‘Like you, Por-Por!’ we cried, all of us together, the way we always did. And Por-Por waved us away, just as she always did.
‘Nonsense. Old lady now, old widow so long. You girls remember, you marry young man, not old man like me. Wealthy or not, no matter with young man. Young man plenty of time to get wealthy. Then he not leave you widow so soon.’
‘Ah Choo married a young man,’ my aunt said. She meant my father’s older brother and his wife. ‘Sometimes even young man leave you widow too soon.’
‘That woman she have brain of chicken,’ Por-Por said. ‘Ah Choo and that husband so stupid. Two sons! How lucky can you be, two children, both are son. They call them Ah Sai and Ah Haw. Lion and Tiger. Aiyah, so powerful. Of course he die young. Sons ate father.’ The women frowned and nodded and agreed with Por-Por. ‘Two sons,’ she said, still finding it hard to believe. ‘Sometimes heaven make you pay for such good fortune.’
That night, with the gates of hell thrown open, we tried to keep the hungry ghosts from our door by offering them their feast. In the street outside the front gate we burned gold and silver paper folded into the shape of Chinese ingots, their smoke climbing up to heaven. We threw bundles of hell money into the flames and stuck Chinese candles and joss sticks into the ground. Up and down the street other families had elaborate altars or giant joss sticks, some as big as a man. Over the rooftops the wailing and clanging of the Chinese street opera was carried on the evening sea breeze. Down at street level, the still air was heavy with smoke and incense. We threw food and wine into the flames for the hungry ghosts and then went inside for our own feast.
Our visits to Penang were usually weeks, not days, and there were certain things we did virtually every time. Our Penang Rituals, I called them. We visited our aunt’s house where our mother played mahjong all day long. We took the funicular railway up to Penang Hill for afternoon tea, had curry tiffin at the E&O Hotel down by the sea. We went to the Kek Lok Si temple with its fairytale pagoda on the side of a hill and counted the steps to the top. There were supposed to be over a thousand, and my sisters and I would climb and count and each end up, puffing and panting, with a different number, and it was one of the many things we never agreed on.
Penang was a duty-free port, which was a concept I could not grasp no matter how many times it was explained to me, and Pa bought his English shirts and ties there. His ties were always striped and his shirts always white, with a hunting horn under a Q on the label inside the collar. He would take us to Whiteaways on the promise that we could eventually have ice cream at the Cold Storage Creamery. Later, when we got back to Por-Por’s, he would take the shirts out of their cellophane and crumple them into the bottom of his bag, like they were used and old. He said if the customs inspectors on the other side of the ferry realised that they were new shirts he would have to pay duty on them, which was how much he had saved by buying them in Penang, thereby making the whole thing a waste of time. That was one of the first times I began to have any understanding of what the law was all about. Pa explained it by saying that disobeying a law when it didn’t hurt anyone was a triumph of wisdom over dogma, a word he explained as having to do with ‘blind authority’, the concept of which I eventually managed to grasp.
On one of our earlier Penang visits Pa took us to a house that he told us was the most important in Penang. On the way there he even said that it was probably the most important in all Malaya, and we were expecting a Sultan’s Istana or a Chinese millionaire’s mansion that looked like a palace. There seemed to be hundreds of Chinese millionaires’ mansions in Penang and we thought this one must be really special to be more important than the ones we had already seen. In the event he took us to Armenian Street in the middle of the old part of town, which was narrow and grubby and certainly not a street you would expect to come across any self-respecting millionaire. We found ourselves standing in front of a very ordinary little blue terrace house. What was so important about this, Mei asked, and Pa then told us that in this house the overthrow of the Chinese Emperor, the last Emperor after thousands of years of Emperors, was planned. He said that this had once been Sun Yat-sen’s house. I knew who Sun Yat-sen was, as his picture was hung for all to see in every Chinese school and Chinese association hall in Malaya. He was the father of modern China, which I knew because my father had told me many times, but I never knew until then that he had ever lived in Penang. I asked him if Sun Yat-sen was still the father of modern China. He didn’t even get a chance to answer, because Mei quickly said the father these days was Emperor Chairman Mao. I didn’t know if that was the right answer, but it clearly brought a smile to my father’s lips.
