FOOD CONSTITUTES A major part of the average Peranakan’s life, whether it is cooking, eating or talking about it. It certainly is in mine! It is interesting how the memory or smell of a particular dish can evoke a strong response. Especially for a foodie like me. (Or you can say piggy!) The availability or lack of a particular food in one’s childhood can be deeply ingrained in one’s memories. And so it is with me.
I am amazed at how the memory of the smell of a specific food can pull me back to my childhood in Kampong Potong Pasir. Even though it might be snowing heavily outside my window in England and I am tucked up warm under a goose-down duvet in the twenty-first century, I can be resurrected again into my family’s attap hut in 1950s Singapore. A kampong is a Malay word for village. The Malays were, after all, the indigenous people of Singapore.
What a delight it was to be awakened by the delicious fragrance of coconut milk boiling with the rice to be made into nasi lemak, my mother’s pièce de résistance. The fragrance flooded our little attap-hut. Memories of food and my childhood are invariably linked with intimate memories of my mother, whom we called Mak. If we were lucky, we would get to eat the nasi lemak. At other times, Mak would scoop the cooked coconut rice, add the sambal, ikan bilis and various condiments and place them on banana leaves, wrapping them into green pyramids. She put them all in a rattan basket and my eldest brother, in his drawstring shorts, was the first in the family to cart them round the kampong, calling out, “Nasi Lemak! Nasi Lemak! Lima Sen! Coconut Rice! Coconut Rice! Five cents!”
The kampong, located off Upper Serangoon Road, was down the hill from Woodsville, which we called Atas Bukit. Near our village was a Christian cemetery called Bidadari which was allegedly named after a Malay fairy. It was the best known and most well-kept cemetery on our island. Unlike the slightly ominous atmosphere of the Chinese and Malay cemeteries, the Christian cemetery had a look of peace and serenity with its neat rows of graves, its tidy lawn and white marble tomb-stones. Entered through either of the sets of giant Victorian wroughtiron gates, the cemetery sprawled over a few acres of land. With its undulating topography of green fields and trees, it conveyed a hint of the rolling hills of the South Downs of England, so perhaps that was why the British chose the area as the last resting place for their dead.
Our village was predominantly Malay, and it suited us Peranakans, since we spoke more Malay than Chinese. Mak is the short form of the Malay word, emak, or mother. Our family managed with a bit of Teochew and Hokkien, but not Mandarin. As our Peranakan ancestry is from the Malacca line as opposed to the Penang line, we spoke the Baba patois, a rich hybrid of Malay and Hokkien; with an occasional mangled English, Dutch or Portuguese word. My mother wore the sarong-kebaya all her life, a Malay costume which Peranakans incorporated as our own. She always looked elegant and feminine in it. At home, my father, whom we called Ah Tetia, wore a singlet with the male sarong, usually patterned in stripes or checks rather than the floral batik of the female sarongs.
Like many Peranakan women in the old days, my mother was a skilled seamstress and an excellent cook. At one time she had servants to order about in the kitchen in my grandparents’ magnificent house in Malacca in the Federated States of Malaya,
“Chop this! Gilling that! Tumbok belachan!”
I can imagine her with her arms akimbo or outstretched, pointing to this and that. She was never an aggressive person, her face was sweet and demure but she learnt from her mother that a household had to be run properly, and therefore servants had to be directed to perform well. However, subsequently the family fell upon bad times and she ended up in the shanty village of Potong Pasir with my father.
“Whatever your circumstances, always live with joy,” Mak used to say.
She was always optimistic, and often sprouted philosophical sayings like those which intrigued me. After all, she was uneducated. Where was the wisdom coming from? It was the trigger which made me want to find out more about her.
