Cries of wonder rose from the townsfolk when the electric lamps were switched on. Wong Mansion was transformed into a magnificent jewel heralding the age of scientific wonders in Ipoh. Its light could be seen for miles.
“Wah! Night into day! Just like that!”
“Keeps the ghosts away!”
“Keeps the robbers away too! So bright like this, who dares to rob you?”
Inside the mansion, Tuck Heng’s guests were just as dazzled, both by the electric lights and their host’s new hairstyle.
“New hair, new house, everything bright and new! I congratulate you, Kapitan!” Chan Ah Fook’s voice boomed across the drawing room, filled to overflowing with guests and well-wishers. He took out his silver pocket watch, stared at it for a moment and exclaimed again, “So bright, my poor old eyes can read the time! Very good, very good!” He slapped Tuck Heng on the back.
“Thank you, Uncle Ah Fook, thank you!” He was relieved.
As the proprietor of the Medical Hall of a Hundred Prosperities and the president of the Chan Clan kongsi, Old Master Chan Ah Fook was Ipoh’s most respected and influential resident. His eyes might have dimmed with the years, and a stiff gait might have slowed his walk, but his voice was as strong as twenty years ago, still capable of rallying his White Crane clansmen. His approval was important.
“Clansmen, our new Kapitan is to be congratulated! We’re proud of him and happy for him that the foreign devils hold him in high regard.”
Loud applause greeted Ah Fook’s speech. His gold teeth flashing in the glare of the electric lights, he ended it by declaring, “I’ll install electric lamps in my house too. All my piglets are here to see your lights, our Tuck Heng!”
He waved his cane and pointed to his children, one of whom was just six. After the loss of his Malay woman, he had returned to China and married a farmer’s daughter who had blessed him with six sons and four daughters.
“My piglets and I wish you bright success and bright fortune, our Tuck Heng!” Then dropping his voice to a melodramatic whisper, he asked, “Young dog, why did you cut your hair like this? Are you declaring your support for Dr Sun’s anti-Manchu party?”
“Why’re you whispering to my son? Come and sit down.” Wong-ma pointed to the seat beside her. “My Tuck Heng owes you much for teaching him how to survive in this country. Even as he rises, he should seek your advice before embarking on anything. Even the cutting of hair!”
“Ma, your old friends have arrived.” He tried to distract her from the subject of his hair.
“Right, right! Old Fook, at our age, it’s so good to see old friends again. Even Big Tree and Big Dog and their families are here.”
“May good fortune and bright success enter this house!”
“Aiyah, Loh Pang, no need for such formality. I see your wife every other day. And why such a big gift? Your presence is enough!”
Wong-ma’s face was wreathed in smiles. Tonight she was the quintessential matriarch, charming, hospitable and gregarious as she greeted her former White Crane comrades. All of them had settled in and around Ipoh and had prospered with the town. Many of them owned shops, tin mines, factories and trading firms of one kind or another. Big Tree and his brother were the town’s rice merchants and Old Lee, the butcher, had become the owner of several pig farms in the countryside.
“Our good wishes, Wong-ma. May good fortune and blessings enter this beautiful mansion! Many thanks for inviting us,” Big Dog greeted her as he led his children to bow with clasped hands before her.
“How tall they’ve grown! And they’ve kept their queues! Ah, fine young men! Chinese to the bone!”
Tuck Heng ignored her barbs and the stares of his elders, sidestepping their questions about his haircut. “And your daughters, Big Dog? Any good match yet?” Talk of marriage was bound to distract them.
“You girls are all waiting for a good husband, aren’t you?”
“Look, Wong-ma. You’re making them blush.”
