Goodbye My Kampong

by Josephine Chia

  We did not know we had another far worse flood still to come.

  “Aiyyoh! Aiyyoh! Aiyyoh!” Uncle Krishnan cried in a voice announcing disaster as he beckoned us to come and watch the TV. “Come, come see the news!”

  The American rocket, Apollo 1, was supposed to be launched in February at Cape Kennedy in the US, to attempt the first manned lunar landing. Unfortunately, during a launch rehearsal test on Friday, 27 January, the command module caught fire and killed all three astronauts: Command Pilot Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward H. White II, and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee.

  The price for trying to be the first nation on the moon was high.

  Independence also exacted a high price. It was one thing to be free, but it was no fun to be poor and to have to look after our country ourselves. When the British eventually withdrew their forces, we would be a country without any proper defence. It was imperative to build up our own military. On 13 March, Defence Minister Goh Keng Swee initiated a bill for mandatory conscription into National Service (NS) for all young men born between 1 January and 30 June 1949.

  Officers from the People’s Association (PA) came to our village to explain to us what it entailed. The racial riots of the 1950s and 1960s had threatened to disrupt our social harmony, so the PA was formed in 1960 to act as an intermediary between the government and the people to explain government policies to ordinary folks, especially illiterate villagers. After the airport at Kallang was moved to Paya Lebar, the PA took over the airport’s control tower and terminal, to turn it into their headquarters. It was the PA who created the community centre in our village, for the villagers to have somewhere to go to for games and entertainment. This was where the PA officers gathered our eligible young men and their parents. Of course, the inquisitive people, kaypoh neighbours like us, turned up too.

  “You know the British are planning to move out their military very soon,” the man called Mr Yap said in Hokkien, as his colleague, Suhaimi, translated what he said into Malay, and Ananda translated it into Tamil. “You remember the bombing across the road at Sennett Estate in 1963? That was the fifth bombing that year. In 1965, we had that terrible bombing at MacDonald House, National Library and Katong. Who is going to protect us from these kinds of things after the British pull out this year, huh? We have to build up our army and we have to train many more to take care of our security. Your life is precious to our gar’ment. We need to protect our sea so that our fishermen can fish, protect our airspace so that our aeroplanes can fly, protect our borders so we can all be safe. We are a tiny country, easily threatened by bigger countries. If we don’t recruit our young men, to train them in defence methods and warfare, we will be totally defenceless. Might as well let other countries just walk in and take control…”

  Those of us listening started to murmur in agreement. NS made sense.

  “The British tried to implement NS in 1954 but failed,” one of the villagers reminded everyone.

  “Yes, because the British expected us to fight for them,” Suhaimi said. “But now, we are governing our own country. We will be defending ourselves and our own country, not some other foreign power.”

  “True, true,” people murmured.

  “But what will it mean for us?” young Ah Peng said. “If we join NS, does it mean we get tortured?”

  “For what we torture you?” Mr Yap said with a slight note of exasperation. “We need you. We will help you build your body up to be strong. Of course, that’s hard work if you are not used to physical exertion. But you’re a farm boy, right, Ah Peng? You are used to carrying earth and heavy things, you won’t have difficulty in lifting a firearm.”

  Ah Peng beamed. “Yah, no problem man!”

  “No problem for me too,” said Ramasamy. “All day I carry bricks for construction.”

  “But how we going to survive if you take away all our young men and they don’t work and don’t bring home money for our families, huh?” one parent asked.

  “Don’t worry! Gar’ment will pay salary one. We supply free uniform and boots,” said Mr Yap, who cheered now that the proceedings had taken on a more positive note. “Give the boys free food and lodgings. First, we have registration. Second, on 30 August, on the day of enlistment, our army trucks will come here to pick up all the young men. We will have a little makan so your family can come and send you off. Third, after the new recruits have settled in, parents can go and visit them in their various camps.”

  The same message was repeated around the island. Nine thousand young men were eligible, but not every one of them was as willing as Ah Peng and Ramasamy from our village. On 26 March, 100 youths marched down Geylang Serai in protest against compulsory conscription. They were dispersed quickly by the police.

  Taking advantage of this murmur of rebellion, 400 anti-government rioters staged demonstrations in Geylang, Aljunied and Chinatown on 1 May, Labour Day. Many of them were protesting against the Trade Union Amendment Act. Our country’s unrest continued into June, when another 100 protestors including young girls, suspected to be from the Chinese schools, raided the Central Fire Station at Hill Street. They set fire to it and to hapless motorcars that happened to be parked nearby. Some smashed into the US embassy and tore down the American flag from its flagpole. But those rebels quickly wised up to the fact that it was not advisable to mess with this government.

  In another sector, Thailand was restricting the export of rice because of poor yields. Rice, the staple food of the people of Singapore, especially for the ordinary working majority, became expensive. So the government started the Eat Wheat Campaign, churning out posters for island-wide distribution which said, “Wheat is good for you” and “Wheat gives you a variety of food to suit every taste”.

  “Cham lah, Ah Phine,” Third Elder Brother said to me. “You are such a Peng Thang, Rice-Bin. I can’t see you convert readily to wheat.”

