Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  © 2011 Catherine Lim

  Cover art by Opal Works Co. Limited

  Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions

  An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International

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  eISBN: 978-981-435-192-8

  One

  In April 1993, barely a month after her husband’s death, Miss Maria Seetoh reverted to her maiden name. It was surely a slight to the sanctity of the married state, endorsed both by her church in a major sacrament, and by her society in a major economic policy by which only married women qualified for government-subsidised housing. Moreover, it spoilt the good name of the quietly, properly mourning widow.

  Miss Seetoh made her students use the desired name when they stood up to greet her as she entered the classroom each morning. It had to be a carefully considered, systematic re-training of forty young voices to make the switch from the old address, after such long habituation, but she succeeded in a week. If a few forgot, the rest would giggle and watch for her reaction, a full-blown ritual of pure entertainment. She would instantly, in frowning protest, step out of the classroom, wait outside for a few seconds, and then re-enter to face, with calm severity, the forty boys and girls still standing at their desks. Magisterially erect, she would wait for the little ripples of giggling whispers to subside into one hushed enveloping silence, and then, as the last act of the elaborate ritual, cup a listening hand to her right ear, now fully turned towards them, for the corrected greeting. It always came in a perfectly synchronised roar of ‘GOOD MORNING, MISS SEETOH!’, upon which the sternness vanished, and with a broad smile and theatrical bow she acknowledged their success, and the students – oh, how she loved them! – broke out in loud applause and laughter.

  Many years later, long after Miss Seetoh had left St Peter’s Secondary School, one of her students who became a well-known Singapore artist held an exhibition which included a portrait of a young woman leaning against the wall, her arms folded across her chest, her face lit up by a smile that was the total glowing configuration of skin, mouth, teeth, eyes, eyebrows. Miss Seetoh’s smile was ever unique. The nostalgia of memory had perfectly reproduced her trademark turned-up shirt collar and slightly rolled-up shirt sleeves which together with her ponytail gave an impression of perky confidence that some of her female students tried to copy. Less imitable was that dazzling smile, also the tiny bird-like waist discernible in the portrait.

  The principal of St Peter’s Secondary School liked to speak of its portals of learning and tolerated their occasional battering by the seismic eruptions from Class 4C on the third floor. The effect on school morale, though, had to be carefully monitored and assessed, for the walls separating the classrooms were thin, and already some students were asking their teachers why only Miss Seetoh’s students were having all the fun. In the staff common room one floor below where the teachers went between lessons to mark students’ homework or sip coffee, some would ignore the ruckus, and a few silently roll their eyes upwards at the antics of St Peter’s maverick English language and English literature teacher. Collectively, they were dull, dowdy and dour, beside the effervescent Miss Seetoh.

  ‘Come and look,’ said Mrs Neo one morning. She was the longest serving teacher in the school, with thirty-four years’ service, just one short of earning the Golden Merit Medal from the Ministry of Education, and she courageously defended her traditional teaching methods against the newfangled methodologies that the younger inspectors at the Ministry were sometimes emboldened to pass on to teachers in their training workshops. It was said that after each workshop, she made a show of throwing away the folders of teaching guides and notes, being completely secure, as the rest of her colleagues were not, in her white-haired seniority and status as the widow of one of Singapore’s most revered wartime heroes during the Japanese Occupation. His heroic underground activities and eventual execution by the Japanese merited some paragraphs in the history textbooks used in the schools.

  Mrs Neo was just now standing at a window in the staffroom that looked out on the school grounds. Two colleagues joined her, and all smiled to see the strange scene in the distance. Under a large shady tree, earnestly watched by Miss Seetoh and a group of students, two boys, dressed in oddments of clothing meant to pass off as ancient Roman garb, were engaged in a fearful struggle that ended with one falling to the ground with a roar of ‘Et tu Brute!’ and the other triumphantly standing over him with a dagger realistically smeared with red ink. A third student, in a borrowed sarong worn toga-style, stepped out for a full oration over the corpse of the murdered Caesar before it suddenly sprang up from the grass, in an unscripted frenzy of crotch-pulling, screaming ‘Red ants!’, and then all was pandemonium.

  The creative eccentricity of Miss Seetoh’s teaching methods could be copied, but not of her married life which had ended as sensationally as it had begun, creating little private stirrings of gossip that were not allowed to disturb the smooth surface of life at St Peter’s.

  Once the principal came to investigate, probably sent by the surly discipline master who did not want to confront Miss Seetoh himself – Miss Seetoh of the refined manners and classy way of speaking that exposed the fumbling inadequacies of the adversary.

  ‘What was that noise?’ the principal asked, and Miss Seetoh said, her eyes sparkling, ‘The noise of being happy, sir.’