Big Dog’s daughters fled into the inner chambers where Lai Fong found them giggling with merriment. Meanwhile their brothers crowded round Tuck Heng and plied him with questions about his hairstyle. Their admiring looks and murmurs made their elders frown. But there was little that the older generation could do to stop the spread of new ideas and fashion sweeping into Kinta Valley. Young men returning from Penang and Singapore were already sporting Western-style cotton shirts, jackets with coin buttons and twill trousers. Many too had started to wear their queues hidden beneath their felt hats, walking with a swagger as they swung their walking sticks in imitation of the English foreign devils.
“They’re just restless. The best thing is to get them wives,” Mrs Chan Ah Fook said.
“I can be your children’s matchmaker.”
“And a better one you’ll not find in the whole of Ipoh,” Wong-ma declared, patting Aunt Loh, her friend of many years.
“Our Wong-ma is drunk with happiness tonight! That’s why she’s praising me to the sky!”
“Look at her. Smiling till you see only her teeth! May our Wong-ma grow old and prosperous like Laughing Buddha, surrounded by grandchildren and great-grandchildren!”
“Thank you, thank you!”
Wong-ma dabbed away a happy tear. Watching her, it struck Tuck Heng that her face was no longer the dried-up bittergourd that had confronted him years ago in a dim red hut in Bandong. Like the rest of her, it had filled out with the good years although the lines of bitterness were still etched on her cheeks.
“Thank you, thank you, my friends,” she was murmuring, poised between weeping and smiling. She was the proud mother of the Kapitan China of Ipoh. “Our gods have ears even in this foreign country! I know they’ve heard my prayers!” she declared with such certainty Aunt Loh was to remark later that her words might have challenged the Malay spirits that night. “Why else would the Malays cause trouble?” she asked.
But for the moment, no one in the mansion was thinking of troublesome spirits or the Malay partners of the White Cranes during the Bandong wars. The old comrades were reminiscing and their memories were personal, communal and therefore highly selective. As tales of past battles, terror in the jungle, betrayal by friends and defeat by foes flew back and forth across the room, Wong-ma was stabbed by the memory of her banishment from Penang.
“Here, he drove in his knife! When he forced me to leave my Tuck Heng, the son I’d waited for more than twenty years! Right here!” She clapped a palm over her breast. “To this day I can still remember how he asked me to leave Penang! And I vowed to return some day. Every night I pray. Lord Buddha, I say, don’t let him be reborn! Let him wait till I join him in the next world! So I can tell him to his face how I felt all those years! And when I join our ancestors, I will be buried next to him in Penang! As we say back in Sum Hor, ‘Alive I’m his wife; dead, I’m his ghost!’ Then the sons of his Penang wife will have to bow before my grave!”
“Choy! What a thing to say!”
“Chieh, at our age, what’re we afraid of? If it’s our time to go, we go. If it’s not our time yet, even if we want to die, we can’t. That’s why I’m still here and Tai-kor Wong is not. So what’s wrong with a few words about the grave?”
“Choy, choy,” Mrs Chan looked distraught as her eyes sought her husband’s for help.
“Wong-ma! No more talk of unhappy things! Trot out your little piglets. It’s ages since we’ve seen them.”
Ah Fook gave the others a wink. Her grandsons, Kok Kiong (Nation’s Strength) and Kok Wah (Nation’s Prosperity), were her two most precious gems.
“Fong! Bring out my piglets!”
“Yes, Ma.”
The children came in.
Yoke Foong (Jade Phoenix) and Yoke Lan (Jade Orchid) greeted their elders in the restrained manner little girls from good families were trained to assume in company.
“But here’s the most important piglet!” Big Tree pointed to Kok Kiong.
“How old are you? Eleven?”
“Almost twelve, Granduncle,” Kok Kiong replied. He was a serious-looking boy with the grave features of his mother.
“Have you mastered the Three Character Classic yet?”
“Master Lao is already teaching us the Four Character Classic, Granduncle.”
“Excellent! Excellent! A scholar in the making, I say, Wong-ma.”
“I can say the Three Character Classic too, Granduncle!” Little Kok Wah tugged at his silk jacket.
“Don’t boast! You can only recite three pages!” his sisters protested.
