Blood in her urine, blood in her faeces. For the last month, there’s been blood whenever she pees in the chamber pot. Look at the red rooster featured on the pot, mocking her with its beady eye. Stupid cock. The chamber pot was part of her wedding dowry in China, along with the washbasin with the red rooster design, her zǐsūn tǒng 子孙桶. Her husband on their wedding day looking so fine in his livery, bringing the sedan chair, accompanied by the popping sounds of firecrackers and drums. Turns out he’s a dolt, a ne’er do well, good only for lolling around with the pipe, sunk into a stupor. And now, Min Fong, out of filial duty, has to remit money every month to support him and his mother. With effort, she lets the stream run, grunting a little. Po Jie snores in her corner while Ah Lan bats at invisible mosquitoes as her mouth moves like a ruminant. Rustlings and giggles issuing from between the wooden slats—that si-futt-hahn Chin Leng at it again, canoodling with Mun Heng the clog maker, whose wife has run off, leaving him three daughters to foster out. Isn’t one of them working as a ma jie, a nursemaid for a British colonial household? Lucky girl, last time she came to visit her pa, she had belly fat poking through the frog buttons of her samfoo. Belly fat, imagine! Or maybe not belly fat, maybe she’s in that way, and Min Fong imagines one of those mixed-race babies, all curly brown hair and florid red skin, and would it even get to take on the father’s last name? Chin Po walla-walla-something, those tongue-twister names, think about that.
Not so much blood this time, a relief, but she knows something is very wrong. She’s been getting fatigued as the day wanes; once, her knee gave out as she was carrying her two pails of cement, slung across her shoulders with a bamboo pole. The pails up-ended, wet cement oozing out. Lucky she’s on good terms with the kepala and he came running with a scraper. Maybe Dr Fan down the hall can give her just a pinch of this or that powder, stirred into a cup of hot water. Costs about ten cents—a day’s meal. Her share of the rent is due, tomorrow in fact, just a pok-gai situation—two dollars a month she pays for a four hundred-square-foot room shared by four, living on top of each other like cockroaches. She’s due to send money home as well. What to do? She’s just gotten hired for this Bukit Timah job—by hanging around Tofu Street day after day, where the head honcho does all her hiring—it won’t do her any good to skip work, she’ll get replaced in the blink of an eye. Many samsui women around, just as hardy, just as stoic. Kind Mrs Cheng, from a few rooms down, says to just catch a dead rat, cook over burning charcoal, make into liquid and drink. Quite a few scoundrels of the rodent variety walking bold as brass across her hanging larder, she says, can catch one for you. Oh, don’t listen to her, Po Jie says, Mrs Cheng is so san ba, like it or not the drink will kill you, country bumpkin that she is.
Po Jie is her dearest friend. Po Jie it was who sent word through her family network that women could get jobs in the colony of Singapore. Pay the tsui haak thirty yuan and it would be seven days’ journey by boat—eating, lurching about, vomiting, shitting on a big boat, first to Hong Kong, then onward to Johnson’s Pier. Po Jie it was who found Min Fong her first job on Eu Tong Sen Road. How time flies—back when she got married, she never thought she could do this kind of hard labour, working on a construction site carrying buckets and buckets of cement and bricks, clambering up and down rickety scaffolding better than a long-tailed monkey. Walking two hours to these sites just to spare the thirty cents tram fare. A samsui woman doesn’t think about danger or accidents, she worries only about rainy days because work stops and she won’t get paid. Last month also no work, long days sitting on her chamber pot—upturned it doubles as a stool—gazing down from her papan-shutter window at the inner courtyard where the landlord has his apprentices scurrying around, trimming roots, peeling bulbs, skinning snakes, or setting horns of mountain goat and penises of deer out on round, rattan trays to dry. Landlord Lu is like a multi-coloured wolf, god knows what he imbibes from his own medicinal store—that sik long—seven offspring, warbling or various degrees of bawling, the wife shouting curses in Hokkien, which no one understands in this Cantonese-ridden shophouse. Well, at least it’s entertaining. Ach, maybe if she passes, Po Jie would see fit to send her ashes home, or burn her some hell-money, seeing as how they’ve shared a room for five years. Or at least Po Jie might think of her when she prays for her adopted daughter at Kwan Im Thong.
Thinking about Po Jie’s adopted daughter makes Min Fong’s heart itch like a mosquito bite—you don’t want the burden, and yet it worries away at you. She gets approached often enough by families with too many daughters, it being assumed that like the ma jies, samsui women have also taken a vow of celibacy and have money to spare. Min Fong pushes the chamber pot back under the table—to be emptied first thing in the morning before the night-soil man comes—and gets back on to her bamboo floor mat.
Four of them sharing a room, if Tai Mui hadn’t left, it would’ve been five of them. Still, not as bad as the six coolies down the hall, two in the top bunk, two in the bottom, two on the floor. A dull pain in her bowels, Min Fong tries to ignore it, but lies awake, her head on her porcelain pillow staring up at a gecko slowly creeping across the ceiling, marking its territory. A daughter would empty her chamber pot for her; a daughter would massage her abdomen with White Flower Oil, fan her slowly until her cold sweat disappears.
As darkness gives way to the wash of blue-grey dawn, she sees Chin Leng silently skulking back into the room. Maybe it’s the smug smile on her face, or maybe it’s because Min Fong couldn’t get to sleep and the day is bound to be a rotten-egg day, or maybe because there ought to be a modicum of face-saving decorum in this sardines-packed-in-a-tin-can they call a room, but Min Fong, with sudden ire, says what’s been sitting in her heart for a while now, ‘You really shouldn’t carry on like that.’
Chin Leng stops in her tracks. A surprised look on her face, but not overly perturbed. ‘Carry on like what?’