Our kampong was within walking distance of Sennett Estate and the fabled Alkaff Gardens. The gardens were splendidly laid out alongside part of the sprawling Bidadari cemetery. Shaik Alkaff was a Yemeni from the Alkaff family, who came over from Indonesia in 1852. He loved old Japan, so styled the gardens like a Japanese tea garden with a restaurant, tea kiosks, artificial lake and a replica of Mount Fuji. The spot was a popular recreational place and was so scenic that many of the Shaw Brothers’ films were shot there – Singapore’s first home-grown films, with our own home-grown actors. The most well-known and talented of them all was the dashing Malay actor, musician and director, P. Ramlee. He was handsome, had a pencil-thin moustache and a charismatic smile. And I had an adolescent crush on him.
“Ah Phine,” he would say in my dreams. “I’m so in love with you! Please marry me!”
I don’t know why Chinese villagers were fond of adding the ‘Ah’ as prefix to a name. They also liked naming people by their characteristic, Ah Sang (Hokkien for someone who was thin), Ah Puii (for someone who was fat). Malays would say Chichak Kurus (Thin Lizard), or Si Gemok (That Fat Person). Nobody took offence or mentioned the discrimination act!
Nobody called me Josephine. The three syllable foreign name was a mouthful for the majority of the kampong folk who were not English educated or literate. Peranakans tended to be Buddhists or Taoists. But my family was converted to Catholicism by English missionaries who gave us food, clothing – and new names. Converts like us were called ‘rice-bowl Christians’ – people who converted not because we believed that a Christian God will save us from hell-fire but because we were hungry.
When I was a teenager, I slept on a mattress on the floor of our attap-hut. There were only two beds in our home, placed head to foot against each other. One was for my father who slept with two of my brothers; the other was for my mother who slept with two younger sisters. My baby brother slept in a sarong-cradle. I was made to sleep next to my third elder brother on a fold-up camp bed. When I started menstruating, the close proximity to my brother became awkward so he and I managed to find a mattress for me. It was discarded by the English family living in the mock Tudor houses at the top of the hill at Atas Bukit, which was above our kampong. In the beginning, while sleeping on the floor, I would quake with terror when the rats emerged from drains and fields to scuttle all around me in the dark, their nails scratching the crude cement floor. Even though it was hot, humid and muggy, I always had a thin blanket pulled right up to my ears in case the rats decided to keep me company in my bed! So there I was lying on this mattress, dreaming of the handsome P. Ramlee planting kisses on my cheek. I could feel the wetness of his saliva.
“Oh, Ramlee,” I mouthed dreamily.
But he didn’t smell as I had imagined he would smell. In fact he smelled doggy. The gamey doggy smell woke me up with a start. My parents always opened the kitchen door the moment they got up so that air could rush in to cool the house. A neighbour’s dog must have inadvertently wandered through, without anyone noticing, and it was the dog who was licking my face and slobbering all over me! Yuck! My dream of P. Ramlee evaporated immediately. Alas!
I was envious that the beautiful leading ladies like Saloma and Siput Sarawak got to sing and dance with P. Ramlee. Most of the films were musicals, and P. Ramlee had a sonorous and sexy voice. Two of his most famous films were Ibu Mertua-Ku (My Mother-in-Law) and Bujang Lapuk (Old Bachelor), and he sang the eponymous songs, making everyone cry at the first and laugh at the second. Admiring fans and villagers would crowd the magnificent Alkaff Gardens whenever a film-shoot was taking place. But to my joy nobody got to kiss him either – such intimacy was not flaunted on screen in our time.
“P. Ramlee datang! P. Ramlee datang! P. Ramlee is here! P. Ramlee is here,” the shouts would go up whenever the great actor arrived. I, like all the other young girls, would shriek and swoon at the sight of him. Many would flock to the first air-conditioned cinema, The Alhambra in Geylang, to see his films.
