The Catherine Lim Collection

by Catherine Lim

  “Ready,” said the mother and the daughter carefully prised his legs apart, deftly unzipped his fly and brought out the offending member, now limp and helpless in her hand.

  “You wronged me five times,” she addressed it severely, as if it had a life of its own – and indeed, during those times, it seemed it did, rearing and moving its head like some predatory animal. “Here,” said the mother, handing over the knife, and in simultaneous explosions of blood, screams of pain and shrieks of triumph, the target object was cut off and held aloft, between thumb and finger, a little nondescript trophy. The young man jumped up, screamed and screamed even more when he saw himself thus denuded. Covering the spot with both hands, his body bent double over it, he hopped about, wailing, not unlike the cartoon character or the comic hero of film and TV slapstick, who has just been kicked in the groin by the little lady, except that in this case, the groin was just not kicked, but killed, with the blood-spattered hands to prove it.

  “Police! Call the police!” screamed the man, while the two women ran away, still carrying their prize. Outside in the darkness, they stopped near a drain that was sometimes half-filled with water, and threw the pathetic little piece in it, gurgling with demonic glee at the successful completion of their revenge.

  “In Thailand,” said the mother, “they feed it to the ducks. I wish there were a duck or chicken just now.” Then the women returned to the house and gave themselves up.

  The manhood was lost forever, for after looking for it in the drain for almost an hour using powerful torches, the police called off the search and assumed that it had been washed away or eaten up by a fish or frog. The frantic young man, who had had hopes of it being found and reattached, settled into a state of permanent despair.

  The women were unrepentant, and when asked why they did it, said they had to, giving the impression they would do it again.

  The newspapers in Singapore were full of the story for days. It brought letters of sympathy which were equally bestowed upon the wronged women and the equally wronged man, but when there appeared a picture of the man, looking very depressed and saying that it was a fate worse than death, the sympathy shifted in his favour. Then somebody wrote in to ask the intriguing question: Why did the women choose a form of revenge that invariably led to their being caught? The letter provoked a flurry of replies which examined the causes from a variety of angles – psychological, cultural, biological, political – from the need to turn penis envy into real action, to the instinct to preserve fellow women from the same sad fate, to the pure joy of proclaiming woman’s only area of monopoly of power, since men could never retaliate in kind.

  Wrote a very upset male, “It boggles the mind to think what women are capable of doing; they can claim the superlatives of violent revenge!”, followed by another, equally anguished: “Men, be forewarned. It may be necessary for us all to go around wearing groin guards!” Both the women of course went to jail, the mother getting three years and the daughter five, and the last thing heard about the poor dispossessed young man was that he was seeking help from a witch doctor somewhere in a mountain village in Thailand.

  The Feast of the Hungry Ghosts

  “ ... now consider the paucity of language in this respect. ‘Purest’, ‘Fairest’, ‘Wisest’, ‘Bravest’, ‘Gentlest’. This is about all we can manage. How can the mere addition of three pitiful little letters ‘e-s-t’ hope to capture the full depth and width and breadth of the excellence that is Woman? Until we devise an adequate linguistic system for this purpose, we would have to be satisfied with the so-called superlatives in the language.”

  (From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)

  A visitor would be struck by the grandeur of the building and even more by the grandeur of its purpose: to house the remains of one woman who had died more than 50 years ago. It was an immense structure with the inescapable curving pagoda roof to remind the Chinese emigrant of home, and to allow the gratification, since Filipino law did not permit him to own land, of owning great houses. When the house was ready to receive his dead wife, he must have further gloated, as he supervised the ceremony of transferring the remains to its new and permanent home, on the contrast between this house and the surrounding hovels of the natives. Indeed, the contrast would strike the visitor as positively obscene: the fully air-conditioned building with its tiled floors and marble pillars for one dead woman, and the tin-and-cardboard shacks clinging to the sides of denuded hills, home to hundreds of ragged women and children who regularly emerged to scrabble in the rubbish dumps close by.