The little boy drew himself up to his full height and puffed out his chest. “But I’m only three years old! One year one page!”
The whole company burst out laughing and the boy scampered to hide among the folds of his grandmother’s samfoo.
“Are we shy now?” Wong-ma hugged him.
Yoke Foong and Yoke Lan tried to pull him away, but he clung to his grandmother. “Go away! I’ll stay with Grandmama!” He stamped his foot.
“No need to be rude. You can sit on my lap while your sisters show us their needlepoint.”
Yoke Foong blushed as she brought out the phoenix she was embroidering. The girl was fair like her mother. Her nose was finely chiselled and her almond-shaped eyes were like her mother’s too. Next to her, Yoke Lan, who took after her father, looked like a peasant child, with none of her older sister’s delicate features.
“I don’t like needlework. I want to go to school, Grandmama.”
“Your Papa said he’s going to build a school here for everyone. Right or not, Tuck Heng?”
“Right, Ma.” But his eyes were fixed on the doorway.
“Are you looking out for Old Buffalo and his family? They should be here soon. Last month I sent our servant to his farm. It’s out in the middle of nowhere.”
“How are his wife and daughters?” Aunt Loh asked.
“Haven’t seen them for years. Old Buffalo never lets them out of his sight.”
“The older he gets, the worse he becomes! His girls have never been to town, you know? Old Buffalo guards them like a miser guards his gold.”
“Don’t worry, he’ll be here.” He got up.
“Where’re you going, Tuck Heng?” Wong-ma asked.
“I’ve to go outside and wait for the senior district officer and his party. He’s bringing a foreign woman to watch the lion dance.”
“Didn’t I tell you our Tuck Heng will go far?” Ah Fook asked. “Look at those lines and that mole. Signs of fame and prosperity.”
He felt he was standing at the summit of success as he scanned the sea of faces in the garden. The gates of the mansion had been thrown open for this auspicious occasion and the townsfolk, drawn like moths to the free food and bright lights, were crowding into the grounds. Coolies who were members of the clans and kongsi were streaming through the gates and helping themselves to the food laid out on wooden trestles.
“Scrambling like hungry ghosts,” Mr Lam, his manager, grumbled.
“Once in a lifetime, let them be.”
He was prepared to be a generous host. All he asked from the gods was to let everything run smoothly tonight, especially the senior district officer’s visit. Who knows what this might lead to? Perhaps an appointment to the Legislative Council which would place him on the same footing with the Right Honourable Ong Boon Leong. That would be something to look forward to.
Beyond the gates of Wong Mansion, the open grounds had been transformed into a fair, lit by the oil and kerosene lamps of hawkers who had seized the chance to make some money. Throngs of men with wives and children in tow, miners, amahs, rickshaw pullers, labourers and office clerks with their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and the entire extended family had come to view the wonder of the electric lamps. Snapping at their heels were hustlers, hawkers, pedlars, medicine men, snake charmers and even beggars on crutches who hobbled out to the fairground to rattle their tins at the crowd.
“Watch this miracle!” A man sliced the air with his sword. It drew the crowd. They gathered round him and his assistants.
“A snake! Look, it’s a python.”
He slit the belly and drank its blood.
“Good, ah! Good, ah!” The crowd clapped.
“Now watch this!”
His tongue stuck out. His sword sliced it.
“Eeee! Ma!” Children covered their eyes. Their mothers screamed. Blood dripping from his mouth, the man raised his bottle.
“Miracle snake blood,” his assistants announced. “One dollar! One dollar!”
The man took a gulp and the tongue stopped bleeding. Loud applause followed.
“See! No blood! Cured immediately!” The medicine man went round the circle of people, displaying his miraculously healed tongue. The men rushed forward.
“Here! One bottle!”
“One bottle for me!”
“Over here, two bottles for me!”
“Only fifty bottles left!” the medicine man yelled.
