by Tan Twan Eng
Our neighbour was Old Mr Ong, the former bicycle repairman. He had kept his ties to his motherland. When the Japanese invaded China, he started the Aid China Fund to collect money for the Nationalists. For his reward Old Mr Ong was made a colonel in the Kuomintang Army. It was just an honorary rank given to him by Chiang Kai-Shek, who in all probability scattered these around freely to the Overseas Chinese as rewards for their generous donations, but Old Mr Ong was very proud of it. He sent us a copy of the local Chinese newspaper with the photograph of him receiving the honour.
We had been neighbours with Old Mr Ong for twenty years, but my father only became friends with him after the Japanese massacred hundreds of thousands of Chinese in Nanking. We found it hard to accept the news when we heard it – the slaughter, the rape of old and young women, of children; the mind-numbing savagery of it all. What enraged my father more was the fact that the British had done nothing to stop it, nothing at all. For the first time in his life he questioned the high standing in which he had placed the British, the admiration he had always felt towards them. When he heard that Old Mr Ong had opened his home to the Kuomintang agents who were travelling the world to raise money and support, my father began attending the meetings. Together with Old Mr Ong and a group of well-known Chinese businessmen, he visited the towns and villages in Malaya and Singapore, making speeches and urging the people to contribute to the Aid China Fund. Kuomintang agents accompanied them to describe to the audiences how hard the KMT soldiers in China were fighting the Japanese. Sometimes I was allowed to attend these campaigns. ‘You can always tell which side a man supports, just by looking at whose photograph he puts up in his home,’ I remember my father saying to me once as we drove home after a rally. ‘It’s either a portrait of Sun Yat Sen, or that fellow Mao hanging next to the family altar.’ Our servants did the same thing in their quarters at the back of our house. A few days later my father ordered them to take down Mao’s portrait.
In 1938, when I turned fifteen, the Japanese government wanted to buy rubber from my father. He refused to entertain them, but later changed his mind and agreed to meet the trade officials in Tokyo. He took us all with him – it was on that trip that my sister fell in love with the gardens of Japan.
The negotiations with the Japanese failed. My father refused to sell any rubber to them.
The officials’ wives were chilly to us after that: no longer smiling, no longer keen to show us around. Later Yun Hong told me that the KMT had instructed my father to accept the Japanese government’s invitation and to report back on what he could discover. Unfortunately, the KMT failed to warn him of the long memories of the Japanese government.
Two years later, in the last weeks of 1941, Japanese troops landed on the north-east coast of Malaya, fifteen minutes after midnight and an hour before Pearl Harbour was attacked. People think that Japan entered the war through Pearl Harbour, but Malaya was the first door they smashed open. Japanese soldiers crawled up the beach at Pantai Chinta Berahi, taking the places of the leatherback turtles which emerged from the sea every year around that time to lay their smooth round eggs. From the Beach of Passionate Love, they cycled and fought their way down Malaya, riding their bicycles along the back roads past Malay kampongs and paddy fields and through jungles the authorities had assured us were impenetrable.
My father was confident that the British soldiers would stop them. But three weeks later the Japanese reached Penang. The British evacuated their own people to Singapore, leaving us natives to face the Japanese. The Europeans who had been coming to our parties for years – the Faradays, the Browns, the Scott brothers – all of whom my parents considered their friends – left on the ships, disappearing without a word to us. But there were also many who refused to run away, who refused to abandon their friends and their servants to the Japanese – the Hutton family, the Codringtons, the Wrights.
Kian Hock, my brother, was in the police force. He had been sent to Ceylon for training two months before the Japanese came. My father ordered him to remain there. Old Mr Ong asked us to go with his family to his durian orchard in Balik Pulau, on the western side of Penang.
‘We’ll be safe from the Jipunakui there,’ he assured us.
