breasts of film stars with this thing—the mottled flesh, the stiff, starched pad of skin under the shrivelled and weeping left nipple.

  ‘Stop staring, stupid girls,’ Por-Por said dully. But mostly she was beyond modesty and beyond caring.

  They kept her in the household as long as they could, wheezing, moaning and vomiting on her coconut fibre mattress on the kitchen floor. She became a fixture there, like Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy, smiling in blooming porcelain health on her altar in the opposite corner. On her better days, Por-Por sat up on her mattress and scolded the girls for cooking and cleaning badly.

  ‘Are you blind, stupid girls? Can’t you see the dirt under the sink? Do you want the kitchen to be invaded by rats and cockroaches? Do you want to see me eaten alive, dummies? Useless and good for nothing, you are.’

  The Lim family told friends and neighbours rather proudly that Por-Por was dying. The white doctor had even confirmed this. Everyone flocked through the back door into the kitchen to have their curiosity satisfied. Yes, yes, they said, shaking their heads sadly. She was certainly dying, they told each other. Everyone could see that; so sad, you know.

  Por-Por loved the melodrama of her death. She was the daughter of schoolteachers in China and had grown up in a Methodist mission school, but she had failed her parents. She had foolishly squandered the opportunity of education, she lamented regularly in later years when she chased the Lim children around the courtyard with a bamboo cane, forcing them to do their homework. She had grown up among books and knowledge, yet she remained illiterate. Instead she had preferred to enjoy herself with men at the local coffee house until her mother had had enough and kicked her out of the house. Then she was forced to migrate to Singapore and find work as a servant. So let that be a lesson to you all, she scolded the kids.

  Por-Por had hoped to marry after she had saved up enough money from working as a servant. She was beautiful and smart, and she ran the household efficiently. But then the war had come along and when she returned from the Yoshiwara after the Japanese occupation, she knew that she would never be able to marry. No man would want her anymore. Perhaps it was just as well, she used to say. Years of living with the shopkeeper and his sons had bred in her a deep contempt for men. All her grudging affection was reserved for Pandora first, then Percy-phone. But they were women and they hardly counted. To the shopkeeper, she was invisible; a nonentity even though she kept his house running smoothly and brought up his children. All her life she saw bitterly the insignificance of her existence in the eyes of others, and felt the horrific stain of having been a Japanese kuniang; a stain which could never be washed away no matter how often and meticulously she scrubbed herself each day.

  Now, dying had made her the undisputed queen of the kitchen and courtyard. Pandora propped her up on bolsters and pillows and Por-Por granted neighbours and friends an audience. She was temporarily revivified by the attention, succoured by sympathy and gratified by the loud lamentations that swelled in the courtyard each day as she rehearsed for a different audience the trials and tribulations of her life: the parents who had loved their Christian god more than their only daughter; the missionaries in China’s Fukien province who had abandoned their flock when the communist guerrillas came and stole her grandparents’ chests of jade and gold; her stupidity in not studying harder when she’d had the chance; the rich men who’d wanted her when she was young and beautiful, and who would have married her at the snap of her fingers; her devotion to the House of Lim, especially Pandora, her foster daughter; and finally, the long story of her sickness. She honed her tale, adding more tear-jerking pathos to each retelling.

  For a brief moment, she made them all feel as though they were players in a larger drama with an obscure but significant meaning, something absent from their pedestrian lives. The process of Por-Por’s dying was cathartic for the neighbourhood. People went away shaking their heads sorrowfully, wiping away their tears, feeling glad they had visited, feeling somehow nobler.

  Eventually, tired of the incessant flow of people through his backyard, the shopkeeper moved himself to exert his authority, the only memorable instance that decade, by decreeing that Por-Por should go away to the Longevity House on Sago Lane—also known as the Street of the Dead—in Chinatown. The Longevity House was a hospice of sorts where the indigent went to expire. The Lim women’s protests could not budge him. He suddenly remembered that he was Head of the House, and all the years of Por-Por’s servitude and devotion counted for nothing against the pleasure of exercising power and the prospect of regaining domestic peace and solitude. With that one decision, he repaid the years of subtle insults and mocking comments heaped on him—and on all men—by Por-Por.

  So she lay exhausted and silenced on an old soiled bed, covered incongruously by a new patchwork blanket the girls had sewn her from the scraps of material left over from their Chinese New Year dr
esses. They went to visit her twice a week, bringing her jellies and porridge, and once, when they had saved up enough money for it, bird’s nest soup with slivers of ginseng root. As she wasted away before their eyes, she grew hungry for the little details of their lives, especially Pandora’s.

