Nonetheless we took precautions. We gave Ah Long a new suit and bought him a single ticket on the omnibus which ferried passengers from Ipoh to Taiping twice a day. Siew Lan was able to remember enough from her Taiping days to provide exact directions to my daughter’s house and my son-in-law’s workplace. She arranged a room for Ah Long by telephone so that all we gave him as a cash advance was two dollars, enough for a week’s meals and small contingencies. He had strict instructions to find out where my son-in-law went every day. Only when he had answers was he to make a reverse-charge call to Siew Lan by telephone, at which point she, who knew Taiping well, would descend to verify his discovery. If he completed his task, he would be paid ten dollars, but if he lied, Ah Long would get nothing more and would have to find his own way back to Ipoh.
Though the plan sounded easy, a problem soon arose. After three days Wai Man disappeared from Taiping, and the coolie had no means of following him. Until then my son-in-law had evidently led a chaste life, going to the bank every morning and returning each evening as one would expect. On the morning when he drove out of Taiping, Ah Long noticed his direction of travel and told Siew Lan that the boy had headed towards Ipoh. I was incredulous. ‘Really-ah?’ I asked Siew Lan.
‘Just mean he went south, Chye Hoon,’ my friend replied. ‘We not know he drove where exactly.’
Ah Long’s version of events confirmed my daughter’s story, but it also put our plan in disarray. I berated myself for not having foreseen this. Hui Fang had told us her husband often went out of Taiping, yet we had failed to account for something so simple. Into this tangled web Siew Lan’s white husband gallantly stepped, inadvertently becoming the central player in our plot. Perhaps more than anything else it was this which elevated him in my mind. I was forced to look at him afresh and saw for the first time not only spidery hairs and cheeks still pink from wear, but also the kindness in his sharp green eyes. Where before Se-Too-Wat remained a white devil I had to put up with because he happened to be Siew Lan’s husband, after our Taiping escapade he became a true family friend.
It fell on Se-Too-Wat to drive the thirty miles in a hired car, so as not to be recognised. Once there he paid Ah Long before patiently tailing my son-in-law around the small town. It must have been tedious as well as uncomfortable, for the weather was hotter than usual, and Se-Too-Wat had never fully adjusted despite years in the tropics.
Occasionally even indoors the forest of hairs on his arms made him pour with sweat. On his return, a noticeably browner Se-Too-Wat reported that Wai Man had travelled to a bungalow in Kuala Kangsar, a village halfway between Ipoh and Taiping, where the bank had a small representative office. As soon as my son-in-law’s transactions were complete, he shot off to a single-storey wooden house of the type built for government workers, set within a large compound, where my son-in-law apparently spent the night. Se-Too-Wat could see that this was no guest house. He surmised that Wai Man was visiting a lady, but it was not until two days later, after my son-in-law had departed, that he finally had a good look at the female in question. Sophisticated-looking, he told us, clearly Chinese, wearing Western dress and with a good figure.
When I heard this, I felt sick in my stomach. I wanted to walk home, but Siew Lan insisted that her husband drive me. ‘You very pale, Chye Hoon,’ she said. Though none of us mentioned it, our minds were on Yap Meng Seng, for we knew then that a meeting was inevitable.
I set off to see the old man several days later. I shall never forget his reaction . . . the confidence oozing out and his smugness. ‘My boy wouldn’t do that,’ he proclaimed, haughty eyebrow unmoved. I screamed, gesticulating wildly in the hope of shaking the man, until we ended up almost tearing at each other’s throats like angry chickens. I was so furious that I boiled over, tempted even to snatch the oval reading glasses from the bridge of Meng Seng’s bony nose. It took all my restraint to contain myself. I could not see how I would make this arrogant man acknowledge that I was neither mad nor stupid.
‘You no believe me, you ask Se-Too-Wat-lah,’ I finally cried out in exasperation.
The patriarch turned pale. ‘What does he have to do with this?’ he asked as he removed his glasses.
