The Catherine Lim Collection

by Catherine Lim

  How could it be explained, except by the presence of a dead rat in the house or a dead cat outside whose odour the wind wafted in through the window at the time of our talking about grandmother? But we were, all at once, aware of a powerful smell.

  I had heard of people smelling jasmine at the precise moment of the death of a loved one, but this smell was frightful. It lasted more than two or three minutes, during which we shifted and sniffed uncomfortably.

  Someone whispered, “She’s here,” and then broke into the same chant of propitiation that had been uttered days before in front of the altar.

  Of Blood from Woman

  “May she vomit blood on her death-bed, and may she then die!”

  The curse, rendered in English, loses a great deal of its alarming vehemence; there probably are not words enough in the English language to convey the sheer force of Chinese vituperations. It is the totality of facial expression, the physical act of dragging the words out, as of a monstrous birth, and above all, of the whole force of tradition going back to countless generations, that invests each image with a power and a terror that cannot be explained by meaning alone.

  “May she vomit blood on her death-bed, and may she then die!”

  I remember the utterance, made amidst great convulsive sobs by a young woman against an elderly woman who had done everything in her power to thwart her husband’s taking in this young woman as his second wife. The weeping woman was standing in front of an ancestral altar; by thus inviting the spirits to bear witness, she had put the stamp of irrevocability on the curse.

  Sometimes, for the same purpose, a curse was uttered in the presence of thunder and lightning. The picture of a dying man or woman spewing blood – that was one of the most terrifying images of my childhood.

  I once heard of a coffin that somehow slipped the grasp of the pallbearers so that it crashed to the ground, burst open and threw out the corpse, a very fat old woman. And I had read somewhere of a degenerate English king whose deceased, bloated corpse had to be squeezed into the coffin which actually burst open in the church itself, flooding the church floor with blood.

  All these images had fused in my fervid imagination into a scene of the most frightful kind, and for a long time blood became associated with all that was sinister and direful.

  I had an aunt who had attended, though never participated, in seances with the dead at gravesides. The purpose of calling up the dead was often to seek their help in getting the winning numbers of lotteries. Aunt was an inveterate gambler and claimed that she had won on several occasions with the numbers given by the spirits.

  What did they look like? Very often you could not see them distinctly, said Aunt. Once she saw a faint colour of smoke, and another time, she felt a strange indescribable chill overcome her and heard a kind of rasping voice.

  How were the spirits called up? What had to be done first? Blood, said Aunt. The blood of a white cockerel freshly slaughtered at the graveside. This was absolutely indispensable. The blood was then poured through a hollow bamboo stick stuck near the grave, certain prayers were chanted and the spirit would then rise.

  Blood to make a man die, blood to bring him money – and blood to make him a good husband. For blood from woman was the most potent, it was claimed, to make a man love you and treat you well.

  I had often been fascinated by this method of securing a man’s love; a woman, desperate for the charm to work, actually made use of each monthly emission. The blood was mixed in food which was then offered to the unsuspecting object of desire. The charm was said to be the most potent of all the charms to win the total love of a husband or lover.

  I remember that there was a half-Thai woman who lived in the town for a while; an old, fat, gross-looking woman whose mouth and teeth were a permanent bright red from the betel nut and sireh she was always chewing. She had had three husbands; her fourth was 13 years younger – a handsome, quiet and refined fellow who had a good job in some government department and who never looked at another woman. The half-Thai woman, complacent in this man’s total love and devotion, made no secret of the means by which this subjection to her will had been secured, and actually taught other women how to go about achieving the same happiness.

  As a girl, I could not see beyond the bizarre element of this charm; it was only later that I saw its terrifying symbolism. Woman, who had always been held as inferior and was expected to be subject to her menfolk – her father, her brothers and later her husband – and who during her menstrual period was regarded as so unclean that any major disaster was attributed to her failure to stay away during this period of uncleanliness, was now having her revenge. She was having a secret and malicious chuckle against men who wanted her body but blamed it for misfortunes that happened to them. Fishermen would never allow a woman near if they wanted a successful expedition; timber-loggers venturing into the vast wilds where spirits dwelt in every tree, would never permit the contaminating presence of a woman.

  And now, said the woman with a secret glee, you who would have my body but condemn it as unclean, drink this or eat this! The half-Thai woman embodied, in the most revolting way, this dark triumph of woman. She spoke in a rough, raucous voice to her husband, demanded his full pay packet and if he so much as looked at another woman, berated him soundly and hurled obscenities at him. He took it all meekly; people shook their heads knowingly and spoke of the secret source of the woman’s power.

  Perhaps only once in her life was blood of woman not considered evil, but actually good and even capable of driving away harmful spirits. Hymeneal blood, ultimate proof of chastity on her marriage bed, and captured on a clean white piece of linen, was reverently stored and put away, its presence thereby repelling evil and attracting prosperity for her husband and harmony for the household.