It was a treat to go to the cinema then. Mostly we watched films outdoors in a communal area when the Film-Man came with his reels of films and a portable screen. It was quite a challenge to watch films outdoors during the monsoon season! Umbrellas would go up and the screen would come down. When there was a break in the rain, the umbrellas came down and the screen went up. We learnt to keep the thread of the story in our heads whilst waiting for the rain to stop. Sometimes we would even discuss what could possibly come next. This back and forth yo-yoing would go on until the Film-Man got fed up and gave up altogether. Then we really had to make up our own endings. Probably my first training as a future writer! But when it was not rainy, it was so much fun. We sat on seats constructed out of a plank placed on top of two kerosene tins at each end. Hawkers took the opportunity to ply their wares; the kachang putih man sold a variety of nuts in cones made out of newspaper, KAMPONG SPIRIT – Gotong Royong the ice-ball man shaped the shaved ice into a ball with his naked hands, then swirled it with colourful syrup, the mua chee woman slicing the sesame flavoured mountain of mua chee with a flat aluminium slicer.
Singapore was largely rural in the 1950s. Orchard Road was still an expanse of nutmeg trees and palms. Coconut trees abounded, particularly in villages, and if they were not on a privately-owned plantation, the fruit could be plucked by anyone agile enough to climb the tall trees. Usually it was the small Malay men who could scale up the trees like monkeys, their bare hands and feet gripping the rough trunk. I have a memory of seeing one climber nearly reaching his goal. He was close to the plume of coconut leaves where all the coconuts were hanging. He reached out to pluck a coconut. Only it wasn’t a coconut. It was a tabuan, a wasps’ nest! In retaliation, the swarm of tabuan surrounded him and stung him. He fell from the top of the tree, falling headlong downwards, screaming as he did so.
Those were the trees where my mother got her coconuts from to make her nasi lemak. But usually it was coconuts she had found, brought down by the wind. It was amazing what one could find when one was poor and hungry – a chicken’s egg from a hen that had strayed from its coop: an eel, belot, from the monsoon drains; ubi kayu, or tapioca, from the undergrowth of forests; fallen fruits from over-hanging branches from people’s gardens; half-eaten cakes and boiled sweets from the dustbins of the rich English.
It was a laborious task to separate the coconut husk from its shell; then to scrape the moist white flesh out; then manually grating the kernel on a metal grater, and finally adding water to squeeze out the milk. But the result was worth all that effort. I can still taste Mak’s special coconut rice in my memory as if time has not passed.
The Kallang River cut a broad swathe across Kampong Potong Pasir. This river was both the boon and bane of the village. It caused major floods in 1954 and 1967. In the days when there was no piped water supply to the kampong, its water and surrounding springs and wells provided drinking water. Vegetable farms grew up on the banks of the river, farmed by Chinese farmers, supplying fresh chyesim, kailan, water cress, ubi kayu to markets around the island. I can still remember fooling around with the neighbourhood kids in our bare feet on the mud bunds that surrounded the padi fields. It was simply a delightful experience to squelch our toes into cool, wet clay and mud.
Before I was ten, I was like a boy, bare-chested and flat-chested, dressed only in homemade drawstring shorts. My mother was an expert on the Singer-sewing machine. During Chinese New Year, she would peddle it furiously. Like all Peranakans, she was pantang, superstitious, and insisted on new curtains for the house and new clothes for us, to bring in good luck and prosperity. Unable to afford fabric from the major department stores, Robinson’s or Metro or stores on the High Street, she would buy them from peddlers at Robinson Petang (Thieves Market) at Sungei Road. Because most of the goods sold were either stolen or damaged property, it was pure luck whether we got fabric that would be the same shade the whole way through! When times were really bad and she could not afford to buy any new clothes for us, she would recycle the previous year’s curtains, to sew them into shirts and dresses. At least the clothes were regarded as new!
“So clever your mother!” Neighbours would say when they saw all of us eight brothers and sisters wearing clothes in the same patterned material. But my brothers were not amused; floral patterns were not masculine enough for shirts!
I was born in 1951 and spent all of my childhood and teenage years in Kampong Potong Pasir. Lighting was provided by carbide and hurricane lamps and later, a generator supplied intermittent electricity. It was pot-luck when the generator worked, making for some exciting times.
