THE MEMORY OF HER visit to Ah Siew’s kongsi fong continued to absorb Mei Lan. On their return to Lim Villa, Ah Siew put her straight to bed after a light meal of rice porridge. The next morning Mei Lan struggled to surface from sleep. Frightening dreams had buffeted her about all night and she awoke still tired and fractious. As she opened her eyes to the day the strange and jumbled images of her dreams dissolved, and she saw with relief that Ah Siew had already drawn the curtains at the window and the sun streamed in. A pair of golden orioles perched in the branches of the tree outside; a blue dragonfly hovered against a blue sky.
Mei Lan pushed back the covers and stretched. Ah Siew was already laying out her clothes and directing her to the bathroom. It was Tuesday, Ah Siew reminded her, and they would spend the afternoon with Second Grandmother. Tuesday was Second Grandmother’s foot day. She liked Ah Siew to bathe her feet and bind them up in fresh bandages. This was not Ah Siew’s work for she was exclusively Mei Lan’s amah. Mei Lan’s mother, Ei Ling, grumbled at the hijacking of her servant but Second Grandmother’s word was law. Second Grandmother owned three slave girls who were at her service day and night, but she said only Ah Siew’s gentle hands could soothe the pain of unbinding her broken feet. Mei Lan accompanied Ah Siew to Second Grandmother’s quarters on Tuesday if her mother was out dancing or dining or playing mah-jong; now she was in Hong Kong and her protest could not be heard.
After lunch Ah Siew took hold of Mei Lan’s hand for the journey through Lim Villa to Second Grandmother’s quarters. Stairs must be climbed, corridors travelled and the great ballroom crossed. The large reception rooms lived in permanent gloom, curtains drawn against a sun that faded upholstery from Paris and carpets from China. On rainy days Mei Lan played in these dim rooms with her elder brother JJ, their rubber ball bouncing amongst Ming porcelain, bronze ornaments and nude nymphets of Italian marble. The place filled Mei Lan with melancholy. She hated the fusty smell of damp upholstery and the rotting wheat and onion pellets strewn about to deter the cockroaches.
Beyond the ballroom was the door to Grandfather’s jade museum, housed in a part of Lim Villa that had been built especially for this purpose. Glass cases lined the room displaying the precious stone carvings. Sometimes, Mei Lan crept unseen into the museum to gaze at its extraordinary contents. In the shuttered half-light the smooth green stone exuded a strange opalescence. Mei Lan’s mother wore a small jade pendant as a protective amulet; it had been taken from amongst the bones of her grandmother during the cleaning of her grave, long after her flesh was rotted and gone. Jade was a stone of magical properties prized above all else, Grandfather Lim Hock An had told Mei Lan. He had bought his first piece decades before with the initial profit he earned from his tin mine.
Lim Hock An had been a tall, muscular man when he arrived in Malaya from China at the turn of the century, to work as a coolie in a tin mine near Ipoh. His intelligence was apparent to everyone; he rose quickly to the position of coolie supervisor and eventually began to prospect for tin on his own. As he hacked his way through the jungle with little relief from heat or the throttling vegetation, his slender resources were soon exhausted; he was ready to give up when he struck his first deposit. After that he had the luck to strike it again and again. Soon he was the owner of several large tin mines and employed coolies of his own. When his parents died he brought his wife Chwee Gek from China to join him. She handled the money, paid the coolies and did the accounts for she had some slender education. An American missionary couple in her home village had opened a school for girls; Chwee Gek had been allowed to go for a while to learn about numbers and letters. In later years, Lim Hock An got himself teachers and more education than his wife. He had a zeal for education that only the uneducated know. Although he never learned to read or write fluently, he sent his son to study in England and built schools that bore his name in China. He belonged to a generation that left their homeland in order to survive, but wherever they landed and lived, always looked back to China. Singapore was never more than a temporary place to acquire wealth before returning home. Now, trailing after Ah Siew, Mei Lan passed the closed door of the Jade Museum and thought of the green magic pulsating within.
Lim Villa appeared pinned to the ground by its four octagonal turrets. In the upper rooms of these towers the Lim family had their separate quarters. Lim Hock An occupied one tower and Second Grandmother another; Mei Lan with her family lived in a third. Although the fourth turret lay empty for the use of guests, it was said that Lim Hock An was merely biding his time and soon this area would house a new wife. Such gossip was not mentioned before Second Grandmother – any thought of an additional wife in the house drove her to shout dementedly and claw at her slave girls until their blood ran.
