You Might Want to Marry My Husband

by Yap Swi Neo

  There were two types of fillings: tiny cubes of taukwa or tofu fried with finely chopped leeks and preserved radish, or minced pork fried with leeks and preserved radish. The pieces of choy-pau-pan were then steamed for about half an hour and eaten hot with chilli sauce and sweet black sauce. These dumplings were perfect teatime snacks. I could eat twenty of them at one sitting. When I was ready to go home, Aunties would make them and pack them in ice-cream boxes for my brother and me. Again, should they know of anyone going to Singapore, they did the same.

  The house was awake. My niece opened the door. Time to move on. I drove on to the small Catholic cemetery. Hearing the haunting horn from that railway track, I paused where my Mummy, Ah Kong, Ah Por, Nee-Ee, Sum-Ee were together in life, together with Jesus. Mummy you left us too soon. We did not know the why, we only knew only the how. The only one who knew would not say. There was no closure for my brother and me. Why did I not bring flowers? Light candles? True love didn’t need them.

  It was hot and sunny, yet I felt a cold chill. Amidst the tranquillity of the tombstones I cried. I cried for my Mummy, my Ah Kong, my Ah Por, my Nee-Ee, my Sum-Ee, my most beloved brother Pin Kor and perhaps also for myself.

  * * *

  A district in south Malaysia. ↵

  Boss. ↵

  Grandfather – mother’s father; Ah Por –mother’s mother. ↵

  Local guava. There are many varieties, jambu batu is the seedy variety. ↵

  Malay female ghost. The movie is Return of the Pontianak. ↵

  Firm beancurd cakes. ↵

  Dried salted radish. ↵

  Literally ‘red hair’, a local term for Caucasians. ↵

  The Men In My Life

  Before the days of supermarkets, online shopping, and convenient transport systems of city trains and air-conditioned buses, hawking of foods and goods were the norm. Hawkers travelled on their tricycles, visiting neighbourhoods monthly and calling out their presence. We knew where they stationed themselves and flocked to see what they had to offer. This is the story of the three most looked-forward-to men in my life.

  The Mee Tok Tok Man

  The Mee[1] Tok Tok man was a showman. The chef enticed us with his tok tok invitation. He had a piece of cane bamboo about eight centimetres long split in half. He beat the two pieces against each other to create the tok tok melody. It was a musical instrument in itself, depending on the length, thickness, speed and tempo.

  We ogled at his offerings. On his pushcart countertop he had a charcoal fire and a small wok, and on the sides plastic double-decker shelves where he displayed his temptations. There were yellow noodles, white flat rice noodles and white rice fine noodles. In a plastic container he had his prepared taugeh[2], chai sin[3] and eggs; in another container he kept the sliced fish cakes and fish balls; in another, ice cubes which itself held a container of cockles; and yet another container of chopped garlic, and of course the must-have pork lard and pork crackers.

  The show opened. He tied a Good Morning white towel[4] round his neck to absorb his perspiration. He scooped a tablespoon of the fat, bold and evil, but deliciously guilty, greasy pork lard and loads of cockles into the noodles; the faint yellow flames of the charcoal fire mirrored his equally greasy face and neck. No fried noodles is worth its name without these greasy, tempting lard crackers.

  He clanked his metal spatula on his metal wok, belting out in rhythm, ‘Come eat, mee soup got, fry also can. Want egg forty cents, no egg thirty cents. Bring own egg also can. Ta pau also can.[5] Come!’

  At the bottom of his portable kitchen he kept small pieces of charcoal. Beside it he had his cooking oils, several varieties of sauces and chilli paste. His serving plate was the daun upih. This is the soft, thin and broad frond sheath of several species of palm tree. The sheath was washed and dried. The durable, pliable, leak-proof reusable sheath was then folded into a boat, the noodles scooped into it and served with a bow. Like a Master Chef, he declared ‘I never serve food without tasting it first.’ With a nibble of a ribbon of noodle, it passed the ‘very good’ test. The noodles were best eaten with friends and neighbours around our chef. At times we shared one another’s noodles. As a wandering hawker he did not have utensils. Because he was in the premises of his clients, we brought our own utensils and often our own crockery. We were already a ‘Reuse, Reduce, Recycle’ community back then.

