Outside the renewal of the earth continued. Rains lashed Ipoh town, turning its baked fields into swamps and giving succour to the trees. I reminded Weng Yu that he was so changed on his return from London we could hardly recognise him. The aching in my heart must have been evident, because Weng Yu swallowed and hung his head. A boy from Ipoh who did not speak Hakka or Hokkien or Cantonese – what sort of son had I brought up? In the end the gods had smiled on us once more, and all had turned out well. Weng Yu had found himself an amazing wife – a beautiful woman from a wealthy family who was refined, well brought up, educated – a good wife and companion. Now that he had two lovely children, a boy and a girl, with another on the way, it was imperative he took care of what was precious in this world, especially the little ones, who relied on him.
‘My son, think of your wife, your children. You how can gamble instead of work? Think of what Mama do for you . . . Also your brothers and sisters.’
Weng Yu’s cheeks puffed in indignation. ‘I am not a villager, Mama.’
He jerked out of his chair and marched towards the door. My daughter Hui Lin ran to stop him, but Weng Yu pushed her away. I followed, shuffling one foot in front of the other as quickly as I could while I tried to grab Weng Yu’s arm.
‘Son, you no leave like this!’
Turning an anguished face towards me, Weng Yu cried out, ‘Mama, why are you always meddling where you shouldn’t? And when you should do something, you don’t.’
‘What is meaning, Weng Yu? You say what?’
‘You let Big Sister go back to that useless husband of hers, didn’t you? Why? Because you chose him for her.’
We stared at one another then, my little prince and I, not as mother and son should, not as we had once done before the cockerels crowed, but in blank incomprehension. I peered into Weng Yu’s soul, and the uncontrolled fury I saw there threw me back. I could not think what to say.
‘And when Second Sister gave birth, you could have done something, but you didn’t. Why don’t you leave me alone too?’
The torrents had stopped by then. A light drizzle was falling; into this, Weng Yu stumbled like a man intoxicated. I watched him disappear into the night. As I held out my hand, the fine Ipoh rain caressed the sleeve of my baju. Help us, Kuan Yin, I said silently. I closed the door wearily, my heart bleeding, yet thankful that I had finally spoken.
51
In the months following my confrontation with Weng Yu, I lost sensation in my toes. The numbness came on gradually. I noticed nothing until I saw black bruises on the sides of my feet, pustules like those which graced the heels of the mistress of ceremonies Yong Soon Soh. With the pustules came a loss of control that terrified me: I could not feel my toes, which did not tingle even when I crashed my feet against the heavy almerah in my bedroom. I stumbled around like a drunk, my gait unsteady as if I had been drinking.
Once he saw the state of my feet, Weng Yoon insisted on dragging me back to the hospital. The trip served little purpose. We were seen by a Chinese man, who very kindly not only confirmed my diabetes but also pointed out that I was growing clouds in both eyes. It was only a matter of time before I became blind.
With such joy to look forward to, I waited impatiently for my Green House to be completed. It was my one glimmer of cheer, like a star in the night sky. I monitored progress by badgering Weng Yoon every night for an update on what the builders had added that day. Construction seemed absurdly slow. I couldn’t believe how long it took to put up what was merely a single-storey house with four bedrooms. No wonder the mansions of the towkays took years to complete. Weng Yoon had taken me to the building site early in the project but declined to do so again, because, he told me, my presence had been bad for morale. I had shouted at the contractor, whom I thought was cheating us on materials, and also at the labourers for working at too leisurely a pace. After years of mellowing, my previous fire returned with a vengeance, because I no longer saw the point of curbing my tongue. Why bother if I could pass into the next world at any moment?
The Green House might have been completed sooner if our workers hadn’t been put on two projects at the same time, a fact Weng Yoon omitted to tell me. When he took me to the building site, he had merely pointed out the plot of land next to mine. The plot – which happened to be his – was then no more than a piece of undeveloped land overgrown with belukar, uninviting in the way all virgin land is. Unbeknownst to me, Weng Yoon was doing so well for himself that he had decided to build a house – for himself and the girl to whom he had lost his heart.
