Years later, I lie awake
In the deer enclosing heart of a household.
Years later than in a crib
Floating among the white moon faces that
beam and grasp.
Years Later, flecking the eyes,
Faces like spheres wheeling, savoring
mysefl.
Years later, I awake to see
Dust faIling in the dark, in the house.
I know no other childhood
than mine, and that I had left secret as something I both treasured, the
one talent that my parents unwittingly have provided me, and shameM, how
these same parents have as unwittingly mutilated me. Moving myself from
Malacca, a small town two degrees north of the equator, to New England,
then to Brooklyn and to the rich New York suburb of Westchester County;
and now to Southern California, I have attempted to move myself as far
away from destitution as an ordinary human creature can. In the move from
hunger to plenty, poverty to comfort, I have become transformed, and yet
have remained a renegade. The unmovable self situated in the quicksand
of memory; like those primeval creatures fixed in tar pits, that childhood
twelve thousand miles and four decades away, is a fligitive presence which
has not yet fossilized. Buried in the details of an American career, my
life as a non-American persists, a parallel universe played out in dreams,
in journeys home to Malaysia and Singapore, and in a continuous undercurrent
of feelings directed to people I have known, feared, loved, and deserted
for this American success.
The irony about
a certain kind of immigrant is how little she can enjoy of the very things
she chases. Even as she runs away from her first life, this other life
that begins to accrue around her remains oddly secondary, unrooted in the
sensuality of infancy and the intensities of first memory. Before I could
learn to love America, I had to learn to love the land of unconditional
choice. The searing light of necessity includes my mother and father, characters
whom I never would have chosen had I choice over my history.
Before there is
memory of speech, there is memory of the senses. Cold water from a giant
tap running down an open drain that is greenish slime under my naked fret.
My mother's hands are soaping my straight brown body. I am three. My trunk
is neither skinny nor chubby It runs in a smooth curve to disappear in
a small cleft between my two legs. I am laughing as her large palms slide
over my soapy skin which offers her no resistance, which slips out of her
hands even as she tries to grasp me. I do not see her face, only her square
body seated on a short stool and a flowered samjbo that is soaked in patches.
The same open
area, the same large green-brass tap above my head, only this tiine I am
crying. My anus hurts me. My mother is whittling a sliver of soap. I watch
the white piece of Lifebuoy grow sharper and sharper, like a splinter,
a thorn, a needle. She makes me squat down, bare-assed, pushes my body
forward, and inserts the sliver up my anus. The soap is soft, it squishes,
but it goes up and hurts. This is my mother's cure for constipation. I
cry but I do not resist hen I do not slide away but tense and take in the
thorn. I have learned to obey my mother
Both scenes occur
in my grandfather's house. The house is £111 of the children who
belong to his sons. It is already overflowing with my brothers and cousins.
But all I remember of this early childhood are my aunts.They bulk like
shadows to the pre-verbal child, very real and scary. One aunt is tall
and stringy; her face, all planes and bolted bones, stares and scowls,
her voice a loud screech. Another aunt is round; everything about her curves
and presses out; her chest is a cushion, her stomach a ball, her face a
ftlll moon, and her smile grows larger and larger like a mouth that will
eat you. I am afraid of them both. They wear black trousers and dull sateen
samf'o tops, gray embossed with silver or light blue filigree.Their hair
is very black, oiled to a high sheen, pulled tight off their faces into
round buns, secured by long elaborate gold pins.
I do not remember my
mother's figure in this infant's memory of my grandfather's house. She
is an outsider, and silent in their presence. This is not her house as
it is their house, although my father is a son here. In my infant memory
my mother is never a Chinese woman the way my aunts, speaking in Hokiden,
will always be Chinese.
Hokkien, a version
of Southern xiamen, the Min dialect from the Fujien Provirice, is the harsh
voluble dialect of the Nanyang, the South Seas Chinese, directive, scolding,
a public communication of internal states that by being spoken must be
taken in by all. I heard Hokicien as an infant and resisted it, because
my mother did not speak it to me.This language of the South Chinese people
will always be an ambivalent language for me, calling into question the
notion of a mother tongue tied to a racial origin. As a child of a Hollien
community; I should have felt that propulsive abrasive dialect in my genes.
Instead, when I speak Hokiden, it is at the level of a five-year-old, the
age at which I moved out of my grandfather's house on Heeren Street into
my father's shoe store on Kampong Pantai. Hollien remains for me an imperfecdy
learned system of grammar comprised of the reduced nouns and verbs of a
child's necessary society-chiapuai (eat rice); ai koon (want to sleep);
kwah (cold); ai kehi (want to go); pai ("ad); bai-bai ~ray); baba (father);
mahmah (mother). It remains at a more powefflil level a language of exclusion,
the speech act which disowns me in my very place of birth.
Chinese-speaking
Malayans called mc a "Kelangkia-kwei)'~or a Malay devil-because I could
not or would not speak Hokiden. Instead I spoke Malay, my mother's language.
My peranakan mother had nursed me in Malay, the language of asslinilated
Chinese who had lived in the peninsula, jutting southeast of Asia, since
the first Chinese contact with the Malacca Sultanate in the fifteenth century.
And once I was six and in a British school, I would speak chiefly English,
in which I became "fluent," like a drop of rain returning to a river, or
a fish thrown back into a sea.
Hokkien had never
been a language of familiarity; affection, and home for me. Like the South
Seas Chinese paternal house I was born in, Hollien laid out a foreign territory,
for I was of the South Seas Chinese but not one of them. Hokiden was the
sounds of strong shadowy women, women who circled but did not welcome me,
while in my grandfather's house my enclosing mother dimmed into two hands
washing, holding, penetrating me, neither a face nor a shadow
Then, when Baba
opened his shoe shop, we had our own house. Here, in my memory, my mother
becomes a woman. She chattered to us, her two sons, her daughter, her baby
boy; in Malay I do not remember moving to the shophouse on Kampong Pantai.
It was as if I woke up from a dark and Among the White Moon Faces discordant
infancy into a world of pleasure in which my mother was the major agent.