  ‘What’s happening, stupid girls?’ she asked each Wednesday or Saturday afternoon when Percy-phone and Pandora visited.

  ‘Pan-Pan has a boyfriend,’ Percy-phone volunteered. ‘His name is Jonah Tay. He’s from a rich Hokkien family in Malaysia and he’s studying dentistry at the university.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before, dummy? What does he look like? Handsome or not? Bring him to see me.’

  But Pandora didn’t. Subsequent Wednesday and Saturday afternoons came and went without any sign of Jonah Tay. He was helping his mother at home. He was working at the dental hospital. He was studying for his exams. He was never free.

  ‘What’s the matter, stupid girl? Are you ashamed of me, stinking arse? Are you afraid that he won’t want to marry you when he sees me? Have you forgotten who I am? I’m your foster mother. Who took you in and looked after you when Madam Tan abandoned you and sent you back? You could have died in the streets if it hadn’t been for me. Ungrateful girl. You’re useless! Don’t come and see me anymore until you bring him. I curse your black cunt and all the children you will push through it. May they give you as much heartache as you’ve given me.’ She turned her face to the wall and shut her eyes.

  Pandora went away and cried, resolving to bring Jonah the next time she went to visit Por-Por.

  It was so dark and lonely in the Longevity House, Por-Por felt as though she were buried alive in a catacomb. The darkness accrued a suffocating weight. All around her she heard the moans, the wracking coughs, the wheezing gasps from fluid-filled lungs. She wanted to scream, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ until she realised that the sounds were squeezing out of her own lungs. The air was foetid with the stench of putrefying flesh, the decay of the body inside and out. Most denizens of the Longevity House were dumped there and forgotten until they died. Then the overcrowded rooms echoed with the loud wails of the bereaved, many of whom were professional mourners paid for by guilty relatives so that the corpse would have a noisy send-off to the underworld. Buddhist monks from a nearby temple sometimes appeared in their grey robes, chanting prayers monotonously and marking time by beating on wooden blocks or cymbals. The keening wail of hired mourners would rise, rise, rise and then crescendo, fading away as the shock of iron nails sliced into the cheap wood of the coffin lid. The box would be hoisted onto wiry shoulders with the ease of familiarity, like crates of ripe, heavy fruit, as the noise and life trickled out of the doorway, leaving the house still.

  Por-Por lay dead on her bed. The sheets were soaked with urine. She had shat in her pants from the terror of impending death.

  DOGFISH AND GOOD DEEDS

  Pandora met Jonah Tay because Percy-phone—on her way back from work and laden with brown paper parcels of nasi lemak for dinner—fell into a swollen stormwater canal during the monsoon season and was washed down towards the estuary of the Singapore River. Terrified and half-drowned by murky water, she was fished out of the drain by a skinny young dental student who’d been cycling over to a classmate’s home with biology books in his canvas satchel and a dead dogfish in a plastic bag so that they could dissect it to study for their zoology exam.

  He helped her, limping, coughing and lamenting loudly, onto the muddy red bank, steadying her as she slipped and slid in the squelching clay. She thanked him over and over again, gripping his hand hard and pouring out words of gratitude in a Chinese dialect he didn’t understand. He looked away and tried to disengage his hand, embarrassed by her effusion of thanks. She stank of river sewage. Cautiously, he lowered his chin to sniff at his left shoulder. His nostrils quivered in revolted reaction. He stank as well.

  ‘Ai-yah! Ai-yah!’

  Percy-phone had discovered the loss of her brown paper parcels of food. Her tears of gratitude transformed into terrified wails as she thought of the neatly wrapped packages of fragrant coconut rice, crisply fried anchovies, cucumber chunks, boiled egg slices and chilli sambal paste now swirling out to sea. Fish food. There would be no dinner for the Lim family that night because Mei Ling would be out gambling and Por-Por was no longer there to cook. The shopkeeper would be furious.

  ‘Please,’ she begged in English when she saw that he didn’t understand her dialect. She dropped to her knees, slumped in the mud in an appropriate supplicatory posture, one hand grasping the grey material of Jonah’s trousers as if it were the sacred hem of a god’s robe. ‘Please, you have to come home with me and explain what happened to my father. He will believe you.’

  Rising irritation at this pathetic, stinking, sobbing woman warred with reluctant compassion. For a moment he wished that he had just stood on the bank and watched as she was swept out to sea. But pity won, for his heart was soft in those days, as yet unpetrified by the accumulated disappointments of a lifetime. He gently helped Percy-phone to her feet, promising to take her home and ensure her father understood that it wasn’t her fault the parcels of nasi lemak had floated away.