‘The man is married. Just because no one says anything does not mean it’s right.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a kay poh, what business is it of yours?’
‘I’m just saying, people talk. A woman who is too non-fussy brings everyone’s morale down.’
Chin Leng doesn’t speak. The issue has never been raised before, it’s clear to see. That it’s raised so directly is really diu-min—a major loss of face. Min Fong, older than Chin Leng by a good half-decade, has the right to chastise; Chin Leng is obliged to listen, these are the unwritten codes of ‘face’—but Min Fong can make out the series of emotions skirling Chin Leng’s features, even in the dim light, objections swelling upon the tongue and then quelled. The moment balloons out; it’s clear Chin Leng has heard her, Min Fong can read the frustration in the clenching of her upper arms as Chin Leng settles down in her spot on the raised trestle bed next to Ah Lan. The silence extends, takes on a bristling quality.
Finally, Chin Leng says, ‘I’ll try to be quieter, Sister Min, but if you don’t like what you see, you shouldn’t look.’
A week passes, and the pain in her bowels becomes naggy; she keeps feeling the need to defecate, but when she goes, no dice. She has no appetite and consequently, has had to miss a couple of days’ work. Swallowing her misgivings, Min Fong asks Dr Fan for a consultation. He asks her to lay her wrist on top of the small pillow on his desk, and as his two fingers take her pulse, Min Fong looks him over. His glasses are foggy, in need of cleaning. His shirt collar is too big, making his corrugated neck folds look like sugarcane stuck in a planter. A thin, bare moustache sits in the space between his upper lip and nostrils, not quite belonging there. In fact, everything about the room, at once his clinic and also his bedroom, looks out of place. From their fellow residents, Min Fong has heard that Dr Fan comes from an illustrious, scholarly family in China that collected scholar’s rocks and Ming Dynasty porcelain. What a come down, the more malicious of them say, having to eat stinky tofu just like the stupid and illiterate among us.
Mrs Cheng is cooking in the communal kitchen at the back of the shophouse. Oh, the fragrant smells, the woman is a genius with the wok—she can make anchovies and peanuts taste like an emperor’s meal. Dr Fan clears his throat. ‘How long have you had this…ah…problem?’
Min Fong shakes her head. ‘I can’t remember, quite a few months already. Is it something I ate?’ Was it the gecko droppings accidentally fallen into the rice-gruel, which she ate anyway because she couldn’t bear to waste?
Dr Fan adjusts his glasses. ‘Besides the blood in your stool and abdominal pain, anything else?’
‘I feel tired a lot,’ Min Fong says.
Dr Fan makes her lie down on the charpoy in the room, rolls up the edge of her tunic, rests a hand on her abdomen. His hand feels papery dry, yet steady. He taps her abdomen with two fingers of the other hand, his ear cocked. Finally, he tells her to get up and sit down.
He offers her a cup of hot tea. Min Fong isn’t one to refuse beverages of any kind when offered. As she sips—wah, Dr Fan serves such fancy tea—he tells her she has an intestinal problem—leaky pipe, and it’s not likely to go away. In fact, the pain will get much worse in the next few months.
‘What happens then?’ Min Fong asks. Her lip is stinging from the hot tea and the room feels overly stuffy.
Dr Fan looks anywhere but at her, his glance shifting to the shaving mirror to her left, then sliding right to the shelf full of his medicinal powders. ‘Do you have relatives back in China? Perhaps you want to see them?’
‘To ask them for help, you mean?’
Dr Fan finally looks her dead in the eye. ‘No. To go home.’
It isn’t that Min Fong chooses to disbelieve. It’s just that she’s only turned twenty-seven by the Chinese zodiac. Once upon a time, Min Fong remembers walking down a cowpat-littered path beside the river that meanders through the sleepy village she grew up in, a place not just oceans away, but a time long past, and her memories feel sifted and hazy, bits of them drifting past like leaves on a river. That day, she’d set aside the pretty flower-embroidered shoes she was wearing, before heading down to the riverbank to pee behind a tree. She came back to find them gone, and a village matron bustling down the path, dangling a cloth-covered basket on her arm. Min Fong had run after her, accused her of stealing the shoes. The matron had chastised her for disrespect towards her elders, but in the end, Min Fong had been right. When she yanked the cloth from the basket, there her dainty shoes were, a vibrant red with hand-sewn pink peony flowers. Stealing was such a big crime in her mind then, but look now how she steals drops of White Flower Oil from Mrs Cheng for her sore shoulder blades and her abdominal pain. Mrs Cheng is getting suspicious, demanding to know if the coolies next door have been sneaking into her room to nick drops of her oil. Thinking about Dr Fan’s words, Min Fong feels a certain outrage, even shame: who has ever heard of women like her, women with red headscarves, women strong enough to lug bricks and mortar eight hours a day, falling ill? She consults with Lu Daifu downstairs, choosing to reveal only that she has difficulty with her crapper, and he packs for her a mixture of dried herbs wrapped in fuchsia-coloured rice paper, ties it with raffia. It uses up a day’s pay. She asks Chin Leng to request the letter writer in Sago Street to write, on her behalf, to her mother-in-law to say that she won’t be sending money this month because of unexpected expenses.
‘There’s no need to broadcast to all and sundry,’ Min Fong’s tone is a little airy, but the atmosphere between her and Chin Leng is still a trifle brusque. ‘It’s nobody’s business but my own.’
Chin Leng smirks, but simply holds out her hand for the money to pay the letter writer.
However, quick as the turn of a body, the word is out. Po Jie comes and asks her if anything is wrong. What unexpected expenses? Mrs Cheng also pokes her head in with concern: I hear you went to see Dr Fan. Is anything the matter?