In my mother's presence
there is memory of talk, not labon Mother ordered my brothers around. She
scolded us for getting ourselves wet or dirty or tired. She joked with
her sisters on the manners, the bodies, and crude lusts of their acquaintances.
Her baba Malay-the Malay spoken by assimilated Chines~the idiomatic turns
of her ethnic identity, was a wateffall whose drops showered me with sensuous
music. She was flinny, knowing, elegantly obscene. I remember the rhythms
of her phrasings, gentle drumbeats that ended with a mocking laugh, short
scolds that faded away, assuming assent.
In my mother's
house, she was a nonya, a Malayan-native Chinese woman, whose voice ran
soft-accented, filled with exclamations. Scatological phrases, wickedly
runny and nasty comments on neighbors and relatives, numerous commands,
an intinite list of do's and don'ts, her Malay speech was all social, all
appearance and lively never solo, always interweaving among familiar partners.
How could she have talked alone to herself in baba speech? It would have
been impossible. Even when alone, it would be speech addressed to kin,
a form of sembahyang, prayers before the ancestral altar, to dead yet watchfiil
fathers and mothers.
I listened and
must have chattered in response. From a very eafly age, I was called teasingly
by family and strangers a manek manek, a gossipy grandmother or an elderly
woman who loves talk, her own and others'. I must have chattered in Malay,
for just as the Hokkien-speaking elders named me as a Malay, so the Malay-speakers
placed me as an ancestral talken But I have little memory of what I said
or of this precocious childhood tongue I associate with my mother's house.
In memory it is my mother's speech but not mine; it was of my childhood
but I do not speak it now.
My mother wore
nonya clothing, the sarong kebaya. Her stiffly starched sarongs wrapped
elegantly around her waist fell with two pleats in the front. Her sarongs
were gold and brown, purple and brown, emerald and brown, crimson and brown,
sky blue and brown. Ironed till they gleamed, they were stacked in the
armoire like a queen's treasure. She wore white lace chemises under her
kebaya tops. The breast-hugging, waist-nipping kebayas were of transparent
material, the most expensive georgette.They were pale blue, mauve, lavender,
white, yellow-green, pricked and patterned with little flowers or tiny
geometric designs.They were closed in the front by triple pins or brooches,
and these borders were always elaborately worked with a needle into delicate
lacy designs, like scallops and shell shapes, or leaf and vine patterns.
Women with time on their hands, needing food and money, meticulously picked
the fragilc threads apart and reworked them into an imitation of the free
natural world around them. Each kebaya was a woman's work of art, and my
mother changed her sarong kcbaya daily as a curator changes an exhibition.
She was good-humored
in this act, surrounded by many strange containers. One was tilled with
sweet-smelling talc and a pink powder puff like a rose that she dipped
into white powder and lavishly daubed over her half-dressed body, under
her armpits, around her neck and chest, and quickly dabbed between her
legs like a hirtive signal. Another was a blue-colored jar filled with
a sugary white cream. She took a two-fingertip scoop of the shiny cream
and rubbed it over her face, a face that I can still see, pale, smooth,
and unmarred. She polished her clear fair face with this cream, over her
forehead, her gently rounded cheeks, and the sloping chin. Her face shone
like an angel's streaked with silver, and when she wiped the silvery streaks
off, the skin glowed faintly like a sweet fruit. Later, I would discover
that the blue jar was Pond's Cold Cream, the tub of powder,Yardley Talc.
She was immersed in Western beaury, a Jean Hariow on the banks of a slowly
silting Malacca River, born into a world history she did not understand.
More than store-bought
magic, she was also my mother of peranakan female powen Like a native goddess
she presided over an extended fami~ younger sisters Amy and Lei came to
live with her, and younger brothers Ling, Charlie, and Mun passed through
her home on their way to adult separation. She was surrounded by rituals
that worshipped her being. The ritual of the peranakan frmale face began
with white refined rice ground to a fine powden This badak was dampened
with rainwater to form a smooth paste that my mother smeared over her face.
The rice paste caked and dried like a crackled crepe. It tilled in the
fine pores on her nose and cheeks, the tiny lines around her eyes and forehead;
it turned gritty like bleached beach sand. Washed away, it left her face
glimmering like a piece of new silk.
My mother was
the goddess of smells. She perifimed herself with eau de cologne from cut-glass
bottles that were imported from the Rhine Valley in Germany She knotted
one end of a sheer cambric handkerchief and sprinkled the cologne on the
knot. I kept the handkerchief in my plaid smock pocket and took it out
throughout the day to sniff the knotted end. The scent was intoxicatingly
fresh. It was my mother's Hollywood smell.
Some days she
dressed us both elaborately, herself in a golden brown sarong and glearning
puce kcbaya, and I in a three-tiered, ruffled, and sashed organdy dress
with a gold-threaded scarlet ribbon in my ham We rode in a trishaw to a
plain structure, its doorway flanked by banana palms. The walled courtyard
led to an interior room; through the door there was darkness and a ffickering
oil lamp. Gradually my eyes adjusted to the darkness. The small room was
empty except for an altar facing the door, and on the altar was a lingam,
a black stone stump garlanded with wreaths of orange marigolds and white
jasmines. A man as dark as the room, barechested and with a white cotton
dhoti wrapped around his hips, his face marked with lines of ash, a thumliprint
of red in the center of his forehead, took my mother's money He gave her
a small comb of pisang emas-perhaps ten to fifteen finger-sized bananas~nd
a dump of incense like a pebble of gray rock candy.
Later that evening
she burned the incense on a brass saucer. As the smoke rose with a pleasantly
acrid scent she walked from room to room, waving the saucer till the entire
house was impregnated with smoke, the smell of frankincense, and the spirits
that banish fear, pain, and illness. The gray smoke wavered across the
rooms and shrouded me. My mother worked with deities to cast out the envious
eye, the ill-wisher, and the intruding hungry ghosts attracted by the plenty
in her home.This burning incense was the smell of my mother's faith.
