If there is a collective world memory, it must have a collective photo gallery, comprising those pictures taken, over the years, of wars and destruction, human violence of unimaginable proportions leading to human suffering on an unimaginable scale, the wrath of Nature wreaked upon those who least deserve it. These photos, taken either by experienced, skilled cameramen with an eye to capturing tragedy at its peak moment, or by bystanders who happened to be around with a video camera, include some that have become icons, seared forever into world memory. Even a quick verbal description of them will trigger a visual re-play, in every vivid detail. They include:
The black-and-white photo, taken by an Associated Press photographer who was in Vietnam during its terrible war years and happened to be around when a village was napalmed and a little girl ran screaming in his direction, completely naked, her hair flying out around her face, her arms flung out in her terror. The child must have somehow managed to tear off her burning clothes. I can hear her air-rending screams. ‘So hot! So hot!’
Another black-and-white photo, also taken in war-torn Vietnam, showing a South Vietnamese general shooting a captured Vietcong guerilla in the head with a pistol. I can see clearly the shirt that the prisoner was wearing — it was a shirt with rather big checks and short sleeves — as he stood before the general. With his eyes shut tight in terrified anticipation of the firing shot, and his mouth wide open in a roar of anguish, he must have been photographed at the precise moment when the bullet reached his head before blasting it apart, a blood-chilling moment shown in the photo as a small puff of white smoke around his head.
A photo in colour taken by a South African photojournalist, of a starving African child. The child is too weak to walk or even stand, and is seen crouched on the ground. It is the typical picture of a child at the last stage of starvation, with its enormous head, thin body, swollen belly and stick-like legs. What is most memorable about this photo is the large vulture nearby, keenly watching and waiting for the child to drop dead and provide its next meal. I remember when I first saw the picture, I was angry with the photographer. ‘You were more interested in getting a good picture than saving a child? Why didn’t you at least chase the vulture away?’ (But years later, when I read that three months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for the picture, the photojournalist committed suicide, I realised that the poor man must have lived through hell with the image of that child in his head.)
The picture of that lone young man, dressed in black pants and white shirt, with what looks like a paper bag dangling from each hand, standing calmly in front of an enormous tank with many more lined up behind it, in Tiananmen Square. The video footage is even more startling in showing the young man’s defiance. As the tank moves to avoid him, he deftly moves with it to maintain his position of defiance. A skip to the right. A skip to the left. The individual seems to be enjoying himself. His playful challenge of a whole phalanx of military power is stunning. The video was probably taken minutes before the lone rebel was whisked off and never seen again.
A TV picture of the devastation wrought by the Asian tsunami, of a woman in Sri Lanka grieving hysterically over her dead child whose body is laid out, together with other dead bodies, on a makeshift wooden table. The woman’s grief has the eerie appearance of primitive ritual. Her long hair streaming around her face, she repeatedly picks up her child’s legs, one with each hand, and knocks them against the sides of her head, shrieking all the time. After a number of the knocks, she puts down the legs, moves aimlessly, desolately around the table for a few seconds, then returns to her child’s dead body and starts the whole process again. I remember watching with wide-eyed fascination, realising that a mother’s grief can be so great that numbing physical display is its only outlet.
It’s a photo gallery of shock, remembrance, conscience.
I have my own private photo gallery. They contain special images of mothers captured by the camera at the height of maternal anguish. They are all looking at the camera, with calm, silent faces, and large, sorrowful eyes, as if tears and hysteria are futile now, and all hope is gone.
There is the Japanese mother who is lovingly giving her grownup daughter a bath in a large tub, agony written all over her ageing face as she props up her child in her arms. The girl’s mouth is wide open, her eyes are unseeing. She is a complete physical and mental wreck because of the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima.
There is the Jewish mother wearing a heavy coat with the yellow sign of her condemned race sewn on one sleeve, clutching a small suitcase and holding tightly to her little boy, also warmly bundled up for travelling. Her frightened eyes already tell us that she knows the true purpose of the train journey: it will take them both to the death camps, the gas chambers, the annihilation of their race. Perhaps her mind is racing with thoughts about how she can save her son, even at the last moment.
There is the American woman, a farm worker caught, like so many others, in the devastation of the Dust Bowl, her face sun-burnt and lined with worry, as she holds her small children close to her, worrying about where she and her family can go to find work, a roof over their heads, the next meal.
