‘Jesus, is that right?’
‘This colony was founded and built on human suffering. We British were ultimately responsible for untold misery over a period of 130 years. Some historians insist Britain’s opium trade to China and elsewhere is the greatest human catastrophe ever deliberately perpetrated on another people by a single European nation.’ She’d finished her second plate and looked ready for a third. Elma was a big woman and took some filling up, a process she did quickly, scooping up great mouthfuls, unlike her friend Mrs Sidebottom. ‘Wicked, wicked, wicked!’ she exclaimed. Then, barely pausing for breath, ‘What say a taste of the fish-head curry, Simon? Not authentic Indian, a local dish, but excellent nevertheless.’
‘I’m about done, thanks, Elma.’
‘Nonsense, Simon. I’m a big girl and you’re a growing boy. All this talk improves the appetite. History is such a rewarding subject. Fish-head curry is mild, good for your stomach. Come on – I can’t be seen scoffing on my own. Besides, we haven’t done the Opium Wars.’
I’d first tasted the local fish-head curry with Elma, and then several more times with Mercy B. Lord. It was a particular favourite of hers when we ate at various cheap holes-in-the-wall, and here it was in posh old Raffles. ‘Okay, you’ve got me, Elma. Fish-head sounds good for the Opium Wars, which were, I take it, a pretty fishy business.’
‘Oh, bad, bad pun!’ Elma cackled, then suddenly frowned. ‘Simon, I trust I’m not being a perfect bore, am I? I do so love history and am apt to get a bit carried away. Ha ha, wouldn’t be the first time my audience has turned glassy-eyed by the time the port was passed around.’
I assured her truthfully that I was fascinated. When read history can sometimes seem pretty turgid, but history told by a good raconteur who knows and is passionate about the subject can bring it to life. Elma was just such a raconteur.
‘And not only by the Opium Wars, Elma. I was hoping you’d take me right up to the Japanese invasion. Like most Australians I know a bit about our own prisoners of war, the Burma Railway, Changi prison and all that, but it would be fascinating to hear it from the Chinese point of view.’
‘Do my best,’ she said, rising. ‘As you know, I was involved in a contretemps with the Japanese in Honkers myself, so I wasn’t on the spot. But for some of the Singapore people, particularly the Babas and those suspected of being involved with the Chinese communists, it got pretty ghastly.’
‘Ah, yes, my mum talks about it. While she was in Australia during the war, some of her family were involved here, but managed to flee to a remote plantation in Malaya.’
‘Do you mean they were communists?’
‘I don’t think so. They grew and processed palm oil.’
We’d reached the curry table. ‘Oh, goody,’ Elma exclaimed, ‘fresh supplies!’ She stooped and sniffed at the steaming fish heads. ‘Ah, delicious!’ She turned. ‘Have we had this dish before at one of our lunches, Simon?’
‘Yes, at our very first lunch. And I’ve had it with Mercy B. Lord several times.’
‘Oh, but you must try it here. As I said, most of the curries here are Indian-inspired but this one, perhaps the spiciest and most tantalising of them all, is hybrid Indian, Chinese and Malay, a tribute to the local cuisine, and they do it particularly well here at Raffles.’ She started helping herself. ‘And don’t forget the soft bun, will you, Simon?’
Mercy B. Lord had been the first to show me how to eat the sauce, the real delicacy of fish-head curry. You use a soft bun to wipe the plate clean, as you would a slice of bread to sop up the delicious gravy from the Sunday roast, but in Singapore it would not be considered the height of bad manners. The Chinese are far more tolerant regarding table manners – in fact, if the tablecloth is clean after a meal they take it to mean that it was not enjoyable, while a burp of satisfaction is a compliment to the host. But there was another reason for the use of the soft bun with fish-head curry: the sweetness of the white bread helps to soften the taste of the sharp, spicy sauce.