Min Fong turns upon Chin Leng with fury, ‘Was it you?’
Chin Leng sits in her corner, insouciantly darning her torn samfoo trousers while sucking on a sour plum. She shrugs. ‘Don’t look at me. Your silly secrets don’t matter a horse fart to me.’ But adds, under her breath, ‘I guess you’ll need more White Flower Oil now, the way you’re moaning and groaning in your sleep.’
Mrs Cheng looks dumbly on, before catching Chin Leng’s sly meaningful glance, and then her mouth drops open. Po Jie looks nonplussed, while Mrs Cheng looks slightly horrified. It’s nothing compared to what Min Fong feels at having her little theft revealed this way.
As the months pass, Min Fong’s health weakens. It has become impossible to work. A smell emanates from her bowels; her roommates say nothing but avoid staying in the room if they can. The shophouse inhabitants also avoid Min Fong. As if she has nits. Suddenly, everyone has become stupidly religious, diligently sticking their incense sticks in the prayer urns for the Sky God and Kitchen God shrines at the proper times. In her heart, Min Fong doesn’t blame them. She’d probably be no different if another shophouse resident was similarly afflicted. Po Jie cares for her, continuously, without complaint, procuring her food and medicine. But Min Fong knows: sooner or later, in order not to pollute the shophouse—death is such a contaminating thing—she’s destined for one of the death houses in Sago Lane. She’s been keeping up a grand charade of how she’s not ill, but in fact making preparations to sail home to visit her no-good husband and dependent mother-in-law. Po Jie asks if she may ‘borrow’ the chamber pot and washbasin during the time she’s away, and Min Fong, with a heart that suddenly feels pricked, knows what she’s asking. ‘Of course, you can borrow it. You can borrow it for as long as you want.’
During a rare burst of energy one day, Min Fong gets up and cleans the wash basin and the chamber pot in the back shower stall, scrubbing so thoroughly the white enamel paint within pans back the quivery glimmer of her own reflection. A few weeks ago, with a similar jolt of startling strength, she’d actually walked to the letter writer in Sago Street to have a letter written to her husband. A final letter, though she didn’t let herself speak those words. On the way there, however, she was winded and couldn’t continue. It occurred to her then, she had no inkling what to say. Sorry, you emperor-tortoise egg, you have to pay your own debts now and feed your own mouth? Oh, how to say such a thing!
In front of her sat a coffin shop, bad luck on any day to pass by one, and here she was, planting herself right in front of its five-foot way. The shophouse door front had been folded back, and a lad was sitting on a sawhorse inside being taught by his master how to plane a chunk of wood with an axe, while a girl, no older than eleven or twelve, swept up the fallen wood shavings. There were many things Min Fong would’ve liked to do—the thought arrived as gently as spooling thread—and it’s this, this bending over and cherishing a young one. What kind of feeling would that have been?
The couple interested in buying Mr Lu’s shophouse in Bukit Pasoh look as resplendent and minted as new money. As Katharine leads Xiao Mei around the house, she hears her kitty heels tap-tapping behind. Dressed in a tight, flowery cheongsam, Xiao Mei is beautiful and delicate, but her tone, in commenting to her husband on the dilapidated state of the shophouse, is peevish: Eh, very dark leh in the inner courtyard, tiles all broken, I bet when it rains, it leaks all over the place, and can you smell the trapped odour of decades of cramped communal cooking? She inspects the lighter patches on the wall and the burnt marks on the ceiling, marks left by the de-installed shrines of the Sky God and Kitchen God, marks of incense burning. Tsks.
The husband, Daniel, is a serious, smartly dressed office type; his facial contours are strangely flat, with wide nostrils and even wider lips, full and thick. In his crisp, white shirt, navy blue trousers, ducktail-gelled hair, he doesn’t say much in response, but every once in a while, he trades conspiratorial looks with Katharine, and despite being older, more mature, and infinitely less attractive than the wife, Katharine feels flattered, caught within the net of that secretive gaze. Disturbed even.
They are the fifth young couple to look at the shophouse. Strange, most prefer the Housing Development Board flats, a scheme promulgated by the government that’s been wildly successful; HDB flats are brand-new and ghost-free. Xiao Mei is making disparaging comments about old Taoist superstitions. Katharine doesn’t reply. The Kitchen God protects the hearth and family. The Sky God is the Chinese equivalent of Zeus, responsible for proportioning yin and yang, creating the order of the cosmos and the four seasons, putting all the dots and sparkles and spangles in the sky, offend this God and you’re probably going to be reincarnated as a dung beetle, what does this girl know? But, then again, these are heady times, look now, Singapore is independent and the ground underneath their feet seems constantly shifting, what with the rapid demolition of the old and the massive construction of the new. Who can blame the young people for casting off all manner of shackles and superstitious beliefs?
The wife wanders on ahead, banging open the front window shutters. The husband hovers nearby, his presence causing the hairs on Katharine’s forearms and the back of her neck to stand alert, a sort of electric anticipation. If only she dares tilt her head towards him, return his forceful gaze. They’re actually in the room where Katharine grew up from age eight to sixteen. Out of nervousness, she hears herself telling the husband about growing up in a family of six daughters. Being ‘fostered out’ is neither here nor there; she was lucky. While Po Jie had ‘adopted’ her, it was essentially an arrangement of upkeep—taking the burden of an extra mouth to feed away from her parents, but without Po Jie insisting that she come and live with her to serve as servant. But all that changed when she was eight and one of Po Jie’s roommates succumbed to a mysterious disease, leaving a room vacancy. Katharine remembers vividly the day she arrived to stay, carrying a bundle of two changes of clothing and the book of Chinese characters she was learning on her own. She’d been taken to a funeral that day, a day she never forgot. The coffin sat in a death house, and a washbasin with a rooster design had sat on a stool in front of a portrait of the deceased, who was a young-looking samsui woman with a stern expression, as if ever ready to cudgel you around the ears if you sassed her. Inside the washbasin was a cup, complete with toothbrush, toothpaste and a towel. Katharine remembered thinking, what the heck is this, are you supposed to wash your face and brush your teeth before you kowtow to the dead?
