CHAPTER FOUR Pomegranates and English Education

     A pomegranate tree grew in a pot on the open-air balcony at the back of the second floon It was a small skinny tree, even to a small skinny child like me. It had many fruits, marble-sized, dark green, shiny like overwaxed coats. Few grew to any size. The branches were sparse and graceflil, as were the tear-shaped leaves that fluttered in the slightest breeze. Once a fruit grew round and large, we watched it every day It grew lighter, then streaked with yellow and red. Finally we ate it, the purple and crimson seeds bursting with a tart liquid as we cracked the dry tough skin into segruents to be shared by our many hands and mouths.
     We were many Looking back it seems to me that we had always been many Beng was the fierce brother, the growly eldest son. Chien was the gende second brother, born with a squint eye. Seven other children followed after me:
Jen,Wun,Wilson, Hui, Lui, Seng, and Marie, the last four my half-siblings. I was third, the only daughter through a succession of eight boys and, as far as real life goes, measured in rice bowls and in the bones of morning, I have remained an only daughter in my memory.
     We were as many as the blood-seeds we chewed, sucked, and spat out, the indigestible cores pulped and gray while their juice ran down our chins and stained our mouths with triumphant colon I still hold that crimson in memory; the original color of Chinese prosperity and health, now transformed to the berry shine of wine, the pump of blood in test tubes and smeared on glass plates to prophesy one's fliture from the wriggles of a vrrus. My Chinese life in Malaysia up to 1969 was a pomegranate, thickly seeded.

     When Beng and Chien began attending the Bandar Hilir Primary School, they brought home textbooks, British readers with thick linen-rag covers, strong slick paper, and lots of short stories and poems accompanied by colofflil pictures in the style of Aubrey Beardsley The story of the three Billy Goats Gruff who killed the Troll under the bridge was stark and compressed, illustrated by golden kids daintily trotting over a rope bridge and a dark squat figure peering from the ravine below Wee Willie Winkie ran through a starry night wearing only a white night cap and gown. The goats, the troll, and Willie Winkie were equally phantasms to me, for whoever saw anything like a flowing white gown on a boy or a pointy night cap in Malaya?
     How to explain the disorienting power of story and picture? Things never seen or thought of in Malayan experience took on a vividness that ordinary life could not possess.These British childhood texts materialized for me, a five- and six-year-old child, the kind of hyper-reality that television images hold for a later generation, a reality, moreover, that was consolidated by colonial education.
     At five, I memorized the melody and lyrics to "The Jolly Miller" from my brother's school rendition:

     It was my first English poem, my first English song, and my first English lesson. The song ran through my head mute~ obsessively, on hundreds of occasions.What catechism did I learn as I sang the words aloud? I knew nothing of millers or of larks. As a preschool child, I ate bread, that exotic food, only on rare and unwelcome occasions. The miller working alone had no analogue in the Malayan world. In Malacca, everyone was surrounded by everyone else. A hawker needed his regular customers, a storefront the stream of pedestrians who shopped on the move. Caring was not a concept that signified. Necessity; the relations between and among many and diverse people, composed the bonds of Malaccan society. Caring denoted a field of choice, of individual voluntary action, that was foreign to family, the place of compulsory relations. Western ideological subversion, cultural colonialism, whatever we call those forces that have changed societies under forced political domination, for me began with something as simple as an old English folk song.
     The pomegranate is a fruit of the East, coming originally from Persia. The Pomegranates and En9iish Education language of the West, English, and all its many manifrstations in stories, songs, illustrations, filins, school, and government, does not teach the lesson of the pomegranate. English taught me the lesson of the individual, the miller who is happy alone, and who affirms the principle of not caring for community Why was it so easy for me to learn that lesson? Was it because within the pomegranate's hundreds of seeds is also contained the drive for singularity that will finally produce one tree from one seed? Or was it because my grandparents' Hokiden and nonya societies had become irremediably damaged by British colonial domination, their cultural confidence never to be recovered intact, so that Western notions of the individual took over collective imaginations, making of us, as Vi S. Naipaul has coined it, "mimic" people?