Seated at our table with our buns at the ready, Elma Kelly tucked into what was our third helping from the curry table. ‘Now, where were we? Oh, yes, your family. I apologise, I didn’t want to pry, Simon. I only asked because a lot of middle-class Straits-Chinese joined the communists after the Japanese invaded Manchuria in the thirties. Japan committed unspeakable atrocities against the Chinese, well before the Pacific War. The massacre of Nanking on the 13th of December 1937 alerted the world, of course.’ When I looked blank she went on, ‘For about six weeks Japanese soldiers pillaged the city and raped and murdered over 300 000 Chinese civilians, mostly women and children. By the way, among other atrocities, they used live Chinese men for bayonet practice in order to harden up young Japanese military recruits.’
I shuddered. ‘The poor Chinese peasants seem to attract disaster from outsiders or from a warlord or the emperor or the government. Ah Koo, my great-great-grandfather, left China for the gold rush after his family and some twenty million other peasants lost their lives in the apocalyptic Taiping Rebellion led by Hong Xiuquan, a Christian convert of all things, who referred to himself as “The heavenly king and younger brother of Jesus”.’
‘Well, well, so you do know something of Chinese history, Simon.’
‘Not really. That’s family stuff, Elma. Only it seems that the poor bloody peasants always get the rough end of the pineapple.’
‘Ah, yes, true, but it’s often because of an attempt, albeit usually a disastrous one, by the Chinese peasant to get out from under the yoke of oppression. In the case of the Taiping Rebellion it was to escape from the persecution of the Qing dynasty. After a hundred or so years of oppression they put their hopes for emancipation in the hands of a raging lunatic.’
‘Poor buggers don’t ever seem to get it right,’ I said.
‘Right or wrong, it also accounts for the appeal of Mao’s communists in the 1930s,’ Elma replied. ‘Not only was his a peasant army, a force with which they could indentify, but it was also one willing to fight against the Japanese invasion. At the time, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government was fighting Mao’s communists in the Chinese civil war and they were reluctant to split their forces and go against the murdering, all-conquering Japanese.’
‘What are you saying? Chiang Kai-shek would rather have had the Japanese conquer China than allow Mao Tse Tung to get the upper hand?’
‘I wouldn’t be the first to accuse him,’ Elma said. ‘In fact, it wasn’t until 1937, when both sides in the civil war agreed to cease hostilities and combine to fight against the Japanese, that the sons of Nippon were effectively opposed.’
‘So eventually the communists and Kuomintang stopped fighting each other to fight a mutual enemy – seems a fairly obvious strategy.’
‘Quite. The Chinese have a very strong sense of motherland, of nation,’ Elma answered. ‘They may have lived for five or six generations in another country but they still think of themselves as quintessentially Chinese with their first loyalties to their ancient motherland.’
While I was beginning to feel the effects of the champagne, Elma didn’t seem in the least affected by the French bubbly. She went on to explain. ‘It soon became clear that Mao’s peasants were far more interested in fighting the Japanese and defending the homeland than in Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army, so it’s hardly surprising that the communist cause appealed to Singapore’s working-class and middle-class Chinese. Their forebears were originally from peasant stock, so it made sense to join the communist party in support of their homeland.’
She paused. ‘Remember, Simon, the Straits-Chinese middle class and working class had no reason whatsoever to love their British colonial masters, or the Baba, who between them had exploited them and then destroyed them with opium addiction over the previous hundred and more years. So being a member of the communist party or a communist trade-union member in Singapore was seen as a badge of honour, a sign of resistance against the oppressive colonial government and their English-apin
g rich Chinese Baba toadies, who were playing cricket and rugby and sending their sons to Oxford and Cambridge.’
I remembered that Chairman Meow’s father, my maternal grandfather, had been sent to Cambridge to study organic chemistry. ‘How did the Brits, the local government, feel about this? I mean, being a communist wasn’t outlawed in Britain or anywhere else before the war, was it?’
‘Ah! The exception was Singapore,’ Elma said. ‘The administration and the wealthy Baba families felt very threatened and cracked down on the movement and trade unionists. They wanted no part of a doctrine that put the common people first. This in turn forced the local communists and affiliated trade unions to go underground.’ Elma raised her head from her plate and chuckled. ‘Of course, the irony was that when the Japanese invaded Singapore, they, the communists, were the only well-organised underground movement. They fled into the jungles of Malaya and harassed the Japanese from there, becoming a highly effective partisan force. Your family may well have been among them in Malaya.’