Daniel, the husband, laughs. She realises she’s talking like a fool. In fact, Katharine half-subscribes to all the Chinese rituals and rites, but maybe it’s because she wants to seem agreeable; she’s trying to sell a shophouse here. Showing the shophouse is a favour to Mr Lu, her boss. She keeps books for Mr Lu’s import-export business—from a Chinese medicinal shop, he’d since branched off into kelapa sawit (palm oil) and Sarawak pepper, taking advantage of Singapore’s port and regional-hub capabilities.
Daniel smiles at her. ‘I also don’t go in much for these old Chinese superstitions. My mother still observes all the rituals, so lou-tou and old-fashioned, but then, can’t blame her, she immigrated as coolie labour from China.’
‘So did mine,’ Katharine says, thinking of Po Jie who has been more of a mother to her than her own.
‘That’s how it is, isn’t it? You just follow like a blind bat. Very primitive.’
‘The Chinese are superior.’ The wife has suddenly snuck up behind them, how had they missed those annoying tip-tapping kitty heels? ‘Industrious, thrifty, hardworking, enterprising. That’s how we made it here.’
Katharine and the husband both say nothing. He looks sheepish, as if caught out, while Katharine feels deflated by the smug racial pride. Oh, what would this couple think if she told them she’d once gone out with a Malay man? She was half-crazed with love. Now, she’s a disappointment to her parents, taking a vow of celibacy like a ma jie of old, turning into a lou-gu-poh (spinster).
The young couple says they’ll call her if they want another viewing. With some regret, Katharine watches the husband open the door of his Austin Minor for his wife. He gives Katharine a last look and a small wave. Likely she’ll never hear from them again.
Her bodily response to him, though, had her all shook-up. Still some life in the old lou-gu-poh body after all. She heads towards Smith Street, where she’s due to run a historical tour for a group of Taiwanese tourists. She volunteers at the Tung On Wui Kun, one of the clan associations in Chinatown to which she claims lineage. Because of her versatility in both English and Mandarin, Katharine is pressed to do the walking tours every Saturday. European tourists have commented that she seems very knowledgeable, her English excellent; they loved her stories about how Chinatown got its name of Niú Chē Shuǐ, the opium dens, the death houses that recently inhabited Sago Lane.
A group of seven middle-aged women are waiting, thoroughly equipped with sun and heat protection: newly bought nipah fans, sunhats and sunglasses, and sleeves to protect the arms. Katharine greets the group in Mandarin. Right away, one of the tourists, a woman wearing a lovely dress with a full skirt and tortoiseshell glasses, comments that it’s peculiar to have a Chinatown in Singapore when Singapore is already so Chinese; isn’t the entire city a veritable Chinatown? No Chinatown in Hong Kong or in Taiwan, only places like San Francisco or Toronto, where the Chinese piāo lái piāo qù, where identity sloshes about, as if afloat on a boat.
Slightly taken aback, Katharine explains how Chinatown in Singapore is a function of colonial history, how Sir Stamford Raffles, that astonishing, enterprising upper-class statesman and scholar, had cleverly segmented Singapore along ethnic lines with the Jackson urban planning scheme, forming kampongs for the Malays, the Indians and the Chinese, in pursuit of ‘communal harmony’, a Confucian value!
She’s led the tour group down Smith Street now, and in front of them is the former famed Chinese opera theatre, Lai Chun Yuen. Quickly changing topic, she mentions that, in its heyday, it staged Cantonese operas twice a day. The Taiwanese tourists are all agog. But the woman who had made the Chinatown comment seems dissatisfied. She stands slightly apart from the group, fanning herself slowly, an air of mystery about her. As a history hobbyist, Katharine wonders if her spiel has become too pre-packaged, too convenient. What other stories does the façade of Lai Chun Yuen hide? Her mind casts back to what Xiao Mei had said about the industriousness of Chinese immigrants; it’s not that she disagrees, it’s just that her viewpoint feels like one of those movies-on-wheels of old—a peepshow of Mickey Mouse cartoon, partial and disjointed. Chinese coolie labour had no choice in their ‘adopted’ home—don’t work, you don’t eat. How many other stories about Chinatown, indeed about Malaya as a British colony, and Singapore and Malaysia as newly developing nations comprised of large percentages of migrant labour, are just as real, just as full of sacrifice and hardship and sheer toil, but remain buried and lost in time?
After the tour, Katharine is exhausted. She catches the bus to Bukit Merah, to visit Po Jie, for whom she cooks dinner three times a week. Po Jie, who still does construction work, even though she must be close to sixty by now. When Katharine urges her to think about retirement, Po Jie laughs. ‘What, retire to an old folks’ home? I don’t want.’
On the bus, she finds a seat next to a window. The entire day feels like a grafted skin of perturbation and disquiet. She finally allows her mind to go where it’s wanted to go since the shophouse. Hayqal. Their love affair that had ended so abruptly, so unceremoniously, leaving her wounded and desolate for months. Ten years have passed; yet she remembers their first date so vividly. They’d gone to see P. Ramlee’s Madu Tiga at the Cathay, clutching each other in a giggle fit when the three wives of a cheating husband lounged together at the beach and said, in sweetly saccharine tones, that they’d scoop each other’s eyeballs out. Afterwards, Hayqal had taken Katharine to have satays on Beach Road, then they put-putted home on his moped. At the wrought iron gate, he’d grasped hold of her hand, boldly intertwined their fingers, and led her to the night shadows of some overly-luxuriant nipah palms. He wasn’t much taller than her, and as he leaned in close, he hesitated, as if unsure, as if he were aware of all the leapfrogging of boundaries with this one minuscule gesture. ‘May I?’ he whispered. Such a gentleman, how could she refuse? Katharine moved her mouth just infinitesimally closer. His thumb and fingers encircled her chin to tilt her lips up; his mouth opened and took hers.