We left home on the morning the Japanese planes started bombing Georgetown: Old Mr Ong and his two wives and their sons and families packed into three cars; my parents, Yun Hong and I in my father’s Chevrolet. The roads leading out of Georgetown were crowded; hundreds of people were fleeing to the hills of Ayer Itam. All of us had heard what the Japanese troops did to the locals in every town they swept through.
The road became deserted as we neared Balik Pulau. We had passed only the odd Malay kampong. I had never been to this part of the island before. Old Mr Ong’s durian orchard was on a high, steep slope. As we drove in, Yun Hong pointed through the gaps in the trees to the sea below. ‘I should have brought my paints and brushes,’ she said.
From the front seat my mother said, without turning around, ‘We won’t be here long enough for you to paint anything, darling.’
The orchard’s overseer was Old Mr Ong’s cousin, and he greeted us with all the ceremony due Old Mr Ong’s wealth and status. The overseer moved his own wife and daughters out of their home to accommodate the old man and his family. My mother looked as if she was about to cry when we saw the dilapidated one-storey wooden shack that was to be our new home; she was even more horrified when she discovered we had to use an outhouse. She wanted to go back to our home on Northam Road immediately, but my father stood firm.
Yun Hong and I soon got used to living in the shack. We spent our days exploring the orchard. The durian season had just started and the air was heavy with the smell of the spiky, ripening King of Fruits. Ah Poon, the overseer, warned us to be careful. ‘Can kill you- lah, if fall on your head.’ Nets were stretched out between the trees to catch the durian. Walking beneath them, I felt I was inside a circus tent, gazing up at the acrobats’ safety net. Every time we heard the fruit dropping through the branches, we’d look up quickly, just to be on the safe side. Yun Hong could not tolerate the fruit, but I loved their pungent, creamy flesh. ‘Your breath stinks,’
she would complain after I had eaten my fill. ‘No man’s going to want to kiss you.’
We often went down to the beach, thrilled to have it all to ourselves. It was one of the few times in my life I could go swimming without having to worry about people staring at me and laughing and making snide remarks. This part of Penang looked out to the Andaman Sea, and once I even saw a pod of whales, their breaths erupting out of the water. They swam so close to shore that I could count the barnacles on their skin and hear their breathing, moist and hollow as though they were grunting through a rubber hose. The sound was familiar, yet also otherworldly. I would climb out onto the rocks and sit there for hours, watching them until evening fell and their presence was detectable only by their vaporous sighs. The whales stayed in the bay for a week and then one morning they were gone.
It was easy to forget that we were in the middle of a war but, once a week, Ah Poon, returning with supplies from a village a few miles away, would give us the news. KL had fallen, and then Singapore. Thousands of ang-moh had been sent to internment camps. The Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere was now in place – with Japan enjoying the lion’s share of the prosperity.
Then the Kempeitai began sweeping through Penang, rounding up people and taking them away in lorries. Old Mr Ong warned Ah Poon to stay away from the village for a while.
One afternoon my father made us go to Ah Poon’s house. All the women, including Old Mr Ong’s wives, were queuing up to have their hair cut by Ah Poon’s wife. They had decided it was prudent to make us look as unappealing as possible. That was the first moment I felt real fear.
* * *
We had been living in the durian orchard for nearly five months when the Kempeitai came for Old Mr Ong. The secret police had been looking for him. They had also been looking for my father. Arriving in two lorries, they ro
unded us up in front of Ah Poon’s house. We knelt beneath the noon sun, our hands behind our heads. Some of the orchard hands managed to slip away into the jungle when they heard the Kempeitai coming, but there had not been the opportunity for us.
And anyway, where could we have run to?
The Kempeitai officers knew all our details. They compared our faces to the photographs in their dossiers. They ordered Old Mr Ong and my father into Ah Poon’s house. We could hear everything from where we knelt outside: the shouting, the beatings, the cries of pain rising into inhuman screams. The younger of Old Mr Ong’s wives fainted. I listened until I couldn’t recognise my father’s voice anymore. Then the house fell silent.
