They were herded into two cells in the Kuala Lumpur Central Police Station. Tuck Heng was squeezed into a cell with nine other men. Their cell was foul and stuffy. A small skylight in the ceiling let in air and light. Below that was the wooden tub with a broken lid which served as their toilet. Out of respect for him, the coolies gave him the floor space farthest from the wooden tub. Still the stench at the end of the day was unbearable for they were not allowed to empty the tub till the next morning.
“What’s going to happen to us?”
“The White Crane won’t desert you. Someone will come.”
But no one came. No police officer showed up. Only the Indian peons came round with mugs of tap water after they’d banged on the door of their cell.
“Quiet! Drink up and sleep!”
He looked at his pocket watch. They had been held for more than twelve hours.
Then one of the coolies started to sing softly to himself an aria from a popular Cantonese opera, Lament of a Scholar Imprisoned by the Mongolians.
“Louder!” a voice in the next cell yelled.
So the coolie sang louder, his rich baritone rising to the ceiling. Another coolie joined in. And another. Then a member of an amateur opera troupe sang the part of the boastful Mongolian king.
“The Mongolian doesn’t know what boastful is! Wait till he meets the red-haired barbarian here!”
He recognised the voice. “Low Yau! Are you here too?”
“Tuck Heng?”
“Those devils nabbed me when I was trying to settle a fight in Peng Street!”
“Always making peace! But the bastards won’t believe a word you say!”
“And you think they believe you, Mr Editor?”
“Chieh! We in the Yat Poh Press never cared a damn what the devils believe! Wait till I write about this!”
“Quiet!” the Malay guard shouted.
But no one heeded him. To pass the time, they sang and told each other stories of ancient Chinese heroes and their own village heroes.
“Who doesn’t know that Towkah is the son of the Brave Poet of Sum Hor?”
“How many scholars have his courage to speak up?”
“But it takes only a few to turn the tide. See what one man, Dr Sun, has done.”
Just before sunset, they were given their first meal, a tin plate of rice and slop and a mug of sweetened black coffee. As their cell grew dark with the coming of night, the talking ceased. Surrendering himself to the darkness, he lay down on the hard concrete floor and tried to sleep. But cockroaches crawled all over him and the stench from the toilet and the humming of insects kept him awake. It reminded him of his days in the Bandong mines. He flapped his arms. But it was useless. The pests returned as soon as he stopped. He cursed under his breath. He’d done nothing to deserve this incarceration.
The next day a group of White Crane elders visited him and the coolies.
“Send a telegram to my family in Penang and Ipoh.”
“We’ve already done that. We’ve also written and presented a petition to the governor.”
The petition began with the usual fawning phrases:
We, the undersigned British subjects and Chinese merchants, humbly present this petition to His Excellency, the Governor of the Straits Settlements. We deeply regret and humbly apologise for the disturbances which broke out during the Lunar New Year celebrations. It was unforeseen and unfortunate. The Chinese people have always been peace-loving and law-abiding.
When your petitioners reflect on the thousands of Chinese who arrive like ants each year at Penang, Malacca and Singapore, they see that the fame of Your Excellency’s government and the paternal protection which the people receive under Your Excellency’s government have made the Chinese brave the stormy oceans to come to these shores to seek a livelihood. They know that in this country, protected by the British flag, they will find ...
The flourish of brushstrokes expressing the standard phrases of flattery had been honed to perfection by centuries of petition writers who had had to appease the emperor and his dreaded mandarins in the Forbidden City. But the petition writer of Kuala Lumpur, writing on behalf of the Chinese merchants, had added a little sting.
Your petitioners have long enjoyed the fair and just rule of Your Excellency’s benevolent government. However we fear that people of bad character have misinformed Your Lordship about the disturbances. Their misguided actions have led Your Lordship’s police to imprison most unjustly the Honourable Wong Tuck Heng, a highly respected leader of the Chinese merchants.
The very phrase “imprisoned most unjustly” shone in the darkness as he tried to get some sleep on the second night. But sleep eluded him again in the hot crowded cell. He was still furious with the English inspector who had stood at the doorway, holding a white handkerchief to his nose while he tried to verify the number of coolies in each cell. Everyone including the editor of the Yat Poh Press was classified a coolie. What had irked him most, however, were the Inspector’s cold grey eyes. They said that the prisoners were the muck stuck to his boots.
