CHAPTER THREE   Geographies of Relocation

     Strangers were in the house. They were moving furniture, snatching at our clothes in the almeira, cursing loudly The entire kitchen was stripped. My father stood helplessly to one corner, watching the men at their work. My mother was somewhere packing, crying about her lost bangles. For as long as I could remember she had half a dozen or more elaborately wrought gold bangles on her wrists. They jingled like bells as she walked or waved her hands in conversation. She had had to give them up, andso her eyes were red, her hair unpinned.
     In the afternoon the lorry was packed with a few pieces of the furniture that we were allowed to kee¾the yellow painted iron bunk bed, the queen-sized wooden headboard and bed, the smaller almeira with the mirror insert-and with a few blankets and pillows, dishes and pots, our school uniforms and some clothes and towels, our school books and bags, my doll that closed and opened its tufted lids over plastic blue eyes. Everything else belonged to the creditors. I was eight years old, and even I could understand that, although I did not understand why it happened or what would happen to us next.
     Finally, with all of us in it, the lorry drove us away from our house on Kampong Pantai. I sat on the mattress that had been secured by ropes on top of the possessions, feeling brave and lonely and strange. I promised myself that I would never forget this adventure. I watched the streets as the lorry drove on; the houses appeared already changed, as if in a foreign town.
We had been given the front room on the second floor, the dirty brown one facing the noisy street, of Grandfather; house, now the property of all the sons. Between this front room and First uncle; rooms to the right was an open space, then the balustrades fencing the stairwell and the twisting wooden ffight of stairs with its black polished carved spindles and the curving arm that reached like a flowing spiral of wood to the ground floor inner parlor A large air-well filled the pador with sunlight or damp night air, and a corridor on the left connected our room and First Uncle's rooms to Third and Sixth Uncles' moms at the back of the house. The bunk bed had been placed in the open space, and Mother's almeira, the bed, and mattresses for the children were arranged in the bedroom.
     I lay on the lower level of the bunk bed in the brown evening. For the first time in my life I felt hunger My stomach growled and I pressed back against the lumpy mattress with a lassitude that came from being alone and from not having eaten all day What an odd sensation hunger was! An emptiness, it left me giddy and weak. Nothing mattered much. Time seemed to have slowed down, and I was sitting or lying somewhere outside it, watching its motions. I did not cry because there was no one to see me cry I wondered if anyone would find me here. I was neither sad nor happy, merely conscious of breathing by myself with a faintness that was new to me.

     After that evening I remained hungry for almost two years. Caught in a pyrarnid scam, Father owed large sums of money He had lost his business and ever#bflg we possessed as a family, and forced to declare himself bankrupt. Even his fliture earnings belonged to his creditors. For a long while we lived on his very small salary-what didn't go to the creditors~as a salesclerk for a new Bata shoes shop on Riverside Road. Destitute and homeless, we lived in that brown bedroom in Grandfather's house for over a year.
     For the first few months Mother appeared to manage. I walked two miles to school and nibbled at crackers for breakfast, not the fancy Hundey's Biscuits that came crackling fresh from their green-papered tins, but hard soda biscuits from local factories. Five cents bought ten of them in the corner Chinese store that sold them separately out of tall, square-shouldered cans. There was no lunch, but at dlnner we ate the broken rice that cost much less than the rounded, polished grains preferred by the Chinese. I never complained about the dishes-kangkong (swamp vegetables), ikan bilis (dried anchovies), kiam chye (salted cabbage)-that appeared on the round wooden table for barely a few minutes before vanishing into the bowls and mouths of my ravenous brothers.
    We knew there was no money No one needed to tell us this. We were reminded of it each tune Mother gave us a five-cent coin for soda biscuits with a particular lurtive glance so as to impress on us how difficult it was to arrive at that coin. When she gave us ten cents to buy the ikan bilLs for dinner, we knew how far ten cents had to stretch and how precious that little coin was for all of us.
     Yet I do not remember being deeply unhappy about my constant hunger or about Mother's anxious doling of coins. Returning to Heeren Street was entering another country; marking the COflClUSiOfl of childhood and the growth of independence for me. Impoverished as we had suddenly become, my parents could not afford the luxury of a girWhild. The fancy clothes, the attention, the demands that I act like a girl were abandoned as poverty roUed its monolithic impression on them.
     With poverty came space. I was no longer confined to a house and m yC mother's company Now I roamed the streets with my brothers and cousins.  In packs of seven, eight, or nine we ran up Heeren Street, past the shuttered, respectable baba houses with their flowered tile walls and carved black wood doors to the Chinese mid&e school whose playground was open to our for ways.I From there one could jump down to the beach, for the Straits of Malacca lay immediately behind Heeren Street. Running down the beach, we passed  patches of wild grass to the left and the stinky outhouses of these same respectable homes, while to the right the sea wall kept the Straits away from us and fastened safely to the horizon. At some point the sandy tract met a macadam lane that brought us out to the lower end of Heeren Street, and we a trailed home past the crenellated roofs and colonnades of grand baba homes.
     One afternoon we were wild with excitement. Someone had proposed that we walk along the sea wall and have a picnic out on its flirthest point. My mother fried slices of ubi kayu, a gray spotted yam-like root, with batter, and we r carried these slices with us like trophies. They vanished long before we  clambered onto the wall, but the pride I felt at this festive production of farnily food at a time when hunger was continuous in our lives remains even today.The warm greasy delicious slices symbolized our access still to a condition  above that of bare necessity. Malnourished as we were, food for play aroused a joy that food for survival alone never brought.  I balanced on the sea wall constructed of granite boulders; the huge mica-speckled blocks formed an uneven surface at least two feet across. The sun shone on the blue waves to the right, and on the left it burned and caked the  mud that would later be reclaimed and built up into housing tracts dividing Heeren Street forever from the shore of the Malacca Straits. The water did not appear very deep to me, although the barrier wall was well above five feet high.  My eldest brother gave a triumphant shout; he had dragged up a sea horse in a rusty can that had once contained Players cigarettes. We crowded around his treasure. Barely an inch high, the sea horse flurried its fins and flickered its elegant head in the water that was fast running out of the holes in the tin. I felt if the wealth of the world around m~the hard bright sun, my steady feet finding  their footing on the hot boulders, the translucent blue water rippling quiescentiy along an entire half-sphere, and the womanly little creature puffing its chest and rufiling its tail in the little space of waten. Geo9rophies of Relocation
 