At this, the crowd pushed and fought its way to the centre, hollering for bottles of the snake blood.
“Twenty bottles left! No more! No more!”
Men fought each other as they tried to grab at the last few bottles of this miraculous medicine. Their women screamed and cursed at the mob and tried to protect their daughters. Old Buffalo waded into this sea of angry men with his wife and daughters.
“Son of a pig! Keep your bloody hands to yourself! That’s my daughter you’re touching, you swine!”
His wife clung to their three daughters. Her arms tried to shield them from contact with the beasts. “Don’t let them touch you!”
The girls were terrified. They had never left their farm before. They floundered and squirmed in the sea of bodies. The noise overwhelmed them. The babble of foreign tongues confused them. They clung to their mother and struggled to keep up with Old Buffalo who was charging through this heaving writhing sea. Never had they seen so many people before! Their farm near the silent hills was miles from the nearest dwelling. Aaah! A black beast with red teeth! The girls recoiled from it. The ragged bundle spat at them. “Blood! Blood!” The girls shrieked and backed away from his stream of red sireh juice. They fell over each other. Huge shadows loomed. The oil lamps hissed and sputtered. The multitudes pressed in. They felt trapped. A thunderous clap of firecrackers made them jump.
“The lion dancers are here!” the crowd roared.
Vigorous beating of drums and firecrackers greeted the arrival of the senior district officer and his entourage which included Inspector Ian Thomson, Mrs Winters, a writer for a magazine in London, the chief engineer and the surgeon general. They had arrived in two gharries accompanied by a small contingent of Sikh guards.
“Welcome, welcome, very honourable sirs and lady!” Tuck Heng greeted his guests and bowed with hands clasped before him. “Tank you! So very, very much tank you! Please to come in!” He spoke in his clipped and heavily accented English. Flustered by the presence of so many important white people, he scraped and bowed and chatted incessantly above the noise of the drums and gongs.
So much face for him, he thought. Aye, so much face! He could think of nothing else except the prestige and privilege of entertaining them. He bowed and smiled, and bowed and smiled, as he led his white gods and goddess to the dais, specially erected so that they could sit apart from the mortals. His only regret was that Ong Boon Leong was not there to witness his glory.
“Please, sir, ah, you sit! Lion dance, begin soon. Very soon.”
“Oh, how quaintly he speaks,” Mrs Winters whispered to Mr Douglas. A burst of firecrackers greeted her words. This was followed by the roll of drums and the clang of gongs and cymbals. “Oh, how delightfully exotic and colourful! I shall be able to write a wonderful piece about this.”
A pair of lions led by the bigheaded clown pranced in front of them. The black lion of the Hakka Black Flags trotted round the red lion of the Cantonese White Cranes. It cocked its head, eyes blinking with mischief, and raised its tail and hind leg like a dog peeing. “Good-ah! Get him!” The crowd guffawed and cheered again and again. Inside the mansion, guests from the Cantonese and Hakka clans raised their glasses and toasted Wong-ma and her son, “Good health! More wealth and prosperity!”
Cymbals clanged. The bigheaded clown flung copper coins into the air. Free money! The crowd surged forward. The lions pranced and fought for the red packet of cash and green lettuce of victory dangling enticingly atop a bamboo pole. “Higher! Higher!” the crowd roared. The pinnacle of a lion’s success and proof of a lion dancer’s skill was to be the first to snatch away the red packet and lettuce. The black lion kicked up its front legs. The red lion fended off its attack. “Move back! Move back!” The White Crane and Black Flag members shoved away the urchins and beggars picking up the coins. A Sikh guard’s moustache twitched with consternation. His fellow guards held on to their wooden truncheons. Memories of riots lingered in the police force. Again and again the bigheaded clown teased the prancing lions with his fan and flung more copper coins into the air. “More! More! For good luck!” the crowd roared. Two red strings of firecrackers went off.
“God of Thunder!” Old Buffalo’s wife let go of her daughters’ hands and covered her ears.