  Lee Geok Chan

  Lee Geok Chan was one of my students in pre-university. One of the many for whom long hours of study ensured, at most, a scraping through the examinations. She was a pale, small-sized, earnest-looking girl, always seen with a book or a sheaf of notes in her hand. Her father was a tailor, her mother a washerwoman; there were three brothers and two sisters. Geok Chan was the second in the family and the eldest girl.

  Her desire to pass the examination, get a job and help the family put her in a constant state of nervous effort, so that she was to be found at all times blinking anxiously as she took down a teacher’s lecture verbatim, copying notes from the blackboard with extreme diligence, or writing an essay with a concentration all the more remarkable for the noise and complete abandon of those around her in the classroom.

  I always found it painful to have to tell Geok Chan, in response to her timid inquiry of how she could improve in her written expression, that her English was rather weak, her use of words frequently inappropriate, and that she often strayed off the point in her essay. She would nod in docile agreement, but at the same time the disappointment showed visibly on her face. Additional lessons did not seem to have helped and each week it became a special pain for me to hand back a piece of work, to see it snatched up eagerly and checked for its grade, and then to see the crestfallen look on the thin, pale face.

  Like so many others, Geok Chan was preparing for the A-level examinations at the end of the year. In the last month before the examination, she often came up to me with a quick nervous smile and handed me a sheaf of essays to mark.

  One of the essays caught my attention. It was better than the others; in fact, it was the best she had ever written, and there was hope yet, for her, if she could produce something like that in the examination. I forget the exact words of the essay topic she had picked from somewhere, but it was about happiness. Geok Chan had written simply and with conviction about her concept of happiness; some parts of the essay were, I thought, beautifully lyrical. I suddenly realized that, freed from the constraints of conventional essay topics, she wrote with ease and obvious pleasure.

  I called her up and commented favourably on her essay. She glowed with pride.
“If I write like that in the General Paper, will I get a credit?” she wanted to know. I had to warn her, rather sadly, that the essay topics in the General Paper were not of the kind that permitted this spontaneity. I encouraged her, though, to go on expressing her innermost feelings.

  “They’re in me all the time. I couldn’t express them before, now I think I can,” she said, blinking not with nervousness but, instead, with a kind of feverish joy.

  On the morning of the essay paper, Geok Chan was killed in a road accident. She was walking along the pavement just outside the school and was about to enter the school gates when a lorry came racing along, crazily jumped the road divider and crashed into her. She died instantly. It was the most cruel death I had ever known; my colleagues and I wept long for this earnest, good girl who had always tried her best and whose only ambition was to earn enough to support her family.

  The essay on happiness that had astonished me by its power and lyricism lay, among a pile of unmarked papers on my desk, almost like a keepsake, for she had collected all the other essays, and had somehow left this one with me. When I went to see her parents, who were too grieved to say anything, I brought this composition with me and handed it to her eldest brother, who just put it aside with her other school things heaped on a little wooden table in the small two-room HDB flat.

  The recollection of that small body under sheets of newspapers on the road disturbed me for many days afterwards. The blood had flowed copiously; it was a moment’s glance before I turned away and quickly walked back to the staff room from where we had been summoned by the frantic cries of those students who had witnessed the dreadful accident. But the scene stayed in my mind for days, and it was inevitable that some of us would have had dreams about Lee Geok Chan in our sleep.

  I dreamt that she approached me with a poem on sorrow or something like that and asked me to grade it. Another colleague dreamt of her exactly as she was that day, under the newspapers on a wet road just in front of the school gate.

  In the bustle of a new school year when new eager faces crowded the school corridors, Lee Geok Chan was soon forgotten. Occasionally, however, something or other cropped up to remind us of her and then we recollected that terrible day in December.

  One occasion was the release of the examination results in March. Students started coming to the school very early in the morning, as soon as they had learnt from the newspaper that the Ministry of Education would be releasing the results that day. The computer print-out with Geok Chan’s name showed the grades for these subjects – History, Chinese Language and the General Paper. She had obtained a credit in Chinese Language, but had failed for History and the General Paper.

  There had to be a mistake regarding the General Paper – how could there have been a grade for that subject? Geok Chan was killed before she could sit for the paper. Her death was in the morning; the paper was at two in the afternoon.

  It was a very low grade, in fact the lowest on the scale. If a computer had to make a mistake about one who was already dead, some of us laughed uneasily, surely it could have erred on the side of generosity?

  Geok Chan’s elder brother came to collect the results slip, which he did desultorily, without a glance at the statements on the slip, and was gone almost immediately.

  I first of all ascertained from the Minister of Education that there had been no mistake in the printout; then I wrote a very polite letter to the Cambridge Syndicate of Examiners, asking them to explain why the essay of the candidate Lee Geok Chan had obtained such a low grade. It was a laborious process involving excessive red tape, for there were certain formalities to be gone through, including the payment of a stipulated sum of money.