Second Grandmother’s rooms exuded a powerful smell of heady French perfume, the medicated lineament rubbed on to her arthritic limbs and the opium she regularly smoked. One by one Mei Lan liked each of these smells, but together they combined to make her head ache. When at last Mei Lan and Ah Siew entered her quarters, Second Grandmother was waiting for them seated on a black lacquer chair, regal in embroidered silk. At the sight of Mei Lan her face creased in a smile, revealing her many gold teeth. Mei Lan approached for the kiss Second Grandmother expected, and was forced to examine her at close range. Tobacco discoloured her remaining teeth and her breath was soured by opium. Mei Lan concentrated on the smell of the perfume that was always strongest about her ears. As Second Grandmother held her close and whispered words of affection, Mei Lan tried to remember the impossible name of her perfume. Schiaparelli. Sometimes she managed to remember the whole name, and sometimes there was no more in her head than a Schia . . . and nothing could get her beyond it. A forest of embroidered pink peonies covered Grandmother’s long sam and matching trousers; jade earrings green as spinach and lit with diamonds hung from her ears. Jade covered her wrists and more diamonds her fingers; pins of silver filigree speared her upswept hair. Second Grandmother appeared encrusted all over by workmanship. Even the black lacquer chair she sat upon was thickly inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
‘So late. Aiiyah, my feet are aching. Waiting so long.’ While she embraced Mei Lan, Second Grandmother rebuked Ah Siew.
At once Ah Siew hurried to check that the towels and bandages, the water boiled with monkey bones and the soft red sleeping slippers placed side by side, were ready. Then, two of Second Grandmother’s young mui sai gently levered her up from the chair to begin the journey across the room, their mistress swaying painfully between them upon her tiny feet. Sometimes, Second Grandmother’s feet were too painful to bear her weight and she demanded to be carried. At these times she mounted a slave girl’s back to be taken to the garden or the dining room; she rarely went out of the house. Only women with big feet went out of the house, she always said in disapproval. Once she was installed again in a chair Second Grandmother called for Mei Lan to sit near her. Mei Lan noticed that tonight only the mui sai, Gold and Silver, attended Second Grandmother and that Little Sparrow was absent.
‘Where is Little Sparrow?’ Mei Lan asked. Little Sparrow was Second Grandmother’s prettiest slave girl. Behind her Gold and Silver giggled, Ah Siew turned to look sharply at the girls, who bit their lips and fell silent. Ah Siew tested the temperature of the water, adding spoonfuls of ground almonds, mulberry root, frankincense and white balsam; her hand disappeared into the milky water, mixing in the oil and herbs.
‘Little Sparrow has gone to the nunnery; she was getting too fat. When she is thin she can come back,’ Second Grandmother answered tartly. At the mention of the word ‘nunnery’, Mei Lan’s interest was alerted.
‘I never heard of going to a nunnery for being fat,’ Mei Lan replied in surprise. She had thought a nunnery was a place of praying women, a refuge for the sick or homeless or unmarried girls like Ah Siew’s sisters.
‘Ssh, Little Goose. It is rude to ask questions,’ Ah Siew whispered.
‘A nunnery serves many purposes,’ Second Grandmother added more kindly. Behind her Gold and Silver smothered another giggle and Grandmother turned to glare at them.
The girls were dressed identically in floral samfoo. Their hair, plaited in pigtails, hung over their breasts and a thick fringe covered most of their brow. Little Sparrow had always been similarly attired and Mei Lan had not noticed that she was fat, only that her eyes were bright, her lips a soft red and that when she smiled dimples pricked her cheeks. Now, with the knowledge she had gained from Ah Siew and her friends, Mei Lan appraised the girls anew. Gold and Silver and Little Sparrow must all have been sold by their parents for a bag of rice or a few coins when they were seven or eight years old, just like Ah Siew’s sisters. Now, Little Sparrow was already fifteen and Gold and Silver thirteen years old. Sorrow for the girls and horror at their plight blew hot and cold inside Mei Lan. What would she feel, what would she do if her parents decided to sell her? Worse than this was the realisation that it was her own grandfather who had bought the girls as a present for Second Grandmother. That one person could be bought as a gift for another filled her anew with distress.
