The Catherine Lim Collection
Page 32
Further dredging in the mine of her vocabulary is necessary to throw up more glistening nuggets of laudation, and by the time the writer has finished writing the reply to the Ministry of Cultural Development, typed it and sealed it for posting, it is replete with the most profuse thanks for the signal honour.
The writer spends the next month working on the story to be presented. It is the most demanding task she has yet set herself, but the result is something she is extremely satisfied with. She has succeeded in writing the story that is uniquely Singaporean, the story against which all future attempts at Singapore writing will be judged for inculcation of national pride and fervour.
But some quarters are not pleased. The writer receives letters, the tone of which ranges from mild admonition to distinct displeasure.
The Unit for the Revitalisation of Mother Tongues (URMT) writes:
Dear Catherine Lim,
We have read your story and are pleased to note that all the characters speak Mandarin. This reflects well on the efforts of URMT. However, we note that the parrot on Page 3 speaks dialect, i.e. Hokkien. It is described as sitting in its cage in the sitting room squawking Hokkien proverbs, idioms, and some obscenities. This may be construed as the Xiu family being insincere in their efforts to speak Mandarin at all times, secretly speaking their dialect at home; how otherwise could the bird have picked up Hokkien? Therefore, we would be pleased if you could make the necessary correction.
Catherine Lim replies:
Dear Sir,
I am in full agreement with you that the reference to the parrot speaking Hokkien will give people the wrong impression that dialect is still being spoken at home. I shall accordingly make the parrot curse in Mandarin. There will be the consequent loss of colour and flavour, for Hokkien curses cannot be matched in their virulence and power. But in the national interest, this literary advantage will be willingly foregone.
The writer receives the following letter from the Department for the Enhancement of True Asian Culture (DETAC)
Dear Catherine Lim,
We would like to draw your attention to a certain detail in your story, of which you may not be aware. There is a vivid description of a spittoon on Pages 11-13. Moreover, you describe, in equally vivid detail, the early morning ablutions of the Old Patriarch, in which there is much loud and laboured gathering of phlegm in the throat prior to emission into the spittoon. We would like to suggest to you that the spittoon is not an artefact that one would select for the projection of Asian cultural refinement. Could you not think of some other artefact?’
Catherine Lim replies:
Dear Sir,
I’m sorry that you do not like the spittoon in my story. I have to beg your understanding for its retention, as it is central to the plot of the story. The removal of the spittoon, together with all the activities of the Old Patriarch connected with it, will irreparably destroy the unity of the story and cause it to lose its focus. I did indeed try to replace the spittoon with the French commode, this being the only other portable artefact I could think of (portability being an absolutely essential ingredient in the plot), but I had to abandon the device, as I think the intrusion of a foreign contraption would harm the Asianness of the story. Therefore I would be most grateful if you would let me retain my spittoon.
On your point that a spittoon may be a demeaning reference to Asian culture, may I make bold to point out, Sir, that at a recent Christie’s auction in London, a spittoon from an imperial bedchamber was sold for $1.2 million. It was described as exemplifying the finest in the art of that period.
DETAC replies:
‘Dear Catherine Lim,
We accept your explanation for wishing to retain the spittoon in your story. However, we would insist that instead of making it a cheap enamel spittoon, you upgrade it to porcelain.’
Catherine Lim replies:
Dear Sir,
I am very happy with your suggestion that I upgrade my spittoon. I have made the necessary revision, and the spittoon is now no longer cheap enamel but fine porcelain. Moreover, the inside rim is inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
The Department of the Inculcation of True Moral Values (DITMOV) writes:
Dear Catherine Lim,
We have just fine-combed your story and found, to our satisfaction, that the Asian value of Filial Piety is dominant. May we congratulate you on your awareness of this important Asian value. It is precisely because it is so important that the examples and illustrations provided must have maximum impact. We have found that the examples in your stories are too weak. May we suggest that you bring in the well-known Confucian story of ‘The Young Man and the Mosquitoes’. In case you are not aware of the tale (and clearly you are not, otherwise you would not have omitted it in your story in the first place), may we briefly tell it: There was a young farmer who was extremely filial to his old mother. He was so filial that every evening, he would take off his shirt, and exposing his bare body, call out in a loud voice, ‘Oh, mosquitoes, Oh, mosquitoes, please come and bite me. Bite me all you want, have your fill of me!’
Now when the mosquitoes had had their fill of him, they left his mother alone, so that every night, she could sleep undisturbed.
We suggest that you take note of this most inspiring anecdote, give it a Singapore context, and incorporate it in your story.
Catherine Lim replies:
Dear Sir,
What a wonderful story that was. It was a serious omission on my part, but now I have made up for my negligence by incorporating the anecdote fully into my story. I have described in detail the swarm of mosquitoes, and the vicious bites and welts they left on the filial young man’s body. I have also taken the liberty to add a detail that was not found in the original Confucian tale, namely, that the young man slept with a cherubic smile on his face, that reflected the deep satisfaction and peace experienced as a result of filial piety.