My mother lived through
her senses. I do not believe she was capable of thitiking abstraedy Her
actions even late in her lifr were driven by needs-for food, shelter, security
affection. when needy mothers love, there is a shameflil nakedness about
their emotions, a return to flagrant seW-love, that embarrasses. Their
heat is distancing: we are driven to reject them before they can eat us
up. Because my mother abandoned us when I was eight, I was never certain
that she loved her children till later in life, when she needed us. Living
through her senses, she could not lie about her needs. In this way my mother's
actions were always honest.
When she lived
with us, my mother did not read except for magazines on Hollywood stars.
Father was enthralled by the movies that frequently came into our town,
and he bought expensive copies of Silver Screen and Motion Picture, fan
magazines imported from wildly distant cities like Chicago and Burbank.
I grew up in the company of glossy photographs of Leslie Caron, Doris Day,
Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Douglas Fairbanks, even Roy Rogers and Dale
Evans, and those magnificent creatures Trigger, Lassie, and Francis the
Talking Mule.
Other than these Hollywood familiars,
we had few photographs and no pictures hanging on our walls. Framed certificates
testifting to Father's success in passing the Senior Cambridge Examinations
and in achieving the status of a Queen's Scout hung along the upper floor's
corridors. So Father's identity was literally imprinted on the walls of
our home. But Emak's presence wavered in our senses, entangled among our
synapses, roused involuntarily by a scent from a perftime counter, a passing
sadness at the sight of white-colored blossorns, an undercurrent of loneliness
in a church or temple where old incense still lingers in the empty pews.
My mother's aesthetic
sense was insensible to anything as abstract as a picture or a photograph.
It must have been Father who cherished the photographs of actors and actresses,
which came all the way from California, to be gazed upon by my five-year-old
self. These portraits were as remote from me as the statues of Ganesha,
the elephant-headed god, whose temple my mother visited, as remote as the
gold-leafed, soot-covered seated figures of Kuan Yin, Goddess of Mercy;
and Kwan Ti, God of Literature, War, and Justice, that rested on the tall
altars where we placed joss-sticks twice a year in the Cheng Moon Teng
Templ~the Temple of The Green Mercifti] Clouds. Hollywood, it Mindu,
and Chinese spirits circled the maternal air, fit denizens whose presence
in our lives gave comfort, interest, and security when we chose to remember
them. But except for ancestral worship days and forays to temples, Mother
lived chiefly from day to day without spirits.
In the background
another woman ruled, a doughy-complexioned, large-boned woman in a cotton
samfoo. Ah Chan washed our clothes, cooked our meals, and cleaned the bedrooms
upstairs. Ah Chan came in the mornings and left every evening. She was
and was not one of us.
Ah Chan made
it possible for Mother always to be careflilly dressed. She ironed our
clothes to a high starched gloss. Often she sat on the little stool by
the open-air bathroom area next to the kitchen, where she had a large zinc-plated
tub fill' of water and dirty clothes. Or she stood in front of the baked
clay charcoal braziers, raising a shower of ash with each blast of her
breath, stirring the blackened wok with a huge cast4ron ladle. Ah Chan
swept the rooms upstairs with a soft straw-plaited broom, pushing the skirt
of straw from one corner of a room to the othen Stocky, broad, silent,
she was always doing something. I never heard her speak.
Ah Chan's daughter,
Peng, older than I was yet also a young girl, came to our house in the
afternoons to help her mother with the laundry ironing, cooking, and washing
up. I did not play with Peng, for she was the servant's daughter and, hke
her mother, she remained busy and silent.
My earliest remembered
dreams are of Ah Chan. Behind my shut eyelids white spots move and dance.
Gradually then faster and faster, the spots rotate and magni~ till they
each resolve into a round shining face with two bright black eyes and a
beaming sfliiie.They are all faces of the same woman. Her smile brightens
till the myriad rows of white teeth shine and blind me, although my eyes
are tightly shut. 1 am terrified of this frmale vision, these expanding
faces with their pasted elongating grins spinning bodiless everywhere.
why should Ah Chan terri£y me when she continues to remain in the
background, seemingly screened and unheard?
Memory fixes
two versions ofAh Chan, the maternal servant. In one she is stoically silent.
Constantly moving, she works at small domestic chores, a necessary machine
in the household. In the other version, a nightmare of beatific power,
her face multiplies and expands to claim the entire ground of my vision.
I wake up with my five-year-old heart racing. Awake I am careful to stay
with my mother or to play in a room away from Ah Chan's presence.
Before there was
trouble there were years I remember as happy, when we ventured out as a
family to visit Grandma, Grand Auntie, and Mother's and Father; friends.
In the evenings or on Sundays after Father had taken out the plank panels,
fitted them into the metal tracks, and closed up his store which sold Bata
shoes, we squeezed into his dark green Morris Minor and drove slowly up
the coast with its old colonial houses, or to Bandar Pasir where friends
lived in new housing estates.
It was a ritual
my mother called makan angin: to eat the wind, to move as leisure. Not
as a challenge or as a means to an end, which are Western notions of travel,
but as easy pleasure. It held nothing of the association of speed that
"wind" arouses in the West, but rather of slowness, a way of drawing life
out so that time is used maximally Makan angin makes sense only in a society
in which time is valueless, a burden to be released with least financial
loss and most pleasure. It speaks for lives that have not understood necessity
or luxury and that drift in dailiness, seeking escape from boredom of the
senses through the senses.
The Tan family lived
in a grand rambling house in Klebang. The circular driveway enclosed a
flowered plot that was circled with yellow and blue tiles. Bachelor buttons,
cockscombs, and zinnias glowed orange, blood red, and plum purple in the
evenings when we visited. I wandered by the garden dazed by growing things.
Pink clusters of sweet william flourished above me, and a thickly-branched
jambu-ayer offered green-pink watery guavas. Inside the polished planked
living room, the adults sat on rattan armchairs. Who knew what they said
to each other, why the Tans felt it necessary to welcome us, what my parents
intended by these visits?
I do not remember
these relatives or friends visiting us except for Chinese New Yean There
was something different about my parents: their restlessness to be out
of the shophouse, shuttling their children, first three, made up of Beng,
Chien, and myself, and gradually including Jen and Wun, all of us putt-putting
into an unpaved driveway, stopping by to visit for an hour or two. Was
there a pathos to this unreciprocated ritual? Even as a five-year-old child
1 understood social place. We were a piece of Malacca society but
not secured in it.