     But I resist this reading of colonialist corruption of an original pure culture. Corruption is inherent in every culture, if we think of corruption as a will to break out, to rupture, to break down, to decay and thus to change. We are all mimic people, born to cultures that push us, shape us, and pummel us; and we are all agents, with the power of the subject, no matter how puny or inarticulate, to push back and to struggle against such shaping. So I have seen myself not so much sucking at the teat of British colonial culture as actively appropriating those aspects of it that 1 needed to escape that other familial/gender/native culture that violently harnmered out only one shape for self. I actively sought corruption to break out of the pomegranate shell of being Chinese and girl.

     It was the convent school that gave me the first weapons with which to wreck my familial culture. On the first day, Ah Chan took me, a six-year-old, in a trishaw to the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus. She waited outside the dassroom the entire day with a chun, a tiffin carrie~ ftlled with steamed rice, soup, and meat, fed me this lunch at eleven-thirty then took me home in a trishaw at two. I wore a starched blue pinafore over a white cotton blouse and stared at the words, See Jane mn. Can Jane mn?Jane can mu. After the first week, I begged to attend school without Ah Chan present. Baba drove me to school after he dropped my older brothers at their school a mile before the convent; I was now like my brothers, free of domestic female attachment.
     The convent school stood quiet and still behind thick cement walls that hid the buildings and its inhabitants from the road and muffled the sounds of passing traffic. The high walls also served to snuff out tht world once you entered the gates, which were always kept shut except at the opening and closing of the school day Shards of broken bottles embedded in the top of the walls glinted in the hot tropical sunshine, a provocative signal that the convent women were daily conscious of dangers intruding on their seclusion. For the eleven years that I entered through those gates, I seldom met a man on the grounds, except for the Jesuit brought to officiate at the annual retreat. A shared public area was the chapel, a small low dark structure made sacred by stained glass windows, hard wooden benches, and the sacristy oil lamp whose light was never allowed to go out. The community was allowed into the chapel every Sunday to attend the masses held for the nuns and the orphans who lived in the convent.
     But if the convent closed its face to the town of men and unbelievers, it lay open at the back to the Malacca Straits. Every recess I joined hundreds of glrls milling at the canteen counters for little plates of noodles, curry pufl~ stuffed with potatoes, peas and traces of meat, and vile orange-colored sugared drinks. The food never held me for long. Instead I spent recess by the sea wall, a stone barrier free of bristling glass. Standing before the sandy ground that separated the field and summer house from the water, I gazed at high tide as the waves threw themselves against the wall with the peculiar repeated whoosh and sigh that I never wearied of hearing. Until I saw the huge pounding surf of the Atlantic Ocean, I believed all the world's water to be dancing, diamond-bright surfaced, a hypnotic meditative space in which shallow and deep seemed one and the same. Once inside the convent gates, one was overtaken by a
sense of an overwhelming becalinedness, as if one had fallen asleep, out of worldliness, and entered the security of a busy dream.
     During recess the little girls sang, "In and out the window in and out the window as we have done before)' and skipped in and out of arching linked hands, in a mindless pleasure of repeated movement, repeating the desire for safety, for routine, and for the linked circular enclosure of the women 5 community that would take me in from six to seventeen.

     I also learned to write the alphabet. At first, the gray pencil wouldn't obey my fingers. when the little orange nub at the end of the pencil couldn't erase the badly made letter, I wetted a finger with spit, rubbed hard, and then blubbered at the hole I had made in the papen Writing was fraught with fear. I cried silently as I wrestled with the fragile paper that wouldn't sit still and that crushed and tore under my palm.
     My teacher was an elderly nun of uncertain European nationality, perhaps French, who didn't speak Enghsh well. She spoke with a lisp, mispronounced my name, calling me "ch6rie" instead of "Shirley," and, perhaps accordingl~ showed more affection to me than to the other children in her class. Sisterjosie was the first European I knew Even in her voluminous black robes and hood, she was an image of powder-white and pink smiles. Bending over my small desk to guide my fingers, and peering into my teary eyes, she spoke my name with a tender concern. She was my first experience of an enveloping, unconditional, and safe physical affection. She smelled sweet, like fresh yeast, and as I grew braver each day and strayed from my desk, she would upbraid me in Po megranates and English Education the most remorseflil of tones, "Cherie)' which carried with it an approving smile.