These were some of our normal rituals, for visits when there were weeks to spare, but that trip was just for a weekend and there was no time to spare for any of them. On the morning before we left Ma said we should all go to Burmah Road for ice kachang, a suggestion that I thought could very well have the makings of a new ritual. At first Pa said we should really make a start because he had to stop to see someone at Sungai Siput on the way home and there were all the roadblocks to get through. But Ma was insistent. I could see that she did not want us to leave and I guess Pa could too, because he soon said Sungai Siput could wait. Usually when he said he had some business to take care of, nothing could sway him, but this time he readily conceded, and it was obvious that was because it meant a little more time with Ma.
I knew from the earliest time I knew anything that my father adored my mother. Mei, who was my source for most things that I knew about our parents, said that it was because Ma was so traditional in her views and Pa loved her because she connected him with his Chinese roots. If it wasn’t for Ma, I sometimes thought that Pa could ignore the fact that he was Chinese altogether, could happily immerse himself completely in his law, with his leather books and his unfathomable words and his whisky stengahs, but that was only because there was so much I was yet to learn about my father.
He took us to Soon Fatt Coffee Shop, which I knew was his favourite because he said once he wasn’t sure if he liked it so much because of the sweet things he could get there, like ice kachang, or simply because its name always made him smile. I asked him then what Soon Fatt meant and he said ‘smooth path to prosperity’, which was certainly nice, but it didn’t seem all that much to smile about. As we made our way to a table past huddles of men playing dominoes and draughts with beer bottle tops, instead of the usual raucous Hokkien echoing off the tiles we heard a single voice, a man in the corner reading from a Chinese newspaper. The other men listened intently, nodding and grunting. He finished just as our bowls of ice kachang arrived, shaved ice piled high into creamy white and red syrupy mounds.
‘Soon Fatt,’ Pa said with a smile.
Being Hokkien himself, Pa understood the dialect and I asked him what was so important that it had to be announced to everyone so loudly. ‘It isn’t so important,’ he said. ‘People leave their papers in coffee shops these days for the next person to read. A lot is happening now and people need to know. But not everyone can read. So someone who can reads it aloud for the others. That man was telling the others that the government is buying Land Rovers with loudspeakers to drive around the kampongs and tell everyone not to help the bandits. That’s like propaganda. You remember that word, don’t you?’
‘Anti-Bandit Month,’ Ma said before I had a chance to answer him. ‘They’re still calling them bandits.’
Por-Por began to shiver. This happened whenever she ate ice kachang, and I quickly hopped up and rubbed her arms and shoulders. ‘You’re a good girl, Ah Su,’ she said. ‘Good girls help their mothers and fathers. You must pray for a brother this time. Your mother and father need a son or they will die a hungry ghost. Better to be a man for one day than a ghost for a thousand years.’
My parents were both eyes down, scooping up the melted syrupy water from their bowls. But Mei and Li had stopped eating, their eyes now fixed on Por-Por.
That was the first time I ever considere
d the fact that my parents would one day have to cross the River of Death with its inky water and bloated bodies. Even worse, I thought if they died hungry ghosts it would be my fault for being born a girl. And I could tell that Mei and Li were having the same terrible thought.
18
In happier times my husband and I would sometimes find an occasion to stroll across the Padang in Ipoh to Clayton Road, admiring the great Gothic edifice of St Michael’s with its rows of white gables and arched verandas rising over a sweep of playing fields. Sammy and I longed for our baby to be born a boy, and one reason was so that he could attend this wonderful institution, the best school in Perak. St Michael’s was at the heart of established Ipoh overlooking the Padang, the courthouse, the Ipoh Club and all the important banks that held the wealth of the most prosperous town in British Malaya. Such a dream was forlorn now: Sammy was gone, and with the Japanese occupying the country I could no longer imagine the son he never saw having the opportunity to wear its colours.