‘You call him-lah . . . Go on. Then you see-lah your precious son is how good.’
As I turned to leave, I made sure my words rang down his driveway. ‘Call Se-Too-Wat, then come see me. You like or you no like, also we have to talk.’
The next week brought an unexpected visitor to our house: Liew Tsin-sang, who arrived alone bearing a basket of fruit. When I saw how nervous the young man was, I guessed the reason for his mission.
He sat down awkwardly, cleared his throat and spluttered. Finally, after rubbing his hands together, he told me in a shaky voice that he wanted permission to take Hui Ying out to a film that Saturday afternoon. Swallowing hard, he continued, ‘Peng Choon Sau, I hope very much that you will agree.’
I smiled at the earnest young man before me. ‘Hmm,’ I began, at which point Liew Tsin-sang’s dark face turned pale. He looked at the floor as if the earth had just trembled. ‘Tell me, you and my daughter, your intentions are what?’
The boy cleared his throat once more. ‘Hmm, I . . . I . . . like your second daughter a lot,’ he stammered. ‘I think I would like to marry her.’
‘You only think?’ I asked in as gentle a voice as I could.
‘No, no . . . I . . . I didn’t mean it like that,’ he mumbled. ‘I would like to marry her,’ he said in a louder voice.
‘Hui Ying, her feelings, you know or not know?’
Liew Tsin-sang shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘I believe I have reason to hope. But I don’t know for sure, Peng Choon Sau.’ I watched the lump in the young man’s throat bob in and out as he swallowed. He fidgeted with his hands. ‘I wanted to ask her out before, but I was afraid . . . in case she said no. You see’ – and here Liew Tsin-sang spoke in a softly confiding tone – ‘I . . . I . . . like her . . . very much, you see.’
I tried to imagine this flustered young man as he went about his daily business in the courthouse. Could I see him with my daughter? Yes, but such a grave decision could no longer solely be mine. In our new world my second daughter, Hui Ying, would have to make up her own mind.
When Yap Meng Seng finally came to see me, the contrite look on his face told me he had found out about his son’s mistress. Taking laboured breaths, the old man sipped the tea Ah Hong handed him.
‘Not much I can do, Chye Hoon,’ he muttered.
‘He is your son.’
‘But he’s grown up already. He earns his own living now. He won’t listen to me-lah.’
‘So what, you not even try-ah?’
Meng Seng looked away in embarrassment. Huffing, he puffed air loudly out of his nostrils so that a noise escaped from the top of his throat, a low wheeze which broke our tense silence. The next minute the patriarch’s right leg began to shake violently up and down, jerking continuously with such force that his whole body rocked. I watched in amazement. From my silence it was clear I expected an answer.
‘I can tell the boy what I think,’ Meng Seng finally said. ‘But I can’t promise anything will change.’ He opened his mouth to say something else but just as quickly closed it again, as though he feared he might provoke me.
Several days later he came to tell me that Wai Man flatly refused to give up his mistress. According to the old man, my son-in-law became angry when confronted. He told his father to mind his own business. It was the first time his son had raised his voice, and Meng Seng shook at the recollection – ‘I’ve never known Wai Man in this mood, like a man possessed.’
I covered my mouth with one hand. Without thinking, I turned towards the patriarch and told him simply of my wish to see my daughter. The old man understood, even suggesting that he bring her to Ipoh himself, together with my grandson.
It was while Hui Fang and Choong Meng were staying with us that my second daughter, Hui Ying, asked for my permission to become engaged to
Liew Chin Tong.
The request was not unexpected. I had watched Hui Ying blossom in the previous months. ‘My girl,’ I said, brushing her left cheek with my right hand, ‘I hope you with him happy.’
I apologised that I would not be able to give her a grand wedding, but Hui Ying brushed this off without a second’s thought – ‘It doesn’t matter, Mama.’ Then, in a tone far more mature than her twenty years would have indicated, she added, ‘What’s important is that we love each other.’