  Her new bright world would exclude the judgemental and censorious, the dull and the lackluster, and would be confined to her students, fresh-faced, eager-eyed, pure-minded, in their ridiculous uniforms matched precisely to the pristine sky blue and white colours of the Virgin Mary as she stood in her shrine in the school grounds.

  For the few laggards who forgot the new address for their teacher, there was a penalty: each had to pay a fine of fifty cents, which Miss Seetoh promised to double or triple, for the amount to snowball into a grand prize that would go to the student who had made the greatest improvement in English grammar by the end of the year, just before the exams.

  ‘There you are,’ whispered Miss Teresa Pang to the colleague sitting beside her at the staff common room table.

  She was the other English language teacher, secret
ly seething from the invidious comparisons, even if implied only, with Maria Seetoh. A school day was too long to sustain the appearance of cool, unconcerned professionalism, which consequently broke into little sharp comments to whoever was around to listen: ‘Breaking another school regulation with all those money transactions going on in class! Doing it with impunity, in her high class English.’

  The famous carrots and sticks used everywhere in the society, from the government downwards, to get people to behave – Miss Seetoh used both with equal ferocity, the school being society’s microcosm. She was in a witch-hunt, she told her students, to drag out and destroy every one of their grammatical mistakes. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it’s important for you to secure good grades in the O Level exams. But it’s important for me to do something when I see you mangle and murder the language of Shakespeare and Milton and Jane Austen!’ Miss Seetoh knew all the plays of Shakespeare.

  A poster hung on the classroom wall, done by the same artistic student whose interest then was only in cartoon caricatures, showing Miss Seetoh in black witch garb riding on a broomstick, carrying someone behind her, a man recognisable by his pronounced forehead dome, beard and ruffled Elizabethan neck collar as the revered Bard, cheering her on as she used another broomstick to put to flight a giant octopus with a dozen waving tentacles. Each deadly tentacle carried a sentence that carried a common grammatical mistake, coloured bright green, to suggest a venomous snake. The double deadliness, explained the artist, was to reflect the seriousness of the problem, for according to Miss Seetoh, a composition with just three major grammatical errors would instantly earn a poor grade from the examiners in the Cambridge Examinations Syndicate.

  One error which most certainly originated in the schools, had, in the most alarming way, become ingrained in the speech of a whole society – ‘I ever went to a circus when I was a child’ – resisting the remedial efforts of at least two generations of English language teachers.

  Another was one that Miss Seetoh had picked up from an entry for a national essay competition of which she was one of the judges – ‘Mr TPK our great Prime Minister with vision and high endeavour have given prosperity to Singapore.’

  Indeed, the largest number of errors she had picked up from classroom compositions had to do with the Prime Minister. Either the deep awe inspired by his name led students to borrow the laudatory phrases regularly used in the local newspapers and string them together in complex, formal sentences, only to flounder in a mess of grammatical, lexical and stylistic contortions. Or there were simply too many students choosing to pay tribute to the Prime Minister whenever a composition title allowed them to do so.

  ‘Why don’t you write about what you know best,’ said Miss Seetoh. ‘It’s perfectly okay to write about your funny grandfather, you know. Or your aunt who goes to the temple to get lucky lottery numbers. Swee Hua, you told us about your Ah Kor who went to a cemetery to get help from your grandma’s ghost, and won two thousand dollars? Or your awful neighbour who keeps you awake all night because she plays mah-jong non-stop. Jun Ling, has your family solved the problem yet? But no more leaving dog shit in the shoes outside her flat, do you hear?’ The student, during the weekly forty-minute session called ‘Improve your English through fun story-telling’ had described the operation in the grossest of gratuitous details until stopped by Miss Seetoh.

  Her students tittered. They had no inhibitions about sharing the comic indignities of their lowly lives in the large, sprawling housing estates, during the creative writing sharing sessions. To bring these, however, into the austerely formal world of the G.C.E. O Level examinations was a different matter, and so, despite Miss Seetoh’s advice, they chose to play safe and write about safe, adult-approved topics in the composition paper, the safest, presumably, being responsible citizenship under a responsible leadership. One student had written about Mrs Neo’s hero husband by simply lifting the paragraphs from the history book. Miss Seetoh made him cry by telling him that dishonesty was a hundred times worse than a hundred bad grammar mistakes, and then made him rewrite each plagiarised paragraph in his own words. On the school bulletin board were pinned up the regular newspaper reports of official speeches extolling hard work, discipline, tolerance, the community spirit. School mottoes and slogans on every wall screamed back their support. There was a rule for her weekly composition writing lesson: nobody was to use any expression taken from The National Times or The Singapore Tribune.

  In her creative writing class, Miss Seetoh had a large waste-basket into which she dropped each pathetic echo of the language of cheap romances and TV soaps, filling it with rosebud lips, starry eyes, honey kisses, tender embraces.