My mother’s nasi lemak and her skill in making nonya kueh rescued me from a life of ignorance. Without them and her tremendous effort to defy my father and, against all odds, to enrol me in school, I might have been someone’s maid, or running a foodstall selling nasi lemak all my life instead of writing these English words. My moment of epiphany came when I saw a Milo tin when I was around seven or eight. It suddenly hit me that I could not understand the squiggles that were inscribed on the tin.
“Mak, I want to go to school,” I said.
“You know that your father won’t allow it or pay for it.”
“But I want to study, learn English.”
“How badly do you want to go to school?”
“I really, really want to.”
“How really is really? Are you prepared to work for it?”
I noticed that her eyes lit up. I was her first surviving daughter. There were others before me who had not lived due to the lack of food and health-care. She had so many children, she lost count.
“It would be good if you don’t have to depend on a man for your living all your life. I have to put up with a lot. You need not go through what I have to. I will take in the neighbours’ washing and you can help me wash the clothes, bringing the water up from the well. I will make more nonya kueh and nasi lemak and you can go round the village selling them.”
“Yes, yes!” I said with enthusiasm. “I will do anything to go to school!”
And so I followed in my brother’s footsteps and hawked the nasi lemak around the kampong. “Nasi Lemak! Nasi Lemak! Sepuloh Sen! Coconut Rice! Coconut Rice!” But by this time, the price had gone up to ten cents per packet.
Growing up in the kampong, we were deprived of many comforts. Our family was extremely poor. There were days when we did not have any food to eat. Some days it was just soya sauce on boiled broken rice, the lowest quality rice which was used as feed for chickens. But the greatest thing we had was our mother’s love. She was a special lady, beautiful, devoted, compassionate and inspirational, not just to our family but to all the other villagers. She motivated each one of us to work hard and to succeed. My brothers and sisters all became successful in their chosen careers and businesses, buying themselves landed properties. I was the least business-minded, starting off as an Assistant Dental Nurse for seven years, then I attended Lembaga, adult education classes, to sit for my A-Levels. Eventually I managed to get into Singapore University; the first in my family to do so. I read literature, for I had dreamt (considered silly at that time) of becoming a writer. Having a family and a career postponed my dream for sometime, but eventually I decided that it was what I really wanted to spend my life doing. I managed to do an MA in a Creative Writing programme at a university in England.
In 1992, I became the first Singaporean to be short-listed for one of the UK’s top literary awards for short stories, the Ian St. James Award. I wish my mother had been present at the award ceremony at the London Hilton. One of my sisters did attend to share my joy. Subsequently, I was invited to appear as a local author at literary events in the south-east of England. It was a great accolade. I could not have achieved my dream if Mak had not sacrificed so much. Thus, I am eternally indebted to her.
Kampong Potong Pasir was razed to the ground in the early 1970s. The village metamorphosed into a concrete Housing Development Board (HDB) estate. The broad Kallang River was narrowed, some of its water channelled elsewhere. All the vegetable farms were dug up and the fish ponds filled. And we lost some magnificent trees like the angsana and banyan, with their splendid canopy of leaves. A foundation of drainage and water systems was necessary for the creation of the blocks of flats, so the land was raised to its present level. So what used to be a hill at Atas Bukit now looks like a small bump. In fact there may have been more hills in this area in the old days because the words potong pasir mean to cut sand – potong means cut and pasir is sand. In Hokkien it is called Suah Ti. Suah means sand. Ti refers to the fish ponds. Some of these ponds were created when sand was excavated for land reclamation.
Like many kampongs in Singapore, our village too was destroyed in the 1970s. Bull dozers stampeded in like a herd of mechanical beasts flattening the attap houses, consigning our way of life into history books. So I cannot balik kampong. Balik kampong in Malay literally means going back (to the) village but it is also a metaphor that suggests a kind of emotional going home. I can no longer balik kampong, at least not in a physical sense. But I can always return to it in my memory and would like to share these memories with you.