‘I’d love to think so, Elma, but it doesn’t sound like my family. My mum’s dad went to Cambridge. I think they were more concerned with saving their skins when the Japanese started murdering the wealthy Straits-Chinese.’
‘Very perspicacious of them. The Japanese retribution on the local Chinese was a very nasty business, I can tell you.’
‘Elma, can we go back a moment?’ I asked. ‘Singapore was thought by the Allies to be an impregnable fortress. Did the locals feel the same way?’
‘Unquestionably yes. It was perhaps the one thing for which they were grateful to the British. They’d been nurtured from the cradle to believe Britain controlled the seven seas and Singapore was a veritable fortress against aggression from outside. After all, it was one of the original reasons for its founding. They believed they were safe and made almost no preparation for possible conquest by the Japanese. Singapore island was the citadel, so why, they asked themselves, leave it?’
‘Is that why so many of the Baba were caught with their pants down and stayed put and didn’t escape or go bush as my family did?’
‘Well, of course, I wasn’t here when the Japanese invaded, being, as I said previously, in a spot of bother of my own in Hong Kong, but I think I can probably answer you. I’ve spoken to a number of people who were here at the time and they all make the same point. They may have disliked the British, but to a man and woman they believed the propaganda about Fortress Singapore. In a word they felt safe, protected by British naval guns and 200 000 British and Commonwealth troops, many of which were Australian, incidentally. They believed the Brits when they said the Japanese couldn’t possibly come through a neutral Thailand and march down the Malay Peninsula through the impenetrable jungle. They even believed that Japanese pilots couldn’t fly at night because the entire Japanese population suffered poor night vision!’
I grinned. ‘They were not alone in that – we believed the same propaganda crap in Australia.’
I knew what had happened to our forces. In the briefest terms, the British expected the attempted Japanese invasion of Singapore to arrive by sea. Although the big guns could be turned and pointed inland towards Johor on the Malayan mainland, they were designed to fire at an approaching Japanese fleet and were only supplied with armour-piercing ammunition. This meant that they were largely useless against land targets. The massive shells, weighing a ton each, tended to bury themselves in the soft earth without exploding when they hit their targets.
Despite being told repeatedly that this wasn’t possible, Singapore woke one day to find the Japanese had arrived via the back door. They’d marched and bicycled down the Malayan peninsula through the impenetrable jungle, capturing Malaya on the way, to arrive finally at the Johor Strait, the narrow stretch of water separating Singapore from the Malayan mainland. They crossed onto Singapore island to face largely ineffective resistance. Percival, the British general in charge, had convinced himself that they would choose some less obvious place to come ashore.
Another calamitous miscalculation by the British was that almost the entire water supply for the ‘impregnable fortress’ was carried by a pipeline running along the Johor causeway. All the Japanese had to do was turn off the tap. But the British saved them the trouble by blowing up the causeway, thus robbing the island of its main water supply. Percival does not go down in the annals of military history as a major thinker and tactician.
The Straits-Chinese population watched as the ‘racially superior’ and ‘invincible’ British forces, out-fought and out-thought by the Japanese, surrendered after a week. I hoped Elma Kelly would be able to give me some insight into local feelings round this time.
We’d completed the fish-head curry and polished our plates with the soft buns. Now, a little lightheaded from the champagne, I confessed myself full to bursting.
‘Oh, but you must have a tiny space for dessert. The gulab jamuns are a house speciality,’ Elma insisted.
One again, compliments of Mercy B. Lord, I knew about these wickedly sweet balls of what amounted, as far as I was concerned, to eating large balls of sticky goo. ‘No, really, thank you, I simply couldn’t,’ I protested. After the sharp, almost stingingly hot fish-head sauce, the idea of the sticky sweetmeat was revolting. Elma Kelly was proving she had a stomach of cast iron. ‘A cup of tea will do me very nicely,’ I said.
‘Well, I have to say you’re a big disappointment, Simon Koo! Not only in your lamentable knowledge of Asian history, but also in your appreciation of Indian delicacies.’ She laughed, her right eyebrow raised in mock disapproval. Then she indicated the direction of the dessert table with a nod of her head. ‘Would you mind terribly?’
