When a Flower Dies

by Josephine Chia

  People handed out platitudes kindly, but the well-meaning words grated, and sounded shallow. How could they know how much George meant to her?

  He was my North, my South, my East and West,

  My working week and my Sunday rest,

  My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

  I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

  The words of the Yorkshire poet, WH Auden, lashed at Pansy in huge waves, reminding her of the enormity of her loss. She felt as if she was a boat about to sink. More than once, she too had wished she could stop all the clocks. Without George in her life, everything seemed deflated; the world seemed to be drained of colour. No amount of jamu could heal the wound left by his demise.

  Now she’s away from all that was familiar. She has to try to live life again. A new start in a new country, almost. The day yawns ahead like a huge chasm. Pansy wonders how she is going to fill it on her own. All her daily routines—attending to her clients, house and garden, meeting with her friends, and her regular walks—have been snatched away by her move to a different country. Moving to a new neighbourhood is challenging enough, but moving to another country is a huge upheaval, even if it is back to your own.

  She feels at a loss and is still in a state of inertia, with no enthusiasm to start something new. She could offer to go and cook and clean for Anthony and Emily—but they have a full-time helper. She could go and visit her grandchildren, but they are busy with their jobs, or course work at university. It wouldn’t be convenient for her to simply drop in. There is no one whom she knew sixty years ago that she could call. She wonders how old Hassim is now, the entrepreneurial boy who had devised games on market days for the town children, or whether Khatijah is still alive. Those were the days when the village shared one public telephone; there were no mobile phones, nor was there any Internet. It was difficult to keep in contact once the villagers were dispersed. Especially when the majority of the villagers were uneducated and could not write letters.

  What can she do that will be meaningful? Lying there in the strange bed, Pansy looks out listlessly through the open window, hoping to see sky and a bird, some sign of wild life that would connect her to nature. But instead, she sees concrete tower blocks; instead of hearing the waves ebb and flow across the shingled beach with a shushing sound, she hears the whine of traffic, rubber tyres scratching on asphalt. The walls of the room are so close to her that her chest constricts and she feels as if she has been incarcerated in a prison. Her studio apartment is compact, about the size of her Bracklesham conservatory, less than five hundred square feet. It’s one of those ‘shoe-box’ apartments, marketed as if this was a positive moniker or selling point. From her bed, the living area and pantry with the stove and microwave are visible, encroaching into night-time space. It is akin to sleeping in a kitchen!

  “I have to get out,” she decides. “I must see the open sky and sea, hear the waves.” Pansy dresses herself, wondering which fabric would be more comfortable in the humidity she has to get used to again. Her arthritic fingers fumble with the buttons. She puts on calf-length capri pants. It took her a while to adjust to calling trousers “pants” as they do here, like in the USA, when in England “pants” refers to one’s underwear. To think that when she was a teenager, she had to overcome staid rules in order that she might wear slacks! Her father, Hock Chye, would not have approved. He would have said, “Tak seronoh sekali!” Pansy smiles at the recollection. Her father had been strict. What would he have made of George appearing in their village to ask her out? Would he have castigated the teenage George or be reminded of his young self who had run away with someone’s potential bride?

  One of the saddest things about being old, Pansy thinks, is that so many people you know are ill or dead.

  Pansy used to take pride in what she wore but these days it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Who would notice or care? There’s no one to pay her compliments anymore.

  “Darling, that dress looks lovely on you,” George might have said. “That colour is perfect! Oh, I like the way you’ve done your hair…”

  Small things. But they were treasures. It meant he bothered to notice. It meant she was somebody to be noticed, somebody to someone. His comments had made her feel feminine, youthful, not old as she was beginning to be. It’s as if George had held the elixir of her youthfulness and in his going, he had taken it with him. When you’ve been a part of someone for so long, knitted to each other in so many ways, it’s hard to regain that sense of being on your own again.

