The last visit, and more gifts.
Gloria’s mother was not in, and Angela was glad of that, for she had nothing in particular to say to the fat, obsequious Eurasian woman who flattered her shamelessly in bad English. Gloria and Wee Nam stayed with her, in her small, two-bedroom terrace house. They had applied for a Government flat, but would have to wait at least five years.
Gloria was in; she was listening to the radio when Angela came in. She immediately turned it off and rose deferentially, a very young-looking woman, looking no more than a teenager with her hair in two bunches and wearing T-shirt and shorts. Angela had brought her a box of barbecued pork and a packet of grapes. She was nervously profuse in her thanks.
“This dress has become a little too tight for me. I’ve worn it only once, so it’s still new. If you don’t like it, you may give it away to one of your neighbours,” said Angela, knowing Gloria would never do that. Gloria would get her mother’s help in making the necessary alterations, but she would never pass on such an expensive dress.
The girl’s eyes showed deep interest as she took the dress and looked it over. “Thank you very much, I think I can wear it,” she said, and then put it aside with deliberate casualness, Angela could already see her wearing the dress for church the coming Sunday.
Poor girl, thought Angela. If her husband were more responsible and less a rolling stone, she could afford dresses like this. Poor girl.
The topics of the two previous visits having quickly exhausted themselves, Angela went on to ask Gloria about her sisters. Gloria’s pale face took on an animated look. She went into the bedroom and brought out some colour snapshots of her two sisters, one in Australia and the other in Canada. The one in Australia was photographed against an apple tree, holding an apple hanging from a branch, the one in Canada amidst a riot of summer blooms.
“How nice,” said Angela. “Do they like it over there?”
The girl’s eyes dimmed.
“I wish I could be there too,” she said. “I wish I could go away – go far away.”
This was invitation enough for Angela to probe into the poor girl’s troubles, something she had wanted to do since seeing the dejected face at the funeral.
“Why, Gloria,” she said. “Aren’t you happy? Aren’t you happy with Wee Nam?”
“My sisters have emigrated. I wish I could emigrate too, but Wee Nam says it is difficult to get a job in Australia or Canada,” said Gloria with small-girl petulance, as she looked down and fingered a corner of her T-shirt, adding, “Surely he could do some business there. My friends say you can open a restaurant or a curio shop or something like that.”
Angela would have liked to ask, with vehemence, “Where’s the money coming from, pray?” But right now, she felt sorry enough for the girl to content herself with, “It’s not as easy as you think, Gloria.” Then, with great solicitousness, “But tell me, Gloria, are you very unhappy?”
She was not prepared for the response – a spasm of sobbing – and she took the poor girl into her arms and comforted her.
“Never mind, Gloria,” she said soothingly. “I understand. Wee Nam owes Boon a lot of money, but we understand, we both understand.”
“He owes other people money too,” said the girl with some bitterness.
“Do you know how much?” asked Angela with sudden concern. She already saw the younger brother running to the elder, begging, and the elder brother writing out a cheque and surreptitiously passing it to him. “How much?”
“A few thousand, I think,” said Gloria.
“Gloria, listen. You be brave and take care of your health. What else can you do? On my part, I shall advise Wee Nam to be more stable and to stick to his job. I think he will listen to me if I catch hold of him and give him a good talk one of these days. But don’t worry. I won’t tell him what you told me.”
“I have these horrible nightmares,” wrhimpered Gloria. “I wake up and can’t go back to sleep again.”
“Oh, never mind that,” said Angela. “Since that dreadful funeral, we’ve all had frightening dreams. It’s the psychological state we’re in, that’s all. The most important thing is that it’s all over. Now you promise me you’ll take care of yourself? Next week I’ll come with some poh piah for you and your mother. Mooi Lan makes very good poh piah.”
The grateful girl accompanied her to the door, visibly cheered by the visit. Angela was heartened.
Three visits today, each more satisfactory than the last, thought Angela with satisfaction, as she drove home. She had gone out of her way to bring gifts and cheer to three pitiful women.