No one stopped to admire the architecture of St Michael’s by this time. The Japanese had expropriated the property as their headquarters for Perak, and there were terrible tales about what went on behind those walls. We had heard the entire top floor was now the Governor’s residence. I was taken nowhere near the top floor. They marched me around to what was once a dormitory for school boarders, now sealed up, closed off and secured into a large and gloomy dungeon. There was only one door, a low grate perhaps three feet high that was raised to allow entry and fell to the floor with a thunderous clank of metal. To enter and to leave one was required to crawl on all fours, like an animal. I had no idea how long I was to be here, but I soon came to refer to this place as ‘the zoo’. There was no segregation here as there had been for my brief stay at the police station. I was to share my cage with eleven other wretched animals, all of them male. We also shared a single commode in the corner, and the accompanying tap was the only source of water. Animals had no comprehension of shame, no need for privacy.
At first I could not tell night from day in the place and had no concept of the passage of time as the windows were boarded up. Sounds carried from the outside world through the slits that served as air vents became both clock and calendar. The dawn chorus of birds, the massed singing to alert others of their kind that they had survived another night, woke me from a fitful sleep each morning, and in my heart I responded to them. I was beginning to appreciate the grave nature of my situation, but I had also survived for now. A true vocal response was not possible. We were a silent order of wretchedness in this place once run by Catholic priests and brothers. One of the men attempted to teach me a rudimentary sign language in Cantonese, which I found difficult to grasp. I had mastered a limited vocabulary of perhaps just two dozen words before he was dragged off in the middle of one night and I never saw him again.
They were always coming to drag us off – in the middle of the night, the middle of the day, at any time that took their fancy, the clank of the metal grate rousing us from our self-inflicted stupor – and the screams would echo down the corridor for hours before we would see them again, thrust head-first back into the cell at the end of a boot.
We received an evening meal of boiled tapioca with a little salt, and a breakfast of what passed for soup, but was really nothing more than a few anonymous leaves in barely salted sago water. This was served up to us in coconut halves. One day, when I could stand the stench of the commode no longer, I used one of the shells to scrub the floor and the walls all around it. I did not finish until I had scrubbed nearly half the cell floor, only ceasing because a guard took exception to my use of the ‘crockery’ and gave me a beating for my trouble. It was an early taste of what lay in store.
The fear that the next clank of the grate would be for me, that I would be dragged out and taken to wherever the screams originated, was always on the mind, but it was the agony of hunger that was the most difficult to cope with. As days and then weeks passed, it was increasingly physical as well as mental. A man who arrived some time after me resorted to picking the bugs – and there were countless colonies of them – from his skin and popping them into his mouth. Before he was dragged away for the last time he had gone so far as crunching big black cockroaches between his teeth, biting off the heads before swallowing the bodies whole. I suppose it meant they did not wriggle as they slid down his gullet. I called him the ‘Bugger’, which afforded me a rare but brief moment of amusement every time I thought of him. Another man was in the habit of whimpering constantly, a soft mewling sound high in his throat that reminded me of a monkey. Uncharitably, I gave him the name of Tarzan’s companion from the pictures, Cheetah. I had no idea how long he had been held in this terrible place and wondered what strange irrepressible habits it would eventually give rise to in me.
I became convinced that I was going to die of hunger before the interrogators got around to me. I was convinced that they had already discovered what they needed to know from other sources, and were happy just to leave me now to perish in my own time. Not for the first time, I was quite wrong about the Japanese and their intentions.