“Ma! Ma!” her terrified daughters screeched. They had lost her. Other bodies pressed against them. Mouths leered at them and eyes winked at them. The girls covered their breasts. “Turn back! Turn back!” But their shouts went unheard. Their way was blocked by the bodies surging towards the lions and the hail of copper coins.
“Pa! Pa!” Hysteria gripped them.
“Eaters of shit! Watch your bloody hands! Daughters! Where are you?” Old Buffalo bellowed. “Daughters!”
Young Omar squeezed past him. Wedged between the thousands of arms and legs, he craned his neck this way and that way as he pushed under the mob. He wanted to see everything. He elbowed his way through the throng, trying to edge closer to the lion dancers. “Wait! Wait!” Nawawi went after Omar. His own head was giddy with anticipation. His Chinese father was in the mansion. He was sure of it. All the White Crane miners would be there, the shopkeeper in the town had told him. Hurry! Hurry! His heart pounding, he fought his way towards the electric lights.
“Nawawi!” Ibrahim called after him.
“Datuk! He’s in there. My Chinese father is there!”
“How can Che’ Wong tell you which of his friends is your father?”
“I’ll show him my father’s kris!”
He reached into the folds of his sarong. Out came the kris which flashed menacingly in the lamplight.
“Malay devil with knife!” Old Buffalo’s daughters screeched.
Heads turned. People started running. “Malay devil with knife!” The cry was taken up and repeated throughout the fairground. “Amok!” another cried. Panic seized the crowd. Blind fear rippled through their hearts. A child stumbled and wailed. “He’s got a child!” Mothers grabbed their children and ran. Fathers tore through the multitudes. Some stalls were overturned. The oil lamps ignited and burst into flames. The fire spread to the other stalls. “Kill the pigs!” Chinese hawkers lunged at Malay pedlars, blaming them for the fire. Fist fights broke out. More stalls were overturned. Black Flags and White Cranes raced out of the mansion and leapt into the fray. Some of them swooped down upon Ibrahim. They felled him with a mighty hand chop on his neck.
“Pig-eaters!” Nawawi rushed to Ibrahim’s defence. He fought back with a vengeance and knifed a White Crane.
“Watch out! The Malay devil is armed!”
“Police! Police! Quick! Over here!”
The Sikh guards parted the mob and fell upon Nawawi. A truncheon hit him on the head. Then a burly Sikh pulled him up by the hair and tried to wrest the kris away.
“You son of a pig!” Nawawi clung to his precious kris. He kicked out at the guard.
“Father!” Omar stumbled among the legs. A kick in the stomach sent him sprawling. “Father!” he screamed in pain.
“Omar! Omar!” Ibrahim raced towards his son. The monsters and their truncheons danced all round him. “Omar! Omar!” Still the blows fell upon him. Before his horrified eyes, he saw Nawawi mercilessly bludgeoned. He tried to stop them.
“Mistake! Please stop!” But his pleas went unheeded.
The grounds of the mansion was a sea of confusion by now. Mrs Winters had fainted on the dais. Mr Douglas and the chief engineer shielded her body from the crush of coolies swarming all over them. Inspector Thomson fired his pistol into the air. It set off a stampede. Like a herd, the crowd made for the gate. Several people were trampled on. More women fainted. Children wailed. Thomson raced to a gharry and ordered the Indian syce to bring it round to the dais. He fired his pistol again and again to clear a path for the vehicle. The shooting sent those inside the mansion scampering for cover. Tables and chairs were overturned. Veterans of the Bandong wars thought that a battle had broken out.
“Children! Into the kitchen!” Wong-ma’s voice was hoarse with fear. Gunshots kept ringing inside her head. Visions of the Bandong dead clouded her aged eyes. Their ghosts shrieked and flew round and round the room. The walls wavered and caved before her. She missed a step. “Aaah!” Headlong down the steps she fell.
“Grandmama! Grandmama!”