Then there is the picture that touches me most of all. I saw it many years ago, in a local newspaper that had reproduced it from a Thai newspaper. It shows the webbed, worn face of a very old woman, whose lips are a mere line, pulled inwards over toothless gums. Her eyes are large and sunken, and a small, thin, bony hand is raised to press against a cheek. The accompanying report in the newspaper had told the tale of an eighty-year-old widow in a small Thai village, who supported her handicapped fifty-year-old daughter in the only way she knew how — plucking coconuts and being paid a few cents for each, by the coconut plantation owner. There was another picture showing the old, white-haired woman, with her sarong hiked up between her legs, high up on a tall coconut tree, her legs tightly clasping the trunk, her feet pressed firmly against it, one wrinkled hand on a ripe coconut, ready to twist it off and drop it to the ground. That photo stands out in my gallery. I remember it haunted me for days for its sheer unbelieavability: how could an old woman, at the end of her life, be forced to make her living this way? I wanted to believe that the report was a hoax, perhaps a stupid April Fool’s joke. But no, all the images in my gallery are very real indeed. Such things do happen in the world.
All these images of suffering mothers elicit the strongest emotions in me — compassion for them, anger with the forces that had caused their plight, a sense of guilt that, in my privileged world free from these terrible forces, I had never experienced the tiniest fraction of their hardships, and most of all, a breathless admiration for a maternal love so great that it would have stopped at nothing to care for offspring.
Such pure, unconditional love can only be explained ultimately in terms of fundamental biology. The woman’s functions of childbearing and child-caring condition her instincts and emotions to be strongly nurturative, channelling all her energies into the one most important role destined for her by Nature — motherhood. In today’s modern, advanced societies, it is said that even the most successful single woman, even the most aggressive exponent of feminism, begins, at some time, to feel the pull of that primordial urge, and to heed the warning of that infamously ticking biological clock.
The evolutionary scientists tell us there is an even more fundamental explanation for this powerful urge in women. It is genetic in origin, and hence immutable, determining the behaviour of all female species on the face of the earth for all time. Whether it is the lowly bird fighting off the predators swooping upon her brood of nestlings, the gazelle quickly eating up the afterbirth of her newborn to prevent its smell from reaching the hyenas, the bear or wolf ready to tear to pieces the intruder threatening her cubs, they reflect this genetic disposition. Human mothers across cultures may differ in the way they bring up their children, but are united in this inborn, Nature-ordained behaviour shared with animals. More specifically, Nature has made provision for a special, mother-child bonding chemical called oxytocin to kick in as soon as a female gives birth. Such a clever evolutionary trick to ensure that, right from the start, the most necessary human emotion for survival, love, is a mutually rewarding one!
My picture gallery of heroic motherhood, which I started when I was in Malaysia, has enlarged to include images from Singapore. Oddly, they are images only in my imagination, for I had seen no photos of these mothers. I had only read about them in newspaper reports or heard their stories from others. But they have faces nonetheless. For my imagination, with unerring intuition, has drawn in the furrows of anxiety on the brows, the wildness of terror in the eyes, or simply the calm stoicism of habitual sacrifice and love. Indeed, there is only one, universal face in the realm of motherdom. Among these images:
The mother of a much-loved late president who, he told me, was a lowly worker in a hospital, working long hours to support her family. The only treat she allowed herself was an occasional drink of the cheap but potent toddy, to help her cope with the strenuousness of her work, or to put her to sleep more easily for the next day’s labours. When he became an ambassador in a rich country, he was personally given the keys to the embassy’s celebrated wine cellar. Seeing the row upon row of the most expensive wines, he wept in remembrance of that dear mother.
The mother of a businessman who was only briefly mentioned in a newspaper report in connection with something that her son had done for her, an act so spectacular that it drew all attention away from her. This businessman had, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of his mother’s death, commissioned the most beautiful Paper House for the Dead for her. He chose Taiwan craftsmen to do the job, for he did not think those in Singapore were equal to it. This traditional tribute to the dead, at its most magnificent, was a paper house that could be the size of a small room, made entirely of fine quality paper and delicate bamboo frames. Inside it was a wealth of artefacts, also in paper, for the comfort of the dead one in his or her life in the next world — furniture including beautiful curtained beds, couches and chairs; possibly an opium reclining couch and opium paraphernalia including the long bamboo pipe; a rich wardrobe, jewellery, a trishaw to take the dead one around (or a paper model of a Ford, if that modern form of transport had already arrived), all fashioned in paper with meticulous care. Most importantly, there was a retinue of paper servants to accompany the dead one, including the indispensable bondmaids, to do the regular back massaging. (As a child in Malaysia, I saw such a paper house, on a much more modest scale, for the funeral of my grandmother.)