     The months in Heeren Street mingled plenitude of experience with greater and greater deprivations. I was a minor child in a large house filled with five households (Tua Peli's or First Uncle's, Sali Peli's or Third Uncle's, Goli Peli's or Fifth Uncle's, and Sixth Uncle's or Luc Click's First and Second Wives'). while the women were occupied with laundry; cooking, and childbirth, we children were left on our own. Mother was no more than a figure in the background as I lingered in my cousins' roorns, all of them filled with bedding and presided over by maternal presences. Tua Elim of the spare sharp body and suspicious countenance sent you away, and you were glad she was a stranger rather than your mother Sab Elim's plump srniling face made you stay and stay, although with four sons and five daughters there was really no space for you in their two rooms.
     Besides, I soon found myself unwelcome. Sali Elim's second daughter, Ah Swee, closest to me in age, was a sweet-faced, quiet child, and I looked for her in the afternoons, finding a comfort with hen One afternoon she was holding a doll with blue marble irises and yellow tufted lids that opened and closed when it was laid down. "ThaCs my doll!" I said with immediate conviction. "No, it's mine!" Ah Swee bid the doll behind hen "Let me look," 1 insisted. "My doll has a red vaccination mark on its arm:' So a blemish of paint on one plastic arm had been tendeily worked into a childhood fantasy during those years when I played with my blond doll in our old home. The small smear of red paint confirmed what my fast-beating pulse already knew But Ah Swee snatched the doll away from me. She's mine!" she cried, ran into her family roorns, and closed the door I was not allowed into Sali Elim's rooms again.
     Desolate, I visited Luc Click's First Wife. Fair-complexioned and soft-spoken, she was taken up with the care of three children who were much younger than I. But directly behind Sali Elim's chambers, in the very last room on the second floor, with its own winding back staircase for entry, Luk Click's Second Wife and two sons made a space for me. Sixth Uncle's Second Wife was peranakan, like Mother, and the only auntie in the ancestral house besides my 4' mother who could speak English. When my eight-year-old self appeared like an apparition up the winding stairs, she smiled a gentle welcome, as between two equals. "Sit!" she said, motioning to some cushions, and I threw myself down I and stayed for the afternoon. Her nonya kindness was like a sun-warmed guava to a hungry child. I basked in her attention and helped myself to her copies of magazines and romance novels. She was especially welcoming after Mother left us, although by then I preferred running in the streets to sitting in her dimly4it, closed-in room.
     The rooms downstairs were larger, and we all shared them. Even with the numerous children the front parlor was alinost always empty and quiet. Here Among the White Moon Faces the heavy carved front door and decorative fence door-the pintu paga~ swung open onto a room flanked by two interior passageways. Between these entrances, directly facing the front door, a large altar fronted by a lower table was draped with a clot embroidered with colofflil fruit, birds, and personages. Peaches, phoenixes, the high bald forehead of the God of Longevity all called attention to the desire for long hie that haunted the Chinese psyche, a psyche that had never quite discovered myths of immortatity to still the fear of death.
     Instead we many children were a testiniony to our grandparents' afterlife. Their sepia-tinged portaaits looked gloomily at us as we passed through the altar chamber to the bright noisy wofid outdoors or to the clamorous families secreted in the interior rooms. The altar held a brass urn filled with joss ash in which we casually stuck a few sticks of burning joss during special ancestral worship days. Bowls of oranges and tangerines, sigIQing wealth, offered to our grandparents' spirits rernained untouched for months. In long days of desperate hunger it never occurred to me to take one of these offerings; except for special festivals, whatever was placed on the altar was beyond human desire, entering the boundary of ancestral ghosts.
     When we were living on Kampong Pantai we had come to pray before this altar on Cheng Beng, for the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts. Mother stayed up late the night before, shaping squares of paper with gold or silver centers into bricks. In the morning she boiled chickens in soy; ginger, and rice wine and made stews of pork cuts ringed with inches of fat and thick fleshy skin. These she packed careflilly into delicate porcelain bowls. We spent the day at Heeren Street, arranging the bricks into elaborate pymmids before setting them on fire. As they burned down into ashy mount, we placed Mother; flagrant dishes on the altar together with dishes prepared by the other womenfolk. Later in the day someone would throw the spirit dice to ask the ancestors if they had finished their meal. If the two die fell either both closed or both open, we waited. If they fell with one closed and the other open, then the dishes were quickly removed from the altar and everyone, adults and children, feasted on the cold ash-sprinkled remains. Feedrng our ancestors every Cheng Beng bonded us as one Lim family, springing from a common root and tied together in ways that could not be unknotted.