Mei Lan looked down at the opaque broth of long-boiled monkey bones awaiting the immersion of Second Grandmother’s feet. Whenever she was given chicken soup she remembered this bowl of perfumed broth, and was unable to eat. Ah Siew stirred more scented oil into the water and an astringent smell drifted up. Second Grandmother’s feet were the ideal three inches in length that society had once demanded, and were small enough to rest in Ah Siew’s palm. The amah slipped off the tiny embroidered shoe and began to unwind the bandages. Second Grandmother groaned and stared grimly at the unbound feet of her slave girls.
‘How lucky you modern girls are; no need to bind your feet. In my day a man looked only at your feet. If you had a tiny foot and an ugly face you could make a better marriage than if you had a big foot and a beautiful face. Nowadays, men judge beauty only from a face. Everyone has gone mad.’ She spoke through clenched teeth and then roared at Ah Siew.
‘Aiiyah, don’t tear at the bindings like that.’
The bandages criss-crossed Grandmother’s feet in a figure of eight, pulling her heel towards her toes, pushing up the arch, which had finally snapped allowing both ends of a foot to meet. Mei Lan took a deep breath and held it for, as the bandages were unwound, an unbearable stench was released. Ah Siew unravelled the bindings, until the tiny hoof-like protuberances that were Grandmother’s feet were at last revealed. Second Grandmother was now breathing hard for the pain of release seemed almost to equal the pain of confinement.
‘My feet were bound at the age of five. Aiiyah, I remember it still. Nowadays Government has stopped foot binding, but I have heard there are men who still want women with lotus feet,’ Second Grandmother announced, proudly surveying the crushed stumps as the final bandage was removed.
‘Didn’t your mother know how much it hurt you?’ Mei Lan asked. She could not imagine her own mother putting her through such torture.
‘My mother was far away, but had she been there she too would have done what every mother did for a daughter to find a good husband.’ Second Grandmother’s silk trousers were pushed up high and she scratched her bare knee with a long painted nail. The soft calves of her legs were wasted, but her thighs were muscular beneath the silk from the peculiar gait she was forced to adopt to walk on her tiny feet.
‘The Master married me for my feet. Feet as small as mine can drive a man crazy. Look at my beautiful little red dumplings, my golden lilies, my lotus buds.’ Second Grandmother stuck out her legs and crooned to her mangled feet.
‘If your mother was so far away, who bound your feet and took care of you?’ Mei Lan insisted.
‘Oh, an aunty.’ Second Grandmother always swept aside questions about her family. She had no stories to tell of her village in China like Ah Siew, and never mentioned brothers or sisters. Everyone, even Gold and Silver and Little Sparrow, had memories of a former life to root them in the world. Only Second Grandmother’s past appeared hermetically sealed. It was as if she had sprung from nowhere into marriage with Lim Hock An. The only thing that Mei Lan knew was that, before she became Second Grandmother, her name had been Lustrous Pearl.
‘Why an aunty? Was your mother dead? Did you live in the aunty’s house, in the aunty’s village?’ Mei Lan was full of questions.
‘Ssh, Little Goose. Learn some manners, it is rude to question an elder,’ Ah Siew said, turning sternly upon Mei Lan.
‘Where did you meet Grandfather?’ Mei Lan ignored the amah’s admonishment and tried another line of attack.
‘I was just fourteen when the Master saw me. He said he had never seen feet like my little lotuses. Once he drank wine from my shoe.’ Second Grandmother smiled a secret smile as Ah Siew steered her ‘red dumplings’ into the bowl of scented water, then sighed in relief as the amah massaged almond oil into her callused skin and the crevice between heel and toes.
‘You married Grandfather when you were fourteen?’ Mei Lan asked, wondering how anyone could drink wine from a shoe, let alone a shoe that held such a stinking mutilated foot.
‘The Master preferred me above all the others,’ Second Grandmother replied softly.
‘What others?’ Mei Lan frowned, petulant with frustration. ‘If you were fourteen then you were younger than Little Sparrow is now.’
Second Grandmother’s expression was suddenly so fierce that Mei Lan retreated into silence. Grandmother’s past was shrouded in silence and not even Ah Siew would explain it to her. It seemed all of life’s real knowledge must be gathered piecemeal from adults, like parts of a jigsaw that she must later assemble. The knowledge about the sale of girls, picked up so inadvertently in the kongsi fong, she had already slipped into its rightful place to illuminate many new things.