  Pansy tries to uplift her mood by singing the opening bars of ‘So Nice’:

  Someone to hold me tight

  That would be very nice

  Someone to love me right

  That would be very nice… so nice

  She grabs a handful of shelled groundnuts to stop her blood sugar from plummeting, knowing that she needn’t worry about eating properly as she’ll most certainly run into a food centre with a myriad of food stalls selling Chinese, Malay, Indian and Western food every few hundred yards, in this country where eating out is a national pastime. Has food been made easily available to satisfy the people’s basic hunger, so they will be contented? A type of soma perhaps? She is very likely to come across a food centre that’s open for breakfast through to late supper, or even one that is open twenty-four hours. Pansy pauses a few seconds as if waiting to hear the cry of the itinerant hawker calling out his wares as they did in the old days, the noodle seller clacking his bamboo clappers and calling out, kway teow mee! Or another, shouting, satay-satay! Or kachang puteh! But there is no such need now: the hawkers are housed in sanitised food centres with running water and electricity where they wait for customers to call on them.

  Indeed, Anthony had obeyed his father’s last wish at least partially, and had bought Pansy an apartment, although it is a little distance from his own home near Newton Circus, which is accessible to District 10, a much sought-after neighbourhood. Like the majority of kiasu Singaporean parents, afraid to lose out, he and Emily had settled themselves in a district where the top schools were, so that their three daughters had a better chance of getting into the school of their choice according to the school admission system. In this country, people do not move house just to get better views but to be nearer schools, work or aged parents. Anthony had used up most of George’s savings and money from the sale of the house in Bracklesham Bay to move his family to a more posh apartment, so he had little left over to buy his mother one that was in a similar class to his. But he had made sure she was near a wet market, food centre, facilities, bus-stop and mass rapid transit or MRT station, the kind of accoutrements that a housing agent will include in his spiel to raise the value of a property.

  “You got everything here an old person like you could need,” Emily had stated firmly, in a tone that did not brook a challenge.

  “Honey…” Anthony said weakly, then faltered.

  Goldie came for a visit, and when she saw the tight space of the apartment for the first time, her face fell. “Oh, grandma, this must be so terrible for you after your beautiful home in Bracklesham. You are deprived of your wonderful view!”

  Her words so succinctly expressed her feelings that they nearly made Pansy weep. But she put on a brave front and said, “But I’m lucky to be here, to be near you all. No house or scenery can take the place of family.”

  “When I get time off, grandma, I will take you on holiday to Batam. We can rent a bungalow right by the sea.”

  But Goldie, like many people here work very long hours and the trip never materialises. At least she visits, not like the other two.

  Pansy’s condo is located in Aljunied, once a thriving Malay kampong community and agricultural area in eastern Singapore, named in 1926 after Yemeni businessman and philanthropist, Syed Sharif Omar bin Ali Al Junied. Like many of the traditional villages and farms which were wiped out by urban development in the 60s and early 70s, Aljunied is now a government Housing & Development Board (HDB) estat
e of subsidised housing and industrial buildings.

  The area is adjacent to Geylang, another former kampong, now famous for its Minangkabau-design wet market, eateries and durian stalls. The durian is a soft custardy fruit with a hard casing of thorns or duri in Malay. Called ‘King of Malayan fruits’ for its exquisite taste and cost, its smell is very distinctive, fragrant to locals but disgusting to the uninitiated, especially Western noses. Since the smell tends to linger, the fruit is banned in air-conditioned places and on public transport. So here in Geylang, stallholders set up makeshift tables and chairs for patrons to sit down to eat and enjoy their fruit instead of having to cart it home. But in some of the less salubrious parts, the area has been usurped by girls from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and neighbouring Southeast Asian countries. Amongst the narrow lanes, which retain their Malay designation, lorong, the girls tout for their clients in tight-fitting dresses and pelmet-skirts. The establishments they work in, with red oversized address numbers and lanterns, vie for space with Buddhist temples, from nearly every branch of Buddhism: Chinese, Thai, Tibetan, Japanese, Sri Lankan, Mahayana and Theravada. The two could not be more incongruous. Perhaps the temples were set up as refuges for the labouring girls or the men who made use of their services to cleanse their guilt! The most sought-after girls are those who are fair in complexion, as they are considered the epitome of beauty by local men. They are mostly PRC girls who make a point of keeping out of the sun or carry umbrellas when they have to face its intensity. Others flaunt their complexions and their charms in karaoke bars, table-top dancing joints, and so-called “massage parlours”, like those at Orchard Towers, to entrap and wed ang mohs for a ticket to luxury, or local uncles so that they can get Singaporean Permanent Residency or PR status. If they can’t find one to buy them an apartment in a private condo, at least they can capture one who owns an HDB flat in a public housing estate.