  But the real obscenity of contrast lay in the food: for the dead woman, one Madam Teh Siew Po, the altar table creaked with an abundance of roast pig, young white fowl steamed in their own pristine juices, the most finely spun rice noodles, herbal soups, pink sugared buns, peanut sweets, almond paste puddings, rare fungi, and even rarer sea cucumber cooked with fragrant cabbage, oranges, lichees, pomelos whose thick, soft skin was carved into a ring of delicately curving petals to reveal the succulent pink fruit inside, and for the living woman, one Mrs. Raphaela Santos and her family of seven children, ages 10 to one, fistfuls of rice, boiled vegetables that had been salvaged from the rubbish dump and one fried fish which they were all to share.

  This was the time of the annual Chinese Feast of the Hungry Ghosts, when Heaven and Hell emptied themselves of the spirits of the dead to allow them to return to Earth to be fed by their relatives in a continuing show of remembrance and love. No ghost was better fed than Madam Teh Siew Po; every year, since her death in 1936, the ghost feast had been held for her (even during the war years) and each year she came and partook of the magnificent spread. That she had actually returned could be ascertained by the simple procedure of leaving a tray of ash overnight on the altar table and checking it the next day for footprints (very small, for Madam Teh had bound feet). The caretaker, once he was assured of the fact, was free to dispose of the food as he liked. Over the years, the practice of packing the food in separate parcels to be distributed among various relatives had become a hassle for the old man, and lately, he had simply dumped the food outside the house and closed the gates again, in the full knowledge that within minutes, it would be grabbed up by the beggar woman with the seven children.

  For three years running, Raphaela Santos and her brood had whooped with joy at the sight of the ghost food; in a highly efficient division of labour, they had, within minutes, packed up the good stuff in their paper bags, cardboard boxes, tin buckets and plastic mugs, and were carrying it home in triumph for a succession of family feasts. By gathering up the unfinished remnants and boiling them in a rich stew, Raphaela Santos was actually able to extend the annual celebration by a few more days.

  Then disaster struck. That year, no footprints were seen in the ash, therefore the ghost had not come, therefore the food could not be removed. Raphaela waited in great anxiety, straining her neck to peep through the window. She saw the splendid offerings on the altar table, the centrepiece being always the roast pig, in their porcelain dishes and tureens, amidst flickering candles, joss-sticks and flowers, and the old caretaker snoozing in his folding chair nearby. She saw him get up and go to examine the tray of ash, and held her breath, as he closely turned the tray this way and that in the sunlight, to catch any imprint. No, there was none, and he put back the tray and returned to his chair.

  Raphaela fretted fearfully; if Madam Teh did not appear soon, the food would surely spoil. The weather was hotter than usual, and the air conditioning would be no guarantee.

  On the fourth day, the caretaker, squinting at the ash and detecting a faint print near the centre of the tray, decided that the ghost had at last appeared. But it was too late! With a heart near to breaking, Raphaela and her seven children, her newest baby on her hip, watched the caretaker empty each plate and tureen into large black plastic bags, tie up the bags securely, then carry them to dump into the refuse bins outside. They waited for him to get back into the house, then closed in, making frantic
little noises as they untied each bag to see what could be saved. It was no use; all the food had gone quite bad.

  The next year, as the Feast approached once more, the hopes rose again. The eternal roast pig, roasted to precisely that point when the crispy, crunchy skin detached itself to provide a separate, purer eating pleasure, the shiny white steamed chickens carried in a bunch by their necks, the mountain of pink, sugared buns shaped like peaches and women’s breasts – Raphaela’s children could describe each item in perfection of detail, as it was carried into the house by the caterer. She said to them, “Hush, we’ll wait and see; we don’t know what will happen,” remembering the bitterness of the previous year’s experience.

  They waited, with held breath, their eyes never leaving the Great House, so that they could be the first to run up and lay claim to the booty. The waiting seemed interminable, and Raphaela, knowing that their next meal would be from ghosts or never, began to fret and mutter her fears out loud.

  “The weather’s much hotter this year. The soup will be the first to go, and then the vegetables. The roast pig may be saved yet.”

  She continued sullenly, “Some people who have all the food they want, even when they are dead, have no thought for others who go hungry all the time.”

  She prayed to the saint whose name she bore, and whose holy image she wore in a small brass medal on a string round her neck: ‘O holy St Raphael, Helper of the Innocents and the Suffering, help me!’