DITMOV writes back:
Dear Catherine Lim,
A cherub belongs to Western culture. Please delete the reference from your story.
Catherine Lim replies:
Dear Sir,
I have replaced “cherubic’ with ‘fairy-like’. Fairies belong to both Western and Asian cultures.
Catherine Lim then gets a letter from the Ministry of Environment:
Dear Catherine Lim,
We are not happy with the reference to swarms of mosquitoes in your story. This is a gross inaccuracy. There are hardly any mosquitoes in Singapore today, owing to the assiduous cleaning up operations of our Ministry. We would therefore urge you to remove that anecdote from your story; otherwise Singapore will have a very poor image as a dumping ground.
Catherine Lim replies:
Dear Sir,
I am really at a loss about what to do. Could you please liaise with the Department for the Inculcation of True Moral Values and let me know of your joint decision? Needless to say, I will go by that joint decision.’
The Ministry of Environment and DITMOV reply:
Dear Catherine Lim,
After much discussion, we have both agreed on a compromise. The anecdote may be retained but ‘mosquitoes’ should be replaced by any insect whose presence, even in swarms, does not reflect poorly on the hygiene of a country. Needless to say, flies, lice, bugs, ticks, fleas, leeches and chiggers are OUT.
Catherine Lim replies:
Dear Sir,
Will bees do? There are some Chinese legends which show bees in a very favourable light. In fact, there is one in which the Queen Bee is a reincarnation of a most august warrior princess.
The Ministry of Environment and DITMOV reply:
Dear Catherine Lim,
Bees are okay.
Catherine Lim sighs with relief. The story is finished at last. With much trepidation, it is presented at the International Writers’ Conference in Oslo. Alas, to Catherine Lim’s intense disappointment, it receives no prize. Indeed, it is not even deemed fit for the Honourable Mention list. The writer is crestfallen and
is about to rush out to send a telegram home, apologising for failing her country, when her attention is suddenly drawn to the words of the chief judge on the flower-bedecked, light-filled stage.
“We must make special mention of the entry from Singapore. Although it has not been placed, we must congratulate the writer for a story that was so unique as to defy all easy categorisation for judgement. It makes use of disparate elements, so disparate and opposed that it has required a feat of imagination to pull them together into a story. The concrete and the abstract, the real and the imaginary, myth and fact, the arcane and the ordinary – all these have been brought together in a narrative mode that fits no existing category. For instance, there is a reference to a spittoon, mysteriously crafted so that while it serves some mundane purpose, its interior remains pure inlaid mother-of-pearl, And there is a strange bird that is a mixture of earthiness and ethereality, of the crude sounds of the earth as well as the brooding silences of heaven. The symbolism is tantalising, and has so far eluded the judges. We would like to say that the fact that the Singapore entry has not been placed does not reflect on its quality; it simply reflects the judges’ inability to comprehend its full meaning. Therefore, it is our pleasure to award a special prize to the Singapore participant, a prize for creating a new genre of the short story, and for opening up new vistas for creative exploration which we hope other writers will be inspired to emulate!”
The Woman’s Book of Superlatives
Prologue: Images
I listen and hear her voice which she tries to keep steady with resoluteness of purpose but which is dangerously close to a sob.
“You held out your hand for an egg,” she says, “and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned a great lesson: how to endure without a sob.”
And it is invariably at this point that I see her tilt her head backwards, a simple action which has the marvellously manifold function of suppressing the sob, setting a final stamp of defiance on her little speech and preventing the secret tears from spilling out of her eyes.
This admonition to women saddens me. It conjures up for me images of suffering women for all time, beginning with, appropriately, that of the female skeleton in a Stone Age settlement with a stake driven through where the heart was, and a little pile of bones between the parted skeleton legs. The archaeologist’s surmise was that the woman had been found by her husband to be with child, not his, and in the tribe’s ritual of punishment reserved for such faithlessness, he had driven the stake through her and the child out of her in a simultaneous panging of birth and death.
I see also the Victorian woman in long black dress, gaunt after eight child births and soon to die from her ninth, and the Chinese peasant woman, sick with anxiety as the mid-wife pulls out other yet another girl-child, and she knows she has lost the last chance to redeem herself with her husband.
A woman’s fears are inseparable from her fecundity; she dies in childbirth, in more than one sense of the word.