  It took Cambridge a month to reply. I received a plain official statement on how the candidate had gone entirely out of point in the essay section, for she had written a piece on happiness when there was no essay topic even remotely resembling this. The statement added that by itself the essay was commendable for its expressiveness and strength of feeling, but since it was written in total disregard of the given examination topics, it could not be awarded any marks.

  The mounting sensation of excitement and terror that gripped me as I read the statement was something I had never experienced before. It was impossible to contain the thoughts that were now crowding my mind, and I soon found myself in urgent consultation with my colleagues. It cannot be, it cannot be, we said again and again. And yet again and again, no matter how hard we tried, no matter how many theories we tested, there was no accounting for the fact that the essay which had been sent to Cambridge together with thousands of other essays, and which had been marked and given a grade, was the essay of a dead student.

  Unable to let things lie, I wrote to Cambridge again and requested, urgently, to have the essay script of candidate Lee Geok Chan returned. I added that I was prepared to pay any amount of money that the authorities might deem reasonable to compensate them for their pains.

  Probably fearing that a move of this kind could set the precedent for anxious parents or teachers intending to fine-toothcomb a marked script and argue for a better grade, the Cambridge Syndicate turned down the request. It had never been and would never be their policy to return marked scripts to candidates. All they were prepared to do was furnish a statement about the script, and they had already done this.

  But this is no ordinary script, a dead person wrote it, I wanted to cry out in exasperation when I read the reply. Then I realized how nearly impossible it would be to give this explanation in the circumscribed language of formal correspondence. I tried, though, so eager was I to get to the bottom of it all, but after a while Cambridge chose not to reply to my requests, probably dismissing me as a crank.

  I almost pleaded with them to send me a typewritten copy of the candidate’s essay, so that the marking and grading of the script could remain confidential, but they must have misinterpreted the tone of the letter and taken offence, for they finally wrote back to say that they would no longer entertain any correspondence on the subject.

  I tried to enlist the help of Geok Chan’s family, but it was to no avail. The elder brother had been posted to some other town; the younger brothers and sisters did not seem able to understand me and the parents spoke only a dialect I could not comprehend. In any case, they were still too sorrowful to do much beyond shaking their heads mournfully or raising their voices to curse the driver of the lorry that had killed their daughter.

  It is now more than 10 years since Lee Geok Chan died. I am not satisfied with the explanation that my colleagues finally settled on. A coincidence, they said, somebody’s essay was mistaken for Geok Chan’s; after all, there were thousands of essays to be graded and confusions of this kind were not at all surprising.

  But the topic was so specific. It was on happiness, I protested, the very same topic she wrote on just before the accident. And the qualities of freshness and expressiveness were precisely those I had noted in that last essay she showed me. That could not have been a coincidence; there must have been a mistake then, said some of my colleagues. A coincidence, a mistake – the words threw a blanket over all that remains, to this day, a mystery.

  Two Male Children

  The house bulged with people. If there were too many people, it was not the consequence of want but choice, for the patriarch had insisted that all the married sons continue to stay in the family house while married daughters could leave if they so wished.

  He had grown up in China, where married sons and their families stayed with the parents. But whereas over there a certain amount of privacy was afforded by the separating courtyards, here the families piled into the rooms of two adjoining double-storeyed shophouses, the dividing wall of which had been torn down to form one continuous unit.

  The old patriarch was very rich, for he had invested shrewdly in coconut and rubber plantations and owned row upon row of shophouses in town. But he had fixed ideas about how money was to be spent, and comfortable living conditions were not one of the
m. At a time when much less affluent families were buying Dunlopillo mattresses and pillows, refrigerators and even Ford cars, he was still sleeping on cotton-stuffed mattresses and the women in his household were depending solely on wooden food-cupboards with wire-netting doors and legs standing in thick earthen bowls filled with water to prevent the ants from getting at the cooked food kept in the cupboards.

  As for cars, he clearly had no intention of owning any or allowing his three sons who were helping him in his business to own any. He was sole proprietor of a fleet of buses which brought him a very good income, and he gave his relatives, who numbered hundreds, free bus passes.

  The patriarch was by no means niggardly; in matters concerning male progeny he could be astonishingly extravagant, His three sons produced no male children; every year saw a new granddaughter or two and the old man was heard to snort in disgust each time he received news of yet one more granddaughter. He had given his wife thousands of dollars to spend on prayers, good deeds, ceremonial offerings and so on, recommended by temple priests and mediums for the begetting of a grandson. But the money had been futilely spent, and in the end, the old man resigned himself to the prospect of a very long wait for a grandson.

  His remark that the biggest share of the property would go to the first grandson was construed as a warning by the three sons and had immediately set in motion an almost frenzied contest among the three daughters-in-law to see who would be the first to produce the male heir. At any one time, one of the three would be pregnant, but the fecundity was all in the direction of female offspring. There was much hidden animosity among the three women, though they shared the work harmoniously enough in the huge smoky kitchen.