The officers emerged without my father or Old Mr. Ong. They gave an order and their men moved among us, pulling one after the other to their feet and dragging them to one of the lorries: all of Old Mr Ong’s sons and their wives, Ah Poon’s teenage daughters, the workers’ wives and children.
And then Yun Hong and I were selected too.
Weeping filled the air, our families begging the Japanese to let us go. My legs seemed boneless when I tried to stand up. I couldn’t breathe. The guards shoved us into the back of the lorry. My mother was screaming. I had never heard her sound like that. A soldier punched her and then, when she fell, kicked her, again and again. He kicked her face, her head, her stomach. I broke away from the other prisoners and ran towards her. A guard jabbed me in the stomach with his rifle butt. I doubled over and collapsed to my knees. I had never felt such pain before. I forced down the fetid vomit rising up my throat.
‘Get up, Ling!’ Dimly I heard my sister shouting from behind. ‘Get up or he’ll kill you!’
Swaying, I managed to get to my feet. I saw my mother lying on the ground. She was not moving. I could not even tell if she was still breathing. No one dared to tend to her. I looked back to the house where my father had been tortured. The guard shoved me and shouted. I limped back to the lorry. Yun Hong reached out and pulled me up.
The Kempeitai stopped at three or four other villages to collect more prisoners, packing them into the back until there was no space left to even sit on the floor. The air inside the tarpaulin canopy baked in the heat. The seats by the open tailgate were taken by the two guards.
Some of us suffered from car-sickness, vomiting down the front of our clothes. The smell made me sick. I tried to hold down my gorge, but it was impossible. Yun Hong helped me clean myself, but there was not much she could do.
The lorry stopped and we were ordered out to relieve ourselves. The women squatted on one side of the road while the men urinated against the trees on the other side. The guards smoked their cigarettes. Then we were on the move again. We crossed the channel to the mainland by ferry. At the Butterworth train station we were transferred to a goods train waiting by a siding. There were already prisoners packed into the cattle-cars. I was thirsty – we had not had anything to eat or drink all day.
‘You think they’re taking us to Changi?’ I asked Yun Hong, when the train began to move.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know.’
We travelled for hours. The guards gave us a bucket of water to be fought over between the fifty, sixty of us packed into the carriage. Someone said we were heading south. Yun Hong was hopeful that we were being transported to Singapore. ‘Father will find us there,’ she said.
‘He’ll get us out of this.’ She tried to keep our spirits up. ‘If they wanted to kill us,’ she whispered to me, ‘they wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.’
The train stopped once. The doors opened and we climbed down stiffly. It was hot, the sun setting behind the mountains in the distance. We were relieving ourselves beside the tracks when I heard a train coming. Yun Hong pulled me to my feet and brushed down my skirt, doing the same for herself. Many of the other women were too exhausted to care.
The sound of the train grew louder. It rounded a bend in the tracks and slowed to a stop next to ours. Japanese soldiers unlocked the doors to the cattle-cars. Grimy, exhausted-looking British soldiers, some dressed in filthy uniforms, others in loincloths, stumbled onto the tracks.
‘They’re being taken to the railway in Burma,’ a Eurasian woman next to me whispered.
‘Fucking Japs. Bastards.’
The guards huddled together, smoking and chatting. One of the British POWs looked around. His eyes met mine just for a second. Then he sprinted across the tracks, heading for the trees. The guards shouted and fired at him. The man’s body jerked and he collapsed into the wild grass. He tried to get up, but couldn’t. He started crawling towards the jungle. One of the guards strolled up to him and, pressing his boot on the man’s neck, shot him in the head.