And now I see the Indian Suttee Woman, the African Infibulated Woman, the Chinese Bound Feet Woman. Sarojini, hair streaming, in her widow’s white sari, leaps into the flames engulfing her husband’s corpse as it lies on the pile of wood, and after her, a whole line-up of white-clad widows, freed from this barbarous custom, but burning themselves in perpetual suttee in their extreme poverty and isolation. Onika, the girl-child whose lips are sewn together for a man’s pleasurable bursting on the wedding night, and which will be sewn up again, whenever he is absent as assurance of his exclusive rights to her body. My great grandmother who is told to kneel down before the ancestral altars in thanksgiving for the great good luck of being sold as a child concubine into a wealthy family. I see Great Grandmother’s little girl body convulse in pain and hear her screams as they bind her feet tighter and still tighter, her mother bending to hold and comfort her: “Hush, little one, you mustn’t cry. Think of the time when you will be a very beautiful woman and all the men will be asking for you!” And perhaps she is already thinking of the Old One, very wealthy indeed, whose particular delectation is to see the young white bodies, naked except for their little dolls’ feet in silken dolls’ shoes, come swaying towards him like flowers on stalks.
The images will not go away. More come crowding into my mind, in a crazy scrambling of time and place, for neither history nor geography has been protective of women.
The slave girl in the cotton plantation carried to the bed of her coarse owner who will then signal for his son to carry her to his; the ten thousand women and girls whose brutalised bodies are anonymously swept under the blanket term of ‘The Rape of Nanking’ in the history books; the equally nameless Indian women whose dowries are inadequate and so they are burnt by their husbands who then go to report kitchen accidents; the little 11-year-old girl from Hyderabad whose name Bina is known because on the plane with the 60-year-old Arab to whom her father has just sold her in marriage, she has dared to sob out her story to the stewardess who alerts the police; my grandmother whose feet were never bound but whose life was; the little Singapore schoolgirl Pei Yin who died from a very messy abortion and whose father went scot-free.
Scorpion-receivers, all, and Charlotte Brontë’s advice is for them: endure.
The receiving and enduring could begin very early; in Pei Yin’s case, it was about the time she sprouted breasts and became a woman, and in Bina’s case, even younger, for she was only 11 and probably had not yet had her first menstruation. Indeed, it could begin before the girl’s life could begin, and I am now thinking of the newborn baby girls in China, strangled with bare hands, suffocated in trays of ash, thrown into wells, thrown into rubbish dumps or the mud of rice-fields, because the new population policy allows for only one child, and parents’ hopes for a male child are pinned on that one chance.
I want so much to know why this woman who obsesses me has given such fatal advice which has been received down the ages, and retrospectively, right back to the Cave Woman who died with her baby. I want the years between us – 186, to be exact – to melt away, so that I can meet her face to face and talk to her, this intense, strange, small woman who obsesses me.
Her only existing portrait shows a pixie-like but strong face with small, purposeful mouth and dark brown hair, probably her best feature, neatly parted in the middle and utterly smoothed on each side, in the manner we have come to associate with Victorian spinster ladies (she married but was dead within a year, owing to complications in a pregnancy that her doctor thought could not be sustained by such a tiny body, almost like a child’s). There is a small smile playing around her intense mouth, perhaps of triumph at overcoming the scorpion at last.
Over the years, these words of hers have become points of reference by which I try to have a clearer understanding of her thoughts and feelings.
“You held out your hand for an egg and fate put into it a scorpion.” By shifting the blame to fate, she had absolved her Christian God of the responsibility for going back on his own promise. She must have asked for good health for her beloved sisters; she watched them die, one by one, undernourished, lonely, broken. She must have asked for strength for the brother to turn over a new leaf, to stop the drinking, the opium addiction, the irresponsibilities which were draining his sisters of their strength and meagre resources; she watched him die too, a raving lunatic, and bv that time her thoughts must already have shaped into the philosophy of that proud claim of endurance of her sex: “This would never have happened with a woman.”
But the egg she held out her hand most eagerly for and had a scorpion put into it instead, was the gift of a man’s love. She had fallen secretly, passionately in love with a professor, a married man. No, to ask for his love was too much. She asked for mere friendship, expressed in just a few letters that would be enough to sustain her in he
r desolation. There was one which she had read so many times in the privacy of her room and solitary rambles on those wild windswept moors that she knew every word by heart and every meaning accreted around every word by the heart’s yearning. She sent off one letter after another, and waited, but received none. She became desperate, comparing herself, in one of her letters, to the starving beggar who will not dare ask for the food from the table, only wait for the crumbs to fall off it.
Still, no letter came and at last she gave up hope and fell into a dull despair. Unknown to her, her letters had been torn up and dropped into the wastebasket by the professor and later secretly retrieved by the professor’s wife, a most formidable woman who meticulously put the pieces together.
“Close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm.” The gift of a man’s rejection can be too great for a woman to bear, and then fantasy, as only a lonely woman can weave, must come to the rescue. In one of her novels, Charlotte Brontë describes how a young woman secretly falls in love with a professor (who is not married) teaching in the same school as herself. The secretive, jealous headmistress of the school watches her movements closely. One cold, bleak afternoon, as she sits alone at her desk, she falls asleep and in the gathering gloom wakes up to find that somebody had tenderly placed a warm shawl round her shoulders as she slept: she has no doubt who that somebody is, and that her love for him and his for her will grow and overcome all obstacles in a touching fulfilment at the end.