  The afternoon sun continued to beat down pitilessly; Raphaela’s head began to spin giddily and when it cleared, she saw, not the angel but Madam Teh Siew Po, exactly as she had appeared in the photograph on the altar table: a plain, almost sad face, the severe hairstyle of the time not detracting from the youthfulness of the features. She was sitting, as in the photograph, in an ornate high-backed chair, small and slim-looking despite the loose, long-sleeved black silk blouse and baggy black silk trousers, her bejewelled fingers stiffly spread out on her knees, her tiny feet in pointed, embroidered shoes.

  Raphaela stared; she noted the perfect plucked arches over the large sad eyes, the tiny lucky mole above the right upper lip. Half a century separated the two women, and more than half of Fate’s injustice, for one received only eggs and the other only scorpions: the wealthy and protected Chinese woman who never knew a day of want in life or death, and the Filipino slum woman, abandoned by her husband and lover, with seven children to support and herself to die soon from a suppurating stomach wound because she did not have the money to pay for an operation. But just now, the concern was more immediate, for food in the stomach, and Raphaela Santos, with all the energy she could muster, spoke to Madam Teh Siew Po across the immense gulfs.

  “I have been waiting for so long. Will you please come, or it will be too late! It will spoil!”

  She repeated, with mounting exasperation, “Please come. We have not eaten for two days!” The sad, childlike face looked back at her; Raphaela saw, with surprise, the intense friendly interest that was suddenly irradiating the plain features, and felt ashamed of her own ungraciousness.

  “I didn’t mean to be rude,” she said, “I was just so very hungry and desperate that I sounded rude but then – ,” with sudden shrewdness, “we are sisters, are we not, and sisters can bare their sad hearts to each other, can they not?”

  The irradiated face nodded assent and Raphaela, beginning to feel once more the oppression of the afternoon heat, shook her head vigorously, rubbed her eyes, and opened them to see the face gone and at her feet, a rabbit, sitting up, ears twitching.

  “My, my!” she cried. “A rabbit. Enough food for the whole family.” She was sure it was sent by that strange Chinese woman whom she had just spoken to; no rabbit would ever be found in the vicinity, as any four-footed population would have long ago been decimated by the slum children.

  “Come, rabbit dinner!” she said, struck by the whimsicality of the dead woman. But the creature darted away, in the direction of the Great House and was lost to sight. “Rabbit dinner gone,” she said, shrugging her shoulders and playing up to the whimsicality but at the same time thinking it rather unkind of the Chinese woman to play a trick like that on her. She was going to make her sad, hungry way home when she heard the caretaker calling her and beckoning to her.

  “She’s come,” he said matter-of-factly, “so you can have the food. You’re lucky it’s still good.” She saw the basis of his confident announcement – four deep, certainly unmistakable, prints in the ash, very small, like a woman’s bound feet, but also very, very like a rabbit’s paw prints. She wanted to ask the caretaker, “Did you see a rabbit come in just now?” but decided in a sudden access of new found joy that it ought to remain a secret, a secret of loving sisters who could reach out to each other in remembrance and compassion across great gulfs of time.

  Transit to Heaven

  In the sacred texts of the Vedas, it is said: where women are worshipped, the Gods will be pleased.

  (From The Woman’s Book Of Superlatives)

  In the very short time (a few seconds of earth time?) before her soul detached from her body and started drifting away, her entire life was presented to her eyes. It is true then, thought Dora Warren, Feminist Extraordinaire, what they say about the drowning man in the last moments before he goes under, or the leaping woman just before she hits the pavement: their life appears before them in a sweep of intense colour and emotion. She had read of the thrilling chronological rainbow – arc of life’s passages, from childhood through adolescence to the mature and mellowing years, that made the departing soul suddenly ache to come back to reclaim lost loves, but in her case, there was none of this longing, only an impatience to have this presentation, clearly a rite of passage, over and done with quickly, so that she could move on. She was excited about the prospect of arriving at her destination.

  Meanwhile, the obligatory review.