Or less secured than
the Malacca families we visited. My envy of intact families begins with
those Sunday afternoons when, like a gypsy troupe or a circus mob, we stopped
before a private home. Not a shophouse like ours, nor an ancestral house
with five or six families in it like Grandfather's, but a house with a
garden, a living room, a dining room, and bedrooms, possessing the banal
regularity of the Western home.
So we made our
way to another Lim home, no relative of ours but another businessman like
my father, who sold books, magazines, stationery, and school supplies.
The family had once lived above their shop the way we were living above
the shoe store, but, newly prosperous, they were able to move into a bungalow
in Bandar Hilin The parents bustled each time we dropped by, and we never
stayed long.
Their house seemed
to have been constructed completely of cement. The rooms led one to another
with no logic of space, no markers for inner and outer lives. They had
two girls and only one son, their most valuable possession, whom they called
Kau Sai, or Dogshit, for fear of the envious spirits. We thought Kau Sai
was as obnoxious as his name, given to deceive the got. The children, usually
kept busy with tuition classes, piano lessons, and homework, played with
their toys when we visited, disregarding our envious looks.
Perhaps we felt
temporary and unimportant because we no longer lived in Grandfather's house,
like the families of First Uncle, Second Uncle, Third Uncle, and Sixth
Uncle. This ancestral home was a long, many-roomed, merchant's house Grandfather
had built for his children. Grandfather had come to Malaya as a young man
from a village near Amoy, in the Fujien province. He came as a coolie immigrant
with no education or social rank, one of thousands of poor males from southern
maritime China who poured into the British controfled Straits Settlements
at the beginning of the twentieth century A common laborer, he carried
sacks of charcoal wood, rice, dried foodstuffs, and agricultural imports
from the cargo ships anchored off the narrow mouth of the Malacca River,
onto the light boats that navigated the mud flats to unload on the quays.
Through industriousness and foresight, he managed to save sufficient money
to set up a chandler's shop beside the river mouth.
As a young child,
I visited Grandfather's shop, a large room that opened immediately onto
the street. Untidy and crowded, it was a child's fantasy of strange things,
boxes and barrels that overflowed with nails, bolts, screws, brass fittings,
washers, various thicknesses of ropes, steel wires, and other clunky metal
fixtures. He must have done wefi, for he went on to buy farmland which
he rented out. Grandfather weathered the world depression of 1929-32, and
his store and farms prospered with the establishment of Malacca as a careening
station, in the wake of British colonial and naval expansion in the Malayan
peninsula.
With seven sons,
the coolie transformed now into a merchant, a towkay, Grandfather built
a handsome house on one end of Heeren Street, named after the Dutch burghers
who had first settled along the coast by the mouth of the Malacca Riven
In the early twentieth century Heeren Street was where Malacca regularity
of the Western home.
So we made our way to another Lim home,
no relative of ours but another businessman like my father, who sold books,
magazines, stationery, and school supplies. The family had once lived above
their shop the way we were living above the shoe store, but, newly prosperous,
they were able to move into a bungalow in Bandar Hilin The parents bustled
each time we dropped by, and we never stayed long.
Their house seemed
to have been constructed completely of cement. The rooms led one to another
with no logic of space, no markers for inner and outer lives. They had
two girls and only one son, their most valuable possession, whom they called
Kau Sai, or Dogshit, for fear of the envious spirits. We thought Kau Sai
was as obnoxious as his name, given to deceive the got. The children, usually
kept busy with tuition classes, piano lessons, and homework, played with
their toys when we visited, disregarding our envious looks.
Perhaps we felt
temporary and unimportant because we no longer lived in Grandfather's house,
like the families of First Uncle, Second Uncle, Third Uncle, and
Sixth Uncle. This ancestral home was a long, many-roomed, merchant's house
Grandfather had built for his children. Grandfather had come to Malaya
as a young man from a village near Amoy, in the Fujien province. He came
as a coolie immigrant with no education or social rank, one of thousands
of poor males from southern maritime China who poured into the British
controfled Straits Settlements at the beginning of the twentieth century
A common laborer, he carried sacks of charcoal wood, rice, dried foodstuffs,
and agricultural imports from the cargo ships anchored off the narrow mouth
of the Malacca River, onto the light boats that navigated the mud flats
to unload on the quays. Through industriousness and foresight, he managed
to save sufficient money to set up a chandler's shop beside the river mouth.
As a young child,
I visited Grandfather's shop, a large room that opened immediately onto
the street. Untidy and crowded, it was a child's fantasy of strange things,
boxes and barrels that overflowed with nails, bolts, screws, brass fittings,
washers, various thicknesses of ropes, steel wires, and other clunky metal
fixtures. He must have done wefi, for he went on to buy farmland which
he rented out. Grandfather weathered the world depression of 1929-32, and
his store and farms prospered with the establishment of Malacca as a careening
station, in the wake of British colonial and naval expansion in the Malayan
peninsula.
With seven sons,
the coolie transformed now into a merchant, a towkay, Grandfather built
a handsome house on one end of Heeren Street, named after the Dutch burghers
who had first settled along the coast by the mouth of the Malacca Riven
In the early twentieth century Heeren Street was where Malacca Splendor
and Squalor
My mother took
us to a tailor; shop in the back streets of Malacca and had us measured
for mourning clothes. We needed sufficient black clothes for six months,
and because we had to wear black immediately, some of our other clothes
were sent to be dyed. For a week until the tailor was able to complete
the newly fashioned mourning clothes for us, we wore these stiff dyed cloths.
They were more of an indigo than inky black. The dye penetrated the fibers
and made them hard, as in a form of rigor mortis, and the seams of my blouse
sat on my body like rulers. Through the day I walked in an ambience of
indigo stink. It circled my head as the dye difilised with my body; heat,
and its odor rose, wafted from my armpits and pores. I smelled like a corpse
being prepared for burial, so that, although I was not permitted to see
my grand-father; enormous teak coffin as it rested for five days on tresdes
in the front hall of his house, I was reminded every moment that a death
had occurred.