     In return I applied myself to Jane and Dick and Spot and to copying the alphabet letter by letter repeatedly. Sister Josie couldn't teach anything beyond the alphabet and simple vocabulary In a few years, she was retired to the position of gatekeeper at the chapel annex. when l visited her six years liter, as a child of twelve, at the srnarl annex in which a store of holy pictures, medals, and lace veils were displayed for sale, Sisterjosie's smile was still as fond. But to my rnature ears, her English speech was halting, her granirnar and vocabulary fractured. It was only to a six-year-old new to English that dear Sister Josie could have appeared as a native speaker of the English language.
   It was my extreme good fortune to have this early missionary mothen Her gentle, undemanding care remains memorialized as a type of human relation not found in the fierce seWinvolvements of my family My narrowly sensory world broadened not only with the nugical letters she taught that spelled lives beyond what my single dreaming could ningine, but differently with her gentle greetings, in her palpable affection.

     Nurturing is a human act that oveileaps categories, but it is not free of history It is not innocent. For the next eleven years nuns like Sister Josie broke down the dornain of my infancy Leaving the Bata shop and entering the jagged-glass-edged walls of the convent, I entered a society far removed from Baba and Emak.
     The nuns wore the heavy wool habit of the missionary fim black blouses with wide sleeves like bat wings, long voluminous black skirts, black stockings, and shoes. Deep white hoods covered their heads and fell over their shoulders, and a white skull cap came down over their brows. Inexplicably they were collectively named "the French Convent;' like a French colony or the foreign legion, but they were not chiefly white or European. Even in the early l950s, some were Chinese and Eurasian "sisters:'
     Yet, despite their uniform habits and sisterly titles, a ranking regulated by race was obvious, even to the youngest Malayan child. Mother Superior was always white. A few white sisters, Sister Sean, Sister Patricia, and Sister Peter, taught the upper grades; or they performed special duties, like Sister Maria who gave singing lessons, or Sister Bernadette, who taught cooking and controlled the kitchen and the canteen.
     Sister Maria was the only woman who was recogni4bly French. Her accent was itself music to us as she led us thiougli years of Scottish and Irish ballads. No one asked why "Ye Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon" or "The Minstrel Boy" formed our music curriculum, why Indian, Eurasian, Malay and Chinese children should be singing, off-key week after week in a faintly
French-accented manner the melancholic attitudes of Celtic gloom. What was the place of Celt ballads in a Malayan firture? What did they instruct of a his-tory of frelings, of British bloodshed and patriotism? Or were the curriculum setters in the Colonial Office in London reproducing in fortissimo an imperial narrativ~the tragedy of failed Scottish and Irish nationalism, the first of England's colonies-in the physical pulses of the newly colonized?

     Of the nonmissionary teachers from Malacca, many were Eurasian, and a few were Indian, and Chinese. The sole Malay teacher appeared only after the British ceded independence to the Federation of Malaya in 1957. Chik Guru taught us the Malay language in my last two years at the convent, just as now in the United States in many colleges and universities, the only African-American or Latino or Asian-American professor a student may meet teaches African-American or Latino or Asian-American studies. Up to the end of the 1950s, and perhaps right up to the violence of the May 13 race riots in 1969, the educational structure in Malaya was British colonial.
     My first inlding of race preference was formed by these earliest teachers. In primary school, my teachers were almost all European expatriates or native-born Eurasian Catholics bearing such Hispanic and Dutch names as De Souza, De Witt, Minjoot, Aerea, and De Costa. They were the descendants of Portuguese soldiers and sailors who had captured Malacca from the Malay Sultanate in 1511, when Portugal was a small, poorly populated state. Expanding into the Spice Islands in the East, the Governor-Generals of the Indies encouraged intermarriage between Portuguese males and native women, thus seeding the loyal seffler population with Portuguese mestizos. The Portuguese governed Malacca for 130 years.When the forces of the Dutch East India Company captured the port and its fortress in 1641, they found a garrison there of some 260 Portuguese soldiers, reinforced with a mestizo population of about two to three thousand fighting men. For over four hundred years, the mestizos of Malacca had identified themselves as Portuguese.
     The Eurasian teachers were physically distinguished from me. I learned this in Primary Two with Mrs. Damien, a white-haired, very large woman whose fat dimpled arms fascinated me. While she demonstrated how to embroider a daisy stitch as we crowded around her chair, I poked my finger into the dimples and creases that formed in the pale flesh that flowed over her shoulders and sagged in her upper arms. She was a fair Eurasian who dressed as a British matron, in sleeveless flowered print frocks with square-cut collars for coolness. Her exposed arms and chest presented dazzling mounds of white flesh that aroused my ardent admiration. I do not remember learning anything else in her class.