Gold cleared away the dirty bandages and Second Grandmother gave a sigh of contentment as the warmth of the oily water relieved her aching feet. Silver sprayed a little of Second Grandmother’s precious Schiaparelli perfume into the room to freshen the air, holding up the crystal bottle and pressing the rubber bulb held in a tasselled yellow net. It must be dreadful, Mei Lan thought, taking her first deep breath of the evening, not to be able to wriggle your toes but to have them lying in five flat strips almost under your heel.
On these Tuesday afternoons it was Mei Lan’s duty to help prepare Second Grandmother’s pipe. Grandfather’s opium was of the very best quality, and was kept buried in the garden beneath a tall tree where it aged in the earth as wine aged in a dark cellar. Mei Lan ran to where Silver crouched over a small bowl of muddy opiate, preparing to heat the chandu on a long needle over a flame.
Mei Lan took the needle from her, rolling a pellet of the sticky black tar between her fingers and fixing it expertly on to the needle. She knew just what to do, and was already as deft as Gold or Silver at roasting the needle’s precious cargo until it smoked and spluttered. Soon, bubbles covered the pellet and a pungency dense as velvet, cloying as molasses, filled Mei Lan’s nose and lit the very centre of her. Afterwards, Mei Lan scrubbed her hands so that no clue remained of her work in Second Grandmother’s quarters. Her mother did not approve of the opium habit and knew nothing of her daughter’s willing assistance.
Soon Grandmother, now changed into her pale silk nightclothes, was carried to the smoking couch upon Gold’s back, her freshly bandaged feet in red satin bed slippers sticking out each side of the mui sai’s hips. Second Grandmother was considerably larger than tiny Gold and the slave girl bent low beneath her weight. Silver hurried forward and together they lowered their mistress on to the bed of cushions.
‘My pipe, my pipe,’ Grandmother groaned, holding out her hand. Mei Lan held the needle steady; the drug was now bubbling hard and she carefully placed the hot pellet of chandu in the jade bowl of the pipe while Second Grandmother sucked hungrily at the ivory tip. Refilling the pipe was a laborious process and Gold soon took over the duty. Already, Second Grandmother’s eyes had grown glassy as her dreams expanded.
Mei Lan looked around for Ah Siew but she had left the room on an errand. She made her way to Grandmother’s great red lacquer bed and scrambled up to stretch out upon its soft pillows. Usually, a small stepping box was pushed up against the bed to enable Second Grandmother to climb in more easily. Now, the box stood to one side and Mei Lan pulled herself up as best she could. Settling upon the cool silk covers, she looked up at the carved bower of leaves and flowers on the wooden canopy above, a long-throated phoenix nesting at its centre. Only a single phoenix was allowed to exist in the world at any one time, Ah Siew had told her, and it never lived less than five hundred years. When death approached the phoenix built a nest, settled upon it and set it on fire. When the flames had almost consumed the poor creature, a new phoenix sprang to life from the smouldering pyre. Ah Siew said the phoenix was a creature for women to emulate and when things got really bad in your life, it should be remembered. Women were like phoenixes, always rising anew from the ashes of their lives, Ah Siew said. Mei Lan stared up at the phoenix, at the great wings and strong beak and fabulous tail and was stirred by its strange, wild soul, its power to transform death into life. She wished she had a phoenix to look down upon her each night, like Second Grandmother in her bed. Her mother had given her a fan with a delicate painting of the creature. The fan had belonged to First Grandmother, who had been Mei Lan’s father’s mother and who had died when he was ten. The subject of First Grandmother was rather like the subject of Second Grandmother’s past. Nobody spoke about her.
While Second Grandmother dozed, Gold and Silver cleared the room chatting softly with each other. Mei Lan listened and her attention, drawn away from the phoenix, fell upon the Second Grandmother’s foot-stool. She saw it had a drawer in its side that was usually hidden against the bed. She knelt down beside it, curious to know what the drawer contained. Pulling it open she found a folded square of soft muslin wrapped about another set of sleeping slippers. The red silk was embroidered like all of Grandmother’s shoes, but the lining of these secret slippers was equally adorned, painted with tiny scenes of an extraordinary nature. Mei Lan had to turn the shoes almost inside out to get a proper perspective. In the pictures men and women were coupled together in unbelievable postures. The same images were repeated in much larger detail in the book that lay at the back of the drawer. Here, within ricepaper covers were revealed paintings of a strange violence. People sat pressed together half clothed, an arm or a thigh flung out of a curtain of draperies. In other pictures their robes lay discarded and, divested of their colourful attire, naked bodies were white and vulnerable as larvae. In these pictures bare limbs were strangely entwined, bent almost double, spreadeagled apart or wrapped acrobatically about each other. The women wore the elaborate hairstyles and intricate robes of Chinese history and their expressions were always decorous. Yet they displayed the most secret parts of themselves with such flamboyance it caused Mei Lan’s heart to beat and her cheeks to flame. All the men had the same long barb protruding from them and the women offered themselves up to be impaled upon it.
