Tuck Heng rose earlier than usual on the morning deemed auspicious for moving into his new mansion. Lai Fong brought him a basin of warm water. He washed himself and began, as was his habit, to turn his mind to the day’s affairs, little knowing that what he proposed the gods in heaven would not dispose.
“Is everything all right downstairs?”
“Yes. The amahs and servants know that we have to move into the mansion at the appointed hour.”
“Good. The white gods are coming to see the electric lights. The whole of Ipoh is waiting to see our mansion light up tonight. I want everything to go well.”
“I’ll tell the head servant to send for the engineer to check the lights again.”
“Good. Please tell Small Dog to come in now.”
As was their custom, he and Lai Fong spoke politely to each other like friends at a distance. It was as if daytime had drawn to a close their intimacy of the night before.
Small Dog, the barber, was summoned. He bustled into the bedroom with his razors, brushes and a basin of warm water he had fetched from the kitchen downstairs. His hardened scrawny body, covered with the welts of past floggings at the hands of mine supervisors, scraped and bowed before his benefactor. Tuck Heng had saved him from the brink of death.
“A good morning to you, Towkah. An auspicious morning it is for Towkah! A good fortune day! In the market they’re calling you Kapitan already!”
Tuck Heng was cheered by Small Dog’s news. “Towkah” sounded good in his ears, but “Kapitan” was even better. Tonight’s celebration was a double happiness event to celebrate his move into his new mansion and his appointment as Kapitan China of Ipoh. Why, not too long ago, he was “Mr Yesee sir” on the wharves of Penang. Now he’d be as important as the Right Honourable Ong Boon Leong, addressed as “Towkah’’ by the Hakka and the Cantonese and “Towkay” by the Hokkien and the Straits-born.
“The honourable Kapitan China,” Small Dog said with a flourish of his towel.
“All the same whatever name.”
“No, not the same! Towkah is respected as a leader and a man of learning. A forward-looking man.”
“In Penang, my wife’s relations think I’m just a rich Chinaman.” But one day he’d show them that he was not a man to be ignored. As he leaned back into his reclining chair, he chuckled at the thought that Mr Douglas, the senior district officer, had asked him specially to invite Inspector Ian Thomson and a lady reporter from London to see the light-up.
“Towkah, your mansion is the first building to use electric lamps in this country. You’re ahead of your time.”
“So begin and don’t waste time, you chattering dog!” He laughed.
Small Dog made a lather while he asked about the rumours making their rounds in the coffee shops. As was their habit over the years, they started with the gossip and rumours, went on to the prices of tin, pork and other commodities, then moved on to politics in China and the great world before returning to the state of affairs in Ipoh, and once again the gossip Small Dog had picked up at the big houses in town where he was the regular barber. Consequently the process of lathering and shaving was prolonged, for every time he spoke Small Dog had to stop shaving.
“Tin is doing very well on the Exchange. Some people say that rubber will do well too. What do you say, Towkah?”
“That’s the crop with a future. The white gods are promoting it. And what they promote here is what their people want back in London.”
“But what for? You can’t eat rubber. You can’t make anything out of it.”
“That’s what you think, Small Dog. But our eyes can’t see as far as the eyes of those English. Did you read the papers from Singapore?”
“Towkah, you’re laughing at me again. Those words in the papers know me, but I don’t know them!”
“The newspapers say that the English people will use rubber to make wheels for motorcars.”
“Motorcars?”
“Carriages with engines, no horses. But can go faster than horses. On rubber wheels.”
“First electric lamps, now this! I was just telling my friends, ‘Tonight you’ll see wonder. Electric lamps can make the night as bright as day! No need for oil or kerosene lamps any more!’ You’re a forward-looking man, Towkah. Nobody can keep up with you.”
“We Chinese must learn from the West. Just look at their machines. Have you seen them?”
“No, but I heard that they can dig a thousand times deeper. How do they build such machines?”
“It’s their schools, Small Dog. They learn to use their heads and hands. Not like our scholars. So busy memorising long useless poems and essays written thousands of years ago that they don’t think any more. If our scholars had spent their time thinking about China, why, they might’ve overthrown the Manchus long ago!”
“Towkah, it’s true what you’ve said! Is it true then that you’re going to build a modern school in Ipoh? They say that you want teachers to teach in Mandarin and open the school to all Chinese.”
“Right! A good idea, isn’t it?”
“If we’ve a school for everyone, don’t care what dialect he speaks, then maybe we Chinese won’t fight so often, right or not? As I’ve said before and I say it again, we need a forward-looking man like you in this town.”
“Aye, you praise me sky-high, Small Dog. Now you and I are old friends for more than ten years so I don’t mind telling you. Only in Ipoh am I regarded as forward-looking. Over on Penang Island, my half-brothers think I’m a backward Chinaman.” He laughed.
“What? They’ve no ears, ah? You can speak the foreign tongue too. All that yeh-see, yeh-see.”
“I don’t speak English that well. Also I wear a queue. So my wife and her family over there think I’m backward. The Babas, they cut off their queues. Especially those who studied in the English schools. Dr Sun Yat-sen and all those who have studied in Western countries wear their hair like the foreign devils. These new scholars are against our Manchu dictators.”
“Brave men!”
“You think they’re brave?”
“As brave as we Hakkas. We’re fighters. Never kowtowed to dictators. Our heroes in the Taiping Revolution scared the shit out of those sons of bitches in the Forbidden City. Now if I were a learned man like Dr Sun, I’d cut off my queue too.”