Her parents had put their foot down. What was the point of all that money she earned, helping Dr Lu in the shophouse by being his assistant, pounding roots and herbs with mortar and pestle, doing his accounting and washing up, if she were to end up being a Malay housewife? Didn’t she know, after a year or two, he’d tire of her and get himself another? They can have four, you know. Katharine had felt like retorting: the Chinese have multiple concubines, what about that? Then her mother’s weary countenance even as she said, What good is it to have such a nimble brain, good with remembering numbers and facts, and all that schooling she had, a diploma in accounting some more, if all she did with it was marry beneath her status? What did she say he did for a living? Making outdoor furniture? What, not even furniture for inside? What a terrible loss of face!
Was that all they cared about? Their min zi? Whether they lost face or not? Katharine had shouted. Her mother had shouted back, ‘We don’t want you to spend your life being looked down upon. What parent wants that for her child?’
She defied them by continuing to date Hayqal, even as she felt a knot of shame inside at her lack of filial piety, bringing her family honour down, and yes, her inability to curb her unruly heart. Each date though was also a triumph of self-definition, of self-reclamation—biryani in Serangoon Road, kway teow at the outdoor eating stalls on Albert Street, nasi rawan at Bussorah Street—each date was an affirmation that the real matters more than the surface markers of identity, a belief that there’s an inner smoulder of the inexorable and illimitable and indescribable that only the two of them could experience in the other. They made love in his furniture shop, no more than a shack really, in Punggol. To Katharine, he was so sexy—she loved his throat and shoulders, the skin there as soft as a baby’s bottom. He was so gentle with her, sucking at her as if she was pure honey, calling her his honeybee. His fingers, they knew how to work a body, to coax, to smooth, to shape, to spring, to release.
Po Jie had intervened at her parents’ request. Katharine might have gone on defying her parents, but how could she disobey Po Jie, her ‘adoptive’ mother, the one who had ransomed her life? What she owes Po Jie is not just filial duty, but also a debt of honour, to be repaid till death. Po Jie forced a seung-tai on her—introduced her to the tailor’s son from the shophouse next door. Out of deference, even as her heart stormed and raged, she went with him to see a Hong Kong romantic melodrama at the Capitol—Love With An Alien, starring the incandescent Yu Ming. Throughout the film, all Katharine wanted to do was hurl dried sotong and kacang puteh at the ngong lou, who laughed whenever a melodramatic line was delivered. Afterwards, Katharine vomited by the side of the road, into a longkang. The sheer difference in her reaction did not elude her. The tailor’s son jeered, ‘Did you want to see a Malay film or something?’ It was a slap in the face, for sure.
When Hayqal unceremoniously ended the affair—one day, he simply failed to turn up for an assignation, and also oddly, didn’t answer any of her subsequent letters—Katharine swore she could give him up as easily as he gave her up. Her own mother rubbed salt into an open gaping wound: I told you so, I told you he would dump you soon as he catches sight of another pretty skirt. Only Po Jie was there for her. Cooking for her, feeding her, nourishing her. Chubby frog’s legs in ginger sauce. Steamed lotus-wrapped sticky rice, rich with dates and salted egg. Homemade zha jiang mian Po Jie had learned to make—these really Chinese dishes, as if to remind her she’s a true-blue Chinese. Katharine felt like the Kitchen Goddess, her lips being sealed with sticky grease so she wouldn’t cry. But at least Po Jie cared, even if her methods were inept. Katharine had her movies. At Rex or Cathay or Majestic, she could watch The Adventures of Pinocchio or The Real McCoy or Sumpah Orang Minyak. Scream her lungs out at the frightful oily man and feel some relief.
At the front door of Po Jie’s HDB flat, she takes out her key for the metal accordion gate, but before she can unlock it, Po Jie is at the door.
‘You’re home!’ Katharine exclaims with surprise.
‘The back is doing me in today,’ Po Jie sighs.
Katharine feels such familiarity here. Her home away from home. All of Po Jie’s most prized possessions, her sparse Chinese antiques—a circular rosewood table with an embedded slab of marble and ornately carved wooden stools, the Sky God and Kitchen God shrines, which Po Jie had relocated here when Mr Lu moved his family to a two-storey bungalow in Katong. Nothing thrown out. The Chinese chamber pot with a red rooster design, chock-full with old rubber slippers. Up until a few years ago, Po Jie had used it to stash her savings underneath the rough working shoes she’d hewn out of car tires. In the Bukit Pasoh shophouse, Katharine had kept a goldfish in it, her sole childhood entertainment, watching it finning around. Its paint is flaking off now, revealing bald patches of rusty metal. All these cultural objects as proxies to salvage the past, to cement a sense of heritage and belonging, to act as receptacles, as the Taiwanese tourist had charged, to give form to liquid identity.
In Po Jie’s kitchen, a wrapped newspaper bundle lies on the counter. The fishy smell of newsprint emanates as Katharine unwraps it. Inside is a Cantonese lap ngap. Jiminy Cricket, a flattened waxed duck. She yells out to Po Jie, ‘Ma, what’s with the duck?’
Po Jie answers, ‘Do something with it, will you? Old Mr Chow gave it to me.’