  Like all wandering vendors, his charm was his communication and entertaining skills. ‘Kuehtau cham-cham mee, best! You see, mix-mix white and yellow, so nice colour! You want egg, plus 10 cents, all together 40 cents. No egg 30 cents. Bring own egg, free! Also chilli free!’ as he clinked-clanked his metal spatula against his wok with a whisk of his wrist. He cleaned his wok with a short broom brush that was all black and greasy and burnt in parts. ‘Ah Chek[6], you never wash your wok? Only brush, not clean.’

  ‘Where not clean? Who say! This special secret ingredient, this, the flavour of the noodles. Cannot tell, secret.’ I was not quite sure of the secret though. The unmistakable white multi-purpose Good Morning towel round his neck, used to wipe his face, his neck, his hands, and occasionally to cough into, was never removed.

  Sometimes he sang his favourite Hokkien[7] songs, complete with gestures, while frying. ‘So sad. The Prince is crying because his girlfriend not princess, but poor girl. King and Queen say cannot marry girl, so girl jump into river. Then she become ghost because no one bury her properly. The girl ghost disturb King and Queen, until King say Prince can marry girl. So girl ghost become girl again. Then ghost parents take her away, say ghost girl can only marry ghost man. So Prince very sad. Ghost girl also very sad. Now I so sad.’ He sobbed. His next Hokkien song for us would be six to eight weeks later.

  The Macam Macam Man

  The macam macam[8] ah chek was a travelling hardware-cum-domestic needs salesman who came round every two to three months. He parked himself at a heavy traffic spot, near the little drinks and snacks outlet. He had macam macam, all sorts of everything. He rode his bicycle sandwiched between two large carriages, one in the front of the bicycle and another behind the bicycle. Each carriage had four wheels to support the weight of the merchandise. On the outer sides of the carriage he hung his mops, brooms and all other hangables. He honked his little honk, a small, firm rubber like balloon attached to a funnel. Pressing on the balloon created a honk. With a honk and repeated announcements of his new products, he presented himself. He and his carriage were a riot of giddy rainbow colours.

  He cycled effortlessly despite the heavy load. The front carriage contained hardware. This included needlework items, lubricating oils, screwdrivers, chair leg caps and tens of other smaller items. He reasoned that sharp or other dangerous items like hammers, knives and scissors were safer to have within sight, lest an unsavoury character spoiling for a fight snatched them. Likewise, small items such as ribbons and raffia rolls could be easily stolen. In the rear carriage he stacked his bigger items: wash basins of all shapes and sizes, buckets, rubber hoses, stools, aluminium utensils – such as plates, bowls, woks, pots, pans and watering cans, all difficult to be stolen unnoticed. He was a sort of today’s online retail catalogue. His mission statement, if he had one, would probably read YOU WANT IT – I HAVE IT.

  Honk, honk, ‘Today got new brooms, just come. Very nice, big, small. Wash floor, sweep floor, garden. See your longkang so dirty. Mosquitoes live inside drains, you get malaria, can die. This broom for clean longkang. Cheap, cheap only, come see, no buy never mind.’

  ‘Ah Chek, I want zip, long one, you have?’

  ‘Sure got, why don’t have? What colour? How long?’

  ‘I want five bamboo poles, to dry clothes.’

  ‘One pole, sixty cents, six, three dollars sixty cents. Kamsia, thank you.’

  ‘Blanco, one bottle.’

  ‘Yes, I know. My son school shoes by Friday so dirty. Wash and Blanco clean already.’

  ‘Small plastic chairs, one red and one blue.’

  ‘Skipping rope, and o
ne bag rubber bands, mix colours.’ So the purchases went on, bargaining to ridiculous prices, more of a tease, each buyer eyeing what the other bought.

  ‘My friend bought rubber slippers. You got?’

  ‘Ah, Japanese slippers very good to wear. So comfortable. My one good quality, from Japan. Cheap. You very good customer, so I give discount. You tell all your friends come buy. Kamsia. Thank you.’

  ‘Sure or not from Japan. One dollar sixty cents? So expensive!’

  Occasionally, there were complaints. A housewife accused him of cheating her into buying a laundry washboard of such cheap quality that it broke when she dropped it. He retorted that she refused to buy the better quality wood board, not his fault, right? He was a walking computer, being able to recall what each customer bought, when and at what price just by deeply eyeing the purchaser. No, you couldn’t pull a fast one on him.