  It came in clear, separate, hard-edged pictures, one after the other – click, click – like slides projected on to a screen by a slide-projector. The first one showed her as a little, pig-tailed girl being coaxed away from her mother’s side by a visitor anxious to have her play with a small belligerent-looking boy carrying a blue plastic gun. She saw that while the visitor beamed indulgently as the gun-toting boy dragged her out to play in the garden, her mother looked a little nervous and once or twice craned her neck to look out and ascertain that all was well. Five minutes later, her mother and the visitor came running out of the house upon hearing a piercing scream, her mother exclaiming, “Oh, my poor little Dorrie, are you all right?” and the visitor saying reassuringly, “It’s okay, Marge. Chuck only frightens a little, he means no harm”, before they pulled themselves up in front of the kennel at the bottom of the garden where the screams were coming from, and let out a joint gasp: for cowering inside the kennel was the boy, mere jelly in his terror, and standing guard over him with the gun pointed between his eyes, was Dora Warren, aged five, her pigtails flying.

  Dora chuckled.

  Despite the incident, she had gone on to marry Charles at age 19, mesmerised by his good looks, his enormous biceps, his towering strength.

  Click. Dora now watched, fascinated, as the baby was slowly pulled out of her, raw and bloody and slimy, its small face twisted in the rictus of birth.

  “How beautiful! How simply beautiful!” cried the exhausted mother on the hospital bed, but the father who had insisted on witnessing the birth turned pale, gasped, swooned and fell upon the floor, hitting his head with a loud thud. Attention had to be temporarily diverted from the squalling new-born baby to its father knocked out cold on the floor while Dora, raising herself to look, cried out anxiously, “Honey, are you okay?”

  That was probably the turning point in her life. In an apocalyptic flash, she saw what she had only vaguely suspected all along: that man was much weaker than woman. Thundering, marauding, weapon-wielding man was far weaker than procreating, nurturing woman with her baby at her breast.

  Strip a man
of his carapace and you saw a soft quivering core of fears inside; the grown man fainting at the sight of the woman giving birth, and the small boy throwing away his weapon in terror of the little girl and hiding in the kennel, were one and the same. To hide their fears they developed all sorts of myths and theories such as that of the treacherous Eve and of Penis Envy, to confuse and intimidate women into a state of subjugation.

  The discovery was exhilarating, but it would be years before she would develop it into a counter theory to present to the world in a dramatic exposé of the male sex.

  The celestial slide-projector cooperatively skipped those humiliating years of fights and tears and the final divorce to concentrate on the greatest triumph in her life. ‘Runaway Bestseller by First-time Feminist Writer: Penis Envy and Pronoun Envy? Phooey to the Greatest Phallacy ever Told!’ accompanied by a picture of her at the launching of her book, beamingly autographing the 5,000th copy. It had been a thoroughly researched book for which she had actually made an extensive trip to the Far East, having heard of mysterious customs of women bowing and offering gifts to gods with incredibly large priapuses, whether fashioned out of wood, stone or rice dough. Everywhere she went, she saw evidence of this worship – gifts of boiled rice, fruit and flowers in temples, shrines, caves, houses, the roadside – and happily took pictures and made notes. She was stunned by the pervasiveness of the belief but buoyant at the prospect of singlehandedly destroying it, and so save fellow women at last from the worst form of enslavement by men. So the Far East trip which took her through India, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia was thoroughly enjoyable, except for one small, frightening incident in India, which, however, she soon dismissed from her mind.

  She was alone at a railway station in Allahabad late at night and was walking along a wooden platform in the dim orange light when she became aware of large bundles of rags strewn along the side. As she watched, curious, one stirred, opened, and a face appeared, that of a young woman, skeletal in its deep hollows, and then another, that of a small child with large, unmoving eyes. The woman crawled out of the bundle of rags towards her, carrying the child in one arm and stretching out the other to her, in an infinity of pleading, and she saw, to her further horror, that the arm was a mere stump, hacked at the elbow. The woman crawled closer, looked up at her and smiled, her arm stretched out in an enormous effort to touch her. Recoiling in terror, Dora opened her bag, pulled out a sheaf of money, flung it down upon the ground between herself and the woman, and fled, turning round just once, to see the woman still crawling towards her and past the money, arm still stretched out for the touch of sisterliness. Dora fled into the darkness and very soon left the country, and the incident was forgotten back home in the whirl of excitement that attended the publication of her sensational book.