The Catherine Lim Collection

by Catherine Lim

  Gloria looked much better, and Angela commended her on her improved looks. She had brought more snapshots to show, and this time Michelle and Gek Choo’s four little girls monopolised them, passing them on to one another and chattering happily. Michelle spoke proudly of the Australian holiday she had taken with her parents and brothers. She said she too had picked apples from apple trees and ridden on a pony. The eldest of the four girls ran to her father and said petulantly, “Pa, why don’t you take us to Australia too? The only place we’ve been so far is Johore Bahru!”

  Wee Tiong laughed a short sharp laugh and said, “We can’t afford anything so expensive! You’re not as rich as your cousins, you know!”

  “Poor girls,” Angela said to Mee Kin later. “The furthest they have been to is Johore Bahru.” Old Mother had looked a little despondent at first, and Angela had confided to the visitors that somehow she had come to hear about Ah Siong and the Australian divorcee. But Angela and Boon had assured her that there was no Australian woman, and so she was not to worry at all. They were right on a technicality of course: The woman had left and Ah Siong was now alone, but deeply immersed in some religious pursuits, in a sect known as Brotherhood in Christ or something like that.

  They had not told the old one of the latest development; let her be spared the pain of the truth of this wayward son, the son on whom she pinned all her hopes.

  There was animated chatter about the wastrel son, out of the hearing of Old Mother. In this, there was a semblance of camaraderie among them, and several times Wee Tiong and Gek Choo nodded in agreement as Angela spoke spiritedly against the youngest brother-in-law who had, to date, spent at least $100,000 in Australia without having anything to show for it.

  The subject was changed when Boon returned. He apologised for being unable to join them for lunch, as he had to rush off to attend a Rotary lunch meeting. He was not in the best of spirits. Angela tried to distract attention from him for Boon was not one to hide his feelings and just now his moroseness had a dampening effect on conversation and caused everyone to stop talking and sit by in uneasy silence. Angela knew the cause; Minister had seemed to be less pleased with her husband of late, and had shown it in a variety of ways. The proposal for membership in Parliament seemed too long in coming, and might not come at all for Minister was now known to be looking around elsewhere. It was most distressing. Poor Boon, troubles did not come singly for him. The Restaurant Horiatis of which he had a share was not doing well; there were plans to close it down. Those stupid Indonesian businessmen. Boon should never have trusted them in the first place, thought Angela. A distraction presented itself – not exactly what Angela would have wished for, but at least it had the effect of turning attention away from

  her morose husband who sat chain-smoking and looking absently into space. There was a clamour at the door, and Ah Kum Soh walked in, followed by her idiot son who went up to Old Mother, making a lot of noise and then looked round for Michael. The boy came bounding down the stairs and the idiot one gurgled with delight. Old Mother smiled too, and began bustling round in the kitchen to provide lunch for the new visitors, as they had not yet eaten.

  “Mooi Lan, get the food on the table. Don’t let Old Mother do it, she’ll only mess things up, and then you’ll have more cleaning up to do in the end,” Angela whispered with urgency. She herself went into the kitchen to help Mooi Lan. She hoped the wretched day would soon be over.

  “Mooi Lan! Wait! That’s beef, it’s for the children’s dinner tonight,” cried Angela, surprised at the girl’s absentminded-ness. Mooi Lan had gone upstairs with a cup of hot coffee for Boon, had then come down and bungled things.

  “My God, not the beef,” cried Angela with some irritation, “Have you forgotten, Mooi Lan, that dreadful fuss, just two days after she came here to stay? I don’t want anything of that sort to happen again.”

  It was an unfortunate incident. They were all having dinner together and there was a plate of fried beef and vegetables, Mark’s favourite. Old Mother had realised that it was beef only when the tips of her chopsticks picked up a piece. She dropped the piece of beef in a hurry, dropped the chopsticks too for they were now contaminated and picking up her bowl of rice, went into the kitchen in a fit of pique where she sat by herself at a small table, finishing the rest of her food with a new pair of chopsticks. From that day she kept her utensils and chopsticks separately in a corner of her cupboard, bringing them out only at meal-times.