  The trouble with Singaporean women now is that they’re so arrogant and don’t know how to please a man anymore, local men complain in the national newspaper’s forum, explaining why so many Singaporean men are marrying non-Singaporean girls.

  So far, no Singaporean woman has come forward to suggest why many Singaporean girls are not marrying Singaporean men, or are not marrying at all. The latter is a headache for the government who is fighting a battle with falling birth rates, and worse, a falling birth rate of babies from home-grown Singaporeans. Imported Singaporeans are fast out-growing those who are born and bred here; pink identity cards are given to the very rich and talented and those who can bring fame to Singapore with prizes and Olympic medals.

  But sex workers, bargirls and domestic workers are only here on a working pass with no rights to citizenship. You see the ‘China girls’ on the buses and MRT. They have debts to pay. Like them are the domestic workers from impoverished villages in China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Sri Lanka. Some have left old parents, siblings or children behind. Some have been yanked out by unscrupulous recruiting agents. The girls will do everything to not return to poverty and deprivation. Most of them are young and slim, so they wear dresses that look as if they’ve been painted on, teetering on high heels or platform shoes, their faces beautifully made-up, talking to the men they’re with in dolly-girl voices. They smile, tease, cajole and stroke the man’s ego, an art that many modern young women here, especially those in high-powered careers, have not cared to learn.

  Which middle-aged man can resist such nubile charm and supple flesh when his career and other bits of his anatomy might be flagging? Care-worn and elderly men, who pair themselves with such young eye-candy, must have an infallible capacity for deception to believe that their lives with these young women can be secured by their status and fat wallets.

  Pansy passes the girls standing at the corners in stark daylight and smiles at them, wanting them to know that she is not judging them, that if she were in their circumstances, who knows what she would have been forced to do. They are somebody’s sister, daughter, grandchild or maybe even somebody’s mother or wife. They all have someone they miss, and are not without feelings or shame. Pansy’s heart goes out to them. She gives them the gift of her smile.

  “Aunty, zao an,” they greet her in Mandarin.

  “Zao an. Zao an. Good morning,” she returns their greeting in mangled tones, never having to learn the language before.

  In her younger days, the majority of people in Singapore spoke Malay and Chinese dialects such as Teochew, Hokkien, or Cantonese. Besides Malay, Hokkien was almost the lingua franca of the majority in the marketplace. Even Malays and Indians spoke Hokkien. The villages in coastal Bedok where Pansy was brought up had a strong Teochew community, besides the Malay folk. Teochew was the language closest to Hokkien. Pansy was told recently that if she went to Hougang, she would still hear Teochew spoken there, Hokkien in Pulau Ubin, and a smattering of both in Boat Quay, which used to be the combat ground of both clans, fighting for supremacy to own godowns and warehouses at the mouth of the Singapore River. Each dialect brought its own unique culture, customs and type of food from the Southern region of China where it had come from. For instance, Hokkien Mee and Teochew Mee are different, though they are made with the same basic ingredient—mee, i.e. noodles. The first is fried with seafood in a thick sauce, the second is cooked in soup with fish balls or served dry in a hot chilli sauce.

  “Good morning,” Pansy greets the astonished taxi driver when he winds down his window to speak to her. “Have you eaten?”