But certain Cantonese traditional delicacies flummox Katharine—this is one of them. She throws it back into its wrapper, sticks it in the fridge. In the end, she makes steamed egg with mushrooms, stir-fried dow miao, and Po Jie’s favourite, peanuts and anchovies stir-fried in fragrant sesame oil.
Po Jie eyes the dishes on the table. ‘I thought you’d make something fancy with the duck?’
‘It’ll keep, it’s waxed,’ Katharine says.
As they eat, Katharine says, apropos of nothing, ‘I guess I’m not as Chinese as all that. I don’t much care for Chinese sausages either, I guess I never told you.’
Po Jie scoops rice into her mouth vigorously with her chopsticks, holding her bowl close to her chin. ‘You’re more a kangkung and belachan person, I know. Rendang, nasi kandar, that’s more up your alley. Rojak food.’
Katharine pauses. ‘That’s what you say. I suddenly remembered that boy today.’
All these chewing noises Po Jie makes. Why must Po Jie always live as if life is only about eating, sleeping and shitting?
Absent-mindedly, Po Jie says, ‘Didn’t take much to scare him, I thought he’d hold out. That dam-siu-gwai.’ Coward.
Katharine’s chopsticks halt at midpoint to her mouth. White rice cascading like pellets of snow. A slow drip of knowledge, an intuitive understanding bleeding into tissue. ‘You spoke to Hayqal? When would you have spoken to Hayqal?’
Po Jie’s turn now to become motionless. Her eyes becoming furtive, evading. Katharine realises, with a lurch, that in a momentary lack of vigilance, Po Jie had divulged something she meant to take to the grave. Po Jie rolls her rice in her mouth, preventing herself from speaking. She smacks her lips, then picks up a large tuft of dow miao to put in her mouth. She chews. Katharine understands that this will be all that’s ever said. Her heart spins like a barrel, the words sem tong in Cantonese slip into her mind like the muted refrain of a Chinese ballad. Cantonese expressions for emotions are so melodramatic, nothing like their pale reflections in another language—sakit hati or heart pain, jatuh maruah or loss of face. She looks at all the objects on the table, steam from the rice preventing her from seeing them properly, the chipped Chinese crockery and slightly corroded tin mugs, these traces of lived, hobbled lives.
The five samsui women Heidi has gathered together in the shophouse on this torpid afternoon look as frisky, as lóng mǎ jīng shén (vigorous horse and dragon spirited), as nursing home inhabitants watching a Malay oldie they don’t comprehend on the telly. Two are dozing with mouths open; two are chatting, although given the lengthy pauses between give-and-exchange, it sounds more like a random soliloquy than a conversation. Only one appears alert, her eyes tracking Heidi and Ben, Heidi’s cameraman. Her name is Po Jie—Sister Po—her passport name is Chen Po Chun. Not many of these pioneering women still alive, and of the ones Heidi contacted, only these five are fit to travel. For funds to be disbursed the documentary’s mandate is ‘authenticity’, thus Part Two of the documentary will be a trip to China—the return HOME—because it will be a tearjerker of reunions, and when tears flow, people believe it’s true. But here’s Problem No. 1: not all of them are enthused about going HOME. One is worried about what or who she’ll find, while another says she’s not sure the old house hasn’t been torn down, she seems to remember a letter telling her so, but her memory being what it is, maybe it was the outhouse that has been dismantled. Problem No. 2: not all are from the area of Sanshui, and the budget is too tight to film separate village trips. A bit of a Potemkin Village issue, that, Ben remarks. Heidi shoots him a doleful look.
It’s twenty-two degrees, but feels twenty-eight; a storm is brewing and the sky looks swollen and bunged-up. Through the open window the juddering of a pneumatic road drill interjects.
Ben pokes his head out the window. He reports, ‘It looks like they’re breaking up cement. Do you want to have a chat with these blokes, p’raps, considering you’re local?’
Heidi takes a peek. Two Indian migrant labourers in yellow hard hats and neon vests are juggling the drilling. No, she doesn’t want to have a chat with them. ‘I don’t speak Tamil, you ninny.’ She feels irritation out of proportion to Ben’s surface misreading of language syncretism in Singapore. It’s more a cogs-mismatch feeling, like they’re missing the bigger picture altogether.
The ceiling fan whirs slowly, beating the soporific air with lazy paddles. On afternoons like these, Heidi wishes she was back in the UK. Having just relocated home, this idea brings ambivalent, mixed feelings, even an anxiety of sorts: ironic, given that in London, she thought of HOME often and waxed nostalgic about ham jim baeng, salted pancakes, and yau-ja-gui, fried dough sticks. Or maybe it’s ice kachang and banana fritters she dreamt more about.
The idea for Part One of the documentary is to film the samsui women in their home environment. As Heidi was interviewing them and hearing their life stories, she realised that the story she wants to tell isn’t about how feminist and epochal these women are, even though the very idea of women construction workers helping to build a nation’s infrastructure in 1960s and 1970s Singapore is pretty bad-ass, nor is it about their pioneer spirit—their resilience, industriousness, thriftiness and diligence, harnessed as part of a heritage industry of memory-making and a nation-building narrative bent on inculcating desirable values—but rather, Heidi wants to tell a story simply about the individual lives of these women. Stories that aren’t singular, stories that show that they are flesh and blood, 3D. The good, the bad, the ugly. Stories without an agenda. Is that even possible? If stories of these women are allowed just to be stories of a lived life, would it return ownership and agency to them? Would they thank Heidi for unflattening them, portraying their individual stories, neither condemning nor extolling them? Or would Heidi herself be considered exploitative? How important is it for the auteur to interrogate her own motives?