  “Would you believe such eccentricity, such unreasonableness?” she had asked Mee Kin, but at the time, she calmly told her family to go on eating and to finish the meal. She then made arrangements for the family to eat together only on non-beef days; on steak days, the children had dinner early or ate in a separate part of the house.

  “If she were like Mee Kin’s mother,” said Angela wearily, “I wouldn’t have to resort to such ridiculous arrangements. Imagine my poor children not being able to eat beef in their own house!”

  “Grandma, why don’t you eat beef?” the innocent Michelle had asked one evening, going to her grandmother who was sitting by herself in the room.

  “I’ll tell you a story,” said Old Mother, and she smiled when she saw Michael sit down on the floor beside his sister, at her feet.

  “A very, very long time ago, a man died, and his soul went up to the Almighty God in Heaven. Now he would have to be reborn and come back to live on earth, and the Almighty God was not sure whether to send him back to earth as a human being, an animal or an insect.

  ‘I know, I’ll send you back to earth as a cow,’ said the Almighty. At this, the man began to weep and protest loudly.

  ‘Not as a cow,’ he wept. ‘A cow’s life is the most miserable. It works all day in the fields, ploughing, drawing up water. It is not given any rest, andwhen it can no longer work, its master takes it to the slaughter house and with a long knife, cuts off his head, so that its flesh can be eaten!’

  The man wept for a long time, but the Almighty said, ‘No, no, that is a very unfair thing to say. Man is not so ungrateful a creature. He will never work an animal, then kill it for its flesh.’ The man was finally convinced by the Almighty. So he was reborn and came back to earth as a cow. The poor cow, from the moment it was capable of work, was made to work from morning till night. But it bore all its sufferings patiently, thinking to itself, ‘Never mind, when I can no longer work, I shall die peacefully as the Almighty has promised.’ But one day, when the cow was no longer capable of work in the fields, its master brought it to the slaughter house. The animal wept, big tears rolled down from its eyes, but the master had no pity. As the big knife descended on its neck, it let off a piteous howl, a howl of pain so powerful it pierced the sky and reached the ears of the Almighty. The Almighty covered up his ears to stop the painful cry, and then in a loud angry voice he said, ‘I did not know man could be such an ungrateful creature! From this very day I forbid all my followers to touch the flesh of a cow!’”

  Michael and Michelle listened entranced. Mark, to whom Michelle later told the story, said it differed significantly from the legend of the cow that he had read in his book of Chinese legends. They were beautiful legends, beautifully illustrated. Angela had read all of them and enjoyed them. Why, Angela wondered with some sadness, had beautiful legends like the legend of the cow translated into clumsy, unreasonable superstitions that made life more difficult for others?

  Chapter 15

  “You look carefully,” said Old Mother. “You look carefully at the moon and you will see a woman. She’s the lady of the moon. She washes her hair in the water of a stream, then dries it, and sticks a jade comb in it. A comb of real jade – not like mine, which has only a small pinhead of jade.” And she good-humouredly removed the jade pin from the knot of hair at the back of her head to show the children.

  Michelle giggled, clapped her hands to her mouth, looked to her mother and giggled again. Then she listened intently to her grandmother. She liked listening to stories. Every day in school,
she asked her teachers for stories.

  “The lady of the moon combs her hair and sings. She is tired of her jade comb. She wants another one – a gold one. And she invites the man on the other side of the moon to come. If he wants to marry her, he must bring a gold comb. That will make her very happy.”

  “Are there really people on the moon?” asked Michelle.

  “The lady of the moon – last time you told us she tried to cross a river on her small feet and she drowned,” said Michael, and the clarity in his voice and the sweetness of his face brought a catch to Angela’s throat as she sat, watching the children listening to their grandmother while Mooi Lan cleared the dinner things in the kitchen. He never speaks to me with that clarity and sweetness, she thought sadly. My poor Michael. How can I get him to be like the other two?