Eventually, the clank was indeed for me. The room they took me to I recognised to be the school’s science laboratory. I imagine it suited them, having as it did a number of supply points for both water and electricity, which I was to learn were central to their methods. Sergeant Sato, the angry soldier out of uniform who had first interrogated me at the police station, was back again. He stood over me as I was tied to a chair and asked me the same questions over and over again. What is the name of the leader of the bandits? What is the location of their camp? What strength are they? How are they supplied? How many British are with them? To each one I simply said I did not know, at which time he would slap me across the face. It was not so hard that it knocked me down, as had previously occurred, but it nevertheless stung considerably.
This session must have lasted some hours – it was impossible to tell as it slowly intensified from slaps to kicks to the shins, and then to beatings everywhere but the head with clenched fists. Throughout I was harangued with questions and then threatened with ‘very bad things’ to come. Each slap was delivered with a smile that bared his teeth like a snarling dog. It occurred to me that Sergeant Sato took pleasure in inflicting pain.
He changed subjects often to catch me unawares. Where do you keep your radio? How many spies are in your village? How often did you go to the bandit camp? All my answers were simply to say I had no idea what he was talking about.
He showed me the two bottles of quinine again, holding the first one at the tip of my nose. ‘This one we find in your house,’ he said. He held up the other one. ‘This one we find in bandit hut in jungle.’ He waited for a reaction. I do not know if I presented one, but I must admit to a certain sense of relief at knowing now what I was facing. ‘You lie all time,’ he said, and that is when he began to strike me on the head, his particular ‘smile’ accompanying each blow.
Papan was full of spies like me, Sergeant Sadist said. He sneered at me and said, ‘Not so many now.’ He said my friend and helper, Mrs Tay, was dead. He said she had got what she deserved, drowned in the lake at Papan, and that I could expect the same fate if I did not tell him what he wanted to know. He asked me if I felt responsible for her death. ‘Who take care her children now?’ We may have been animals living in a zoo, but in this hell Sergeant Sato was a devil.
He had me kneel on the floor and hold a chair above my head, a chair that had to be lifted into place for me and that I could only possibly manage to keep aloft a short time if I locked my elbows and wrists. He then screamed into my ear: What is the name of the leader of the bandits? What is the location of their camp? What strength are they? How are they supplied? How many British are with them?
My arms both burned with pain and weighed like concrete as I was taken back to the cell, but I was determined to walk unassisted. Curled up into my little corner of the cage, I had time to reflect on what he said. I was su
re he was bluffing about Mrs Tay. Everything he asked or said, apart from the fact that I had treated the guerrillas, was nonsense, so why should that not be as well? Spies in Papan? It was perfectly absurd. Drown Mrs Tay in a lake? That was not the way Japanese dealt with spies. Torture and a swift beheading was their method, and just the fate that was surely planned for me if I ever gave in and confessed to their questions. But I could not avoid the nagging concern that he may possibly be telling the truth. If he was, then Ah Ming would almost certainly have received similar treatment. If so, what was to become of my baby? I determined that the best way to ensure that I would be able to return to him was to endure their punishments, not give in. As soon as I gave them what they wanted they would surely decide to be rid of me forever.
The sessions in the science lab now became a daily routine. A second man joined in the entertainment. He was pudgier than Sergeant Sadist and I never learned his name, but he was dressed in exactly the same civilian way, almost as a uniform itself. It was obvious that in this little game of theirs, he was to be the one I could trust, the one I could confide in. He would lurk in the background as Sato thrashed away at me, before sympathising when the Sergeant left the room for a while. He would say how sorry he was that I had to suffer such punishment, how unnecessary it was, how he wanted to stop it, but his hands were tied. I said it was not his hands that were tied, and for a moment I thought his jovial demeanour was about to crack, but he quickly collected himself and offered me a cigarette. I said I did not smoke, and noticed the packet was English. I wondered whether his Major Tomasu approved. He said I must want a cup of tea, to which I naturally agreed. ‘Roger,’ he said with a smile. It must have been something he picked up from an American film, but he said it often.
The Heart Radical Page 14
