THE NEW YEAR began well indeed. Our own university was born. What used to be a division of the University Of Malaya now became the autonomous, fully-fledged University of Singapore. Appropriately, the inauguration took place on January 1 at the Bukit Timah campus, just off the eponymous road. Built on a forested hill, the placement of the white buildings was reminiscent of classical British institutions of learning, with a clock tower, arched corridors and quadrangles opening onto manicured lawns.

Every time we had a first, whether it was the first university or the first local head of state, it reinforced our identity as a self-governing country, free from the clutches of colonial power. Like a toddler who has to discover his own confidence and ability to walk, our country too had to find its steady feet.

My father, who worked in Bukit Timah, had to cycle past the university campus each day, and he told us how awe-inspiring it looked. This was spoken by a man who did not think that women should be educated! Luckily, my eldest brother did not share our father’s limited view of women.

“Come on,” Eldest Brother said to me. “Let me teach you a game.”

He taught mathematics at St. Andrew’s School, which was just across the river from our village. Eldest Brother liked games that tapped his left brain and had an analytical edge. He produced a wooden board that had black and white squares on it. The board was placed on a disused orange-crate. The slatted crate once held oranges that were sold in the market. These empty crates became our tables or chairs, since we could not afford real furniture. Then Eldest Brother took out the beautifully shaped wooden figurines from the box and set them on the board. He had found the set at Robinson’s Petang, the Thieves Market at Sungei Road, by Rochor River. Someone had playfully nicknamed the outdoor bazaar after the most expensive English department store on the island, Robinson’s; but added a twist in petang, which meant afternoon, to suggest its lack of authenticity – and the name had stuck. Eldest Brother displayed the two sets of figurines, one opposing the other.

“This game is called chess,” he said with authority.

He patiently told me the name of each piece, its position on the board, the direction it could move, and its role. I was amazed to learn that all the pieces on the board existed to protect the King. Once the King was unable to make a move without being taken, he was considered to be check-mated; and the game would end. It was such a novel and bizarre concept for me that I became riveted to it.

“I thought men are always the ones who protect the women? How come the King can only move one square at a time when the Queen can move any number of squares? Is the Queen more powerful than the King?”

“If you stop jabbering, I’ll explain how the game is played,” Eldest brother said, with some impatience. “This game was conceived in India and was styled after a battle. Maybe they had a matriarchal society then.”

Though I was hopeless at maths, I loved the game – it was so exciting, with so many different moves and permutations. And secretly, I loved the fact that it was the Queen, the woman, who had the most liberal moves on the board.

“Not bad, not bad,” Eldest Brother said when we played. “Maybe you’ll be our Girl Wonder.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s a play on words,” said my schoolteacher brother. “There’s a student whose name is Tan Lian Ann and he’s been nicknamed Boy Wonder. He represents Singapore in the chess championship and he’s only fourteen! He just beat defending champion R. E. Fontana in the Malayan Chess Open in KL.”

“Wow,” I said. “It shows we don’t have to be limited either by age or by gender.”

Teaching me chess was Eldest Brother’s greatest gift to me. It became my life-long passion. Not that I played well enough to join in any competition, but it gave me hours of pleasure. Later I told my best friend Parvathi about the rudiments of chess.

“Imagine a woman being more powerful than a man!” I said.

“Huh! That’s only a game,” she snorted. “It’s not like real life, is it? In our world, our fathers and brothers control us and tell us what to do, how to live. If the Women’s Charter had not come in, my father would have married me off last year when I was only fourteen! To a pock-marked man who’s twenty years older than me!”

We looked at each other. The image of that pock-marked old man with the bad teeth must have flashed across our mind’s eye at the same time. We giggled. It was a shared moment of intimacy. Of course we could laugh because we thought the danger had passed for Parvathi.

But for someone who had no schooling, her prospects were indeed dismal. However, I kept on trying to reassure Parvathi that times were changing and that women were getting opportunities they never had before. When I read in the Straits Times about Ong Cheng See, our first local female graduate to be admitted as an advocate, I raced to tell Parvathi about it.

“You see! You see!” I said exuberantly. “We have another woman who has broken the traditional mould! If we can have women as lawyers and as prime ministers, it means you can break out of your mould and not be forced to marry.”

“How?” She asked, her eyes flashing. “How? When I work in a paper factory? I’ve no spare money and no education. Those women had rich parents who sent them to school and university!”