  Rice was indeed my daily fix and I could not feel replete if I did not have at least one plate of rice a day. So its shortage was indeed one of my darkest hours.

  This was followed by another, one which, without sounding callous, I had not anticipated to be a dark hour. I had dreamt for so long to be free of my father’s tyranny that I was shocked by how much I was affected by his loss when my father, Ah Tetia, died. Since his retirement, he had been stricken by abdominal pains. Of course, he had been a chain smoker all his life, filling our house with the horrid smell of stale cigarette smoke. But that would not have affected his stomach, we thought. For one who had consistently carried weights with the other kampong lads, Rajah and Salleh, and who was so healthy to be able to ride his bicycle from Potong Pasir to William Jacks at Upper Bukit Timah Road, his deterioration was rapid. He started having trouble keeping his food down. He used to have such a voracious appetite but now, nothing seemed to satisfy his palate.

  “I feel as if a metallic taste has coated my tongue,” he moaned.

  His belly had swelled to incredible proportions and he was immediately hospitalised at Outram Road General Hospital, ORGH. We didn’t know until after his death that he had abdominal cancer, still a fairly recent medical discovery at the time, so there was no hope for a cure. As his final days approached, our family took turns to be at his bedside. I had always harboured anger towards him, for hurting my mother, siblings and myself with the rotan cane and his belt. He had been merciless during his mad rages and tempers. His ugly words about my worthlessness were a pickaxe that had permanently damaged my self-esteem. I had lived under his continual threat of marrying me off when I reached 17. Now his imminent death would mean that I would be freed from this Damocles’ sword. Yet it brought me no joy. A father was still a father. He looked pale and shrunken on his hospital bed. Only as he lay dying did I recall his good side, his laughter as he tickled my toes to wake me up, our good times at the movies, his great love for films which he passed on to me, sharing his love for his favourite actor, Boris Karloff, who had a physiognomy which suited the horror films he starred in. I remembered
how I used to wait for Ah Tetia to come home when he had been out for his leisure activities. I would whoop for joy to announce to the rest of the family if he was carrying an upeh packet, a skein of folded palm bark, which kept the food hot: char kway teow, hokkien mee, chye tow kway, mee goreng…

  “Ah Phine ah,” he said feebly, when I was on the watch by his bedside. “Ah Lao Ee is calling me.”

  Lao Ee was my grandmother, his mother, who had lived with my rich cousins in town and who had frequently made pork rissoles to give to him for us. But she had passed on the previous year. I knew that he had missed her terribly. When he uttered those words, all my hair stood on end. I felt that the spirit of bent old Lao Ee, in her kebaya panjang, our Peranakan costume for elderly ladies, was indeed standing there at the foot of his bed. Of her four sons, he was always her favorite. It would make sense for her spirit to accompany my father’s to the next realm. I knew then that it wouldn’t be long before he too would depart.

  There was something I had to do before he died.

  Fortunately, I had saved money from my recess allowance and from giving English tuition to the kampong kids. I would buy my father the fish and chips he always bought for us when he got his Christmas bonus from William Jacks. It was one of the lovely things my father did, though his mad rages had obfuscated the memory of that gesture. STC bus number 18 went from Neil Road near ORGH to Serangoon Gardens. This area was home to many British officers and their families. That was where Ah Tetia used to take me to buy one packet of fish and chips, wrapped in newsprint, to be shared with the whole family. The fact that the chips were soft and a bit soggy by the time we got home did not diminish our pleasure one little bit. This time-honoured treat might revive his taste buds or at least give him some moments of pleasure. But the British were already pulling out. Would the fish and chips shop still be there?

  To my utter surprise, Allens, the English fish and chips shop was still there on the corner, as I remembered it, at the end of the parade of shops facing the bus terminus right by the roundabout at Serangoon Gardens. Its lighted signboard had a Union Jack and the stylised drawing of a fish. Even before I stepped inside, the smell of hot oil, fried fish and chips hit my nostrils, awakening old, buried feelings about my father, bringing a lump to my throat. The warmth of the shop caressed my face as I opened its doors. I chose the Ikan Kurau fish and chips, which cost $1.50 cents. At a time when one bowl of noodles was 30 cents and our house rent was $15, this was a huge sum for me. But this was no time to quibble over cost.

  “I know that smell from anywhere! Allens always made the best fish and chips,” my father said with a quavering smile and voice when I presented him with what would prove to be his final treat.

  He only managed a mouthful. I doubted that his taste buds were miraculously revived but at least his memory of its taste was making him happy momentarily. At least he knew that I did not hate him, despite all he had said and done. I thought I saw tears in his eyes.

  “You are a good daughter,” he mumbled, before he slipped back into his morphine-induced fugue.

  At last, he had said something nice about me. I grasped at the straw.