On the day of the flineral,
we joined our uncles, aunts, cousins, and numerous related people in accompanying
the coffin as it moved out of the house to Bukit China, or Chinese Hill,
the oldest and largest cemetery for Chinese in Malaya.We began the flineral
procession at Grandfather; house.The coffin, carved with upturned ends
like a pagoda roo{ was hoisted with ropes and pulleys onto a lorry and
blanketed with wreaths and embroidered banners. Then, his portrait, set
in an oval frame, was tied to the hood of the lorry The scent of the cream
and pink-centered frangipani wreaths masked our sweat and mdigo heat, as
we followed the lorry on foot, crying and lamenting. Hoods of sack cloth
covered our heads, and we shuffled in straw sandals to show how his death
had stripped us to destitution. First Aunt, half-carried by the other women
through the hot streets, screamed the loudest.
The procession
filled an entire street, the flower-bedecked lorry trailed by dozens of
weeping adults and children, and they in turn followed by a solemn brass
band, with drums, trumpets, and Chinese flutes blowing dirges. Behind the
band fluttered banners carried streaming from a single pole or spanning
the breadth of the street between two men. The banners of bright crimson,
purple, midnight blue, and garish green satiny stuff were emblazoned with
the names of associations and shops that had done business with Grandfathen
Men in blue shirts and trousers ran up and down offering yellow "charm"
papers, blessed by the Buddhist temple, to the passers-by Grandfather;
flineral was a civic occasion as much as it was a private grief, and as
we dragged our fraying sandals behind the slow jerking lorry the streets
rang with the shouts of the banner carriers, and with the cries of the
water carriers as they hurried from group to group dispensing bamboo joints
of cool water from their covered buckets.
A photograph
captures this single moment, when I felt Malacca not as a town but as a
familiar spirit, a space extending from the family, and familiarity encompassing
territory intimately inside my memory In the photograph, the coffln~loaded
lorry occupies center stage. The sons, faces visible under their sack-cloth
hoods, kneel in front of the lorry and stare into the camera. Grandchildren
stand on the sides, fanning outwards with mothers and related womenfolk
behind us. There are so many grandchildren that the photograph, forming
a broad, flattened rectangle, appears to have netted me within the psychic
space of the extended family, that veining trajectory of multiple cousins,
blooming for a shortened history in our lives.
This moment imprinted
on me the sense of Malacca as my home, a sense I have never been able to
recover anywhere else in the world. To have fAt the familiar once is always
to feel its absence aften The town through whose streets I mourned publicly,
dressed in black, sack, and straw; weeping with kinfolk, united under one
conimon portrait, is what my nerves understand as home. It doesn't matter
that the family is lost, and that the town has been changed long ago by
politics and economics. Every other place is foreign after this moment.
Father came from
a family of six boys and one girl. He was the only son to have taken a
peranakan woman as his wife. He broke away from being Chinese, and
as soon as his children started school, he began to speak to them in English.
As the fifth son, he had been left to his own devices, and, finding his
pleasures in films and Western music, he constructed a life out of Western
products.These included books. Before poverty stripped him down to essential
pleasures, he read widely if with little depth. Newspapers, magazines,
and omnibuses of Reader's Digest novels filled our home. He must have spent
recklessly on subscriptions. We received National Geographic and two film
magazines; later, as his tastes grew cruder, we received the British Tatler
and Tid-Bit. He ordered copies of British ~nnies for my brothers, so that
we were raised on popular British humor, with Desperate Dan, Billy Buntrr,
Dennis the Menace, and Gnasher.
When 1 study
the few photographs I have of him as a young man, it becomes clear how
differently he saw himself from his older Chinese-educated brothers. My
father is almost always smiding in his photographs, as if there were an
injunction against solemnity or misery in his world. In this way his image
is already un-Chinese. The convention of in&vidual portraits, a seriously
considered expenditure when it wasn't an extravagance, taken perhaps only
once in a lifetime, was that of the gaze across the centuries. One was
looking at masses of one's great-grandchildren and expecting their worship.
It was as human deities that Chinese parents looked into the camera, lofty,
and as always under the eye of eternity, with a tragic cast. But my father's
image for the future-capturing camera defies this Chinese deification.
He sees before him the bent, tilted, shoulder-slanted pose of the Hollywood
stars, the Howard Keels q
Spendor and Squalor
and Douglas Fairbanks of the non-Chinese
woild. His boyish head is always askew in the frame. He tilts it back as
if to invite admiration. He has a smile that can charm any woman, even
a five-year-old child. Sometimes he is posed with other men, but he is
always in the center and at front. His pants are broad linen slacks, and
he wears a cardigan whose sleeves are casually draped over his shoulders
and tied loosely around his neck. In one photograph he wears a Panama hat
and cradles a mandolin. He could have been a Chino in Cuba.
Where did my handsome father get his Western
ways?
Father's imagination was possessed by
Western images. He had a Gramophone that needed to be cranked up, and after
he placed the needle in the groove of the heavy dinner-plate-sized records,
music poured out of a mouthpiece curved elegantly like a horn of plenty
A little puppy with a brown-splashed ear guarded the instrument, and a
man sang, "Oh Rosemarie, I love you, I'm always dreaming of you?'A bright
female voice promised, "Mangoes, papayas, chestnuts in the fire, the food
is so good that you'll wanna stay!" My favorite was "The Mockingbird's
Song)' a tune which veered in my memor>' as the sound of happiness in the
melancholic years that soon followed.
There was a time when Father and Mother
enjoyed taking us to the Great Woild Amusement Park, a fenced-in area adjacent
to the Rex Cinema. We bought entrance tickets for admission and filed through
a narrow gate. Once inside, an entire brightly lit world surrounded us.
Shops frill of records,
I magazines, dolls, and kniclinacks beckoned.
A carousel of metal horses with large painted eyes and flying manes swirled
giddily A screen kept us from seeing into the darkened dance hall where
sailors and playboys paid taxi-girls a dollar a dance.We could hear the
brassy music of the Malay joggert or the slow thump of fox trots through
the open yet hidden door Food stands offered exotic cut apples, pears,
and red plums from Australia. We sat around the rickety wooden tables of
an open-air coffee shop, drinking colored syrups and listening to an ancient
Chinese musician as he sawed on his two-stringed er/ru. With an artist's
pride, he placed a dried plum on our table, and in exchange we gave him
some coins. He did not play for money and we acknowledged this in accepting
his plum for our coins.