     So when Mother disappeared, we suffered no sense of being undone. Father had been less and less in sight. One night he had come home late, they had had another screaming quarrel, aMy this time he had hit her and she wept for a long time, her eyes and one cheek swollen. In the morning she was gone. Much liter, and with no clear recollection of who told me the tal~perhaps it was Uncle Ling or Uncle Charlie in Singapore trying to explain why she had left us-I understood that Father had taken Peng, the young daughter of our old servant, to the cinema. Fallen as he was, perhaps he had found comfort in the young girl; admiration of his past status. Or had he looked at his younger brother; two wives and longed for a fresh child-woman? Had my mother; frequent tears and sighs about the loss of her house, her ifirniture, and her gold bangles driven him away? Was he escaping his many-mouthed children and their skinny legs and arms?
     Returning to the gloomy crowded bedroom, to an unkempt distraught woman surrounded by hungry children, he must have felt the sentence of his life as an intolerable prison, and struck out. She lost two teeth to his fists. Was this the first time he had hit her? I had never seen him raise his hand against her; and did not see that blow then.
Yet that moment was decisive for hen He had crossed the last boundary in marking her violently and in choosing a younger woman of an inadmissible class, the daughter of our servant. Breaking those taboos, he gave my mother perrriission to break that final social taboo for women, that of abandoning her children.
     Perhaps it was fear for her physical sei{ the bitterness of broken teeth, to a wornan who placed so much importance on appearance. Or was it his bankruptcy; the legal recognition of his inability to provide her with any form of security? Father could never repay those debts. When he died years later, he was still legally bankrupt, and all his possessions were in his children; and second wife; name. Was it the fear that all she could look forward to with him were years of hard labor; sexual betrayal, and violence? Or was it the immediate humiliation of living again in the culturally foreign Hokllien ancestral house, a lowly Fifth Sister-in-Law after having had her own home? Sometimes I think she abandoned us because she did not want to see our many hungry faces. Or because of our childish neglect of her as we ran wild and wilder every day through the streets and out of her life.

     I will never know She was there and then she was no longer there. Who dressed me the next morning for school? In my royal blue pinafore and white blouse I walked the two flilies to the convent. Just before the convent walls came into sight I passed by Mother; Second Aunt; house. Grandaunt was a nonya in the grand style, dressed in a meticulously ironed sarong and gleaming starched kcbaya. The doors and windows of her house were always shut. The front porch was swept clean, its uneven red Mediterranean tiles sober and bare. This morning Mother sat by a window which was opened just a crack. She called to me and pulled me through the door The front parlor smefled of old joss; the teak flirniture was polished as if no one had ever used it. She took me by the arm into the second parlor and I sat at the marble-topped table while she spread a slice of bread with marmalade. I was absorbed by the sandwich; nothing had ever tasted so good to me. Greedily, she watched me eat, tears spilling from her eyes. I was uncomfortable: Why was she crying? I would be late for school.
     I told no one about my mother's treat or about her tears. I met her only in the mornings on my way to school, and each morning I looked forward to that slice of bread and marmalade. Sometimes Second Grandaunt was present, a severe woman with her hair up in a bun, stuck with a filigreed gold pin, who said nothing to me. I carried my mother's tearifil face with me all day In the morning I wasn't certain which I was looking forward to more, the bread and marmalade, my only food for the day until dinner, or her sad eyes fixed obsessively on me.
     But in a week she was gone from that window Much later I learned that Mother had left for Singapore to join her brothers and sisters, those siblings she had cared for when she was herself a grand nonya.