  ‘ ‘A shiver ran down my spine’? Yuks!’ She instantly consigned it to the waiting receptacle of shame. ‘Rashid, you had written ‘I was really scared. Worse than when I saw Grandfather’s hantu’,’ she continued, reading from a script. ‘Why on earth did you cancel it and replace it with that atrocity?’ She had a rule in her creative writing class: everybody was to describe his or her feelings from the heart and the guts, never from imitation.

  The clear favourite with Miss Seetoh, among the identified twelve horrors on the poster, had elicited a deliciously wicked chuckle. It was a spelling rather than a grammatical error, and it bore the full force of the punitive broomstick – ‘We can be proud that our Singapore is now an effluent society.’ The class had laughed at previous misspelling howlers that Miss Seetoh liked to draw to their attention and challenge them to depict cartoon-style. The classroom walls were decorated with drawings cheerfully showing students being ‘canned’ by the discipline master if they came late to school, the giant tin cans, into which the screaming culprits were dropped, actually bearing familiar local sardine or luncheon pork labels; and of hunters firing ‘shorts’ into the air, the shorts, emanating from huge gun barrels, being the recognisably navy blue ones used for the Physical Education lessons.

  The principal, on his regular rounds of the classroom, sometimes stopped by to look at the pictures and ask Miss Seetoh about them. Dressed in impeccable white, his hands clasped behind his back, a puzzled frown on his grave face as his head twisted this way and that to follow the wild cartoon swirls of the artist’s crayons or marker pens, asking the same earnest questions as he did at educational seminars, he was himself a humorous sight, and the subject of a student cartoon drawing that had to stay out of sight. A member of that brave band of ageing, conservative community leaders who tried to adapt to the changing times by occasionally wearing a bright floral shirt and clapping to the impossibly loud music at a student party, he was happiest when in his habitual white and doing his rounds of the school.

  The students had stared blankly at the ‘effluent society’ sentence on the chalkboard, and Miss Seetoh had said, ‘Go look in your dictionary. Make that one more word for your vocabulary list.’ She loved the witch-and-Shakespeare poster so much she removed it from the classroom wall after a while to take home and put up in her apartment.

  The penalty money went into a round tin box that stood on Miss Seetoh’s table, prettily decorated by a student named Maggie. It was Maggie, a bright, bold, fun-loving girl who had had the idea to circle the tin box with a broad band of white paper that carried the message, in bright colours: ‘Mrs Tan is no more. Long live Miss Seetoh!’

  It was shocking – a secret joy suddenly revealed to the world with the public aplomb of a portentous royal announcement. Miss Seetoh stared, feeling a hot flush spread on her neck and cheeks. A picture of composure, she was now all cringing embarrassment in the bright glare of an exposed truth that was both frightening for its guilt and exhilarating for its promise. Between the two appellations of society’s recognition of a woman’s status, scrolled her private story of breathless escape. It was surely the work of a single moment of inspired genius for Maggie who made the most deplorable grammar mistakes in speech and writing, even for the Special Needs class of overaged students held back for two years for extra coaching to prepa
re them for the O Level exams. Strictly, Maggie did not qualify to be in the creative writing class, but had begged so hard that Miss Seetoh made an exception for her. Her short stories, always in bad English, swung between the mawkishly sentimental and the crudely earthy, both held up as samples of bad writing, with the name of the author erased. ‘I don’t mind,’ said Maggie airily. ‘You can use my name. My stories, they all true, I tell you!’

  The girl was holding up the box with both hands and turning it round very slowly before Miss Seetoh’s eyes, so that she could read, as a continuous statement, the words on the encircling band. They danced before her eyes, like a flock of released butterflies. Maggie was grinning and watching her with keen interest.

  It was one thing to reclaim a maiden name upon widowhood, and quite another to flaunt it in concrete, documented proof. The society, taking its cue from the government, could be unforgiving towards single women boldly disavowing the sanctity of marriage. Renegades were safe if they kept quiet, never if they openly challenged authority. ‘Do you like it, Miss Seetoh?’ said Maggie. ‘Yes, I do.’ It was only partly a lie. She wished Maggie had not done anything like that. But she was impressed by its brilliant audacity. If she had wished to celebrate her new status, she could not have expressed it better. Out of the mouths of babes. Or rather, of worldly-wise teenage girls like Maggie, teetering on the brink of womanhood, sensing its perils, ready to test its intoxicating power.

  The principal had, shortly after, called her into his office. ‘I understand,’ he said in his always polite and guarded manner, ‘that you would like to be called by your name before your marriage. But have you made it official? Because, if not, your name will continue to be ‘Mrs Bernard Tan Boon Siong’ in the school records.’

  ‘Oh, that’s okay,’ said Miss Seetoh. ‘I only meant for my students to greet me by my old name. Makes me feel more comfortable.’