by Hsu-Ming Teo
‘Eh, Percy-phone. You all right or not?’ The shopkeeper was moved for the first and only time in his life to express open concern for his third daughter. Then, without waiting for an answer, he clapped Jonah on the shoulder, ignoring the slime on his shirt. He led Jonah away to pour him a glass of Guinness and to press on him six mandarins and a jar of peanut brittle to take home. Mei Ling came in from her mahjong and explanations were repeated. The Lim women hovered over Jonah and fussed flatteringly while the shopkeeper made unexpected conversation. At last, his heart warmed and his ego puffed by the regard of the Lim family, Jonah stood up to leave.
‘Come again, ah?’ Mei Ling cried hospitably as she showed him out the back door. ‘Don’t be shy, you know.’
The shopkeeper, too, called out his approving invitation as he shuffled upstairs to his abacus beads and Chinese newspapers while waiting to eat. ‘Don’t be a stranger. Always welcome.’ Then, without a glance at the girls, he ordered: ‘Call me when dinner is ready.’
‘Thank you, Uncle,’ Jonah said. ‘Goodbye Auntie, Pandora, Percy-phone.’ He paused to give Pandora a meaningful look which she missed because she was busy scrabbling in the kitchen cupboards for leftovers to make some sort of dinner. Goodbyes were returned, hands were waved and then he stood alone in the alley as the door shut and the bolt was slid home. He stared at the blue door for a moment, his heart thrumming with love and desire. Pandora, he thought euphorically. Then he turned to scan the alleyway once, twice, and realised that his bicycle was gone. Stolen.
His satchel lay in the gutter, next to broken Tiger beer bottles and empty Camel cigarette packets. His biology book had been flung down carelessly near the satchel, falling open at elaborately labelled diagrams of the human respiratory system and the gastrointestinal tract. A large shoeprint was visible across the crumpled pages. Belatedly, he remembered that he had been on his way to Beng Chee’s home to study for their next day’s zoology exam.
First love was temporarily flooded by the swelling tide of panic. He bent down and picked up his biology book, smoothing out the creases and brushing away the dried mud from the pages before putting the book carefully into his satchel. He now remembered that he had left the plastic bag containing the dogfish by the canal bank when he had pulled Percy-phone out of the water. His heart thumped painfully with fear and futile hope as he jogged back to the river, desperately praying, ‘Please God, please God, please God.’
But there was to be no second miracle that night. Love had been given and, in the eternal law of compensation, something had to be taken away. He found the plastic bag lying where he had dropped it when he waded into the canal. It had been shredded to ribbons by stray dogs. The remains of the mauled dogfish lay three feet away, a few slimy scraps of flesh clinging loosely to the polished bones that gleamed pearlescent in the bright moonlight.
And, like the terrified woman had a few hours ago, twenty-year-old, five-foot-ten Jonah Tay sank to his knees in the mud and sobbed in the certain knowledge of the brutal beating that would be meted out by his thirty-eight-year-old, four-foot-nine mother when he did not do well in his exam the next day. No Tay children could ever be too old to be beaten into better behaviour by their loving parents. He bore the stripes of his mother’s love for weeks after that, a reminder of the costly act of compassion and his fall into love.
PRIVILEGED SON
Jonah Tay had been born in Malaya on the day when, far away in Europe, Hitler’s panzer divisions rolled into Poland and mowed down the cavalry that rode out valiantly to meet them, sabres waving uselessly against the crushing tanks.
The Second World War passed by the Tay family, casting barely a ripple in their daily lives. Their village was located in too remote a region of the hills to be of much interest to anyone. Decades later, the few remaining Tay relatives who’d stayed on in the village long after most of the family had left would tell visitors that under the stubby spikes of emerald grass in the football field were buried dozens of skulls and bones of villagers executed by the Japanese and ploughed under. Their ghoulish stories were false, a mishmash of myth and other people’s truths. Japanese troops had appeared out of the jungle one day. They made a desultory search for radios in houses which barely had working electricity, helped themselves to sacks of rice, a few glittering trinkets and the odd serving girl, then disappeared down the dusty road again.