When I read about the cost of the breathtakingly beautiful paper house that had arrived from Taiwan for the Singapore businessman, I couldn’t believe it — thirty thousand dollars, which twenty or so years ago, was a huge sum. The house was taken to the grave of the man’s mother, and ceremonially burnt on it. It was reduced to ashes in less than half an hour. The businessman wept as he apologised to his dead mother on behalf of the family who had been too poor to give her a proper funeral, and begged her to accept the long postponed tribute to her selfless love.
The mother of a young, fifteen-year-old boy who was killed in a hit-and-run, and who was reported to have stood, for weeks, at the spot where he had been killed, with a signboard, in both English and Mandarin, begging for information that would lead to the arrest and prosecution of his killer. I remember reading in the report the woman’s tearful description of her dead boy as an extremely filial son who took care of her after her husband’s death. The woman never once said that she loved her son, probably held back by cultural restraints on overt expressions of emotion. But the wealth of details about their everyday lives that emerged in the interview told of a maternal love without equal.
She would wait for him everyday when he came home from school, to make sure he could sit down immediately to a good, hot meal. During the time of his examinations when he had to stay up late to study, she stayed up with him, to provide company and hot nutritious drinks, even when she was unwell. When he was ill and had to be hospitalised for a week, she begged to be allowed to be with him at all times, sleeping in a chair beside his bed. I don’t know what happened to her in the end, whether her patient waiting for weeks in the hot sun, with the crying plea on the signboard, paid off. There is the familiar, nightmarish scenario of the brokenhearted mother who can’t cope with her pain anymore and kills herself to be with her loved one.
I never saw the faces of these mothers, but their images are forever displayed in my private gallery of tribute to the stunning purity and power of their love. And it was the least known and most faceless of mothers that I chose to make the central character of a short story that I had written but never published.
It was inspired by the picture of the young man standing in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square. I wrote about his mother, not him, because I imagined that her pain must have been greater than his. In my story, she is a widow with an only son, a very promising student on whom she bases her hopes and lavishes her love. Her wages as a factory worker is meagre, and she spends nearly all of it on him, making sure he eats well, has a comfortable room for his studies, is able to buy the books he needs. He is studying for an important exam, and she suddenly has the idea to help build up his strength with something that her mother, and her mother’s mother, had always sworn by — a type of very high-quality, high-cost ginseng which if brewed correctly is a student’s best aid, both physically and mentally for the all-important exams. So she buys this precious ginseng, almost depleting her savings.
But she is worried because her son is being distracted by a great deal of political activity going on among the students in his college. They talk excitedly about revolution, about change at last. They plan a huge rally in Tiananmen Square to show the authorities that they mean business. Her son wants to join in the revolution. Suddenly his exams seem less important. She is worried for his safety, for she hears that there could be real trouble at the Square. But he ignores her pleas not to get involved, and goes out to join his friends. He doesn’t come home for days. She waits in mounting fear. One day she is told about the tanks. And then someone tells her that her son had foolishly defied the authorities and had been mowed down by a tank. He said his body, soaked in blood, was quickly carted away.
She is desperate, crying for her dead son. She knows what she must do. She brews his ginseng and puts it in a flask. Then she makes her way to the Square. It is empty except for some government men hosing away the blood of the massacre. There are some soldiers around, warily watching. They approach her to shoo her away. But when she kneels before them and begs for permission to carry out a little ceremony of remembrance for her son, they decide she is harmless and walk away. From a short distance, they watch with curiosity as she kneels down at a certain spot, takes out some joss-sticks, lights them, clasps them in her hands, closes her eyes and murmurs something. Next she sticks them in a small urn, and places the flask of ginseng beside it. She says, ‘My son, drink this. It will make you well and strong.’ Then she gets ready to leave.
After she has left, the two young soldiers who have been watching come up to take a closer look at what she has left behind. They unscrew the top of the flask and smell the hot ginseng brew inside. One of them says, ‘Hey, this is superior ginseng! My grandmother once brewed it for my father. She said it cost a fortune!’ Laughing, the soldiers take turns at the precious stuff. Before leaving, they kick away the joss-sticks but decide the flask is worth keeping.
I hadn’t wanted to publish the story because in the end, I didn’t like the effect it was having on me. I kept seeing the face of the mother I had written about — a composite of all the tragic faces in my gallery.
My mother once told me that a birthday should not be a day of celebration, but of mourning, since the labour pains of a woman were a foretaste of the rest of her life. Today of course this statement would sound nonsensical with the advancement of medicine and the education of women. A birthday an occasion for mourning? That would be laughably far-fetched. An occasion of remembrance and humble reflection? Yes, that would be more like it. Every birthday, I would like to do a gentle tour of my little private gallery of images.