No, five women, thought Angela with greater satisfaction; for early that morning, Muniandy the gardener’s wife had appeared at the door, a thin bony woman in a smelly sari with a baby on her hip and a skinny little boy with scabby legs by her side. “Muniandy,” she complained, “had spent all his wages on drink again.”
“I’m sorry I can’t give you more money,” said Angela, knowing that a gift of four or five dollars would be promptly converted into toddy by the wretched woman herself. Instead, Angela went to the store room and brought out a big tin of biscuits, four tins of condensed milk, a tin of canned soup and a handful of sweets for the little boy. The woman received the presents with effusive thanks and hurried away.
And then Aminah, the washerwoman, equally thin and scrawny – Aminah coming up, smiling apologetically and asking if she could have an advance of $20 on the next month’s wages, as one of her children was ill and had to be taken to a doctor.
Angela was tired of the frequent requests for advances, but this time, in an impulse of generosity she said, “Listen, Aminah. You take your son to my husband’s clinic, Toh Clinic – you know where it is, don’t you? I shall tell the nurse there not to charge you anything,” and a further impulse made her slip a five dollar note into the washerwoman’s hand.
“You are very, very good, mem,” said the poor woman, overcome.
Angela was happy – she, dispenser of good things, bringer of relief.
Chapter 6
The boy was so happy on the morning of his birthday, Old Mother remembered, that he got up with the first cockcrow, when it was still very dark and cold, and he turned over to wake her up.
“Ma, ma, wake up! It’s my birthday!” he said excitedly, shaking her. She was lying on the plank bed; on her other side was Wee Nam, sound asleep.
She said, “It’s still very early. Go back to sleep,” but he was wide awake now and persisted in waking her up, showing all the impatience of a five-year-old.
“All right,” she said at last, with a laugh, for she loved this youngest son of hers; even his impatience and waywardness brought forth indulgent smiles and laughs, whereas she used sharp words for the other sons and freely knocked her knuckles on their heads.
“All right, Ah Siong,” she said and allowed herself to be dragged into the kitchen, for she had promised to make him noodles with pork for his birthday, as well as boil him a big egg, with the shell stained bright red for luck.
The loud knocks on the large wooden chopping block as she minced pork with her chopper woke up the rest of the boys, who trooped into the kitchen to watch, but she said firmly, “The noodles with pork are for Ah Siong only, it’s his birthday today.”
“Yes, and I shall have a hard-boiled red egg too!” exclaimed the little boy shrilly, to forestall any claims to a share of the birthday feast.
“I didn’t have any noodles for my birthday,” said Ah Tiong sullenly, “and no red egg,” but his mother waved him aside impatiently and said, “Go back to sleep, the rest of you! It’s still early. Don’t disturb me!”
By the time the morning sun rose, Ah Siong had already had a big bowl of steaming hot noodles with minced pork and some pieces of liver, as well as the hard-boiled red egg. His mother slipped a red packet containing gift money into the pocket of his pyjama top.
“For you to grow up tall and strong,” she chanted with solemnity of ritual. “For you to be good
in your studies, to be a good boy and obey your parents.”
The boy lost no time in investigating the contents of the packet.
“A dollar,” he said beaming, putting the crisp note back into his pocket and throwing away the red gift paper.
The rest of the day he took full advantage of his status as birthday celebrant to shout lustily at his brothers and stamp on their feet. When Ah Kum Soh brought the idiot one to the house late in the afternoon, Ah Siong rushed out to show him the dollar note, shouting, “I had noodles, too, a big bowl, and a red egg!”
The idiot one, whose large head moved grotesquely from side to side on his thin neck, smiled and gurgled. Old Mother brought him furtively into the kitchen, to the cement earthen stove where an earthen pot stood over one of the three deep holes in the stove, holes for the firewood. A few lengths of lit firewood kept the noodles in the pot steaming hot and deliciously fragrant. There was half a bowl left, and Old Mother was saving it for the foster-son. She made him eat it in a corner of the kitchen, away from prying eyes, but Ah Tiong slipped in, looked into the bowl and said peevishly, “I knew there was some left,” before dealing the idiot one a surreptitious pinch on the thigh, in punishment for stealing away a mother’s favours.