The real threat to the village would come after the war when, during the 1950s, the British colonial government declared a state of emergency and tried to flush out communist guerrillas from the jungles of Malaya. Jonah would then be taken by his mother to Singapore to be educated in an Anglican school, safely away from the communists. The Tay family feared that they would be targeted by communists because they were a Christian family who not only owned four large rubber estates but who also traded rubber and rice with the British.
My son, the doctor, Madam Tay wished to say nonchalantly to her neighbours when she and Jonah returned to the village for a brief visit. She choked on disappointment and spewed forth bitterness when Jonah failed to get sufficient marks to enrol in medicine and had to settle for dentistry instead. In the early years of his childhood, however, before the rubber market collapsed with the invention of synthetic polymers, Jonah had not been intended for either the medical or dental professions. It was assumed that, as the eldest son, he would inherit and run his father’s rubber estates, living a life of indolent luxury, driving around in his silver Mercedes-Benz, wearing a gold Rolex watch on his wrist and carrying a Mont Blanc fountain pen in his checked cotton shirt as he hobnobbed with British businessmen and colonial officers in the larger neighbouring towns. Still, he was not spoilt as a child. Because of the wealth that he would one day inherit, he was made to work with the poorest Indian rubber tappers from the age of eight, so that he would appreciate his good fortune and remain suitably grateful and obedient to his parents.
Some of the rubber estates had been neglected during the war. The trees were over twenty years old and many of the neat paths between them were overgrown with rampant vegetation that supported teeming ecosystems of insects, frogs and snakes. The rubber tappers were afraid to venture into these parts of the plantation. A few years before, a conscientious Indian rubber tapper from a neighbouring smallholding had risen early one morning and entered the dense, ill-kept plantation belonging to a wealthy tea merchant who commuted between the village and Kuala Lumpur. The tapper never came out again. His wife raised the alarm and, the following day, a team of men from the village hacked their way through the undergrowth until they came across a huge, six-foot python lying utterly silent, utterly still in the long grass. Its elastic jaws were massively stretched around the head and upper torso of the dedicated Indian rubber tapper, whom it was very slowly swallowing and digesting.
The Malay peanut seller from the village lifted his parang and slashed it in a downward arc, slicing at the python’s lower body. The other men hacked at the now vulnerable python—with its jaws and upper digestive tract gloved around the corpse, it was unable to writhe or coil in defence. When it had been dismembered, somebody prised the powerful jaws apart and two men dragged out the limp, crushed-boned body of the Indian rubber tapper. Faces were turned away in horror and an old cotton sarong was quickly used to shroud what was left of the partially digested face. The corpse was carried back to the rubber tapper’s wife on a blanket for burial. That night, in different homes across the village, fearful prayers were made to various Christian, Muslim, Chinese and Indian gods to avert the evil that such a monstrous snake must inevitably portend. Meanwhile, the Malay peanut seller, armed once again with his parang, snuck back into the plantation, carved up the python’s body into manageable chunks, stuffed them into a raffia sack and dragged them home. His wife curried the meat the next day and fed it to their malnourished children.
Since then, none of the rubber tappers who remembered the incident would enter plantations that were too densely overgrown. Mr Tay decided to raze two of his old-growt
h estates and replant. For days the sky was choked with a blanket of thick grey smoke as fire ripped through the plantation. Finally the burning subsided to a sullen smoulder and was washed away by an afternoon thunderstorm which turned the dark grey ash into sodden slush. The soil was turned over, fertilisers added and rubber seedlings planted in orderly rows. In all this activity, Jonah was made to participate from dawn till dusk. Mr Tay wanted his son to experience first-hand the backbreaking work involved in maintaining a labour-intensive rubber estate. Side by side with the Indian workers, Jonah dug holes for the seedlings and patted soil and manure into place. Sweat ran down his face, flies and mosquitoes circumnavigated his body and dive-bombed his flesh. The skin of his palms hardened and cracked.
Even when the seedlings had been planted and he was back at school, he did not escape the life of the rubber plantation. Each morning, if it had not rained during the previous night, he was woken up at five-thirty and sent to one of the other two Tay rubber plantations in the silver Mercedes-Benz. He joined the two Indian families who lived in wooden huts on the estate next to the rubber smokehouse, hurriedly eating fried bread and scalding his palate with thick black coffee. The tappers then handed him a bucket and they filed into the dark, silent rows of trees.