He flicked away something which had landed near his ear and sat up. Voices were coming from the office down the dark passage, but he couldn’t make out their words. Then silence regained its hold and his restless thoughts returned once again to plague him like the horde of mosquitoes buzzing in his ears. He flapped his arms several times. Each time, the pests returned undeterred. Finally he gave up and lay down.
As the night dragged on and his irritability subsided, a niggling apprehension rose to the surface of his mind. First like a nebulous cloud on the distant horizon, inching nearer as the hours crept in the dark till he felt a rat’s nipping. What had he done with his life? His father was beheaded for writing about the suffering of the peasantry, for refusing to recant and lick the ass of the mandarin lord.
What have you done?
Damn pests! He flicked at the whining mosquitoes. Nothing as noble as his father. What’s fund-raising and speechifying compared to poetry? Even the English press had belittled him as “John Chinaman upset with pigtail!” and called the riots “the Chinamen’s pigtail brawl”!
When his clan leaders had shown him translations of the papers, he had fumed. Liars and hypocrites! The Inspector had accused him of being a political activist and had threatened him with banishment and deportation. If it was just a matter of the pigtail, then the punishment was weightier than the crime.
Like a newly caught tiger in a cage, his thoughts paced up and down. Was it a crime to express one’s support for one’s homeland? Hadn’t the English foreign devils expressed similar patriotic sentiments for king and country, carousing into the early hours of the night, their drunken soldiers knocking on doors and waking up entire neighbourhoods on New Year’s Day and Empire Day? Snakes and hypocrites! He was born a son of the Chinese earth, how could he not rejoice in the liberation of his homeland? He accepted foreign rule in this country, but he could never accept foreign rule for his China.
He stared at the dark ceiling above him. His keen mind had caught a whiff of sweet-smelling inconsistency. “But Malaya is not the same as China,” he muttered under his breath, mouthing his thoughts aloud as if to reassure himself. He sounded loud and hollow in the silence occasionally punctuated by the sudden snorts of his sleeping cellmates. He cocked his head and listened, but all he heard was the soft scuffling of rats among the rafters.
Rats! The first to leave a sinking ship or a house in flames. For some unfathomable reason the image of burning houses returned to plague him. His home in Sum Hor and the Datuk’s house in Bandong were burned by rats. Yellow or white, they were all rats!
Struck by the similarity of these two events, he became superstitious and believed that the gods were trying to tell him something. He was certain without quite knowing why that his future was somehow tied to his adopted homeland as well as to China, his original homeland. Hadn’t his adoptive father, Tai-kor Wong, risked and lost his life to help the menteri of Bandong fight the English? Had it not been for Musa Talib sitting on him like an elephant, he would have killed the English rat who shot Tai-kor Wong! And that would have been the end of his life in this country! He recalled how he and Ibrahim had stood side by side watching in helpless anger as the English soldiers set fire to the houses of Bandong village. Flames and heart-rending wails, and yet ... he sighed and closed his eyes. Since then he’d lived a comfortable life, offering little resistance, like a fallen leaf floating with the currents down the Bandong River.
A lifetime of river water had flowed under the bridge since he last visited Bandong village, and he wondered what had happened to Ibrahim and his family since Musa Talib’s death. A death he recalled with shame and guilt as though he had been the one to push the old man into the river. Was he being punished now, he wondered, for his grasping callous greed?
A sliver of moon shone through the tiny window of his cell. Strange, how the moon seemed brighter now that he was behind bars.
The White Crane elders had mentioned that the governor had set up an inquiry to look into the cause of the riots and that some English-speaking Chinese had been asked to sit on the panel of advisors. Always English-speaking. He slapped his arm. Something had bitten him in the dark. It felt like a hardshelled beetle. He spat on his finger and rubbed the spit onto his arm. Spit, the cheapest balm for bites in the mines.
When at last dawn came, he was curled like a prawn on his side in the same way that he had had to sleep in the overcrowded sheds in Bandong. The Malay policeman unlocked his cell door.
“Wong Tuck Heng!”