  Primary school children often sought marbles. He had bags of them, fifty in each bag. ‘Ah Chek, fifty too many I want only twenty. Not enough money.’

  ‘You can share with your friend, half-half. Cheaper. You pay fifty cents, your friend pay fifty cents.’

  ‘My friend got already.’

  ‘OK, I teach you business. You buy fifty marbles, one dollar, so one marble only two cents. Then you sell your friend one marble five cents. You sell ten, you get fifty cent, profit already. Good, right?’ Small-time schoolkids’ businesses sprouted, with rubber bands, sheets of stickers, girly clips.

  Another business Ah Chek taught the kids, ‘Play tikam-tikam.’[9]

  ‘How to play?’

  The lesson. ‘Take twenty pieces of paper this big (showing the palm of his hand). On fifteen paper don’t write anything, leave kosong, nothing. On one write ‘1 marble’, second write ‘ten

  cents’, another write ‘two rubber bands’, another write ‘one pencil’, and one write ‘one more try’. Then fold paper into four, cannot see inside. You sell tikam-tikam five cents. Sure make money.’

  ‘What if they complained I cheat them?’

  ‘They cannot complain. Tikam-tikam means, play with chance. Sometimes win, sometimes lose.’ The first introduction to gambling. Was that entrepreneurial or good business sense, or teaching young children scamming and exploitation of greed?

  Nonetheless, he was a welcome ah chek, as we didn’t have to go to town for our purchases.

  Mr Postman

  The postman was the only man in my life who wore a uniform. The most anticipated person when you have a penpal. He slotted letters into the red letter box that was nailed in the corner of the front wall of our house. We never knew his arrival as he did not cling-cling or honk his bicycle bell or, in later years, his motorbike horn. He bound his allocation of letters with rubber bands according to the street and in sequence of house numbers.

  In the local papers when I was a young teenager, there were two penpal columns –Malaysian penpals and foreign penpals. My first penpal was an Indian girl from Taiping. She was two years my senior. My Sisters-teachers in the convent emphasised a thousand times, boys do bad things to girls, so of course penpals had to be girls. It was a four-year penpal relationship. She wrote about the old tin-mining town. She loved the gardens. She studied in the convent like I did. Yes, she had Sisters-teachers. Once I told her that my Sisters-teachers told us that ‘boys do bad things to girls’. She replied, ‘I have two brothers and they had never done ‘bad things to me’. Sisters have no boyfriends, so they also don’t want us to have boyfriends.’ Made sense, girlie secret chatter. She, like all convent schoolgirls throughout Malaysia at the time had fifteen minutes of catechism lessons every morning, but her parents did not wish her to attend the Friday twelve o’clock Mass in the convent chapel. She stayed in the library till the end of the school day.

  She told me about the tin-mining industry and the rich towkays. ‘Our zoo has the endangered Malayan tiger, the only one in Malaysia.’ I wanted to be sure, I went to Malacca Zoo. She was right, no Malayan tiger there.

  She celebrated the sultan’s birthday. She was happy, it was a public holiday. Malacca did not have a sultan, we had a governor. We both celebrated the birthday of the Queen of England, a queen so far away, one whom we would never ever meet in person. But she was so beautiful. I told her I wanted to work in the prime minister’s office and get to travel round the world and have tea with the queen in Buckingham Palace. She said she wanted the same too. We described to each other the clothes we would wear, what we would talk about. She would tell the queen about her favourite dosai[10], I would tell her about sambal petai[11]. We were allowed to dream, weren’t we?

  When she enrolled at Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, she had no time to ‘penpal’. We had not met, not even a photo exchanged.

  My second penpal was a boy from Kenya. I did not know the gender of people’s names as there was no Google search then. I had to buy aerogram air letters. I can’t remember how much they cost, probably forty cents. It was a thin lightweight piece of foldable and glued light blue paper for writing a letter to foreign countries. The letter and envelope are one and the same. On one half of the page was a printed stamp in the top right-hand corner. It was the address page. I wrote letters on the other side of the page, folded it into two and continued on the back second half. The small ears along the top and side of the letter were pressed to seal the letter. Mash a little cooked rice with just a touch of water and you get glue.