Our village was not more than ten miles from the city, but in many respects we seemed worlds away. The difference between the rich and poor was a greater chasm than our huge monsoon drains. Now that I could read the newspaper, I realised that our kampongs were sometimes perceived by city folk as ghettoes, where street urchins ran riot, where filth and germs perpetrated, where gangsters hid, and where the pontianak, the female vampire, still roamed.

People fear what they do not know.

Krishnan, our Indian neighbour who worked with the ‘Municipal’, usually kept himself apart from the other villagers, as he was educated and was a Brahmin. But on this day, he dashed out to the sandy yard where my father was lifting weights with Rajah and Salleh. It was late afternoon, so the long shadows provided a cool shade. Even the chickens, ducks and dogs were enjoying the coolness.

“I have good news, I have good news,” Krishnan announced.

At that moment, Ah Tetia was lifting some heavy bar-bells. He put them down cautiously with the help of Rajah before he sat up. He used a hand towel to wipe the sweat off his bare chest. The towel was thin, with some swallows and Chinese characters printed on it. It was an iconic piece of towelling, as it was used widely by coffee-shop owners and hawkers, who slung it over their shoulders.

“Mr Krishnan,” Rajah addressed him respectfully just as he did with my father. “What’s all the excitement about?”

“The government is going to provide us with a generator so we can have current!” He patiently explained the function of a generator and kept using the word ‘current’ for electricity. “We will have to fix wires and fluorescent tubes in our houses, so that when the generator is turned on we will have light! In the beginning, we will only have light from 7PM to 9PM. But it’s a good start-yes?”

“Yes, yes!” Everyone agreed.

The news spread round the kampong quickly. People rejoiced.

But my father’s friend Ah Gu practised restraint. “People don’t give anything for nothing. I wonder what the PAP wants from us.”

“Gu-ah!!” My father retorted vehemently. “For once – can you be positive? The PAP has done nothing but keep their promise to make our lives better. Don’t you remember that last year they gave us all that material to repair our village road? They also sent the water-truck promptly during the drought...”

“I still think it has to do with all this talk about merger with Malaya. Lee Kuan Yew wants us to agree to his plans. You must be aware that the Barisan Sosialis Party is opposed to the idea...?”

“Gu-ah.” My father said. “You know the Barisan Sosialis has communist tendencies. Just because you are Chinese-educated doesn’t mean that you have to adopt their view. Don’t you think the PM is right? Merger with Malaya, Brunei, Sabah and Sarawak will make us into a bigger, stronger nation. We’re only a little island. Last year we had to buy more water from the Malayan Federation to survive. If we belonged to the same nation, we wouldn’t have to worry so much when we needed water!”

“It’s true,” said Pak Osman, who appeared and joined in the conversation, nodding his head. “All of us used to be part of the Malayan Federation. It’s more natural for us to be part of the same nation than apart. Come, come. We have work to do if we want to get the current into our houses.”

Once again the villagers joined in with the gotong royong spirit, working together as one community. Wooden posts sprouted from our kampong soil like magic trees, their lines of electrical wires like the vines of the banyan tree. A naked bulb stood atop each of the four posts. The technician came to install the apparatus in our house. Thick, black cables snaked their way at the top of our wooden walls to the fluorescent tube. The long strip of bulb looked strange against the naked attap rafters. It seemed like an invasion of a foreign being who had come to stay.

The villagers congregated for the first lighting of the street lights.

“You see,” Ah Tetia said. “The new government is fulfilling its promise to make life better for those of us in villages.”

“Huhh,” Ah Gu grunted.

He sounded more like a pig than the cow he was nicknamed after.

The generator roared into life. The electric bulbs pulsed. Then the light came on. For us who had existed for years on kerosene and hissing carbide lamps, it was a tremendous moment. Mak and I used to embroider and sew manet or plastic beads onto Peranakan slippers in the shifting flames of the oil lamps. Our eyes used to get so tired from the strain. Now we would be able to see our handiwork more clearly. So it was not a moment that we would forget easily.

“Wahh!!” Everyone exclaimed as the first electric light came on to dispel the darkness. But it was short-lived.