It was late in the evening when our train halted for the last time and the doors were pulled open. Thick jungle lay on both sides of the railway tracks. We were marched through the trees to a clearing where lorries were waiting. The drivers started up their engines and switched on their headlights. A guard threw blindfolds at our feet and gestured at us to put them on. Yun Hong gripped my hand. She was shaking. We had heard stories of how the Kempeitai would take their prisoners to a deserted spot in the jungle and shoot them.
The journey was unending. We seemed to be going uphill all the time. The roads worsened. Finally the lorry stopped. No one dared to move. In the sudden silence I heard shouting in Japanese. Then someone ordered us to remove our blindfolds. I blinked, dizzy and disoriented. Climbing down unsteadily from the lorry, I looked around us, shielding my eyes against the spotlights. Night had fallen. Through the trees I glimpsed a section of a high metal fence topped with barbed wire. Beyond the fence was only darkness. From platforms in the trees, armed men watched the fence and watched us.
I glanced at my sister. Our eyes met for a moment. We were worlds away from anything we had ever known.
The guards separated the women prisoners from the men and marched us to one of the attap huts beneath the trees. Inside, twenty to thirty women were standing at attention, their faces sallow in the light of the paraffin lamps hanging from the low rafters. A thin, bald officer inspected the new arrivals. He stopped in front of me. I shivered when his eyes stared into mine.
He moved on to Yun Hong. When he finished he spoke to a guard, who bowed and pulled out half a dozen of the women from the line-up. Yun Hong was one of the chosen. Two of the women started to weep. The guard slapped them. The six women, including Yun Hong, were led away.
* * *
It was still dark when I left the hut with the other prisoners the next morning. I had not slept all night. My arms and face were swollen and itching from mosquito bites. We assembled on a parade ground. Yun Hong was standing on the far side with a group of young women. In the grey light I saw that her face was swollen and bruised.
A small, thin man introduced himself as Captain Fumio. ‘I am in charge here,’ he said through Father Jacobus Kampfer, the camp’s interpreter. ‘It is dawn in Tokyo. The Emperor is about to have breakfast in his palace. You will show your respect to him.’ He made us bow in the direction of Japan. We sang the Kimigayo – those of us newcomers who did not know the words had to move our lips, or risk being slapped. We were dismissed after the singing. I watched as Yun Hong and her group were taken away.
‘What are they doing to them?’ I whispered to the Chinese woman ahead of me, but she did not answer or pretended not to have heard me.
We queued for breakfast in an open-sided shelter that functioned as a kitchen and eating area. Each of us was given a bowl of thin soup and a small slice of coarse bread. We had ten minutes to gulp it down. Then the guards ordered us into single file and marched us through the jungle to a cave in a mountainside that formed the entrance to a mine. Supervised by Japanese engineers, the male prisoners tunnelled deep into the mountain, shoring up the passageways with wooden beams and concrete pillars. The women carried away the broken stones in bamboo baskets, dumping the rubble into a ravine on the other side of the hill.
Limping back to the cave after I had emptied my basket, I noticed a number of Japanese civilians walking about, consulting plans and plotting the angle of the sun.
There were four levels in the mine, linked by a system of tunnels and airshafts. There must have been a river running close by because, a month into my internment after it had been raining heavily for days, the walls in the lowest level collapsed. Water flooded the chamber, drowning the prisoners working down there. We had to go in and pump out the water. The chief engineer told us to leave the bodies there to be buried into the foundations.
Three hundred prisoners lived in the camp. There were seventy or eighty Europeans: civilians and captured Allied soldiers. The rest were Chinese and a handful of Eurasians. The British men kept to their own, as did the Australians and the Dutch. But there were no such divisions among us women. All forty-four of us slept in one hot, crowded hut: Europeans and Chinese and Eurasians. The huts were constructed from bamboo and thatched with attap and all were sited under the trees.
None of the other prisoners knew where our camp was located; they too had been blindfolded when they were transported here. From my conversations with the Chinese women prisoners, I discovered we shared a common background: we all had fathers or relatives who had been active in stirring up anti-Japanese sentiments.