     Second Grandaunt never opened the door for me again. Each morning I waiked slowly past the shut doo~ thinking of that slice of bread. I left for school without breakfast, hid through recess till all the girls had finished eating, and waited all afternoon for dinner when Third Aunt would give us each a plate of rice and some vegetables and sauce.
Did Third Aunt fred us out of charity or was Father paying her?
     It felt like charity We waited for her to feed her children first. When our turn came, most of the meat was gone. A frw vegetables and some scraps of meat remained as leftovers, and this was what we woWed down, the five of us, as quickly as we could before the plates were polished empty
     The hunger was a pain in my belly I was conscious of it all through the day so that it became part of me and I forgot that it was something new and different. Instead I concentrated on the world that had become possible because Mother was no longer with us.
     This world was free. Once home from school I was an unshackled anaal and followed my brothers and cousins as they ran through the streets. I was always a liule behind them; they were faster and impatient with me. But I was persistent. I trailed them and caught up as they stopped to climb a tree, threw stones at a dog, or clambered down from the back of the house to the sandy track and to the sea wall.
     Sometimes they got away from me. I turned a corner and they had vanished, into a friend's house, up an alley, or over a drop. I would find myself alone, streets away from Grandfather's house, in the steamy afternoon, no one stirring except me. Every hawker stall, crowded with rubber thongs, plastic braided shopping baskets, goods I didn't ever look at because I knew we were Geographies of Relocation
destitute and could buy nothing in the world, was empty of customers. All Malacca except me had fallen to the somnambulant speli of the tropical heat.
     Slowly I traced my way back to Heeren Street. How fine it was to be alone and unafraid. I was suddenly proud of myself Nine years old, I walked confidently through the quiet streets I hadjust inherited; no bicycle or rickshaw disturbed my vagrancy. I was aggrieved that my brothers had successtirlly lost me, and I preened myself on being alone. The volatile mixture of sorrowifil loneliness and proud independence nags me to this day
     A wild girl who ran around with boys and alone through the streets, I al50 discovered that crime paid. In a closed room behind the inner parlor Tua Peh, who was managing Grandfather's hardware store, had stored boxes and barrels of goods.We found that by breaking open some of these boxes we could grope in the room's darkness and come up with a handftrl of pipes, copper wires, shiny steel faucets, brass knobs, and iron hooks. These we carried away Rirtively to a store in the next street over where a barechested man weighed our offerings on his balance and gave us some coins in exchange. We knew we were  stealing, although it did not occur to us that it was our own Lim family we were devastating with our thievery
     How rare were those ten-and twenty-cent coins! I held them tightly in my palm and considered everything I could buy with them-dried lemon skins, pickled plums, sugared cuttlefish, preserved fruit. I longed for salty sweet tidbits that I nibbled slowly so that five-cents worth lasted and lasted all day My thrift was that of the survivor who hoarded against starvation.

     Of course, it did not occur to me then to complain that even as my brothers and I went to bed hungry every night, iha Peh and Sah Peh were lying together in a middle room smoking their opium pipes. Our raids into the storeroom went undetected because the entire family was disintegrating. Tha Peh) the family patriarch, had become addicted to opium. A silent man, thin to the point of emaciation, he neglected the hardware store and instead spent recklessly on opium, which he smoked all day The trishaw man who brought the opium into the house showed it to us one morning, wrapped in a dried leafi a ball of tarry substance, smaller than a marble, like a mouse's turd. CAhpien sai," First Aunt said, wrinkling her nose, "Opium shit."
     Sometimes, absolutely silent, I crept up to the middle room where First and Third Uncles lay on the smooth hardwood floors resting on bolsters and sharing a pipe. The pipe was a smooth wooden reed with an aperture in the rnid&e that held a copper clip. The men impaled the opium ball on a long skewer and roasted it over a spirit lamp. When it sizzled and turned oily black it was careffifly placed in the clip, and they took turns sucking in its smoke through the water pipe. After the ball had burned away, they fefl back on their Among the White Moon Faces bolsters and lay dreaming for hours. The only sound during this ritual was the sound of the water pipe as they sucked on it~norting snores that echoed in the room, repeated as the pipe went around their two pairs of hands. The smell of roasting opium was intense, like a combination of coffee grounds, burned soy sauce, and singed hair The snores and the dark flimes penetrated every bedroom; the scent clung to my nostrils like a family taint.
     This dark scent overlapped with the dark nights when I found myself mysteriously alone. My brothers were asleep in the front open space. I woke up in the bedroom and found Father was gone. Clok-clok-clok. The street below echoed with the bang of wood against wood, the noodle vendor's announcement of his itinerant presence to midnight hungry insomniacs. I stood by the glassless window whose wooden panels had been drawn shut and placed my eye against its crack. A street lamp cast its pale nimbus down the cross street, so dim that it turned the air brown and shadowless.The entire scene was empty; like my body which hummed its hunger in an underkey, and like the room in which I stood for long minutes, without Mother and Father I was beyond crying, and leaned idly against the window panels, curious about who I was in this world where everything had shut down except me.

     Soon even Grandfather's house was lost.We had become attached to Third Uncle's family, and we followed them as they settled into a three-room shack, the first house in a row of four All four identical shacks shared the same long roof of zinc. Father, Beng, Chien, Jen, Hui, and I squeezed into the tiny back room, about eight by ten feet wide, next to the kitchen of Third Uncle's house, while our cousins, Sali Peh, and Sab Ehm shared the two larger rooms in the front.
     Although the shack was almost five miles away, I loved walking to school each morning, away from the misery of cramped dislocation. The more crowded we were, the more distant I felt from everybody Walking alone through unfamiliar streets returned an identity to me, and I felt myself as a human in a way that living in my cousins' back room did not allow.
Father gave me ten cents each morning for the bus, but I always walked the five miles to school. I spent the bus fare on food, a lentil cake from the Indian woman who also sold roasted peanuts and boiled chickpeas by the Bandar Hilir Primary School, or a day-old pastry from the Chinese bakery a mile down my route if I could not wait. I saved five cents for the hot walk home at two in the afternoon.
     I varied my route so that I walked through different streets, and I peered into Chinese and Indian stores for riches which my five cents could purchase. A Chinese store on a side street near the Indian part of town displayed barrels of clumpy dates, sticky masses in which twigs, dried leaves, pebbles, and bits of Geographies of Relocation insects were visible. These dates were the food with which the poorest Malays broke their fast as the sun set during the month of Ramadan. Five cents bought a fistijil of solid sweetness and kept me active all day
     Our first meal of the day came at six in the evening. Eageily we waited for Salt Ehm's family to finish eating; then we sat down to the cold rice and leftover dishes.We left nothing on our plates from Sah Ehm's servings-there was simply never enough for us. We never complained or talked about being hungry A kind of pride had overtaken us, even as our skin puiled tighter and our bodies showed their bones.

