From: Rosa - 4
Date: 7/3/00
Time: 8:33:19 PM
The crowded years in our first house in
Kampong Pandan stretched into the long years of my growing up. I cannot remember
how long we had been there when Meimei #7 was born but at the time of her birth
I was seven years old. When Father got his own ‘government quarters’ we
moved, without Paul Suk’s family, to a slightly larger house, with a larger
garden, deep in Kampong Pandan at the edge of open space and mining pools. We
lived there until Father had a job transfer to Ipoh by which time I was in my
second year at the University of Malaya.
In our second home in Kampong Pandan the
family was already complete and the years there have become a mosaic of the
routines and doings of a large family, different shapes of the eight of us at
different stages of growing up, superimposed with striking events, occasions,
happenings that stand out for their individual impact and significance. A
constant that is traceable through this colourful, faceted mosaic is the
presence of Grandfather and Grandmother, for, although they alternated their
time between Phooi Kee and Baan Chai, they lived with us often and long enough
to acquire the status of a constant in my memory.
Indeed, they feature much more prominently in
my recall of the early years than my own parents. Part of this must be the
extended family setup in which my parents by tradition took second place to my
grandparents as the venerables of the house. Their opinions were sought and
acted on, their wishes were carried out and their interests always came first.
Although my parents were very caring, loving and solicituous of our welfare, in
a child’s memory they became but two, however different and special, adults
among other moving, adult figures with Ah Koong and Ah Mah’s commanding
presence at the top. Naturally and luckily they became more distinct
personalities as I grew up and the haze of childhood cleared. Moreover, my
parents had their room downstairs while our room was with Ah Koong and Ah Mah
which meant that, more than our dormitory, their room became our active, living
space during many of our waking hours. Their room as our centre became fixed
even into my adolescent years for I remember that I always did my school
homework there.
Within this room, Grandmother’s bed has
taken on a very special place in my memory. Her iron bed, resplendent with its
mosquito net, was separated from Ah Koong’s smaller iron bed by a stretch of
floor (our sleeping area) and a small desk and a little bedside cabinet. On the
desk rested a tin box of loose Chinese tobacco and rolling paper and an
accompanying spittoon/ashtray; Ah Koong’s Chinese inkwell with its block of
ink and writing brush; and whatever book that Ah May might be reading. In the
drawers were more of their paraphernalia among which there always was a set of
sap-ng-wu cards (Chinese playing cards). In the cabinet were the rest of Ah
Mah’s collection of books and the mahjong set. On the top of this cabinet were
what held the most interest for us – her tins of varieties of biscuits, sweets
and Chinese munchies. A wardrobe, with statues, holy pictures and a burning lamp
on top, served as the family altar.
If my reading of Enid Blyton told me that the
hearth is the focus of British family life, the focus of our lives was often
Grandmother’s bed. It is in this sense that her bed was special. Many stories
and happenings can be woven round it and among these are some of the stories
about Ah Mah herself. Without any prompting, Ah Mah would sometimes tell us
stories about herself and her audience often included Mamma and Sei Yee who had
heard them before but seemed to like to listen to them again. Snippets of these
stories cling very tentuously to my memory but a particular sequence remains
very vivid with a dreamlike quality, as if I had been there myself. The impact
of this set of tales and their immediacy to me, even to this day, rest upon the
fact that they were about a little girl and her grandmother, I suspect.
Grandmother was a Northerner, from Hunan,
what the Southerners call ‘ngoi gong yan’, people from beyond the river (the
Yangtsze). Her mother must have died young as she grew up with her grandmother
(my great, great grandmother, it awed me to think) who loved her dearly. One
night when she was half asleep in the bed she shared with her Grandma she
overheard a conversation between her Grandma and her father
‘ The choice is yours, you have to choose
between your son and your grand-daughter.’
In between sobs the old woman replied,
‘What choice do I have? Surely, it is you I must protect.’
The discussion, Ah Mah explained, as she
found out before long, was to sell her to settle her father’s debts or he
would end up in prison. Their family was not without money but her father was a
spendthrift and a gambler, a bai-ga-chai who had wasted the family’s fortune
and was in danger of being imprisoned for unpaid debts.
On perhaps their last days together, Ah Mah
and her Grandma took a walk in the countryside and her Grandma, pointing to the
land around, told her, ‘All this used to belong to us but your father has sold
it all’. This particular story has always been visually planted in my mind, as
I pictured two lone figures walking a lane among padi-fields.
By then impoverished, grandmother and
grand-daughter shared a meal, either at home or in some lodgings (I am not clear
on this). Some kind person (a neighbour, the landlady?), feeling sorry, put a
piece of chicken in Ah Mah’s rice bowl. Ah Mah picked it up and insisted that
her Grandma should have it. They both ended up embraced in tears. And Ah Mah
would sometimes wipe her eyes at this point of the story and we felt a lump in
our hearts.