The sight of Hui Ying in the Malayan sunlight that day remains one of my clearest memories: her almost translucent skin shimmering, beautiful doubly creased eyes sparkling with joy. I marvelled at how different it was for these young people. Why, they even talked of love! When Peng Choon and I were getting married, love could not have been further from our minds. And yet he and I had built a solid relationship, which turned into . . . what? Gratitude? Loyalty? Love perhaps? I wasn’t sure. I knew only that eleven years later I continued to be distraught at his having passed away early.
In those days I stood constantly before our altar table, watching the coils of smoke as they rose towards the ceiling, where they were absorbed into the darkening cracks. In anguish I presented myself before Kuan Yin and our ancestors. A mere three years had passed since Hui Fang’s wedding, yet time had wrought such irrevocable changes in our lives that even the Goddess of Mercy had trouble responding. With my youngest son dead, my eldest son thousands of miles away and my oldest Nyonya friend starting to wear Western dress, we were in the grip of a relentless march. The tide was taking us I knew not where, but it was so powerful that I felt moved by its force, for there was no question of my not allowing Hui Ying to choose her own husband.
This decision was reinforced by a conversation I overheard one afternoon just outside Hui Fang’s bedroom, where I caught muffled sobbing and the sound of my eldest daughter’s voice. ‘You marry for love,’ she cried out to another person, who I guessed was her second sister, Hui Ying. ‘I marry for Mama. Now look at us . . .’
‘Big Sister, don’t cry,’ came Hui Ying’s reply. ‘Mama would welcome you home, you know that.’
There followed minutes of silence before I heard my eldest girl again. ‘I how can leave my husband, Hui Ying? I have to think of my son. Besides, where to find man now? Man also no want me.’
About that Hui Fang was right. Sadly some things remained the same. The patriarch had asked for my eldest daughter to return to her marital house and her unfaithful husband; ‘Otherwise people will talk,’ he said, adding that he would personally see to it that my daughter and grandson were well provided for. When my son-in-law eventually turned up at our house, he was wholly unrepentant. He strode in, announcing that he was taking his wife and son home. ‘A wife belongs with her husband,’ he said in a loud voice.
His cavalier attitude bothered me. I asked as casually as I could, ‘Husband cheating on her okay-ah?’
‘Mama,’ Wai Man replied stonily, glaring at me, ‘that is a matter between husband and wife.’
I saw my son-in-law in a different light that day and wondered why I had never before noticed the swagger, the way he threw his voice when he spoke. He was no longer the boy my daughter had married but a big fish in a small pond. Unfortunately my Hui Fang proved no match. When ordered to pack her bags, she went willingly. I reminded my daughter that she could remain in Ipoh; there was space for her in the kueh business. But I left the final decision to her. Within minutes both my daughter and grandson had been bundled out of our house.
37
Hui Ying’s wedding to Liew Chin Tong took place on the second day of the second moon in 1923, the year of the Water Pig. It was a simple affair, presided over by Yong Soon Soh and attended by family and close friends, a mere dozen or so guests.
Yong Soon Soh was delighted to be called on. ‘Few people want Nyonya weddings now,’ the mistress of ceremonies confided sadly. She had added years to her age and as many inches to her waist but was no less lively. She continued to make a noise wherever she went, wobbling with terrifying energy as she rattled the bracelets on her wrists and ankles. My eyes were drawn to the bursting folds beneath her kebayas. I marvelled at the woman’s tenacity, convinced that the brooches which held her blouse together would one day fail. I wondered what Yong Soon Soh would do then. In my fantasies she simply waddled into the distance while daring others to stare.
Once we began discussing the ceremony itself, it was clear the mistress of ceremonies had changed. Where before she would have argued over the slightest detail, now she kept nodding in agreement, signing off on ritual simplification with a minimum of fuss. Over tea one afternoon I probed her. She sipped delicately from her cup – the only thing I ever saw Yong Soon Soh doing delicately – before replying with a hint of dolefulness in her voice.