Problem No. 3. This gathering feels off. The ladies do not actually know one another. None of them wants to travel to China on her own. Heidi is hoping that this gathering will enable them to befriend each other and become more comfortable with the idea of travelling as a group. Plus, yield some nice footage.
Yesterday, at Po Jie’s flat in Bukit Merah, even the props had looked all wrong. Ben had walked around the flat and collected some items. Placed them on, or in the vicinity of, the circular rosewood dining table and stools, while Po Jie and her unmarried daughter, Katharine, chattered away, not minding him. A Chinese-style, fleur-design thermos. A celadon teapot and teacups set. A pair of endearing bamboo mother-child chairs.
‘Ben,’ Heidi said, ‘samsui women are supposed to have taken a vow of celibacy.’ From the corner of her eye, she could see Katharine glancing out the window. A stiff set to her shoulders, possibly from the noise aggravation outside.
Ben shrugged. ‘Just snazzing things up. These are from the house.’ Nevertheless, he took away the mother-child chairs, came back with a chamber pot with a red rooster design. Plonked it next to a Chinese silkscreen.
He stood still. Looked around. Grabbed a potted shrub and plopped it in. ‘There now.’
Heidi gave up. Ben loves goofing around. He tried durian when they first arrived and the taste was so vile to him he spat the mouthful into someone’s handy glass of Coca-Cola.
She’d thought Po Jie and Katharine were chatting, but their raised voices finally registered. Not understanding Cantonese, Heidi observed Katharine rising from her chair. Po Jie didn’t look up as Katharine took her mug of tea, ready to quit the room. To Heidi, Katharine seemed standoffish and cold, although impressively—Po Jie had told Heidi proudly—Katharine spoke English, Malay, Mandarin and at least two other Chinese dialects, Hokkien and Cantonese.
Heidi approached Katharine with an enquiring eyebrow lift. ‘Everything okay?’
Katharine didn’t look at Heidi. The tension in the angle of her neck was now palpable. ‘She wants me to accompany her on the China trip. I have work obligations. I can’t simply take a week off.’
Heidi was surprised. ‘Po Jie told me you’re retired? You used to be a bookkeeper?’
The change in Katharine’s face was astonishing: from a frozen visage, her eyes were now flashing with fury. ‘I run historical tours for a Chinatown clan association. I take my duties very seriously. I don’t just play play.’
Heidi was taken aback. Katharine was insinuating that her documentary was ‘play play’. Coming from left field, Heidi wasn’t sure what she’d said or done to offend Katharine, but not wishing to antagonise her further, she gave her most winsome smile. ‘Please don’t worry, we can discuss this nearer the date. You might change your mind as you see how the film develops. I think your mother would enjoy your company on the trip.’
‘She just wants me there to play nursemaid. And I won’t be changing my mind.’
Abruptly, Katharine turned and walked to the kitchen. Heidi and Ben traded looks.
All that now seems smoothed over as Heidi watches Katharine open a Tupperware box of peeled clementine segments for her mother and the other samsui women. Ben is filming this, his eyes fixed to the camera viewfinder. She knows the shot: two generations sharing a convivial moment around food, food as metonymic reference for nourishment, kinship and heritage continuity, and it’s happening unscripted. Sometimes there is an uncanny mind meld between them. Heidi met Ben at NYU Film School. Right from the beginning, their instant attraction for each other was off-the-charts, but she was a shy foreign student and he was one of those charmers who only needed to open his mouth for his nondescript North London accent to trip out and women in New York dropped at his feet like flies. So, they played cat and mouse through an entire semester. Then, one evening, as she entered a lecture hall, he was there, sitting two rows from the front. He looked up and straight at her. There was no avoiding saying hello, and the sudden expectant look on his face made her take a seat next to him. As they waited for the lecture to begin, the entire side of her body close to his felt as though it was burning. Finally, she snuck a look over and saw he too was rigid with tension. Without meaning to, she said, ‘Are we going to have trouble concentrating?’ The dawning of understanding on his face was a sight to behold; she never forgot it. Ben looked at her. He grinned, ‘Looks like it.’ When they left the lecture hall, he grabbed her hand.
As if sensing what she’s thinking, even with his back to her, Ben is making gestures at her, his hands—his paws she calls them, with their fat, pink fingers—twisting behind his back. What the heck is the nutter up to now? Peering, Heidi watches as Ben contorts his hands, then slowly she sees it. Hand shadow puppets: first two raised fingers, middle and index finger, two lopsided ears—ah, a rabbit—next a dog, a butterfly, and what is that…a moose? Heidi bursts out laughing. Ben turns and gives her an air smooch.
Their troubles continue. Turns out one of the samsui women has Crohn’s disease. ‘What’s Crohn’s disease?’ Ben asks. They look it up. Ruptured intestinal walls. Blood in the faeces. Yikes.
To distract themselves from the multiple roadblocks they’ve encountered for the documentary, Heidi and Ben take a weekend jaunt to Bangkok, and at the airport, haggling over the price of a city tour, they lose their camera, or perhaps someone just made off with it. Livid with Ben for not being more careful, Heidi storms off, until she realises she has nowhere to go. It’s the Bangkok international airport. But that’s not all. She comes back for a face off with her one and only, her shadow puppeteer, and he tells her that the film tapes were in the bag with the camera. The news pummels her. Heidi sinks down to the floor, cups both her hands over her face, and bawls. Tears bathing her cheeks like a wrung-out dishrag. This is just the shits, she blubbers. So unfair, what god has she offended? Ben hunkers down and cradles her. She sobs into his neck and the collar of his T-shirt becomes so damp he has to buy an emergency T-shirt to change into. He comes out of the bathroom wearing one that says, This Guy Loves Muay-Thai.