These stories wrenched my heart. Not only
were they about a little girl and her grandmother but they were about my Ah Mah,
they really happened to her! I looked at Ah Mah, sitting on her bed, and
registered in my mind, ‘It did, it did happen, how could it be so’. These
are three tableaux etched in my mind, in considerable details of vividness that
a child’s imagination can conjure, and remain so to this day.
Ah Mah said that she still had dreams of her
Grandma and these always happened when Ah Mah was quite ill when her Grandma
would appear, beckoning to her from across a river. This brought a kind of a
chill to me.
Besides these stories of her life, Ah Mah
often unconsciously revealed her intriguing past as she sat in her room on her
bed. She was often engrossed in reading, modern fiction, literary works or the
classics written in classical Chinese. With one leg tugged under the other,
reading glasses on, she sat on the edge of her bed for hours, lost in her books.
Ah Koong, lying on his bed, rustled the daily Chinese newspaper which he read
avidly to keep up with the world’s news. Ah Mah’s love for reading was hard
earned and came about as a self-imposed challenge. She was indeed sold as a
young girl and, at some stage of her life, became a minor wife of some rich man.
She loved the stories of the Chinese classics and would beg the other ladies of
the household to read them to her. For this she was laughed at. Hurt and
insulted, she decided that she would learn to read by herself. I cannot fathom
how she, a complete illiterate, managed to learn a language as difficult as
Chinese, and both its classical and modern variants as well. Reading became her
passion and if she was not out or playing mahjong she would always be found
sitting on her bed immersed in a book. Or she would discuss the books she had
read with Mamma. I am very proud of this achievement of Ah Mah’s and would
tell this story to my friends and still do when the opportunity arises.
Such is the nature of the Chinese language that, despite her perfect fluency in reading and her commanding appreciation of the nuances of the language, Ah Mah never learnt to write it. There are two possible characters to the surname 'Wong' which was Ah Mah's. The first, consisting of four strokes, means 'king' and the other, with more strokes, means 'yellow', also known as dai-tou Wong, big-belly Wong. Ah Mah said that she knew that her surname was the second 'Wong' only because when she was very little she was standing by her father in conversation with a stranger and saw him scribbling on his palm his surname which consisted of many strokes.. Of course big-belly Wong is also the surname of Mamma and Sei Yee.
I have always been fond of reading and Koko was a most generous source of our rich variety of books. But when I began to read in Chinese, Ah Mah’s collection was there to delve into. Classical Chinese was beyond me but I read with avidity the literary works she had (Ba Jin, Lao She etc). These works were well beyond my standard-five Chinese but because I read them the level of my competence in Chinese increased tremendously. What an invaluable legacy from Ah Mah. To this day I regret that her considerable collection (she spent her money very freely on books), including what must now be very rare volumes of the classics with their peculiar ‘double pages’ and sewn binding, became lost after she died.
My interest in Chinese literature spread to
the works in translation among Paul Suk’s vast book collection, some of which
were still in our house. I tried to read in translation the classic called The
Western Chamber, innocently not knowing that it is rather ‘blue’. I remember
the low exchange of comments and the looks passed between Ah Mah and Mother but
no attempt was made to stop me. I soon gave it up as I found it rather turgid,
the subtlety and subterfuges of Chinese amour being of no interest to a
present-day teenager.
Sitting on her bed, smoking her hoong-yin, Ah
Mah would sometimes burst into song, the high-pitched tunes of an opera, some
times accompanied by hand gestures. We found that funny and entertaining and
giggled at her. Another relic of her past as, some time in her life, she was
with an operatic troupe and had learned to sing. Such a colourful life Ah Mah
had. Or she would talk to herself in her native dialect or enact little
conversations which again amused us and whetted our curiosity although we did
know that she was from Hunan. She must have felt the need to remind herself of
her origins occasionally by practising her native dialect. No Hunanese was
spoken at home. The compromise dialect between our grandparents was Cantonese,
commonly spoken in Kuala Lumpur, and which became our spoken version of Chinese.
Grandfather spoke Hakka but he too had compromised by giving it as much of a
Cantonese twist as he could when speaking to us. Or Ah Mah would cast her mind
back to China and its seasons, always relating them to her other passion, food.
‘The lychees would be in season now’, she would reminiscence, ‘ and we
would be boating in the lake eating the luscious sweetness of the lychees’.
We are very conscious of the enormous gaps in
the history of our grandparents that we have not filled and that the little we
know are in snatches and rather vague. But I am so thankful that Ah Mah, by her
quaint ways, had told me some about herself in her unforgettable, inimitable
manner and to me she was a determined, romantic figure with such a sad childhood
and an exciting life.
2 July 2000