When dawn broke, thin blades of sunlight slashed down surreally through the canopy of large waxen green leaves. The rubber latex which had collected overnight in the tin cups tied to the trunks of the trees were emptied into the buckets. New lines were cut diagonally into a different section of the trunk and the tin cup retied to the bottom of the sloping lines to catch the fat white beads of latex as they bled out of the trunk and trickled slowly down the grooves. A thin, sticky residue would often be left on the lines of old cuts. It was Jonah’s job to collect these rubber tailings, which could still be sold to make inferior quality rubber. When necessary, he lugged around a can of weedkiller and squirted it along the rows of rubber trees to keep the paths free of undergrowth. Later that morning, his young muscles throbbing and his body aching, he would return to the Indians’ huts where the silver Mercedes-Benz awaited him. The chauffeur took him back to the house for lunch before he changed into his uniform and went to school in the afternoon.
Jonah loved school. It didn’t take long for the Tays to discover their son’s intelligence. ‘My son got an A plus in spelling,’ Madam Tay boasted to her fellow church members on Sunday. ‘Top of his class, you know. Very good. Still, I walloped him so he won’t become proud and stop studying.’ Eventually, she persuaded her husband to let Jonah stop working in the rubber estates so that he could concentrate on his studies. In the afternoons, he came straight home from school and sat in the living room under her watchful eye, doing his homework. He was not allowed to play with or talk to his siblings. Each morning, she woke him at five-thirty so that he could read ahead for the day and surprise his teachers with his advanced knowledge. If he couldn’t wake up immediately, she fetched the cane and savagely beat him out of bed.
‘On looking back, I see that perhaps she was a stern disciplinarian, but she meant it for the best,’ Jonah would tell his children years later in a rare moment of confidence. ‘She wanted us to excel in life, to be prosperous, you know, and to have the education that was denied her in our ancestral village in China because she was female. Yes, she beat us often, and hard. You call it child abuse, but she did it out of love.’
Poor Jonah, who oscillated between the blows and briberies of love until he could understand it in no other terms. After dragging him out of bed, his mother fussed over him, bringing him a hot drink of Ovaltine and rice porridge with anchovies, peanuts and pickled vegetables for breakfast. She engaged a tutor to come to the house and give Jonah lessons before he went to school in the afternoons. She loved her son and there was nothing she wouldn’t do to help him be the best in his class. And, always terrified of slipping below third position in any of his subjects, he excelled.
Jonah’s privileged position as the first son was further strengthened by the prestige of his academic achievements. Madam Tay, lavishing her love and cloying attention on him when she wasn’t beating him in order to keep him humble and filial, segregated him from his other siblings. As in many other families, the children had grown up sharing one big bed, but Jonah was untangled from the kicking, struggling limbs of his siblings and given a bed of his own when he excelled at school. For Jonah was reserved the best room in the large house, furnished with a huge antique bed and carved rosewood desk and chair. He was given the first radio in the village, and then the first turntable. At meal times, after Mr Tay had eaten, Madam Tay heaped into Jonah’s rice bowl the choicest, juiciest morsels of suckling pig, braised duck, fried fish, barbecued pork, stir-fried liver and roast chicken. He remained stubbornly thin despite her efforts to fatten him. His brothers would then devour whatever pieces of meat remained, while his sisters were left with the gristle, bones and untouched dishes of stir-fried vegetables. Meat was a sign of wealth and privilege, and Jonah paid for his parents’ favour with chronic constipation, a condition he was to suffer from all his life.
One day the tea merchant’s rubber smokehouse was burnt to the ground. His children’s pet Maltese dog had been decapitated and disembowelled, then flung at the iron gates of their large house. The British soldiers searched the jungle for the communist perpetrators and eventually found some suspects. They tried and executed them. Madam Tay tamped down her hysteria and grimly informed her husband that she was taking Jonah to Singapore to enrol him in an English school there. In any case, he would have a better chance of gaining a place at university if he didn’t come from an obscure village in Malaya, she reasoned, for by now she had set her heart on Jonah becoming a doctor. Medicine was a safe and prestigious profession, she argued. The world would always need doctors whereas the price of rubber fluctuated wildly. Servants were sent to scour Singapore for a suitable house. Two months later, when Jonah was thirteen, mother and son moved into a small semi-detached house on North Bridge Road.