  “Eat already, eat already,” he replies, not used to being greeted so politely.

  “Please take me to the seaside, just somewhere where I can sit and watch the waves…”

  “Where would you like to go? Which part?”

  “On the coast, anywhere…”

  “We’re already in the East so better for me to take you to the East Coast near the Lagoon Hawker Centre, so if you want to come back, it’s easier to take a taxi. There’s a Bougainvillea Garden there…”

  Pansy is delighted that the middle-aged Chinese taxi driver switched to Teochew.

  “Oh yes, please. I love flowers,” she says in their dialect as she gets into the taxi. “You know, since my return from England, this is the first time I am hearing someone speak Teochew. Not many people speak the language these days.”

  “Ah yes, I thought you’ve been abroad. The way you pronounce your English is very masterful, not the same as people here. And no fake accent. I can’t stand it when youngsters use American slang.” He continues, “The government says and the government does. Got no choice, right? Must speak Mandarin, they say. It will unify the Chinese. It’s like most of the campaigns, sound good but have no heart! Mandarin is a language for academics and bureaucrats. Our musical language is gone forever…”

  “I think it’s good that people of Chinese origin should learn some Mandarin,” Pansy says. “But they shouldn’t have stopped us from speaking our dialects…”

  “Correct! Why destroy our culture? Our dialect comes together with our culture. What culture does Mandarin have?”

  “Do you remember the outdoor Chinese wayang, and the Teochew opera…?”

  “Ya lah! I loved the getai shows! But from the 80s, all gone. Today, many young people don’t know any dialect or their own customs or code of behaviour! The government was not so far-sighted. It’s like ‘Stop at Two’ campaign. So what happened? Our population is now zero growth. And today they are begging young people to have children! They even recruit foreigners to be citizens if they provide the country with children, or are good at sports! Then we had that ‘Speak Mandarin’ campaign. They forced all the Chinese kids to learn Mandarin and guess what? Today, some of those youngsters can’t even communicate with their grandparents! My old mother does not speak any English and Mandarin, so my children can’t talk to her. How ridiculous is that? Without your own dialect group, your own clan, who are you?”

  Once a taxi driver starts, he never stops, bursting to spe
ak his mind.

  “Yes, that’s really sad. Same for me. I’m Teochew Baba. My grandchildren can neither speak Teochew nor Malay nor my Peranakan patois. And as I’ve been away, I don’t speak Mandarin. So we have to communicate in English! Not that I see much of them…”

  “What a waste! What a waste!” the taxi driver says. “All that heritage gone! If our children and grandchildren do not know our traditions, our culture has died. Without culture, without identity, how can we have national identity? What does it mean to be Singaporean? You think all these foreigners they give the citizenship to will really treat this place as home? Fat chance! Once they have made enough money and got what they want they run back to their own country. Most of them profit from selling their HDB!

  “Luckily the government suddenly woke up five years ago and set up a museum for your Peranakan culture. The Peranakan culture is so unique to Southeast Asia, shame to lose it. Luckily your people are good at maintaining your culture—you wear your traditional outfits, you do musicals and stage shows in your language, you open restaurants serving your cuisine. You practise your customs and keep them alive.

  “Aiyah! Things are definitely not the same as they were. Now young people all so Westernised. They’ve become ‘yellow bananas’! Yellow outside but white inside. These days, Chinese youngsters are the worst. At least the Malays, Peranakans, and Indians wear their baju kurong, sarong kebaya, salwar kameez and saris. Cheong sams appear only at Chinese New Year. Worse still, they like wearing black, like Westerners. Even at weddings and Chinese New Year. Our parents would have whipped us if we wore even a trace of black for auspicious days. So selfish! Black brings bad luck to the wedding couple and the occasion! It appears that the fairer their skin is, the more they love to wear black, as if black enhances their milky whiteness! Young people say that we old folk are superstitious and old- fashioned. But even if they speak Mandarin, they are without Chinese culture! No manners.