     A few Eurasian girls were among my classmates. While they were not as coddled as the white daughters of plantation managers, they had an air of  easeI and inclusion that 1 envied. Their hair, which often had a copper sheen to it, was braided, while we Chinese girls had black, pudding-bowl cropped hair. By it the time we were twelve and thirteen, and still flatchested, they had budded into my women whose presence in Sunday masses attracted the attention young Catholic males. The royal blue pleated pinafores that covered our prim skinny bodies like cardboard folded teasingly over their chests and hips.

     Thedifference between us and the early maturity of Eurasian girls was a symptom of the difference between our Chinese Malaccan culture and that dangerous Western culture made visible in their lushness. They were overtly religious, controlled by their strict mothers and the Ten Commandinents that we had all I memorized by pre-adolescence. But their breasts and hips that made swing skirts swing pronounced them ready for that unspoken but pervasive excitement we knew simply as "boys:'
    The convent held a number of orphans, girls abandoned as babies on the convent doorsteps, or given over to the nuns to raise by relatives too poor to pay for their upkeep. During school hours these "orphaned" gifis were indistinguishable from the rest of us. They wore the school uniforms, white tort-sleeved blouses under sleeveless blue linen smocks that were fashioned with triple overpleats on both sides so that burgeoning breasts were multiply oveflayered with folds of starched fabric. But once school hours were over they changed into pink or blue gingham dresses that buttoned right up to the narrow Peter Pan collars.Those loose shapeless dresses, worn by sullen girls who earned their keep by helping in the kitchen and laundry; formed some of my early images of a class to be shunned.
     Instead I longed to be like the privileged boarders, almost all of whom were British, whose parents lived in remote and dangerous plantations or administrative outposts in the interion These girls wore polished black leather shoes and fashionable skirts and blouses after school. In our classes, they sang unfarniliar songs, showed us how to dance,jerking their necks like hieroglyphic Egyptians. In the convent classroom where silence and stillness were enforced as standard behavior, they giggled and joked, shifting beams of sunshine, and were never reprimanded. To every schoolgirl it was obvious that something about a white child made the good nuns benevolent.

    The Chinese nuns and teachers looked like us, yet they had social status and powen we were ceaselessly indoctrinated with their moral superiority My lessons in the pedagogy of terror began in Primary Three, when our teacher, Mn. Voon, asked if any of us had played the Ouija board. Ignorant of the game we all answered in the negative. She chose two of us, her best pupils, to report this to Sister Arthur who was investigating the matten Pleased at being let out of the classroom even for a short errand, we ran to the Primary Five classroom, where Sister Arthur, a dark-complexioned Chinese nun with pronounced flat cheekbones and owlish glasses, was teaching. When I announced that no one in our class had ever played with a Ouija board, Sister Arthur's gaze bore down on me. "No, no,'1 she exclaimed, "your teacher sent you here because you-oo are the one who has played the game!" I protested that k was not so; she only had to ask Mrs.Voon herself "No, no, I know how wicked you are, I can see it for myself You-oo are the one who has been playing this devil's board:' I burst into tears, but Sister Arthur held firm. "You are not getting out of my class.You are a liar and you'll stay here until I decide what to do with you:' She sent my companion to report to Mrs.Voon that I was detained, and I stood sobbing in front of the older children for the rest of the school day It was only later in the afternoon that Sister Arthur sent me away "I hope you have learned your lesson now;" she said, and I worried for weeks about what that lesson could be.
     Mrs.Voon never explained what had happened, and it seemed to me that only I knew that a horrible injustice had occurred. I hated Sister Arthur from then on, and remember harderiing myself for years as her pupil. She taught art for all classes from Primary Four upwards, and there was no way convent girls could have avoided being in Sister Arthur's class at least once a week until they left the school.
     Sister Arthur was vigilant against any form of talk during her class hours, and irrepressible child that I was, I could not help occasionally whispering words to the girls around me. Turinng around quick as a gekko from the
blackboard where she was writing directions, she would cornrand me to stan dC up on the desk chain Then, selecting a stick of chalk, she strolled up to me and
asked me to place the chalk upright in my mouth. While the jaws ached from I the forced open position, my saliva flowed copiously To avoid the humlliation of slobbering over my pinafore, I worked my throat and kept swallowing my own bodily fluid. As the minutes changed into hours, the chalk disintegrated with the saliva and I kept choking down this foul combination of spit and gritty chalk, until such time as she allowed me down from my public perch.