     Father worried more about me than the boys. I had headaches, and had grown silent and moody I stared at a wall all evening and cried easily He asked me to walk after school by the Bata shop on Riverside where he was a salesclerk. He placed me on his bicycle handlebar and biked me through the tedious hot streets home to the shack, then he biked all the way back to the store. I drooped over his bicycle, strangely comforted by the slow pedal of the wheels but unable to revive. He didn't say much as we traveled. Across these years I feel his tenderness and my uneasiness with it.
     But Father did not understand my fears. One day I found a rash over my stomach, perhaps formed by heat and my absence of baths. I ran to my aunt and asked her to look at it. Looking glum she said in Hokkien that the rash was called a snake. Nothing could stop this disease once it took hold of you. The snake grew to encircle the waist, squeezing the intestines and stomach until the human host died pa#iiiy "The gold earrings in your ears"¾y some strange Ichance missed by Father; debtors a year ag~"must   be removed immediately" she warned. One effect of this horrible disease was that any gold touching the afflicted person; body would become melded into the flesh. "I'll take the earrings out for you)' she offered.
     I was numbed with the news of my impending death. I imagined the snake twisting around my waist, growing larger every day and the pain that was inevitably approaching. The next morning I headed towards the convent chapel. Kneeling on the pew; I cried wretchedly I felt the pain of the gold earrings stuck in my soft flesh. That evening I begged Auntie to take the earrings off I never saw them again.
    For the next few weeks I cried easily withdrew into somber moods, and suffered headaches. Gradually however, the image of my dying left me. One day the rash was gone and, except for an abiding morbidity a fascination and belief in my early death, I had almost forgotten the entire incident.

    After a few more months, Third Uncle and his family were also gone. In those few months also, Father found his lifelong  occupation as a petition writen it was 1954; the British had just negotiated with the United Malay National Organization (UMNO) for independence for the Federation of Malaya in 1957. Determined to maintain Malay ascendancy; UMNO had resisted accepting the large Chinese population into the federation as citizens of the new state. Legislation controlling citizenship for Chinese residents was enacted, and suddetily millions of Chinese were legally enmeshed, their loyalties and identities suspended until certain forms, government stamps, notarized certificates, and fees were collected.
Father was trilingual. His Senior Cambridge education and Queen's Scout training had made him cornfortable with British regulations and procedures. His Straits-born Malay fluency added social amiability and grace; and his Hollien descent gave him access to masses of illiterate Amoy kinsmen feafflil of British and Malay laws that had been crafted to make illegal immigrants out of them.
      Wealthy Chinese had lawyers to do the paperwork for them. English-educated Chinese went through the Civil Service officers and completed the papers themselves. Father's clients were working-class and poor Chinese, illiterate, some with no fixed address, all suspicious of government and feafflil of detention and deportation.
     Father, a Straits-born British subject, was securely of the Nace. But without a law degree, he could not practice immigration law, so he could not set a fee for his services. Instead his clients paid hirn whatever they could afford or thought was appropriate. Sometimes a farmer paid in baskets of fruit. On good days a grateflil hawker paid a hundred dollars for a successflil petition. Everyone gave something, even if it was only twenty dollars. For a period Father was so successftil at writing petitions for citizenship status for China-born Malayans that he came home late each evening with a pocketiul of ten- and twenty-dollar notes.
    This unexpected and improvised career shift allowed us to move to our own shack next to Third Aunt's house. Father made an attempt to persuade Mother to return from Singapore where she had gone to join her brothers and sisters. He sent an enussary a mutual friend, who visited us one evening. It was already dark outside and Father went to the verandah in his pajarnas to talk to the woman. I could see their two dim figures standing with the night drop behind them.
When Father came back into the house, he had a grim expression on his face. It was one of the few occasions he ever spoke about Mother to us. "Your mother doesn't want to come back.Wefl, she's not going to see any of you ever again.You will have nothing to do with her. She is out of our lives."
    Mother became a huge silence. We never spoke of her to Father, nor to each othen She was forbidden, someone who was not dead and also not allve. But she tried to stay in touch with us. A few months after she'd rejected Father's overtures, she sent a frock to me through another acquaintance. Furious, Father ripped the frock and returned it. "Tell her she can have nothing to do with her daughten I will never let my daughter accept anything from that whore:' But later when Mother sent me a doll, a huge doll about two feet tall that walked stiffly when you held it by the hand and guided it, Father, by then settled with his second wile, kept it in the house. I was allowed to look at the doll and even to walk it on a few occasions; the rest of the time it was kept for safekeeping in its box on top of the almeira. Soon I forgot to ask for it, and, as with my first doll and with Mother, it inexplicably disappeared.
      When I was twelve and older, Mother wrote occasional short notes to me, enclosing a five- or ten-dollar bill. She included a return address, but her notes said very little, and the money gave me a tick in my side, like an ache, reminding me of something about my last few mornings with her at Second Grandaunt's house.