  “The moon’s an uninhabited planet. It’s waterless. The conditions there are not fit for human habitation. Nobody can live there,” said Mark with eldest-brother hauteur. He hated to see his younger brother and sister listen to nonsense and superstition. Once he wrote a composition on ‘Superstitions’ which won him first prize in an inter-school essay-writing competition. In it, he wrote:

  My grandmother believes that an eclipse of the moon is caused by a dragon trying to swallow the moon! She beats two tin cans together, very loudly, to scare the dragon away and so save the moon. When there is a flash of lightning in the sky, my grandmother makes quick motions with her lips, pressing them together, with funny ‘pup-pup-pup’ sounds. In this way, she is swallowing the power of the lightning which will make her stronger and more virtuous! My grandmother says that to dream of human excreta is a sign of coming luck.

  Michelle, who read all her brother’s compositions so that she could talk to her friends about them, had asked what human excreta was, and had then asked, “Why didn’t you write just ‘shit’, Mark? It’s easier,” but her brother had merely said, “Don’t be crude” and taken back the composition book from her.

  Mark had won first prize.

  “The lady of the moon drowned because with her very small feet, she couldn’t cross the bridge over the river,” said Old Mother. “But the man on the other side of the moon sent a big band of silk – with many colours, silver, pink, purple. The lady clung to the silk and was saved.”

  “How can she cling to the silk if she’s drowned?” asked Michelle.

  “She came to life, when she saw the band of silk,” said Michael. ‘The man on the other side of the moon gave her not one gold comb, but two – the second one was actually silver, washed him gold like Grandma’s belt. It looks like gold, but actually it’s only silver, washed in gold.”

  Old Mother laughed. She touched Michael on the cheek and laughed again. She laughed so rarely it came almost as a shock to Angela, listening, watching, but, thought Angela, better to have her talking nonsense and laughing than moping and complaining to the gossipy neighbours.

  Dear God, if only Michael would talk to me like that, she thought sadly.

  “There was an old man. He lived in a temple on the top of a mountain – ” said Old Mother.

  “Another story – good,” said Michelle, hugging her knees.

  “An old man with skin like yellow paper and teeth yellower than mine,” and Old Mother showed her teeth, brown stumps where they were not gold. Michael laughed and said, “Aiya, Grandma. You are funny!” The hours went by, but Old Mother, as if to make up for her long days of sullen silence, went on and on in garrulous good humour. The clatter in the kitchen ceased. Mooi Lan came out, neat in spite of the cleaning up, and brought Angela her cup of coffee.

  Angela whispered, “In one of her rare good moods. Storytelling. Watch,” and Mooi Lan bent over and whispered back, “She was like this yesterday evening, too – when you were out for your mahjong game. Doctor, like you, was amused. He said to me, ‘Have the children done their homework? Are they going to listen to stories all night?’ But he was rather pleased, like you. Such a relief from the usual complaints and curses!”

  The two women smiled, conspiratorially.

  “This woman – she was very devoted to her mother-in-law.”

  Another story. The children were rapt or rather, Michael and Michelle were rapt, Michelle still giggling. Mark had abruptly left. He thought he knew what the story was going to be about. If it was the stupid one about the stupid lady who gave suck to her old mother-in-law out of a sense of filial piety, he would scream – he hated that one – it filled him with intense loathing because of what they had told him when he was only a small boy, but which he had never forgotten. His mother had later told him that what he heard wasn’t true, but it remained with him, the hateful story, and any reminder of the incident – he didn’t care whether it was true or made up – filled him with shame and anger. If his friends in school heard about it, he would die of shame.

  “This woman – she had true filial piety,” said Old Mother, and while the two children listened, rapt, Angela stiffened, anticipating the veiled insults. The old one was always hurling insults at her, but these were always veiled, oblique. She was not a child, she could feel the barbs instantly.

  “This woman – she said to the mosquitoes, come and bite me, all of you. Bite me till my body is bumpy all over. But do not bite my old mother-in-law. So the mosquitoes had their fill of her and left the mother-in-law alone. And in the cold winter season, when the mattress was as ice to the body, she lay on it for hours, taking the cold into her own body and letting out the warmth, so that her old mother-in-law could sleep on a warm bed.