Passing by the
record shop we stopped to let Father browse. A large doll with bright yellow
hair and blue irises stood propped by its box. "Look)' the salesman said,
"if you lay the doll down, it closes its eyes:' Perhaps Father saw the
way I held it, with incredulity and delight. A white and pink doll with
the plumpest arms, and legs that moved the way the German soldiers marched
in the movies! I went home that evening with my first doll, an alien almost
half as big as I,so wondeifril that it was placed in its box high on the
highest cupboard, to be brought down only on special afternoons for me
to play with gingerly Among the White Moon Faces
Father was an
inveterate movie fan. Although fi'ms from Hong Kong and Bombay also showed
daily in Malacca, he seldom saw a movie that was not in English and imported
from Britain or the United States.
There were at least three movie houses
in Malacca in the 1940s and '50s: the Rex, the Lido, and Capitol. The names
of these pleasure houses, owned by the Shaw Brothers who lived in Singapore
and Hong Kong, blazed above two-storied buildings. These imperial Latin
names hardly signified the cheap shambling structures in which light poured
out through a peephole and filled a screen with new images of the West:
white cavalry chasing after wild Indians; Errol Flynn with a kerchief round
his forehead hoisting himself up a mast, pirate's shirt blowing in the
wind and pressing against his giant pectorals, waving a cutlass and challenging
a dozen sailors to a fight.
The cinema facades
were festooned with giant posters advertising the latest Hollywood extravaganzas.
A mustachioed Clark Gable, hair slicked back and head lowered, eyes half-closed,
gazed into the green irises of a flaming red-haired beauty; her skin tinted
pink, who tilted her giant head and lips to greet him. This fantastic American
idealized passion, posed with broad male-clothed shoulders and bare woman's
flesh, covered the Rex Cinema's facade for months. It dominated the entire
open square where singlet-clad peddlers sold slices of pineapple, Chinese
pears, apples, and chiku, packages of melon seeds, dried salted olives,
sugared plums, and barbecued squid. We would stand over the dazzling array
of snacks for long minutes, agonizing over what we should buy with our
five-cent treat.We could already taste the tropical treasures in our eager
mouths, together with the American imaginary-the luxurious orchestra sweep,
panoramic scenes, close-ups of white male and female beauty-to be ingested
in cool darkness and silence. We emerged from the cinema hall gorged with
Western images, our ears ringing with the accumulated noise of the finale,
our children's eyes blinking in the afternoon glare in which suddenly everything
appeared dull, flat, and small.
Since Father's
shop, which sold only fashionable, brand-name Bata shoes, was carried in
the Rex Cinema's opening advertisements, we were given free admission to
every show Even after Father went bankrupt and lost the shop, the regular
ushers knew us so well that they continued to allow us in without tickets.
Some weeks we saw three or four movies at the Rex. On weekends Beng, Chien,Jen,
little Wun, and I set off in a trishaw the smaller boys balanced on the
older, and myseli; a small six-year-old, squatting, scrunched by the floor
We caught the 11 A.M. matinee, then the 2 A.M. main fearure, and reeled
home at five in the evening, drugged and speechiess after so much spectacle.
A vivid memory
at ages five and six is of being wakened by my mother who wraps me in a
blanket. She carries me to the Morris Minor and my father drives us to
the Rex Cinerna. We climb up the stairs to the more expensive balcony seats
where I doze in the midst of flashing pictures and giitzy amplified music.
This ritual of the midnight show is repeated frequently My brothers must
have been left alone in the shophouse while my parents nlendy smuggled
me out. But why me? Do they provide this midnight treat on alternative
nights to my brothers? Or am I special, the only girl and my father's favorite
child, the one he double-dates with my mother?
The pictures
I absorbed in those late night moments now form part of my involuntary
miagination.A Busby Berkeley musical with Esther Williams diving and backstroking,
her strong muscular body pushing through the water. Then she stands perched
on a carousel composed of long4egged sleek women, smiling and waving, a
surprisingly asexual figure of womanhood. A cluriky metal figure ominously
emerges out of a metal hulk, the light dims, the music threatens. This
image frightens me and I keep recalling it for years. Decades later, in
NewYork, I learn that this is a shot from The Day the Earth Stood Still,
a science-fiction fantasy that I believed a part of my Malacca world. I
remember a musical with prancing men and pert women dressed in long flouncy
gowns. That, I arid in Boston, was Seven Bridesfrr Seven Brnthers. Each
midnight show; I wake up in time to watch the finale and see the screen
filled with loudly smging, gesturing, good4ookmg people.
I didn't ask in
the morning about the dazed fantasies. I was too busy filling in the blanks
of the day with sensory motions and with explorations of my body The second
story of bedrooms and a corridor play-area had a smooth polished wood floor,
planked and deeply grained. Bored and delighted at the same time, I lay
on the floor, feeling its cool surface on my cheek, and traced the wood
grains with my fingers. I sat by the glassless window in my parents' bedroom
that faced the street, a wooden balustrade like a fence markmg the division
between bedroom and open ain I held onto the round bars of the balustrade,
pushed my head as far as it could go between two of the bars, and studied
the street below It was dazzling hot and sunny outside. A car drove slowly
past, a trishaw moved languorously in search of a passenger. Across the
street was a row of other shop fronts: the goldsmith's shop showed only
a dark interior, although the steel accordion gates were pushed back all
the way A lorry was parked before the sundry shop, but no one was unloading
anything. The street lay silent like a somnambulist's vision.
My father's
shop had a prominent place on the street, but the street always appeared
quiet and empty Sometimes I went through the curtain that separated the
family rooms from the sales area and found him sitting on a stool, slipping
a customer's foot into a shoe with a shoehorn. He wore dark-rimmed glasses
and appeared serious, a different person in his workplace, a person who
frowned Amon9 the White Moon Faces
impatiently. After the customer left he
wrapped the shoes back in their paper tissues, placed them in their boxes,
and put away the boxes precisely in their places on the shelves, like a
stack of catalogued books. He swept the floor and neatly rearranged the
cushioned chairs. With a feather duster, a huge cluster of black and brown
rooster feathers, he dusted the counters and chairs.