    The move to our own house was more immediate to me than the few reminders of Mother two hundred miles away in Singapore. At first we were ecstatic with the luxury of the move. Beng, Chien, and Jen slept in the back room, while Hui and I slept with Father in one large bed in the one real bedroom. With our own space, we became a family again, only this time we thought of ourselves as a clubhouse. Casual, untidy, loud with music, card games, and sports, the house attracted my brothers' friends who were always welcomed by Fathen The large laterite wasteland in front of the row of houses was commandeered by the boys who measured and chalked with lime the rectangles of a badminton court and set up two poles. Father bought a net, some rackets, and badminton birds, and every afternoon a string of boys rode up on their bicycles and played sets, indulging in flashy smashes and overheads. Father often beat the best of them, chasing after the bird more ardently than anyone. Watching on the sidelines, I was the only girl in these scenes, and, with my brothers, laughed at Father's sweaty antics.
     Father bought a radio cum record player, and while we could afford only a lew records, we listened all day long to the radio which played British and U.S. pop songs aimed chiefly at the British forces stationed in Penang and Malacca. He found a mail-order catalog for musical instruments and sent for a guitar which arrived with an instructional book. We were stunned by its beauty; this gleaming curved body with its magic hole that hummed each time the tightly wound wires were struck. For weeks we gave up our wild play outdoors and bent together, watching Beng and Chien as they tried the different fingerings that produced those A, C, and D chords called music. In the evenings after our meal and Father's shower, he took possession of the guitan In his cotton pajaanas, the oldest child among us, he embraced the guitar's roundness and strummed melodies that led us through rounds of loud singing. "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountam$' "On Top of Old smoky:' "Oh Susannah$' campfire songs that he had learned in his scouting days drew us in a circle that for a miraculous moment made us complete as a fannly

       Our weekdays, however, were a shambles. For a while, Third Aunt continued to feed us, and her older daughter, never sent to school and unmarried still, took care of our laundry Then, Sah Peh, a minor civil servant, was transferred to Muar, a snull town fifty rmles south of Malacca.
      Father contracted with a cheap coffee shop situated in the town market for our dinners. Every evening Beng or Chien set out on Father; bicycle to the coffee shop and returned with a chun crammed with food. The carrier held three containers set up in tiers.The first snaaller container held meat or fish and vegetables; the second of the same size contained soup; and the bottom receptacle which was the tallest was filled with rice.
     Father shared the food out among all six of us. Beng and Chien were given more rice for they were the oldest, but I received as much soup and meat and vegetables as they did. Jealously we eyed each other; portions; no one was permitted to have a larger or better helping. If it had happened that one child received a bigger piece of meat, then Father had to take some of that meat away for another child.
     The food was always delicious because we were always hungry If the soup had strips of salted cabbage and pork fat, it called for cries of appreciation. The meat was usually fatty pork, sometimes chicken, and sometimes ray whose fleshy frns were a special favorite since we could eat almost all of its cartilaginous bones. We all had different approaches to eating. Some mixed the small bits of meat and sauce with the rice; others ate the meat first, and lasdy the rice flavored with the vegetables and sauce. I kept the best for last; filling up with rice and sauce, I saved my piece of pork by the side and long after everyone had finished I turned to that fragrant morsel as my reward. There were never any leftovers.
     When we first moved to Mata Kuching, a Buddhist association, whose temple grounds stood a little way in from the main road, owned much of k. A narrow laterite lane ran past the temple, past other shabby attap-roofed shacks, and about two hundred yards into our row of shacks. The land was half rural; compounds ran into each other without fences and gates to mark private property; and we took shortcuts through gardens and backyards without any remonstrance.
     Seeing so much garden fruit, my brothers and I formed a wild pack. A butterfruit tree in a neighbor's yard was a favorite target. The globular fruit was Geographies of Relocation
creamy flesh insj&, but its skin was covered with numerous small needles like cactus spines that hatb~d our fingers and lips if we were careless.We ignored the pain of the needles as we picked the ripe purplish fruit and crammed the pulp into our mouths. We scanned the mango trees around and did not wait for the fruit to ripen hut picked them as soon as they were of any size. We ate these green, puckerish sour mangoes with relish. A short wayside tree grew right by our front yard. It bore continuously, small berries with a vapid sweet seedy flesh. Unripe, the berries were an inedible hard green. As they ripened they turned pink, then squishy red. We called it a cherry tree, and spent hours climbing its branches, combing them for a handifil of pink and red cherries bidden among the frizzy leaves.
     Driven by hunger we clambered higher and higher, moving from one branch to another above it where cherries waved just out of our reach, till one afternoon Chien came crashing down and lay moaning on the ground. Someone must have gone to get his high-school teacher, Mr. Leong, who drove hifli to the hospital. Tormented by fear for his life, I walked the riffles to the hospital and found him in the emergency room where his broken wrist was being bandaged1 He never received medical attention again about his wrist.
     Perhaps no one thought it necessary; there was certajaly no money for doctor's fees.
     Like everything else about our childhood, that break in Chien's wrist did not set wefl. For years he wore a bandage around his wrist to hide the ugly angle of the bone. I ached for his private shame, for I understood how he hurt even after the bone had healed.