  At this point, her terror banished by a total stranger’s casual act of humanity, Percy-phone fell in love with Jonah irrevocably and forever. It was a love that stood staunchly by her brother-in-law even as she wept with Pandora over the daily throb of marital pain years later. A love that heaped no blame or guilt onto him after Pandora’s death, even as the other relatives stabbed him with accusing glances to salve their own consciences and quieten the insistent whisperings of impatient neglect in their hearts. A love that helped her to understand dimly the tangle of kindness and cruelty, the tug-of-war between duty and domination, tenderness and tyranny, that made up Jonah Tay. And, in understanding, to forgive.

  Now, Jonah picked up his bicycle and mounted it, encouraging Percy-phone to seat herself on the flat wire tray over the back wheel and to hang on to him as he cycled laboriously through the narrow rain-slicked roads to the ramshackle shophouse. He rang the bicycle bell as stray dogs, sniffing the river stench of the sodden couple, loped into the streets and barked loudly. People turned their heads to stare, point and comment openly. This would normally have annoyed him, being the focus of so much embarrassing attention. But he was buoyed by the afterglow of altruism: an English-educated Chinese knight in stinking armour who had rescued a damsel in distress. Percy-phone wrapped her chubby arms around his skinny body (it was like hugging a chopstick, she thought dreamily) and felt the first stirrings of sexual desire as she pressed her suddenly erect nipples to the wet cotton shirt plastered to his back. She thought, with a quick thrill of shame that mottled her face, that only a few layers of material stood between her naked breasts and the flesh of this man who had rescued her twice.

  Concentrating intensely on keeping his balance on the bicycle—the heavy, smelly woman behind him was leaning slightly to the right and her arms were clamped around him like pincers—and sweating profusely with the exertion of pushing the stiff pedals of the bicycle with his bandy legs, Jonah failed to notice the woman’s arousal through her thickly padded bra. His jaw was clenched tightly, his heavy brows dipped into a frowning V as he counted from one to twenty in all the languages he knew in order of familiarity: Hokkien, English, Cantonese and Mandarin.

  One, two, three, four, five . . .

  At each count he pushed a recalcitrant pedal with quivering calf muscles, resolutely refusing to think of the distance he had yet to go before he reached her house.

  Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Pause. Breathe.

  Yat, yee, sahm, sey . . .

  Inhale, exhale.

  Then finally, the welcome tap on the aching shoulder.

  ‘The blue door over there.’

  The counting slowed, the pedals stopped, two pairs of feet—one in red Bata sandals, the other in mud-caked black leather shoes—dropped to the dirty paving of the alleyway, and the bicycle
sagged against the cracked wall. Gasping painfully, Jonah raised a tremulous fist and rapped weakly on the blue door. His chest was on fire and his muscles were liquefied. No answer. He rapped again, harder this time, and he heard the sound of raucous shouts and the echoing slap of slippers on concrete.

  The bolt was slammed back and Pandora wrenched open the door. She saw a skinny man in grease-smeared Buddy Holly glasses, a grubby long-sleeved cotton shirt that had once been white, and muddy grey trousers. Sweat beaded his forehead and his thin chest pushed in and out in ragged respiration. The rotten stench of the river rose from his sodden clothes. She recoiled and was about to order him away when Percy-phone loomed into the light.

  ‘Ai-yo! What happened to you?’

  Loud, solicitous exclamations were exchanged with equally loud and piteous explanations. Wooden doors along the alleyway began to open as neighbours stuck their heads out in blatant curiosity to see what was going on.

  Pandora turned to look at Jonah, ineffable gratitude prompting her to overcome her habitual reserve and shyness with strangers and seize his hand. She shook it warmly. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she said, pumping his hand up and down.

  He stared into her long-lashed brown eyes, took in her slender figure dressed in a pink samfoo and, in that dark and foetid alleyway, on that hot and humid Singaporean evening, Jonah promptly tumbled headlong into love.

  ‘No problem,’ he said nonchalantly, trembling limbs and pain-racked chest now forgotten in the glorious glow of first love. Jonah Tay, the hero. ‘Don’t mention it.’

  Introductions were made, thanks offered again, graciously waived again, and Jonah was then ushered into the house, making his first acquaintance with the broken concrete courtyard that was the backdrop to so many momentous occasions in the Lim lives. He was introduced to the shopkeeper and the men fumbled awkwardly as they groped for a dialect both could understand. In the end, Pandora translated for them. With the gravity and authority that came so naturally to him, Jonah explained in concise but respectful terms exactly what had happened to Percy-phone and the brown paper parcels of nasi lemak.