  And then there came famine and starvation. People were eating the roots and bark of trees. This woman had no food, but there was a little milk in her, and so she lifted her blouse and invited her old mother-in-law to come and suck at her breast, to take nourishment from whatever was left in her body – ”

  Mark, sitting not too far away, though apparently absorbed in the Book of Scientific Knowledge, made sounds of intense irritation.

  His mother went up to him and bent over him, protectively. “Never mind, darling,” she said. “She’s old. She’s old and superstitious and talks nonsense. She also wants to imply that I’m not a good daughter-in-law. Never mind that stupid story. What Kheem Chae told you wasn’t true. It wasn’t you she tried to feed that night. It was one of the other grandchildren – ”

  “DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT IT!” The tears had sprung to the boy’s eyes. He had once, on a visit to Haw Par Villa, seen the whole pantheon of gods, goddesses and mythological figures. Everything had filled him with delight and fascination – the gods in heaven, the demons in hell – until the obscene figurines of the young lady lifting her blouse to suckle her white-haired mother-in-law crouching at her feet – the boy had turned away, embarrassed, confused, and then the hateful story that she had tried to feed him that night when he was crying for his mother and she didn’t know how to stop him crying had blended with the obscene image and caused intense shame. He saw the withered breast, himself pulling at it – and he threw up. It was no use now telling him it was another baby, not him. Mark ran out of the room.

  Michael leaned against his grandmother’s knee and gurgled. “Look at my bangle,” said Old Mother, and the two children came closer to study the band of solid jade round her left wrist.

  “You see the bright green of this bangle, except for the few pale specks here and there?”

  “Yes, I see,” said Michael.

  “Well, when I first bought the bangle 20 years ago, it was all pale, not bright green,” said Old Mother. “Then as I wore it, it became greener and greener. The green spread. That means luck. That means the goodness is coming out of my body, through the pores of my hand, and making the bangle green, bright green. I’m going to be lucky! I’m going to buy a lottery ticket tomorrow, and win the first prize!”

  Michael gazed at her rapt. “And what will you do with your money?”

  “I shall give half to your uncle Siong in Australia (Old Mother said ‘Ow-say-lyah’). Then I shall us
e some to send Ah Bock to China. They tell me there’s a clever surgeon there who can cut open his head and remove the water there. It’s the water in his head that makes him like this. Otherwise he’s all right.”

  “I don’t like Uncle Bock, Grandma. He frightens me,” said Michelle petulantly. “When he talks, saliva falls out, and he makes loud, frightening noises. And Daddy says his disease is congenital. That means he was born an idiot.”

  “Can the surgeon take the water out of his head?” asked Michael. “Can I go with him to China, Grandma? I can take care of him. He doesn’t frighten me. Michelle is silly, to be so easily frightened.”

  “And with some of the money, I shall buy a coffin for Kheem Chae,” said Old Mother. “She lost all her money. Now she has no money to buy a proper coffin – the real type of coffin, not the useless kind. It costs a lot of money.”

  “But Kheem Chae isn’t dead yet,” said Michelle. “Anyway, where is she, Grandma?”

  Old Mother’s eyes filled with tears. “In the old death-house,” she said. “In the old death-house where death is too long in coming. I shall be going there, too. It’s not too far away. Two buses from here. I know how to get there.”

  “Oh, Grandma, don’t die!” There was panic in the boy’s voice as he jumped up and clasped his grandmother’s knee.

  “Yes, I will die, and there’ll be nobody to care, nobody to burn joss-sticks and paper for me,” said Old Mother, suddenly overcome by self-pity.

  Enough was enough.

  “Time for bed, children,” said Angela with severe restraint. “Michael, have you done your homework? There’s a spelling test tomorrow, isn’t there?” But the boy had withdrawn, again, into his secret world of private agonies and confusions.

  “I ... I ...” he stuttered. Then tears filled his eyes. His mother thought, For God’s sake, when will it end? When can I remove him from her influence? But now she smiled with an enormous effort and said, “Never mind, Michael darling. Mummy will help you with the spelling tomorrow morning, before school. Will that be okay, darling?”