Absorbed in the book, Mei Lan did not hear Silver unexpectedly approaching until it was too late. Silver laughed, kneeling down beside Mei Lan.
‘That was Mistress’s pillow book. It must have served her well in the brothel and also with Ancient Master,’ Silver giggled, wrapping the muslin neatly about the slippers once more.
‘What is a brothel?’ Mei Lan frowned in confusion. It was the second time in two days the word had been mentioned, she was determined to know where it was that Ah Siew’s sisters had been sent.
‘It’s a place where men go and pay money to do all these bad things to women.’ Silver leaned forward so that her mouth was near Mei Lan’s ear and pointed to the book Mei Lan had thrust back into the drawer.
‘It’s where Ancient Mistress lived before she came to the House of Lim. She was sold to the brothel before she was five. In the brothel they called her Lustrous Pearl. When she came of age it is said Ancient Master paid a great price for her because of her tiny feet. Even though it’s illegal now, I’ve heard some girls in brothels still have their feet bound to please old men who want such things. They say Ancient Master paid also to be your grandmother’s first man.’
‘Why is Little Sparrow fat and in a nunnery?’ Mei Lan asked, swallowing hard, sensing this was the moment to secure the elusive replies to those questions no one would answer.
‘Because soon she will have a baby. Ancient Mistress is so angry she will not have her in the house.’ Silver pushed the drawer shut and stood up.
‘Why can’t she stay in the house?’ Mei Lan was excited at the thought of Little Sparrow’s baby.
‘Because it is Ancient Master’s baby. If the baby is a boy Little Sparrow will become Ancient Master’s concubine or maybe even his wife. Then Little Sparrow would be your Third Grandmother and her baby would be your uncle. If this happens then Little Sparrow too will wear jade earrings and an embroidered sam and eat bird’s-nest soup like Ancient Mistress. Sometimes Ancient Master looks at me now in the way he used to look at Little Sparrow. One day, if I have a baby boy by Ancient Master, then maybe I will become your Fourth Grandmother.’
‘How do you get a baby?’ Mei Lan’s voice sank lower with each question she asked, for she was dreading now to hear the answers. Silver looked at her in some surprise.
‘Why, by doing what they are doing in those pictures of course, silly. Didn’t you know that already?’ Silver laughed out loud.
It was too horrible. Silver’s laughing mouth grew wider. Mei Lan stared at the soft wet tongue, and the dark hollow of her throat leading down deep into her body, to secret places and secret processes. It was more than she could bear. Leaving Silver staring after her in surprise, Mei Lan ran from the room. On her opium bed Second Grandmother did not stir, her eyes wide but seeing nothing. Gold still sat before the lamp roasting the chandu over the flame, refilling the pipe that Grandmother grasped with her long red nails. The door stood open, but as she turned out into the dark corridor Mei Lan collided with Ah Siew, returning to the room.
‘What’s the matter, Little Goose?’ Ah Siew opened her arms, enfolding the child.
Against the familiar warmth of the amah’s breast Mei Lan could at last unravel the tangled threads knotted up within her. The words came out in no order and made no sense, although the thoughts were clear in her head. People could be sold like onions or fish or a length of cloth. Her own grandfather had paid money for children and then filled Little Sparrow’s body with a baby. And Second Grandmother too had been sold at five and sold again at thirteen to Grandfather. Behind all these things were the pictures in Second Grandmother’s pillow book, which could not now be erased from her mind. Grandmother knew about the things that must be done with men, even her feet had been broken to please them. Suddenly, Mei Lan remembered the trolleybus ride and the communists, heard again the crack of guns and saw the bleeding bodies in the street. Under the weight of other things she had almost forgotten that death as much as life had been included in these terrible two days. A weight of knowledge was settled within her for ever and she could never return to a time before it.
Ah Siew held her close, stroking her head, not minding the tears that wet her shoulder. ‘Too much growing up too quick,’ she sighed.