     My first meeting with Sister Arthur coincided with the year that my father lost his shop on Kampong Pantai, we lost our home, moved back to Grandfather's house on Heeren Street, and my mother left us for Singapore. In I a year of such misery I turned Sister Arthur into a joke, Old Battle-ax. Her Even as some teachers acted badly, in ways that suggested they were not infallible, we were told that teachers were objects of reverence; they could do no wrong. Many teachers were openly unfair and harsh, yet at the same time penetrating voice was to be immediately exorcised with ridicule. Her myopic gaze allegely unearthing evil thoughts in our faces taught me that the convent, like my own disintegrated farnil~ held no certainty of trust or goodness.
     In one sense Sister Arthur was correct. Though I had not used a Ouija board, I was full of questions that no known spirits in my family or in the convent could answer I talked back to my teachers not because I was defiant but because my thoughts in response to their actions and statements appeared irresistibly logical. It always surprised me when teachers were offended by my answers and remarks, though they were frequently, it is true, unsolicited. I did not understand why they were angry; even inflamed, when I said something that appeared to me obviously correct, This pattern of punishment in the convent school for speaking what appeared transparently true continued for years.
     The first time I understood fully that, unlike other children, I lacked the self-protective skill of silence, I had just turned fourteen. Until then I believed what the good nuns had repeated often, that I was a "naughty" child.The many disciplinary occasions that saw me standing for hours outside a classroom door or writing hundreds of lines of what I should or should not do, I believed, were directly related to my "stubborn" spirit. Although Sister Arthur was wrong to punish me for something I hadn't done, her act did not signify that I had not deserved punishment, since I was in any case a "naughty" child.
     But at fourteen, one could become a "bad" girl. Mrs. Ladd, who was held in greater awe as one of the few British teachers in the secondary school, was upset because none of us had completed the class assignment. She was especially provoked by Millie, a timid Chinese orphan boarde~ whom she accused of talking, and therefore not paying attention in her Engiish4anguage class. Mrs. Ladd became so incensed that she left the classroom to call Mother Superior Paul to speak to us, a terrifying prospect.
     In Mrs. Ladd's absence, a hubbub ensued. She had never assigned us the exercise she was now accusing us of not completing. Also, poor Millie, who was crying fliriously, had not been talking. Too timid ever to break rules, she had been hushing us just as Mrs. Ladd had stalked through the door We decided that we had to tell Mrs. Ladd the truth: she had made a mistake, and we all knew it. I asked for a show of hands of those who would stand up with me to offer this information to Mrs. Ladd when she returned with the Mother Superior, and every hand went up.
    When Mother Superior walked in with Mrs. Ladd, whose square Irish jaw was set hard, I sprang to my feet and brightly made my liffle speech. Mrs. Ladd glared at the class and asked how many of the gids agreed with me. I was amazed when no one stood up.
     "How dare you call your teacher a liar!" Mother Superior said, her face ruddy with rage. "what shall we do with her?"
The two white women talked above my head as if I were no longer present. I was banished from Form Two A to Form Two B, the second-rank class for weaker performing students.
    I knew no one in Form Two B. For a whole month I kept my silence before the new teacher who treated me with disdain, and with my new and former classmates for whom my disgrace had made me an untouchable. I was certain I would stay in the B class the rest of my lik, but one day without any explanation I was asked to gather my books and to return to Form Two A where I picked up my position as class leader and scholar as if the entire episode had never happened.
     This incident with its month-long banishment taught me again what I was learning at every stage of my life, that speaking what is evident to my senses as plain common sense can bring swift punishment. I was coriflised by the difference between what appeared manifesdy correct to me and what adults with power-my parents and teachers-insisted on asserting or denying, and I was inhised with outrage by this difference. As my teachers punished me daily for my brashness, what they called my talking back, the burn of defiance in my chest became a familiar sensation. My defiance made me an outcast and a social leader at the same time, and my clashes with authority became a source of amusement for my classmates.