He was
compact, efficient, and angry When his anger erupted, he would seize the
feather duster, chase after my brothers, and thrash them with the rattan
handle, gripping the feathers so tightly that they shredded and fell like
pieces of my brothers' bodies.The rattan whipped through the air with a
singing tone, and red welts appeared on my brothers' bare legs and arms.They
raised their arms to shield their heads.When they rolled themselves into
balls, the rattan cut them on their backs and shoulders. I watched terrified,
guilty: was it because of me that they were being caned? Had I cried, complained,
or pointed a finger at them? I was aware that my father's arm, striking
again and again at my brothers, could as well be aimed at me. I stayed
in the corner of the room, unable to move away from his fliry Sometimes
he yaed at me, "You stay here and watch this. Don't think I won't cane
you either!" I knew he would also beat me some day.
We were not allowed
in the shop except on Sundays when I could stand on a cushioned chair and
jump off, imitating my brothers. Once, I fell clumsily, my elbow wrenched
out of its socket. I screamed with pain; the elbow bone stuck out of the
skin like a sharp stick. Nevertheless, I was determined to follow my brothers,
to act as they did.To be one of them, I had to keep up with them. And they
were a bunch of demons. They shrieked and ran like crazed animals all over
the neighborhood.
Indoors they
had to be quieter, and they delighted in games that excluded me. I stood
by the closed door of their bedroom; they were whispering, conspiring about
a game that I was not permitted to play I pushed at the door, but they
had blocked it with the Rill weight of their four male bodies. I begged
them to let me in, I wanted to play with them, but they refused with gleeflil
laughs. I cried, exhausted.Why was I outside the magic of their play? I
knew it was because I was a girl. What did it mean, that I was a girl?
It meant that I was slower than all of them, although my youngest brother,
four years younger, was barely a toddler 1 was unwanted and unloved by
my brothers.
My oldest brother,
Beng, the prized first-born, was the one who disliked me most, In my earliest
memory, he was gruff and distant. He was conifortable in Malay, and over
and over again I heard him say of me, "Benchi!" signifying antipathy, even
hatred. I understood he disapproved of me because I was a girl. The house
was flili of brothers, except for me, tltrd-born. I was a despised female,
but I was also the only girl whose tears, whines, requests, whims, and
fancies my father responded to unashamedly. The only daughter overtook
the Splendor and Squalor first-born son in a family with too many boys.
This childish anger that Beng showed me never shook my sense of being special,
but it made me timid of the feelings of rivals.
Yet I held an
unequal position over my brothers. All my brothers spoke of my father's
favoritism toward me as a fact of life, and I assumed that I deserved my
father's favors. Because my father treated me as a gift, a treasured child,
I felt myself to be a gift, and that I held treasures within me.
Being a girl
also made me precocious and edgy; asking not "Who am I?" but "How can I
prove that I am not who I am?" From the moment my father dealt with me
more gendy than with my brothers, and I understood my oldest brother when
he muttered "Benchi," from the moment I stood outside a door and felt my
sex make me unwelcome, I decided my brothers' acceptance was preferable
to my father's favoritism. I rejected the identity of girl. Since I could
not have both, I chose equality as a boy over privilege as a girl.
My parents explained
to their friends with exasperation that I was a tomboy, born in the year
of the monkey But I was not born one. It did not come naturally to me to
run fast, to jump from high walls, to speed on a bicycle, or to stay out
late alone at night. I would not have wandered from place to place, except
for the promise, barely sensed, that something was to be picked up, learned,
found, discovered, given, taken, ingested, desired, something that I couldn't
find in my home, that I would be stronger, better, improved, changed, transformed
in a stranger's house.
I was given the
trappings of a girl-child: like an antiquated pleasure machine, my memory
churns out images of tea-sets, blond dolls, doll wicker flirniture, frilly
dresses, red tartan ribbons, and my power as the only girl. Lying on a
rattan chaise lounge, with a high fever, I was a very small and sick four-year-old.
But Baba hovered over me; he had bought grapes, rare delicious gjobes.
Emak stripped the green skins from them.The flesh was translucent, pale
jade, veined, and firm. Delirious with happiness, I held each cool fat
fruit in my fevered mouth.
In a later image,
I sat on the floor gravely arranging the plastic teacups and saucers, holding
each teacup in turn by its littie han&e. Today, this child playing
house is a mystery to me.What was she thinking of as she sipped the air
and set the emptied cup on its daisied saucer? What company did she enjoy
this solitary hot afternoon while her brothers were away in school? There
was a stillness in this child, attentively at work with imaginary companions,
that absorbs me now Was she imitating her mother and the many aunts she
had met? But Malacca society ran on glasses of Sarsi and Greenspot, frizzy;
sugared pop, colored violent blood-brown and orange, rather than on cups
of tea and cream. Tea in Malacca was Chinese tea, poured into small handleless
cups that you clasped in one hand.Where had this gir½hild learned
to drink tea in the British way, grasping Among the White Moon Faces the
handle gingerly between thumb and middle linger and sticking her pfrikie
out like a society woman? The illustration on the box that held the tea
set showed a blond child, also on the floor, drinking tea with her equally
blond dollies. The girl had studied the picture. She was more like this
blond girl than like her aunts or even her mothen Her doll with the straw-textured
blond curls sat upright across from her, the hard blue eyes wide open.