How she loved him, this clever, handsome son of hers. Sometimes she could hardly bear to have him out of her sight, away from the house. Where are you going, why are you so late, where have you been, what are you doing, what are you thinking? she asked him constantly. She had furnished a room at the back of the house, away from the noisy traffic along the road, so that he could study in luxurious peace, but she was constantly invading his territory. She sat on his bed and sighed loud, gusty, long-suffering sighs while he tried to concentrate on geography. She twisted her translucent green jade bangle, played with her gold rings and demanded to know what he was studying.
‘Deserts.’
‘Which ones?’
‘Sahara, Gobi, Simpson.’
‘A fine education this is,’ she scoffed. ‘What have deserts got to do with Singapore or Malaya? Why don’t they teach you something useful in that expensive school we send you to, ah?’
Jonah did not answer her. He concentrated fiercely on the small black and white photographs in his geography textbook and imagined himself tramping across the empty sands, swaddled in layers of clothes that wrapped and flapped around him, cocooning him from the harsh heat of the blinding sun overhead. He stared at the blur of black text on the page until he fancied he could see the atoms skating quickly over the surface of his eyeballs. He felt as though he were shrinking into a small black hole somewhere in the middle of his body. First he felt his spirit being sucked into this pinpoint void, then his muscles, nerves and bones, and then the hole would close up. He would disappear from this world.
One night he felt the soft brush of light black feet on the back of his neck, then the hard blow of a thick mathematics textbook that left his ears ringing and his head reeling in shock and pain.
‘Ai-yah!’ his mother exclaimed as she edged a piece of paper under a squashed black bug and tipped it into the wastebasket. ‘How did that cockroach get in here? It was crawling up your neck, you know.’
Madam Tay was bored. She broug
ht Jonah to the tailor to have two new suits of clothes and several shirts made. In the evenings, after he had finished his homework, she made him play card games with her, the way her husband used to. Sometimes she took Jonah to the hawker centres to buy him yellow bean soup, durian, ice kachang or curry puffs. She made him accompany her on weekends to the wet and dry markets to shop for food which a servant would then prepare into a meal too sumptuous and excessive for mother and son. She made friends with the neighbours and forced Jonah to go with her when she visited them to drink tea and gossip. She turned him into a surrogate husband and wept tears of rage and betrayal when he slipped down to eleventh in his class.
‘You made me go out with you,’ he said sullenly. ‘I didn’t have time to study.’
She brought out the cane—now rarely used—and beat him for his stupidity in the exams and for his insolence in answering back his mother. But she left him alone to study after that, and he learned that he could carve out pockets of solitude if he sat at his desk and opened a textbook. Later, when he was sixteen, he wheedled her into giving him permission to visit his friends on the pretext that they had group assignments to complete. Most of the time she granted her permission, but occasionally she refused out of a capricious need to demonstrate her continuing power and authority over this, her first-born and most beloved son.
Jonah had many acquaintances with whom he studied; other boys from school with whom he sliced and diced rats, frogs, cockroaches and geckos, lifting out their circulatory systems or teasing apart skin, muscle, bone and cartilage to reveal skeletal and exoskeletal structures. But he had no real friends. His mother saw to it that he didn’t have the time to develop friendships. Occasionally he resented her for this, but mostly he was resigned. His bony shoulders were bowed by the weight of her terrifying and obsessive love that manifested itself in new clothes he didn’t want to wear and a hundred delicacies he had no wish to eat. Loudly she lamented her sacrifice in having given up her friends and other children so that he might have the opportunity to study in peace and safety, away from the dangers and backwardness of their village. Some evenings, she wept noisily, missing the company of her husband. Then she dried her tears and wrapped her arms like shackles around her son, sighing that she would sacrifice all this and much more for him, just so that he could get a good education and make something of himself. He comforted her, poured her another cup of her favourite Lung Ching tea, and fussed over her. He felt the chains of guilt and obligation, forswore his resentment and vowed to be a more obedient son.