The worst is yet to come. Only on the return trip does Ben realise his passport has less than six months’ validity, and the airline ground staff refuse to let him fly. Ben says she should go home first, that he’ll join her as soon as he sorts it out. Reluctantly, Heidi acquiesces, but two days later, not only does Ben not turn up, there’s no answer when she calls his cell phone and hotel room. Terrified that something might have happened to him in Bangkok—her mind roils from all the possibilities (seduced in a Patpong sex show? fell into the Chao Phraya?)—she frantically calls up the British Consulate in Bangkok, explaining herself incoherently to the officer at the other end, who responds frostily with, ‘And may I ask what your relationship to said British national is?’ The question stumps Heidi. Doesn’t she love Ben, and yet why has the word ‘love’ never been uttered between them, why does the designation ‘lover’ feel like an ill-fitting suit of clothes? It’s one of those things she can’t bear to admit—are they together because Ben provides a link to that other ‘home’, a link never tensile enough, regardless of how accented her English is (not Singaporean, haah, as the taxi uncles ask). Rootlessness. The lack of an anchor. Where is home for hybrid people like herself, made up like a box of incongruities? Fluid identities that spill beyond boundaries, running like lines of flight, like ley lines that map and traverse different worlds? What lurks within the heart that no one sees, and when confessed, would it form bonds and communal links, as envisioned by Confucian philosophy? Would it create a safety net strong enough to hold her?
Ben finally calls. Over the static in the trunk line, he tells her he’s back in London.
Heidi’s utter shock: ‘What in the world are you doing there?’
Ben’s pause. ‘I’m sorry luv.’ The word ‘love’ used like this throws her. Her mind clouds over. Ben’s sheepish regretful tone over the phone. ‘I didn’t know how to tell you, Heidi, but I just don’t think I can continue with your project. I have no idea what I’m doing traipsing all over Asia, following you around like a hound dog.’
Her project? ‘What do you mean?’
‘I…’ Then, the ultimate shaft. ‘You remember Scott Pennington from film school, don’t you?’ Heidi has a vague recollection of this Scott Pennington—red hair, lots of freckles, a button nose, like Christopher Robin from Winnie the Pooh. ‘He called me while I was in Bangkok. He’s shooting a documentary all about ice up in Norway, it’s quite an exciting project, and he says he could use another cameraman. I just thought…given…’
Heidi doesn’t let him finish. She hangs up on him.
Time flows on. Life flows on too. A couple of months later, as she’s on a flight to Guangzhou with three samsui women seated beside her—one of them Po Jie, but sans Katharine—she wonders if their initial framework for the project was flawed to begin with. ‘Authenticity’ is a gimmick, a façade, not to be confused with the ‘real’. It wasn’t a ‘commemorative narrative’ in the making, it was a comedy of errors. When ‘home’ as a concept is debunked or demythologised, what are you left with?
The eureka moment had occurred as she was scrolling through her Nikon just a couple of days after Ben’s devastating phone call. She’d come upon a photograph of a Chinatown public mural of two samsui women in their iconic red headscarves and navy blue samfoos, squatting down on a pavement sharing a bowl of noodles. Ben, in typical impish fashion, had squatted down between them, and mimed eating a bowl of noodles with chopsticks, sticking out like a goat. Snap! Heidi took the picture.
They haven’t spoken since the call, and the situation is not resolved, so they are back to their inception—the cat and mouse—hiding from each other. That’s how certain things are: they don’t end, they just hang.
The picture, though, had been like a nose tweak. Not ‘roots’, what a dungu she’d been, but ‘routes’! She’d been reading a spate of recently published academic theories: Bhabha, Gilroy, Rey Chow. Being unhomed was the journey itself. It was as if the planet had opened up like the Hungry Ghost Festival, the gates of Hell thrown open, and all manner of ghostly half-realisations given a voice. Her role too became clarified: not creator, but witness. Like the movie houses on bicycles of old—partial glimpses, sneak peeks. Wasn’t that, in the end, what memory making for those in the heritage industry is? Offering a series of windows into the past, and the past is a series of flows?
With that in mind, her focus changed. She filmed them doing their ablutions in the morning—Po Jie still using her Chinese rooster-design washbasin. The chamber pot as signifier. After all, official memory making sifts through what’s worthy as myth, sloughs off the mind-residue without compunction, like so much body waste. She filmed them in a quiet moment: the restlessness on their faces. Also their capacity for stillness, just sitting, staring out the window, listening to the trill of birds. Cocking their ears to listen out for their neighbours in the HDB complex. Sticking incense into the urns of ancestral shrines. She filmed Katharine massaging Po Jie’s knees, calves, wrists, arms and back with White Flower Oil. Her actions so thorough the moment was riven with tenderness. And the past was glimpsed through a sound her camera picked up: the cricks in Po Jie’s joints and bones from a lifetime in construction. She filmed them at dinner with their families, the happiness that stole over their features when a family member nimbly picked up a slice of water chestnut or steamed abalone mushroom with chopsticks and placed it in their bowl of rice. She filmed them close-up, zeroing in on their interior journeys, until the iris dissolved into a counterpane of black criss-crossed with sparkings of light.
In China as well, she’ll be a one-woman crew; her heart throbs when she thinks about the sights that await her. She wants to film them looking at decimated or newly done-over villages, tabulating the forces of industrialisation in their heads. She wants to film them being greeted by the young and old, relatives and friends they don’t know they have, and how the generational divide is fielded through their gestures in between empty silent spaces. She wants to film them absorbing the sights and sounds of the welcome party the provincial government has planned to ‘promote’ these amazing, pioneering women full of grit and fire.
She wants to film the samsui women looking on.
Looking at.
Looking for.
Looking, looking, looking.