‘No, of course not, but I’m chockas.’
‘A tick? Yet another appalling idiom, I take it?’ she quipped, rising to fetch her dessert.
Returning shortly afterwards, she hoed into the plate of sweetmeat as if she hadn’t eaten in days. Remarkable.
I ordered tea for both of us.
‘I’ll have chai masala,’ Elma said.
‘English, black for me,’ I instructed.
‘Now, yes, the locals, you wanted to know their reaction to the capitulation. I recall Jenny Choo, my media manager in our agency here, telling me of the day the Allies surrendered; how as a twelve-year-old with her mother she joined the people lining the streets at the command of the Japanese and watched in dismay as the numerically superior British Empire Forces were marched silently into shame-faced captivity. I recall her exact words: “Elma, the Japanese soldiers were in torn and ragged uniforms and they wore dirty rubber-soled canvas shoes. I remember the shoes in particular. They were designed with a weirdly separate space for the big toe that allowed it to move independently. We stood silent, not daring to even whisper, and all you could hear was the soft squelch of enemy rubber on the hot tarmac as they marched by, and then, in the distance, coming ever closer, the crunch of polished hobnailed boots worn by the men who were now prisoners, all in immaculate uniforms, brasses polished. None of them would look at us as they passed.” ’
‘That’s a pretty graphic description,’ I volunteered.
Elma nodded. ‘Indeed. But one thing became clear immediately. In one fell swoop the myth of white racial superiority was shattered and the unquestioned European domination of India and South-East Asia was over. The Japanese were the first so-called yellow race to call the white man’s bluff. This lesson was not lost on the Chinese or the Straits-Chinese, even though the Japanese were their mortal enemies. Nor was the irony that the outlawed local communists were the only group that had any chance of mounting an effective resistance campaign against the Japanese.’
‘And then, I’m told, all hell broke loose for many of the locals. I know many of them were beheaded, because the Australians who came back after the war told of going to work in prisoner-of-war gangs and seeing hundred of Chinese heads impaled on sharpened poles lining the streets. As you said, the Japanese had a terrible contempt for the Chi
nese.’
‘Yes, of course, and although raping women and young girls was common among the enemy troops, it was not necessarily condoned by their superior officers. Almost any conquest throughout history results in spontaneous rape and pillage. In fact, the Japanese massacre of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya was carefully planned before the occupation. They knew from their spies exactly who they needed to get rid of and the task was given to Lieutenant Colonel Masayuki Oishi of the dreaded kempeitai, the Japanese secret police. The Japanese are nothing if not thorough. The bloodbath that followed, which was mostly by public beheading, included the Baba; anyone thought to have supported the war against Japan in China; members of the Overseas Chinese Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army; all Hainanese – which would have meant all your Li relations, Simon – because they were automatically considered to be communists; men with tattoos, who were considered to be Triads; JPs and former Chinese civil servants, because they were seen to be British sympathisers; anyone, not only Chinese, who possessed a weapon; and several other groups I can’t at the moment recall.’ She took a deep breath and then sighed. ‘Too much champagne.’ Then she turned and directed the hovering waiter to pour more tea.
In fact her memory was quite remarkable. ‘That’s quite a list,’ I said. ‘The streets must have been running with blood. How many local Chinese perished? Does anyone know?’
‘No, not precisely. Lee Kuan Yew once claimed it was 100 000, and while he’s not a man to be contradicted, it’s generally accepted to be around half that number. You hear about those who died in the death camps, or on the Burma Railway, but you rarely hear about the Straits-Chinese who lost their lives in the Japanese conquest of Singapore.’
I sighed. ‘Yeah, I guess we conveniently forget the statistics that don’t concern us. Another case of selective amnesia.’
Elma Kelly glanced down at her watch. ‘Good lord! It’s three o’clock. Bloody hell! I’ve got to be back at the agency for a meeting in fifteen minutes. Bill Farnsworth, Boss Long Socks, is flying in from Australia – never easy, will be sure to ask why we failed to win the Tourist Board account and then go through the budget. Have to be on my toes, what. Waiter!’ she boomed. ‘Get the Sikh chappie at the front to call me a taxi at once!’ She stooped to pick up her handbag.
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