‘Times already different, Peng Choon Sau. We too have to change or else . . . one day maybe . . .’
Looking across at one another, our eyes met.
‘. . . no more Nyonya,’ the mistress of ceremonies whispered. Hope and fear shivered across the space between us. Anxiety hung in the air for a fleeting moment, and then life carried on as before.
Except that in my case it didn’t, because in those few short weeks I made a discovery which shook me.
This came about innocently when I began making enquiries about the Liew family. To my utter surprise l unearthed information not only about Liew Chin Tong and his sister, but also about another family whose secret had lain buried for years – in Gopeng of all places, a one-street settlement about twelve miles south of Ipoh. The Liew family didn’t even live in Gopeng; their wooden house, which Liew Chin Tong described as a hut, was situated on the jungle outskirts.
Liew Chin Tong and his sister grew up with nothing except a table and two chairs between them. Their hut was surrounded by belukar and banana trees. Besides a handful of chickens, they had only the children of the neighbouring shacks for company. Their parents were labourers: their mother was a washerwoman and offered her services in the houses of the rich every morning, while their father, who served in a coffee shop, worked their small plot in his spare time to make ends meet. Although Chin Tong and his sister never went hungry, there were times when they ate only rice and boiled yam or sweet potatoes. Meat was a treat enjoyed a few times each year when their chickens were fat enough for slaughter.
From early on both children had to work. They tended the vegetables, fetched water, fed the fowl, hoed the soil, removed weeds with a spade and hauled a changkol. When not helping with chores, they would huddle beneath a palm tree with the other little ones from neighbouring houses, who gathered to play games and more often than not to listen to Liew Chin Tong’s stories. He had that gift even at a young age. Stories would come into his mind and, watching the faces around him, he would raise and lower his voice to hold the children’s attention, oblivious to the flies buzzing in the sunlight or the mosquitoes swarming at dusk. Inside their cool, dark hut, Liew Chin Tong clung to his sister in their one bed until the day she bled, at which point he was relegated to the damp floor, with just a thin plank separating him from the stony ground beneath.
Then, in a bizarre twist of fate, their lives changed. One morning their mother had only just returned from her washing rounds when a white man called with an unusual question. Speaking in Cantonese, the man told their mother that a new school had started in Ipoh. It had a hostel, he said, to accommodate children from outstation. Although the school was run by missionaries, there was no need for the children to change their religion. They would be taught in English – for free. Would their mother consent to sending them away to school?
Never having expected to face such a dilemma, the poor woman did not know how to react. She directed the man towards the restaurant where their father worked, saying that he too would have to give his permission. Both parents wanted to send only Chin Tong, but the boy, having lived through the trauma of losing his siblings at birth, refused to leave home without his elder
sister. Brother and sister arrived together in Ipoh, never to look back.
Once Chin Tong and his sister gained employment, they started providing for their parents. Chin Tong told me they gave the old folks twenty dollars a month each from their salaries, more during the New Year festivities, so that their parents could live comfortably without having to work. But as with many of my generation, the ethic of work was too ingrained. Chin Tong’s parents were unable to just sit and shake their legs. They continued to tend their plot even when they were already hobbling on sticks.
When I told Chin Tong that I looked forward to meeting his parents, the young man gave me a sheepish look. The elderly couple were not planning to attend his wedding apparently. ‘Good heart-lah!’ I exclaimed. ‘They of course must come! You marry, they no come, how can?’
‘They’re stubborn, Peng Choon Sau,’ Chin Tong replied. ‘My parents have their own ideas . . . hard to change them.’
When it was clear that an independent emissary would be needed, Siew Lan rose to the occasion, volunteering to make the trip to Gopeng with her husband. She said he went from time to time to visit a plantation in which he had a small interest. While Se-Too-Wat set about his business, it would be no problem for her to drop in at the Liew household.
The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds Page 29