I had an inkling he was keeping something from me, because Weng Yoon disappeared every Sunday morning. It wasn’t difficult to guess where he went. Even I knew that the white devils prayed on Sundays. Where I failed was in connecting this unexpected religious interest with a girl. I didn’t find out about her until the night Weng Yoon announced that my Green House was ready. In the same breath he told me he had been courting a girl in Penang whose name was Dora (or as I would say it, Do-lah) and who apparently came from a respected Nyonya family. The boy looked so happy, grinning from ear to ear, that I couldn’t have objected even if I’d wanted to.
Weng Yoon was careful to leave the contentious issue of his intended’s religion to the end, when he explained that his would be a church wedding in Penang, because Dora was a Christian and he too had become one. Weng Yoon watched me closely as he said this, in preparation for an eruption. It never came. My fourth son’s announcement was further confirmation, as if I needed one, that I had failed to safeguard the sword Mother had passed on to me. I looked sadly at Weng Yoon and at my other children too. One by one they were turning to the ways of the whites, and there was little I could do to stem this tide.
With the completion of the Green House, my promise to retire loomed large. Weng Yoon asked when my last day would be and calmly waited for an answer. Having kept his end of the bargain, my fourth son clearly expected me to keep mine.
It was 1938 by then, and we had been making our family kueh for twenty-eight years. In our early years Siew Lan boasted that I had single-handedly introduced Nyonya kueh to the town, a claim which made me blush. It was true that we had given the townspeople a taste for these delicacies, but with Heng Lai Soh, the other long-standing kueh maker, providing stiff competition, I could scarcely take all credit.
Nonetheless we had been responsible for a few stirs: the delivery of kueh on a bicycle; the introduction of a vending cart-and-tricycle for selling Nyonya laksa and kueh together; and of course the brown loyalty cards with the famous Wong family seal. After so many years, catering was as much a part of my life as it was the servants’, and I worried about what would happen when these activities came to a sudden stop.
I mulled over the idea of sharing our catering profits with our servants and leaving the business in their charge, but neither Ah Hong nor Li-Fei seemed enthusiastic. When I raised the question, each assumed that my health had taken a turn for the worse and took fright. My daughter Hui Lin didn’t relish the idea of managing a business either, and her sister Hui Fang lived too far away. With a pang I thought of my second daughter, Hui Ying, whom I felt sure would have carried on our family tradition had she lived.
Without a successor, I had no choice but to shut everything down – kueh, catering and all else. For many nights I could not sleep; I tossed, turned and succumbed to nightmares. I ceased moneylending activities too, although this proved easier. Our family continued earning an income from the two shophouses that were still rented out, but it was my fourth son, Weng Yoon, who took charge of rent collection.
It was kueh, though, that had been closest to my heart. For six mornings in a row I hired a rickshaw to take me around town, where I knocked on the door of every house that had provided loyal custom through the years. On each doorstep I said thank you in person. It felt like a series of mourning calls. Every visit unearthed new memories and brought a few more tears. By the end of that week I was wrung dry of emotion.
On the last morning I
woke earlier than usual. I watched both servants put our thoroughly blackened kettle on to the stove for boiling water. As they lined the steaming baskets with muslin cloth and set the baskets on the heat, I stood in the open air well, savouring the aroma of pandanus leaves rising into the atmosphere. The sight of Li-Fei squeezing coconut milk by hand took me back thirty years – to the time when she was still an apprentice and unable to twist the muslin cloth properly. Now that Li-Fei had become a mature lady, her thick arms left not even a single drop of milk wasted. She could also beat, ladle and wrap. In short, she had turned into an expert Nyonya kueh maker.
When the girls finished all six batches of kueh, Li-Fei loaded the tiffin carriers on to her tricycle while I made my way to the waiting rickshaw at the front of our house. All morning as I sat partly exposed to the Malayan sun, I felt my life grinding to an end.