  I told my classmates about my ‘Kenyan boyfriend’, and we acknowledged he was too far away to do bad things to me. In his first letter he asked whether I was a girl or a boy; he could not tell from my name, so we were on the same page where names were concerned. He lived near a national park and could see Mount Kilimanjaro near the Kenyan side of the border. That rushed us to religiously study the map of Kenya to look for national parks and Mount Kilimanjaro in Philip’s World Atlas.[12] But the atlas only displayed a simple map of African political states, natural landscapes and vegetation of mountains and rivers and major cities. However, look up Britain, and you got large detailed maps of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland with their cities and rivers all marked.

  My penpal described the animals, and the safaris, his close encounters with elephants. He had bathed in the river with little baby crocs. He told of his rock climbing and hiking adventures, eventually to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I told him I climbed St Paul’s Hill in twenty minutes. He wanted to be a game keeper like his father. ‘Save the Elephants’. I wanted to have tea with the queen in Buckingham Palace. He watched a mother giraffe birthing. I collected eggs from chickens in the coop. His favourite food was spiced rice pilaff and goat stew, mine was nasi lemak[13] and chicken steamed in Chinese wine. He pounded cassava and corn, I pounded sambal belacan.

  His adventures were shared with my classmates; we were envious, we wanted to be Kenyans too. I replied to his letters immediately when I received his. He sent me postcards of Mount Kilimanjaro, rhinos, lions. I sent him postcards of St Paul’s Hill, the red Studhuys[14] and satay, meat barbequed over hot embers. As with my Taiping penpal there were no photos sent, only postcards and words to believe in, to savour, to imagine and romanticise and fall in love with.

  Many relationships come to a natural end. So did mine with my Kenyan boyfriend. I guess I had nothing of interest to add to his knowledge about my part of my world, so far away. There was nothing he was familiar with: his mother hippos in the lake, lions hunting for food, the snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro seen hundreds of miles away. The wait for the postman for his letter was futile after about a year.

  The postman was much looked forward to at Christmas and Lunar New Year; how many cards would we receive and from whom? Bills also came in the post, perhaps not so welcome. Unlike all the other men in my life, I still have the postman. I cherish him.

  I remember all the men in my life with nostalgia from the days when I was young. Development and progress have and must replace old-school professions. And I accept that.

  * * *

&nbs
p; Noodles. ↵

  Beansprouts. ↵

  Mustard leaves. ↵

  A white face towel with the words Good Morning printed in red on it. It is a favourite towel among vendors. ↵

  Takeaway. ↵

  Hokkien for ‘uncle’, and a form of address. ↵

  A Chinese dialect. ↵

  Everything, all sorts (pronounced macham macham). ↵

  Chance. Here it means a game of chance. ↵

  An Indian crepe, a favourite breakfast. ↵

  Particularly smelly local beans cooked in spicy sauce. ↵

  In secondary school we had Geography lessons. To get out from ‘under the coconut shell to learn about the world’, our book list included Philip’s World Atlas. There was no ‘Thailand’ but ‘Siam’, no ‘Ethiopia’ but ‘Abyssinia’ ‘Ceylon’ not Sri Lanka, ‘Peking’ not Beijing, ‘Canton’ not ‘Guangzhou’, ‘Bombay’ not ‘Mumbai’ and many more. ↵

  Rice cooked with coconut milk. ↵

  Red building, built by the Dutch when they ruled Malacca, now a heritage landmark. ↵

  Teacher, We Ronggeng

  I was in the Malaysian education system for 22 years. Newbie teachers were often sent to ‘kampong’ or village schools. The Chinese schools were mainly in rubber and palm oil plantations, Indian schools in rubber plantations and Malay schools in areas of rice farming. Educational facilities in the 1960s in these schools were few. I was attached to the school in this story for eight weeks for my practicum.

  I met the headmaster at the state education office to take me to the school where I was to be attached for eight weeks for my practicum before graduating with a Certificate in Education conferred by the Ministry of Education, Malaysia.

  ‘Follow the road, you see coconut tree trunk painted red, then turn right and the road to school.’ What road? There was a parit or ditch, and a bridge made of coconut tree trunks spanning the stream. I counted eight trunks tied together with bamboo strips. It was wide and strong enough to take the size and weight of a small car. The bridge was the umbilical cord between the kampong and the nearest town, six to seven kilometres away. We drove between the batas,[1] through acres and acres of padi fields, left to fallow till the clouds decided to shed tears and water the fields, preparing them for rice planting.