    These conflicts with teachers and reverend sisters continued throughout my years at the convent. With Sister Sean, Sister Patricia, and Sister Peter, my Form One, Form Four, and Form Five teachers, I enjoyed the most intense rulationships and at the same time suffered the most abject treatment. All three responded to me with an affection, pride, and tenderness that I assumed I deserved because I was the flinny student, the quick and bright one. All teachers loved bright students; that was a law of nature. Everything about my life testified to the fact that my value to the wofid lay in my demonstrated intelligence, and I took their keen interest as natural.
     As with Sister Josic, I was Sister Sean and Sister Patricia; pet. "Shirley!" they would call out confidently each time a student answered a question incorrectly or floundered for a date. And so, when the sisters secretly punished me, I believed that they were simply participating in my secret life of the imagination.
     I believed my mind held depths of associations, feelings, and understanding that effordessly distinguished me from my peers. The one subject I could not or would not master was math. Because my math scores were a dismal D or C at best, I needed to compensate for its drag on the annual averaging of grade points that ranked us from first to last girl in the class. Thus I endeavored to score perfect hundreds on every other subject. History, geography, and scripture were study subjects in which my mathematically talented competitors could also achieve. But it was with English, a subject every Malayan student believed was mystically beyond mere study but was achieved as innate talent, that I hoped to overcome my seiflimposed handicap. I marked myself as different from the brilliant math students whose scores I scorned with my contemptuous Cs and Ds: what I lacked in math I would make up for in imagination, the gift which is endowed neither by race, class, or religion.
     One afternoon, Sister Sean, exasperated with something I had said, asked me to stay behind in the room after the rest of the girls had left for physical education class. There, her face contorted with passion, she slapped me hard across my face. I was astonished and dry-eyed. She was doing this for my own good, she said, blinking hard behind her thick glasses. I was never, never to talk back to her like that again.
     So when Sister Patricia asked me two years later to foflow her to an empty 'I classroom and shut the door behind me, I knew what to expect. Sister Patricia had been called to a meeting just before our English period with hen I s aidii "Hooray!" in what I thought was an imitation of British comic book characters. I only meant that her absence would relieve us of tedious English 'I' parsing, but her angry glance in response to my remark prepared me for the worst. Once in the classroom she spun around, her face a scowl of pain. I was rude, I didn't care for her feelings, how dare I suggest that we didn't care to have her as our teachen She struck me hard on my right cheek, then told me to wait till the physical education period was over before joining my classmates.
     After she'd hurried out, I wondered what it was about my mouth that always got me into trouble.My badness, evident at every turn, seemed to be produced by my intelligence, which I also believed would have to save me from myself. The next year with Sister Peter I was determined not to give her cause for grief I would watch my mouth and concentrate on preparing for the 0 levels, the Overseas Senior Cambridge Exariiinations.The results of the exams would determine whether I would be accepted for the pre-university classes.
     By then I was reading T; S. Eliot's After Strange God&, D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley's Lover, Erskine Caldwefl's Thbatro Road, even Henry Miller's 'topic of Cancer, banned volumes that my older brothers
smuggled home, but which they discarded once they found their reputation  tationasit pornographic literature overrated. One hot afternoon while Sister Peter read us Henry V's stirring address, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;' I pondered the vast gap between Shakespeare's language and that in the clandestine publications with their chatter of private organs, illicit sensations, and hidden and dangerous thoughts. 1&y I wrote at the back of an exercise book all the dangerous words I had learned just that year: "cock;' "flick," "penis," "cunt?' They formed a neat list of about seventeen words: then I forgot about them.
     Two days later, Sister Peter asked me to remain behind after class: I had handed in an English essay in the same exercise book. Her long face paler than usual, she berated me for my wicked ways. Her disappointment was horrible to me. Among all the sisters who'd taught me, she was the one I wanted most to please. She was gracefill, grave, reserved; the simple twililde in her green-blue eyes was large reward for any witticism or eloquence, and I had striven to please her by flaying my mind to a high pitch in completing every writing assignment. Now she withdrew any warmth of approval, and for the rest of the year, her anger laid a cold glance on me. I would rather she had slapped me and forgiven me, like Sisters Sean and Patricia.

     My sense of possessing a reservoir of feelings and associations had everything to do with the misery of my everyday life and my withdrawal from it into books.At ten I learned to ride my father's discarded bicycle. Since its bar was too high to straddle, I rode it sideways by placing one foot under the bar, as if it were a pedicab. I must have looked a comic and awkward figure, but the bicycle permitted me an expansion of physical mobility that spelled greater freedom.