The idiot one began to whimper; Ah Siong who happened to be coming in, heard him. The little boy who moved from tyrannous to magnanimous behaviour as easily as from game to game, went up to him and said, with self-conscious generosity, “Don’t cry, Ah Bock. I’ll give you more noodles on my next birthday. Here’s a sweet for you,” giving him one of several that Ah Kum Soh had brought for him to make him grow up tall and clever and good, to sweeten his life.
That night, before he went to sleep, he demanded that his mother tell him a story. She began to tell him the story of the wicked young man who passed shit into the rice bowl of a poor old blind man and was punished by being struck blind himself. “Tell me about the king who built a huge temple,” said Ah Siong. She was half way through it when he said, “No, no, the one about the goddess in the moon who washed her hair in the silver river and combed it with a jade comb.” She began telling him
the story and he again said, “No, no, tell me about the wicked emperor who had leprosy.” She began it, to humour him, this precious youngest son, and was halfway through it when she saw he was sound asleep.
She covered him, tenderly, with the patchwork blanket she had made for him when he was a baby, for she was afraid he would catch cold.
Chapter 7
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!”
The wishes were expressed in a variety of forms – in the red-and-gilt lettering on the banner in the background of the Hotel Grande’s Orchid Room, in the loud chorus of the birthday guests as they crowded round to see the boy, tall and handsome and self-conscious, blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, and on the cake itself, a stupendous structure of white and blue icing, the words ‘Happy Birthday Mark’ in artistic whirls and flourishes to make a pattern with the rows of snow-white candles.
As the cameras popped, Angela and Boon walked up to kiss their son, their pride, on each cheek. The boy looked down self-consciously, blushing, but there was no doubt he relished being the focus of attention in the large crowded room, carpeted and chandeliered, in the Hotel Grande. He wore a long-sleeved, light pink shirt with a black bow and grey tailored pants.
“How tall he has grown, how handsome he looks,” whispered the friends and Angela’s heart glowed with pride and love.
“I must congratulate you, Mrs Toh,” said Mark’s class teacher who, together with the Principal, the Vice Principal and a number of favourite teachers, had been invited for the occasion, “Mark has been doing very well. I’m entering him for the National Speech contest, the biggest event for schools this year. I will probably select an excerpt from Shakespeare. Mark reads so well, he has so much confidence.”
“Thank you, thank you. Mark would never have done so well without the help and guidance of his teachers,” said Angela deferentially. She would have liked to talk to Mark’s teacher longer, but she had to run off to see that everything was in order, that the birthday celebrations went on as planned.
Three or four times, when a friend or relative remarked on the magnificence of the affair, Angela had occasion to say, with an apologetic laugh, “Really, Boon and I never intended anything like this. It’s a once-and-for-all thing, not a regular annual affair. You see, we’ve been promising Mark so many things to reward him for his good performance in school, but you know Boon and me – always busy and running around. So to make up for all the promises we never kept, we’re giving the boy this birthday treat here. Our place is too small for all the teachers and friends he wants to invite; you know the garden can’t take more than 30 comfortably. When the new house is ready, we’ll have a much bigger garden, and there’ll be a special barbecue pit. Right now, there’s just no space. But we’ve told Mark, ‘That’s all! No more birthdays like this. Daddy and Mummy can’t afford more of this!’” Angela tantalisingly withheld the information – much fished for – about the total cost of this birthday bash.
“Oh, we’ll try to get a discount from the hotel manager Mr Chow. Boon knows him well,” she laughed.
But the curious friends would not be satisfied. They began their own computations – the rental of the Orchid Room, the birthday cake, the magic show (the performer was a famous magician from Hong Kong), the birthday food for the children, the separate tables for the adults with the steaming curries and exotic delicacies, the balloons, the flowers, presents for every child.