“Small Dog, I was thinking the very same thing myself.”
“Towkah, I talk only. You know what this town is like! A thousand tongues will wag! Especially the Save Our Emperor League!”
“Let them say what they want. They look backward, I walk forward.”
But Small Dog was hesitant. He’d never cut off a man’s queue before. Though he had spoken confidently, he was anything but confident when he brought his scissors towards Tuck Heng’s queue. He had never given anyone a Western-style haircut before. But he’d seen how it was done down at the Indian barbershop where the foreign devils went to get their hair cut and trimmed.
“Small Dog, a queue, just hair.”
Later Small Dog would tell others that he’d had a premonition that fateful morning. That he’d felt that it wasn’t an auspicious thing to do. But Towkah Wong was insistent, so what could he do?
“Cut it off, Small Dog. It’s getting late.”
His good name and standing in the community mattered to Tuck Heng. That he was regarded as backward in Penang vexed him more than he cared to admit. If the queue was a symbol of backwardness in the eyes of the English-educated, he’d cut it off. And since the queue had become also a symbol of support for the Qing emperor on the Dragon Throne, all the more it should come off.
“Cut it off, Small Dog! We Chinese are adaptable. The world has changed, so must we! Like the Monkey King, we can change our appearances.”
“Right, Towkah, please keep still.”
He laughed as the strands of hair fell around him. He felt light-headed and renewed. “Good, Small Dog! Carry on! Cut!”
“From now on, the English barbarians will not think of you as backward. You’re a great man of vision, Towkah!”
If he felt the barb in Small Dog’s words, he brushed it aside. If the thought that he might be doing this out of a need to be accepted by the English-educated had occurred to him, that too would’ve been brushed aside.
“Is Towkah going to wear a shirt and trousers from now on? Like the rich foreign devils?”
“As the saying goes, ‘A man is first respected for his attire before he’s respected for his character’. So I’ll wear clothes to suit the occasion. If I’m going to the kongsi, I’ll wear my silk gown and jacket. If I’m going to the English devil’s office, I’ll wear a shirt and trousers. Flexible as the bamboo that I am, eh, Small Dog?” He chuckled, pleased with his own answer.
He’d lived in this part of the world far too many years not to realise that a man had to be a cultural chameleon in order to get by.
“Towkah, do you like it?” The barber was standing back to admire his own handiwork.
“Not bad, not bad at all.”
He peered into the mirror and saw himself with hair cut short and swept back behind the ears.
“Now I shall go downstairs and show myself to the women and hear what they have to say.”
“Towkah, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get out of here before your Wong-ma whips me.”
“Wong-ma will hold her tongue and whip today. It is not any other day.”
But the barber gathered up his things quickly and left by the backstairs.
The sun had risen above the shanty huts beyond Tuck Heng’s house. Their ugliness sickened him each time he looked at them. He would tear them down and rebuild. He would change the face of Ipoh and Bandong. In his imagination he was already looking at a town much like the one he had known in China—one of civic grace and elegance with broad streets and tree-lined avenues, with shophouses and townhouses, with schools, medical halls, shrines and temples and clan associations. A town alive with pedlars, letter writers, storytellers and newspaper readers who would read aloud the daily papers to the illiterate coolies and charge them half a cent each. It would be as lively as the town in Sum Hor where he grew up. The thought filled him with longing and made him all the more determined to build it. That was what land was for—to be owned and built on. All men strived to own a bit of this earth; to pass it onto their flesh and blood. Land is identity, stability and family. The reason for slogging.
He heard Lai Fong coming up the stairs and braced himself for her reaction. His second wife was chosen by Wong-ma who had brought her over from China. But after two sons and two daughters, he and Lai Fong were still strangers. She was not fond of speech and was reticent to a fault. Whenever he came home from his trips, she had nothing to tell him. He knew little about her except that she had grown up in an orphanage run by some English missionaries in Kwangtung, and she had even studied in a Chinese school for girls. Not that he was complaining for he was pleased with the way she kept his household and his aged Wong-ma in good health and harmonious balance.
To many people, Wong-ma’s choice of a daughter-in-law was fated. After Tai-kor Wong had banished her from Penang, Wong-ma was befriended by a young Chinese Christian on board the ship to China. During that terrible voyage, their ship had nearly sunk and Wong-ma, depressed and suicidal, had almost lost her life. The Chinese Christian had saved her and raised her spirits. He gave her a sense of direction in her life and tried his best to convert her. But Wong-ma had refused. “No, thank you,” she told her Christian friend. “I don’t want to go to a different heaven after death and be forever separated from my ancestors.”
But the kindly missionary did not give up. When he found out that Wong-ma was utterly at a loss in Kwangtung, he took her to the missionaries’ quarters where they gave her food and shelter and helped her to return to her native Sum Hor, thereby earning her eternal gratitude. That experience had opened Wong-ma’s eyes. For the first time, she saw how the foreign devils could be kind. In choosing Lai Fong, who worked in the missionary centre, Wong-ma was being shrewd. A wife who had had some contact with the English foreign devils would be an asset to her son who lived in a country ruled by these same foreign devils.
“Aiyah!”
“What do you think?” he asked, a little self-consciously.
“You ... look very different,” she sputtered, and for the first time since their marriage he glimpsed mischief on her face. “I better go and prepare Wong-ma for your new look. She ... ah ... she might not recognise her son.”