     Despite our deprivations, we were never asked to help with the housework. After our evening meals, we children set our dishes on the floor next to the cement water tank for Father to wash up, and went off to do our homework.
I had never been taught how to clean anything, even myself Up to the age of nine I had been bathed by one adult or another, first by Ah Chan, then by Mother, and finally Father tried to take over this chore. But he came home so tired and late that he often forgot.
    l became grubbier every day Surreptitiously I would rub one finger along the inner crease of my elbow; shreds of black dirt peeled offi I rubbed behind my ears and fficked off balls of dead skin. Running after my brothers all afternoon I frequently fefl and skinned my knees. Srnall laterite shards stuck to the unwashed raw patches, the wounds turned sulfirous, yellow with pus. Even as a sore healed another formed. My legs and arms were pockmarked with scars
and pus-filled sores.
     During this period Father tried washing and ironing our laundry himself on weekends. His ironing was excellent; with a modern electric iron our clothes Among the White Moon Foces were pressed smooth. But he could not get them clean. Yellow lines showed where dirt and sweat had settled on my white collars, and my white socks had large brown patches at their heels. I had no change of uniforms, so the one blouse and pinafore had to do for the week. Try as I did, by Friday my uniform was rumpled and stained. Every morning I pulled on the same pair of white socks, and set the heels lower into the shoes so that the spreading black soles would not show I changed underwear infrequently; there wasn't enough to go around until Father's laundry day on Saturday

      One afternoon Auntie May-the nurse whom Father had met in the hospital-visited us. Together they got me into the bathroom, which was merely an unlighted walled and roofrd enclosure at the back of the house, equipped with a tap, a large jar beneath it, and a kong, a fin scoop. I had a horror of that space, a kind of claustrophobia that included the darkness, the greenish moldy damp air, and the floods of water it took to get myself clean. To take a bath, I usually ran the tap water into the jan Scooping the cold water with the kong I threw it over my body, pausing only to soap myself. A final rinse and I unfastened the zinc door to hurry out of that slippery moldy space with a sense of having escaped one more time from an unhealthy cage.
But that afternoon Father shampooed my hair while Auntie May soaped me thoroughly I stood still in the middle of their ministering hands, feeling a quiet pleasure in her presence. She was serious where Father was light-hearted, absorbed in whatever she was doing where Father was distracted. I fell asleep early that evening-it was so peaceftil to be clean.

     During the school holidays that year, Auntie May invited me to stay with her in her quarters in the Malacca General Hospital. The nurses lived in a dormitory building by the entrance to the hospital road.These bare rooms with narrow single beds, uncurtained windows, and institutional chests of drawers were usually empty and quiet. The dining room, serving soft-boiled eggs, toast, black tea and sugar for breakfast, was also stark and antiseptic, with a long table and identical chairs. Most of the nurses preferred to live at home and stayed in these quarters only when they were on night duty and could not get away But I was awed by the luxury of Auntie May's world-its regularity its cleanliness, its empty spaces unfilled by people, bedding, and old flirniture! Compared to the nurses' silent dormitories, I saw my home filled with brothers and their noises as intolerably irregular, a quarrelsome chaos.
     Auntie May took me on her rounds during the few days I stayed with hen She was then on duty in the emergency room where poor Malaccans who could not afford a doctor came with their unexplained coughs and tevers. Perched to the side of the large room, I observed the orderlies and nurses at I work. while nurses checked pulses and decided who should be seen by the doctors, the orderlies, all Taiuii men, cleaned and bandaged wounds and led the most indisposed to doctors or to their hospital beds. The work was usually not dramatic, the cuts and wounds from various accidents being treated on the spot with iodine and gentian blue.
     Bored, I roamed the hospital. I browsed through the varieties of Nestle and Cadbury chocolates and magazines from Hong Kong, Bombay, and London carried in the Indian sweetshop downstairs. Sitting on one of the benches set Out among enclosed spaces on the grounds, I studied the small green yards planted with scraggy cannas, unvisited by anyone but bees and midges. The hospital hummed around me: nurses trotted down corridors, ayahs pushed trolleys smelling of steamed rice and cabbage towards the service elevators, and white-clad orderlies disappeared around corners bearing armmls of bandages and mysterious supplies. The institutional order lulled me. I imagined longingly that the convent orphanage must be very much like this-a safe space with lunch and dinner served regulaily at noon and six. This school break spent at the Malacca General Hospital was the closest to a vacation I enjoyed as a child.
     But Auntie May dropped out of sight. I never saw her again. Perhaps my moody company that week convinced her that lire with my father and his children was impossible. I heard later that she became a head nurse and then achieved the ultimate promotion, to matron, supervising an entire hospital staff of nurses. Something about her briskness already indicated the career path she would take. I only wonder what youthiul dreaminess led her to a relationship, no matter how tenuous and sedate, with my fathen Perhaps she glimpsed in him the man he could have been under another sky; a gentle, thoughtfiil, and intelligent man uncrowded by his children, not brought down by the consequences of his body