There’s no denying that retirement came as a shock. I continued to wake at four every morning, unable to stay in bed despite not having to supervise any cooking.
With hours of idleness I could not think what to do with myself. I took to morning strolls in the People’s Park and to chatting with our neighbours along the Lahat Road. Though I had never been keen on gossip, with so much time on my hands even I indulged in nosing into matters in which I had no business.
The late mornings were the hardest. At eleven o’clock, which had been the hour of my money-counting session, I would start seeing coins in my head. I eventually took to emptying the contents of my safe. I would pour the coins on the kitchen table and gather them into piles in sets of ten, as I’d always done, even though I no longer had to count anything. I did this every morning, playing with the reddish-copper one-cent coins and fingering the silver pieces – the five cents and ten cents and twenty cents – until my hands were greased by the smell of dirty money. Not that I cared. The piles of metal and paper, the banknotes I kept tied into fat wads with thin rubber bands, reminded me of what I had done well in this life.
On hauling myself out of bed one fateful morning, I found I could not stand. My knees crumpled just like that. The noise when my head hit the floor woke my daughter Hui Lin, who ran in from the next room before I could even shout for help.
This happened a fortnight before Weng Yoon’s marriage to Dora, and I missed their wedding as a result. Weng Yu’s third child, a baby boy, was born shortly afterwards, and I could not even make it to the hospital to see my grandson Wai Kit. It didn’t help that relations with Weng Yu remained strained. Beneath his cool exterior my son tried to do the right thing, coming in person to inform me about my grandson’s birth and visiting with the baby as soon as he and his wife were able. I could not tell from Mei Foong’s demeanour whether anything had changed, but with a move into the Green House due within days the question of Weng Yu’s gambling had to wait.
To ease my disability, my fourth son, Weng Yoon, bought a sedan chair, a cumbersome contraption with a seat on top that was carried by hired coolies. The men were instructed to handle our things first and then to move me. I, meanwhile, had to wait in the inner hall of our Lahat Road house while our lives were wrapped and transported. Unable to restrain myself, I shouted, often and thunderously, whenever a precious object was at risk of being damaged. When the time came for me to be hoisted on to the sedan chair, the men were so shaky that I thought I would surely fall. I screamed like a baby even after the men’s arms had steadied. I calmed down only when the Green House rose before my eyes – a vision from my dreams, a wonderful wooden house painted completely in lime green.
The house was everything I had imagined it would be; the only thing I had not bargained for was my own loneliness. Weng Yoon and Dora were then away on something called a honeymoon – yet another Western convention the young ones had adopted. My daughter Hui Lin and her husband, Kwee Seng, could stay with me for only ten days. While they remained, they were wonderfully attentive; my daughter even took pains to search the neighbourhood for a gardener and an odd-job man. She did not give up until she found two Malay men whom she felt able to trust, who as well as tending the land had the indelicate task of hoisting me and carrying me on the sedan chair.
With the help of Samad and Kamil, I could survey our new neighbourhood from the comfort of my throne. The two would haul the chair on to their shoulders, criss-cross the newly planted garden to show off Samad’s handiwork and then take me from one end of our street to another. Our street connected two larger roads – Ashby Road on one side and Abdul Jalil Road on the other – but it was just a small lane at the time, so tiny it didn’t even have a name.
Much of the neighbourhood remained undeveloped. Opposite was vacant land covered in belukar and lalang, alongside remnants of a rubber estate thick with mosquitoes. My own Green House was flanked on both sides, but this was a rarity. On one side stood the mansion my fourth son, Weng Yoon, had built, still unfinished, and on the other was a sturdy wooden house designed in the Malay style and inhabited by a Malay family, the Ja’afars.
Though I loved the peace of the neighbourhood, the Green House felt much too large for just me and my faithful servants. Our most regular visitor in those days was the patriarch Yap Meng Seng, who, on enquiring after my retirement, proceeded in the next breath to tell me in great detail about his. I heard about the grand dinner his bank had thrown and the speeches people had made, including the white bosses, and how they had showered Meng Seng with expensive farewell gifts – imported watches, pens and bottles of brandy sold in the exclusive shops. For weeks afterwards his former clients stopped him on the streets of Ipoh to congratulate him on a job well done.