  So at the age of 52, my mother became a widow. She had been married to my father for 35 years. My two elder brothers had since married, but my mother still had five children to look after; Third Elder Brother was jobless, three of us were still schooling, whilst one needed medical care all his life. I was about to sit for my Senior Cambridge Certificate Exams at the end of the year. Hopefully I would pass, so that I could get a job to help towards the expenses so that my sisters could continue school. It meant that for me, there was not even the remotest chance of going to pre-university or university itself. The family’s welfare had to come first. The elder brothers had given their fair share of support and now they had their own families to care for. It was up to Third Elder Brother or me. I had to admit that I was green with envy, eavesdropping on my classmates discussing their plans to attend pre-university and then university. At times like this, one wondered what one had done in previous lives to deserve one’s fate. Although my family converted to Catholicism, our Buddhistic teachings had never been deserted.

  On the day of my father’s funeral, I was staggered by my mother’s anguished cry as her husband’s coffin was being carried out of the house, “Why did you have to leave first? Who’s going to take care of me and all these children?”

  On the rare occasion when my father had taken my mother out to town as a treat, Mak would thread the fragrant bunga melor and chempaka into her hair. It delighted me to have seen her like that. She looked so beautiful and carefree. I also enjoyed seeing my Indian and Malay neighbours wearing flowers in their hair. My dearest friend, Parvathi, also used to plait the chain of creamy jasmine into her jet-black hair, which made her look like a princess. The practice seemed to be dying out, though I was pleased that many Indian women still upheld the custom, and they also used flowers in garlands. But once her husband died, a widow, like my mother, could no longer wear flowers in her hair, as it was deemed unbecoming. Indian women who were widowed had to put on white clothes forever. This was not so for Peranakans. But the family of the deceased had to mourn for three years. For the first year, we were allowed to wear only black, the second year we could wear shades of blue, and in the third, we could wear muted colours, but not red. In a situation when we had to wear a uniform for school or work, we would wear the appropriate colour on a small square of fabric that was pinned to our sleeve, to indicate that we were in mourning.

  Strangely, I missed my father’s presence in the house, even the smell of his cigarettes. In the evenings, I expected to see him sitting at our small table, which also held our TV, wearing his singlet and checked sarong, writing into his notebook all the permutations of Chap Ji Ki, the local numbers gambling game. I expected to see him settle himself in his chair to watch his favourite American TV series, Sea Hunt, which starred Lloyd Bridges as former United States Navy frogman Mike Nelson. Ah Tetia had an aluminium cigarette case with intricate carving and this now seemed orphaned without him. This was the only thing my mother kept, as she gave away his personal effects sorrowfully. No matter how many times he had wielded his arms and fists at her, he was the only man she had ever known intimately since she was 17. His absence drew new lines on her face, pushed her shoulders forward, as the burden of bringing up five children on her own became her sole responsibility. She had lost a husband and we had lost a parent. I never realised the preciousness of having a father until he was gone. I truly prayed that Lao Ee had waited for him and taken him across the bridge into the spirit world.

  In May, at the Monterey Pop Music Festival in the US, long-haired and moustached Scott McKenzie, dressed in a flowing robe, sang the song, ‘San Francisco’, written by John Phillips of the famous Mamas and Papas. The psychedelic pop song with its repetitive beat became an instant worldwide hit. People at the festival wore circlets of flowers in their hair and were dressed in bohemian clothes. They were reputed to smoke pot and practise free love. The first lines of the song went like this: “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.”

  The tune was so catchy that you could hear snatches of it sung or hummed around Singapore at frequent intervals. It played on the radio and on portable transistors. The song and its lyrics brought smiles to many faces. People started wearing garlands of flowers, or pinned them to their hair. The hippies and their culture were born. Hundreds, then thousands of them congregated in places like Woodstock and Glastonbury as they attempted to effect a wave of change. They were protesting against the Vietnam War, the structured rigidity of modern society and conventions and a huge imbalance between the rich and poor. To break out from societal restrictions and conformist attitudes, they advocated less focus on the pursuit of economic wealth. They believed in a return to nature where people could live in harmony in communes where no one owned anything, not even a partner, so that everything could be shared. They advocated that
people should focus on their creativity, their art, music and literature. They took hallucinatory drugs to induce their latent creativity. But before long, their noble ideas morphed into indiscriminate sex and uncontrolled abuse of drugs.

  Subsequently, ‘San Francisco’ became “the unofficial anthem of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, including the Hippie, Anti-Vietnam War and Flower power movements”, as documented by Wikipedia. From then on, it drew a strong reaction from the authorities here in their fight against drug-taking and the hippie culture. This sparked off a nationwide campaign against long hair for men. Pictorial posters of what constituted long hair were put up in all government departments, offices and service centres, like post offices and clinics, stating that men with long hair would be served last.

  This wasn’t taken kindly by some of our young, especially Malay men, who had traditionally worn their hair long, in the style of their warrior heroes like Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat. Of course, the male Sikhs too wore their hair long but theirs was kept wrapped under their cloth turbans, so it did not become an issue. Other young men, singers and musicians, like our kampong boy, Karim, who wanted to emulate international pop stars, also wore their hair long. Suddenly, the length of a man’s hair, once considered a bohemian fashion, took on a different shade, and became associated with drug-taking and a licentious way of life.