Angela was busy supervising, moving about adroitly, checking on the hotel attendants recruited to help at this function, discussing some minor last-minute changes of plan with the hotel manager, greeting guests, acknowledging good wishes, patting the younger children on the heads and cheeks, exhorting everybody to eat and have a good time.
Minister’s granddaughter was there, a little girl attended by her amah. Angela pointed her out to her friends, remarking on her precocity. She looked now and then in the direction of Michael; she had instructed Mooi Lan to be near Michael and keep an eye on him. The boy appeared to be enjoying himself, she was glad to see. She saw him smiling at the antics of another boy and was relieved. Michelle she had no worries about. She saw her daughter surrounded by Gek Choo’s four little girls, animatedly talking to them and telling them stories.
Mark – Mark was her pride and joy. She saw him talking with the ease of self-assurance to his teachers and friends. She wished Minister could come; he had said he might be able to.
The children were hustled into another room for the magic show. Mark had indicated, in the course of planning the celebrations, that he did not want anything childish. He had been to children’s parties where there were magic shows with half-baked magicians who did silly tricks, spoke broken English and resorted to all sorts of cheap antics to make the children laugh.
The magician for his birthday party was different. He was professional and almost as good as the magicians Mark had seen in some TV shows. He had an efficient female assistant and the true magician’s paraphernalia of enormous trunks and chests, huge multi-coloured boxes, shining steel cages, a multitude of colourful balls, steel rings, hoops and kilometres of multi-coloured silks.
It was simply breath-taking.
I knew I wouldn’t regret it, thought Angela, looking round at the rapt faces with utmost satisfaction.
The magician levitated the female assistant amidst gasps, even from the adults. She rose three metres in the air, was then coaxed down slowly until she again rested, completely still, on the black-draped bed.
The applause was deafening.
“Time for tea now, everybody for tea!” cried Angela, clapping her hands with exuberance. “Darling, help see that everybody gets to eat,” she said to her husband. “Never mind Michael, dear. Mooi Lan is keeping an eye on him.”
She herself couldn’t eat a morsel, but the sight of the children surging towards the table
s, eager to sample the piles of cakes, ice creams, cookies, jellies and fried meats warmed her heart. She was glad of the air-conditioning system of the hotel (“one of the reasons why I chose the Hotel Grande”); it kept her make-up intact, for she perspired easily. Her pink silk suit remained uncrumpled, immaculate. She moved to the tables where the adults were gathered, making sure everybody was eating well. Gloria, Gloria’s mother and Wee Nam were enjoying the curries; she exhorted them to have more. She whispered to Gloria, “Would you like to take some back? There’s sure to be a lot left over; pity to leave it behind.”
She said the same thing to Wee Tiong as she passed him, and he nodded and forced a smile. She saw he was not his usual abrasive self. She could pity him. Poor man. That son of his was causing him a lot of heartache.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you all afternoon, but haven’t had the time,” she cried in girlish delight when she came upon Mee Kin, Dorothy and some of her colleagues. Their eyes travelled simultaneously over one another’s clothes and jewellery, while greetings and good-natured teasings were exchanged.
“Listen,” said Mee Kin. “You asked me about those porcelain cups and jars in your mother-in-law’s house. I think they may be very interesting specimens, worth looking at and restoring if necessary.”
“Don’t forget the antique auction at my apartment next Friday,” said Dorothy. She was the wealthiest; her husband owned two of Singapore’s hotels but she had grown fat, coarse and ugly and the enormous pieces of jewellery on the ear-lobes, wrists and fingers only served to accentuate the coarseness and vulgarity. Angela was glad she had more taste.
“That interesting heap of so-called ‘rubbish’ in your mother-in-law’s house,” pursued the indefatigable Mee Kin. “Why don’t we have a closer look at them? Some of the things may be worth saving. You never know!”
“You mentioned an old carved four-poster bed,” said Dorothy. “Well, my sister-in-law found the same thing in her grandmother’s house. It was practically rotting away, but she managed to save it and now it has pride of place in her house!”
The Catherine Lim Collection Page 5