    With my second brother I bicycled to the Malacca Library about five miles from our home. Within the thick red-colored walls built by the Dutch in the 1640s, a room lined with shelves of children's books welcomed me. Behind this front room was a larger chamber filled with shelves that narrowly divided the old red clay floonThis adult section was filled with hard-cover romances, detective thrillers, and books simply categorized "fiction]' The librarian, perhaps out of boredom, for we never met more than another occasional visitor to the library, allowed us to sign up for a children's card, good for a book each time, and for an adult's card, which extended borrowing privileges to three books. Imagine the jinmediate riches that fell into our hands! Four books a day, no questions asked, and another four the next day when we returned the first font The world around me vanished into the voices, the colors, and the dance of language. I gazed, dazzled, into interiors that Malacca never held.
     Even the external world became bated in the language of imagination. Books in arn~, I took to climbing a mango tree that grew a liffle ways up the lane to get away from my father's wife, Peng, and from the trapped sticky afternoon heat in our three-roomed shack. Leaning against the trunk with my feet securely hooked around a branch, I studied the resin oozing from a cut as tiny black ants trailed evenly up and down the grainy bark. The dark green leaves waved a cooling presence around and above me. In the distance, through the dust of the red laterite that separated me from my home, I could hear my brothers' shouts. This world, I understood dimly, was somehow connected to that wofid which I clutched in my hands. it had little taste of adventure, unlike the wars, princes, murders, and balls that took place regularly in books. But it was my world, red soil, green leaves, hot sun, cool shade, sturdy body, distant noises.What connected the two was myseit and I knew I would someday write tllis world down, finding a language that would do justice to it.

     Discovering in books how large the world was outside of Malacca, I also began to see how large my own world was. As reader, I never surrendered my freedom to an author but always asked how what I was reading related to my observations, the people around me, and my surroundings. Knowing that children elsewhere read these books, I assumed that they would also want to know about someone like me. It was in this way that I took up pen-pal writing. The children's comics that Father bought as treats for us carried personals from children in Scodand or Wales or Exeter, who wished to correspond with children from other countries of the Commonwealth. I could not afford the stamps to take up these offers, but for a time I wrote letters to irnaginary pen pals, writing details of my life and stories of school plays and exhibitions, and expressing a desire to hear from them.
    In these letters, like children all over the wofid tracing home as the center of all arrivals, I sent the following address: Mata Kuching, Malacca, The Straits Settlements, Malaya, Asia, The Earth, The Milky Way, The Universe. Malacca was at the center of everything. It was what made the universe imaginable, the address which brought all the letters home.
Pumping my Schaeffer pen frill of ink from an inkwell that winked a copper-green eye, I also considered writing a history of the world. It was convenient for me that Malacca was at the center of that crooked hunchbacked peninsula that filled an entire page,just as Australia or North America each filled a page. Malaya was in the middle of the earth, and everybody else fell out over the edges~hina, cramped like a squeezed orange hai{ India, an inverted pyramid, leaking Ceylon as a teardrop.
This geography, placing me at the hub of the universe, was more than childish egocentrism. I felt the depth of my existence, and accepted that it was flill of meaning. Meaning radiated from me, the subject on whom experience fell and the potential author on whom experience was dependent for sense. At the center of the world, of color, sound, sensation, touch, taste, movement, feeling, the shapes and forces of people and actions around me, I knew myself to be the agent of my world, my life, and the meanings that inflise both.
     I was a child who never saw the universe as outside myself but when I read Blake's line, "to see the universe in a grain of sand)' I understood myself to both that marvelous grain of sand and the speaker who made that image visible. Life's miseries dissipated into the sharp fertility of sense through my fixed idea that all I saw and felt would become words one day The ambition for poetry, a belief in the vital connection between language and my specific local existence, was clearly irrational, even perhaps a symptom of small madness. By eleven I knew I wanted to be a poet, and nothing has changed that desire for me since.
     My convent teachers had little directly to do with my emergent sense of self as a poet. After Sister Josie, every teacher-nun bore down on me with an attention as painful as the stinging red ants that overran Malacca. Their crushing devotion to my behavior, my misdeeds, and my psychology, as well as their occasional malevolence provided a counteruniverse for the diminishment of my family. Still, it was their domineering secretive discipline, together with the unspoken disintegration of my family, that brought me to rebellion and to literature.