The girl played not so much with the tea set as with the picture on the
box. It was quite satisfactory
But finally it
was not as good as the real thing, which was my brothers' play. The boys
played at fighting with each other, noisily and excessively.All kinds of
sounds came from them-bangs, rattles, yells, screams, shouts, yipes, hollers,
short murderous silences, stampings, thumps, pings, singing. It seemed
to me that none of the boys were ever alone. They were always whispering
together, laughing, planning something, sharing a joke, exchanging a look,
chasing each other, pushing, shoving, howling, pinching, punching, kicking,
blaming each othen I whined because they would not tell me what they were
doing, but that was their favorite game, conspiring to keep me out. And
when I had begged enough, they let me run with them in their chases, but
they ignored me. It was too easy to catch up with me. I cried and whimpered
when I was hit, which was after all the aim of their games, to see how
often they could hit each othen
And I? My chest
hurt as I flew down the narrow sidewalks, trying not to stumble against
the dustcans and baskets of garbage left by the sundry shops next to our
home. My breath hammering against my ribs, I scrunched down inside a dry
drain, fearing to be discovered, fearing my brothers' physical play, listening
to their hoots as they galloped up and down above me. I wanted desperately
to be up there, out in the open, whacking them as hard with an open palm
as they were dealing each. othen But I was grateflil to be hiding, to be
silent, secret, left alone, and safe. The minutes passed, and I leaped
from the drain, scrambled in front of the three boys, raced panic-stricken,
and touched the pillar that spelled home.
It was
my brothers' enmity that made me reflise to be a girl. To be a girl, as
I saw through their mocking distance, was to be weak, useless, and worse,
bored. It was to stay in one place and gossip for hours the way my mother
sat gossiping with my aunts and gaandaunts.
My mother's parents
had lived in Malacca State all their lives.Their parents were descendants
of Chinese traders who had migrated to Malaya as early as the fifteenth
century and who had rnarried local Malay women. My mother's father had
been a station master at Tampin, a civil servant for the British administration.
He had moved his family, four boys and five girls, to a house in Kiebang
outside the town of Malacca, survived the Japanese Occupation, then Splendor
and Squalor died suddenly of a bad heart, leaving behind five children
sull at home. His wife died soon after; and Mother found herself hosting
one teenage sibling after another as they passed from her older brother's
hands to hers and then to Singapore where two married sisters were able
to set them up with opportunities and jobs.
A series of aunts
came through our home. First, Aunt Amy, sweet-faced, gentle, always with
a smile that meant nothing except how good she felt to be simply wherever
she was. If my mother was wickedly flinny and driven by the needs of her
senses, Aunt Amy was amusing and grateftil to receive whatever was given
to her. Her strange contentment made happiness inevitable for her, while
my mother's uncontainable needs marked her for misery. Aunt Amy was a bowl
of browri-sugared oatmeal, delicious yet surprisingly good for you. Her
warm and easy temperament gave her the halo of good looks.When Aunt Amy
left for Singapore, Auntie Lei, Mother's youngest sister; came to live
with us.
Auntie Lei was
a short wornan, darker-complexioned than the rest of her siblings, and
fiercely passionate, almost as I imagine I might have appeared at sixteen.
She had a wilfiA vivid face, not pretty at all but catching because the
eyes were so restless, the compact shape of the skull and cheeks seemingly
too srnall for the flirrowed countenance, the concentrated inward focus
of a hirious self Her slight body was dense with resistance; she was like
an animal that would not be housebroken. She quarreled continuously with
my mother, kept her distance from the rest of us, and finally ran away
with a fair-skinned young man whose languid manners promised a life of
poverty
I watched these
aunts, intimate, fleeting, subordinate in my mother's household, the only
women of my blood 1 would know from the inside. They offered two different
selves, but each inescapable from kismat, or fate, as Emak loved to say
Aunt Amy was tamed for pleasure; whatever entered her mouth turned sweet
if insipid. The youngest sister; however; was ruled by passions. Intense,
brooding, her eyes tugged inwards, she was blind to sei&interest and
to safety They were both of marriageable age, but, orphaned and dowryless,
with no parents to negotiate their value, they were social waste, excess,
unhoused women to be taken in by their married sisters as unpaid domestic
help. Aunt Aray willingly waited in another sister's home in Singapore
in hopes of a meager marriage; Lei, sexuality brooding in her sullen body,
defied social approval and gradually disappeared into the Malacca underclass.
Appearing more and more worn through the years, her face never lost its
countenance of discontented sexuality as if in the narrow squalor she had
chosen she had kept unscattered that appetite of the sixteen-year-old.
Uncle Ling came
through, then Uncle Charlie, to be followed by Amy, Lei, and Mun. Ling
and Charlie stayed only briefly, but long enough for me to Among the White
Moon Faces remember Ling's good nature mixed with a cruelty that had him
throwing me into the waves. I screamed with panic as he seized and tossed
me casually like a sack of charcoal into the deep water into which I gurgled
and could not find my footing. I was perhaps four, a child who could drape
her entire body over a blown-up plastic tube and imagine it to be a ship,
but who also had a mind that could understand cruelty and be afraid of
it. My grandparents' orphans introduced me to tragedy, and I learned in
self-defense to stand apart, not to be like Mother and her sisters, who
wept helplessly and who ran away and gave themselves to helpless men, nor
like her brothers who were forced to depend on reluctant relatives.
So much family!
Uncles, brothers, cousins! But all were only one step from strangers. Baba
and Emak were the bedrock, that which could not be lost, although they
might lose each other and themselves. But by the time I was six, even they
were changing into strangers moving away from me.
Baba's temper grew
more uncertain and unchecked, and Emak became pregnant again. The house
was permeated with the scents of chicken and pork liver in Chinese wine
boiled with ginger and ginseng root. One night I saw her using the flowered
porcelain-covered metal chamber pot placed in the corridor connecting the
three bedrooms. No one went to the bathroom downstairs after we went to
bed; life was lived upstairs after S RM. She was huge, her belly floating
in the dark like a boat. The night sarong barely needed to be folded oven
Weeks later we
were told that we had another brother named Wilson, but that our Tha Ec,
our maternal First Grandaunt, would be taking care of him. Lei told us
that a fortuneteller had predicted that Wilson would be a difficult child
who would bring disaster to his parents, and that he would have to be given
away. Tha Ee took him in although she already had three sons of her own
and an adopted daughten Our baby brother came and left without our ever
seeing him.
content
prologue splendor & squalor
war & marriage geographies
of relocation pomegrates & english
education dancing girl scholar
Home Autobiography
Biography Picture
Gallery Bibliography
Malaysia Critiques
Literary Works Acknowledgements
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