    Ironically I struggle with the guilt of my father's sexuality in a way I am sure he never did.
    Father began to leave us after dinner with instructions to get ourselves to bed by nine. Some nights I kept myself awake waiting for him to come home. In the large queen-size bed, I slept on one side, and Hui, who was about six years old, slept in the middle while Father slept on the other side. Sleep was usually easy and pleasurable for me. My brothers had taken to yelling a chorus of good-nights, competing as to who would have the last word. They interspersed their good-nights with loud farts and rude armpit sounds and Father was Sometimes the loudest and rudest of them all.These gales of laughter gradually ceased as one by one we drifted off to sleep.Whenever I roused in the middle of the night, I snuggled my cheek against my bolster and listened for Father's reassuring heavy breathing. Now his late nights meant we scrambled Amon9 the Vvhite MOOfl races
into bed silent and annious. Lying awake I would hold my breath and watch the dark air before me which I fancied appeared to crawl slowly in a series of dots in front of my eyes. As soon as I heard Father's bicycle clank against the verandah wall, I would release my breath and sink into sleep.
   One night I heard a strange voice with Fathen He had brought someone in home with him who giggled and whispered. Overcome by guilt for being awake, I lay with my eyes shut. I wanted desperately to be not there, to disappear  into the bedding the way Hui had disappeared. But frilly awake, I felt the motions of people rustling and breathing around me.They did not get into bed or but must have sat on the floonThe whispers and giggles continued, then faded into other indistinct sounds. Slowly l lost Consciousness, even as an anxious turn in my chest strained to block out every silent sigh that seemed to fill the
minutes.
   Father brought this woman home on many occasions. I learned to turn over and entrr my mmd so that those sounds that had so startled me the first night would become unmemorable. They were things of the night so separate or from the day's events that I could proceed undisturbed by them, as if they were not true. I did not know who came home with Father although I knew the whisper and giggle well.
     One afternoon Father came home from work accompanied by a young woman riding a bicycle.We recoguized her  immediately: she was our old family servant, Ah Chan's daughten Ah Peng was only seventeen, seven years older than I. Fresh-faced and happy, she rode up to the house and left her bicycle on  of our verandah. They had just "drunk tea" together, a Confricianist ritual that conferred on her the custornrny status of second wife. Ah Chan had not approved of her daughter's relationship with Fathen Perhaps she hoped for something better for her daughter than a liaison with a married man burdened
with five children at home and bankruptcy; perhaps she felt bound by past ties to Mother and to class taboos. Ah Peng, however, was pregnant. Ah Chan had no choice but to allow Peng to "marry" Fathen.
   Standing by the front door gaping at the sudden presence of Peng in our family, I did not understand how scandalous Father's actions were. "Peng is going to be your stepmother;' Father said, beaming with genuine happiness. English-educated, I repeated the word "stepmother" to myself SnowWhite and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Red Rose and White Rose, Hansel and Gretet
all the Western fairy tales in which wicked stepmothers and stepdaughters battled in mortal conflict swam into mind.As Peng swept out the bedroom and moved my clothes out of the almeira into the shelves in the back room, I sat on the doorstep and looked out at the open space that Father and my brothers had limed and netted into a badminton court. I knew Peng would hate me. Finally I acknowledged that Mother was never going to return and nothing was ever going to be the same.

     Peng's place in our family was central and total. At the same time, we children proceeded as if she were absent in our midst. Father never intervened in our mutual neglect. I do not remember a conversation with her in all the eight years I continued to live in the same house with her, although we addressed each other occasionally and exchanged remarks. She spoke no En~sh and minimal Malay; I reftised to speak Hokicien to hen We barricaded
Iourselves behind our different languages. We lived together in the closest quarters as linguistic strangers, our mutual hostility remaining unexpressed and seemingly contained.

    We always called her "Peng)' the name by which we knew her when she was the daughter to our mother's servant. Much later I learned she had resented this callous noncompliance with proper Chinese farlial custom. We should have called her "Ma," Mother, for, as Father's second wife, she was also our second mothen Father, however, never requested this of us, perhaps out of liis own seiflconscious embarrassment. We were Western-educated children; by the tine I was six, all five of us spoke English at home and with him. Our home culture was altogether anglophone, including magazines, newspapers, music, games, and sports. Peng was a thoroughly Chinese woman. Barely literate in Mandarin, she had been raised by Ah Chan to do domestic work. She was strong, skilled in needlework, a good cook, thrifty; and already practiced in all the demanding chores of laundry; housecleaning, and child care. The daughter of a servant, she suited our needs as if she had answered a personal ad. We did not reflise to call her "Mother"; it never occurred to us that we should do so.
    She was sullen and unsnnling toward me from the very begliming. She lived for when Father came home. Sitting beside him at the kitchen table, she I picked the best pieces of meat or fish from a dish with her chopsticks and placed them on his plate.While Father still shared the food out among us, we were less iv jealously watchful. For the first time in two years, we had as much rice as we could eat, and often even leftovers. Peng and Father washed the dishes together, she giggling and chattering to him in Hollien. Later when we were in our cots, they continued their conversations in the bedroom. I would hear their
murmurs late into the night, pillow-talk that filled me with restlessness and misery.