The generator grumbled and then went off. We were plunged into inky blackness. People groaned. Someone lit a candle. Then the generator was restarted with belching rumbles, and the light came back on. That was a pattern we became used to. We were lucky if we got a whole hour of electricity per evening. Most of the time our candles, hurricanes, carbides and oil lamps were on standby. But still we were grateful – something was better than nothing. Finally our kampong had a taste of modernity.

On August 2, there was an announcement on the radio; “Britain has agreed in principle to the formation of Malaysia and would hand over the sovereignty of Singapore, Sarawak, Brunei and North Borneo to the Malaysian Government on August 31, 1963.”

September 1 was proclaimed as the day when the citizens of Singapore were to vote on the terms of the merger, in the Singapore National Referendum or Merger Referendum of Singapore. Many of the uneducated villagers were perplexed, so they came to my father to ask for clarification. Everyone sat outdoors in the sandy yard including Karim, our resident musician and singer, and Pak Osman, our village leader.

“Basically, you have to put a tick on one of the three options. One is Option A. Here you choose that all Singapore citizens would automatically become citizens of the new nation, Malaysia. But Singapore will still retain some say in matters such as labour policies and education. And we’ll also keep our four major languages, English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil as our official languages. Because in Malaya, Malay is the official National Language. Two is Option B. Singapore will become a federal state of Malaysia. So Singapore will be no different from the other eleven states. That means we will have to give up control over issues such as labour and education policies to the federal government in Kuala Lumpur. Also, no multilingualism – only English and Malay will be used for official purposes and in schools. Three is Option C. Singapore will enter on the same terms as the Borneo territories, Brunei, Sabah and Sarawak.”

When my father finished explaining, the group talked amongst themselves, discussing the various options.

“Option A makes sense-lah! We can be part of a big nation but we will have our own say and won’t lose our identity,” said Krishnan. “Tamil will still remain an official language.”

“Ya-lah,” Everyone agreed.

“How come there is no option not to join the merger?” Ah Gu had to put the spanner in the works. “Maybe, just turn in a blank vote or what?”

“It’s a vote, so it’s your choice. But think carefully before you put your dhoby-mark. It’s for the future of the country,” my father cautioned him.

My father was using an analogy for the tick that would go on the voting form. He was referring to the spot of black dye that launderers or dhoby workers put on the underside of clothes to identify their laundry, when they used communal drying areas like at Dhoby Ghaut near Selegie Road, where the washing was strung out on lines that stretched across the small wood of trees. In time, the term dhoby-mark also came to mean the signature impression that one made, as in, “he put his dhoby-mark on the way the factory was run”.

In November, the Commonwealth Games were held in Perth, Australia. Formerly known as the British Empire Games, the new name was a reflection of the changing times. My father read the news to his weight-lifting mates, Rajah and Salleh, with great joy.

“Tan Howe Liang has won a gold in the middle-weight division. He lifted 860 pounds! And Chua Phung Kim grabbed a gold in the bantam-weight division.”

“Wah! Two gold medals in one championship!” Rajah exclaimed. “Times are changing for us.”

In December, a different kind of gold was won. The elation over the acceptance of merger with Malaysia by the majority of the people put the authorities in a congenial mood. So when the new dance craze, The Twist, hit Singapore cabarets and clubs, they did not ban it, although there were murmurs that they might. Chubby Checker of USA, whose real name was Ernest Evans, sang the song, accompanied by a twisting of his pelvis, more seductive than Elvis’. The dance demanded great flexibility, as one had to twist right to the floor and rise up again whilst twisting. It was certainly very energetic and it made people perspire profusely in our heat and humidity. Some people deemed the movement too risqué and seductive. Eventually, the government made an announcement over the radio: “So long as it remains a dance and is not sexually or morally depraved, we will not ban the records or films.”

“Hurray!” Everyone cheered.

Karim, who worked at the Great World Cabaret, came home and taught us the dance. He strummed his guitar and sang the hit song, “Let’s do the twist...”

The villagers turned out to watch. Children and youngsters like Parvathi, Fatima and myself rushed to the sandy yard to emulate him. Our elders stood outside the ring, watching us.

“Macham orang gila! Like mad people,” they said with half-smiles.

But we did not care. We shook our heads and hips and thrashed our arms about to the rhythm of the music. Our frenzied dancing frightened the chickens and ducks. Even the dogs whined and crept under shelter. Our stomping feet in the sand raised clouds of dust that flew onto everybody’s clothes. But no one minded, because in some ways, we were acting out the euphoric mood of the nation.