I could not help reflecting on the contrast between Meng Seng’s retirement and my own. Though I had served Nyonya kueh to Ipoh for twenty-eight years, no one had honoured me with a grand dinner. I supposed that was inevitable; I wasn’t even sure I would have wanted anything big, but a small gesture would have been warming. Instead it was I who had thanked my faithful clients, not the other way round. I wondered whether this was simply the difference between working for a large organisation and working for oneself. Who was to know? The kueh business had been like a child to me, perhaps even more important in my life than the bank had been in Meng Seng’s. For once I felt sorry for myself.
After a sleepless night I was determined I would shake off this unbecoming self-pity. I asked Samad and Kamil to take me on a tour of our garden, a grassy plot that would bring me pleasure in my twilight years. Pointing with my index finger, I instructed the pair to grow trees, living shoots that would bear the fruits I had come to love in Malaya – mango, papaya, banana, guava, rambutan. These trees would be mine, I told the men, and they must zealously guard the fruit they bore.
52
The New Year began with an unexpected loss. My daughter Hui Lin ran in one morning holding an envelope in her left hand and with a panicked look on her face. Even in my half-blind state I could tell that her fingers were shaking.
‘What, daughter?’ I asked.
‘From Second Brother in Seremban,’ she replied, panting.
In a sombre voice Hui Lin said that her sister-in-law, the Cantonese girl I had refused to welcome, had succumbed to cancer of the womb. There had been little warning; the girl simply faded within weeks, leaving my distraught son with three young children to tend to.
I let out a cry. No matter what had happened, Weng Koon was still my son, my own flesh and blood, and his children were my grandchildren. I asked Hui Lin to write at once, saying how sorry I was that in my new state of immobility I could not attend my daughter-in-law’s funeral, but I told my son how I longed to see him and his children.
Before the dust had even settled, Hui Lin visited again, this time to tell me about her sister-in-law Mei Foong’s strange wanderings through Ipoh town. ‘I saw her on Osborne Street, Mama,’ my daughter confided. ‘Something is wrong.’
‘What you mean?’
‘She looked sad, very sad. I asked whether she was well and she didn’t answer, just looked through me and c
arried on walking.’
This image of Mei Foong meandering around town with a lost look haunted me, but I could not think what to do. I spent days shouting at the servants. When I tired of that, I would pray before our gods and ancestors. When that too brought no relief, I asked to be moved into the dining room, where I could at least inhale the good, clean mountain air which blew in through the courtyard. It was there while surveying the pink sky over Ipoh’s hills one evening that the idea came to me. Why not invite Weng Yu and his family to live with me in my splendid new house?
The more I thought about it, the more right the plan seemed. My grandchildren would give me the company I desperately craved, and at the same time I could watch over Weng Yu.
It proved easy to persuade my eldest son to move into the Green House, so easy that I feared he might already be in debt. Such thoughts were dispelled when Weng Yu bought himself an automobile – in two-toned cream and black, brand new and imported all the way from Britain. I resisted asking my son how much the car cost, but it must have been an enormous sum.
After Weng Yu’s family moved in, my house was filled with laughter, with tears, screams and hushed whispers and the patter of children’s feet – all that I had missed during my months of solitary living. I moved from the grand room in front to a smaller room at the rear – the only room in the house which opened directly on to the open-air courtyard adjoining the dining room. Fresh air blew in from my beloved hills, and each morning and evening I sat with my bedroom door ajar while taking in continuous breaths, as if the breezes from Ipoh’s limestone hills were a luxury I could not get enough of. As well as facing the hills, my new bedroom was close to the modern kitchen I had planned in consummate detail. Every day without fail the wonderfully aromatic smells of Nyonya cooking drifted in to remind me of all I had been given by the gods.
The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds Page 40