From: Rosa - 12
Date: 7/11/00
Time: 9:36:33 PM
The Female Touch, with Kid Gloves
When, after we have grown up, we look back on how Mamma and Papa brought us up, we all agree that it was mostly by example. Of course there were the verbal dos and don’ts regarding safety and suchlike practical considerations, but as for how to live our lives, our relationships with others, our priniciples and our values we were taught largely by a practice rather than a precept approach. We also learned from Ah Mah and hers was an interestingly varied mix of methods. Among the many stories and fables she told were cautionary tales and there were some illustrative stories regarding dutiful conduct. To this latter category belonged her oft-told tales of the ‘Yi-sap-sei Hau’, the Twenty-four Filial Children of the classical Chinese mode, a collection of stories of the extremes (foolish extremes, we thought) that these twenty-four went to carry out their filial obligations. So familiar were we with some of these stories that we would cheekily tell Ah Mah that we had increased the collection to ‘sei-sap-baat hau’ (forty-eight filial ones) after we had carried out an unwelcome errand for her and this would always cause her great amusement. Sometimes Ah Mah would be very direct and let us know that she was looking forward to the delight of the day when, as working adults, we would give her money to spend. Or she would warn us never to be lawyers as in this profession one is in danger of ‘sek hak chin, ngo hak si’, eat black money, excrete black shit, or being corrupt (Didi #5 was obviously too young to take note of this warning!).
There was also an unfelt learning going on, chiefly among the females, by the process of osmosis. This was/is chiefly related to the method of achieving one’s way in a project by subtle, clever methods, the female touch with kid gloves. Ah Mah resorted to it often; Mamma in her time used it too and there is sufficient evidence to say that the women in the family today find it very useful. Mamma often criticised the ways of the traditional feudalistic Chinese family whose family treasured knowledge, such as age-old medical formulae and handed-down cooking recipies, were taught to the daugthers-in-law and never to the daughters even though they were the flesh and blood. The former bcame members of the family while the latter would, upon marriage, bring their knowledge to ‘outsiders’, their new families. Well, the process of osmosis must be a more egalitarian way as it does seem that all the women, daughters as well as daughters-in-law, seem to benefit from it and use the methods learned through it in varying degrees.
The chief lesson learned through osmosis is the all-important almost success-guaranteed female touch with kid gloves. Not feminine touch, as there is no resort to tears or luring charming wiles or tantrums. Just be sure of one’s objective, clear on the approach, fine-tune the timing for raising the issue, and be gently persuasive, graduating to firmly adamant if necessary. Such was Ah Mah’s technique in the many decisions she made and carried through, several of which became the cornerstones upon which the Chang family was built.
Ah Koong, for all his feudalistic thinking and macho ways, was always the near-sighted, fearing, hesitant one but, fortunately for all of us, he was well complemented by Ah Mah’s vision, her willingness to take a chance, her sometimes devil-may-care attitude and her flexibility to change course when necessary. They arrived in Malaya as penniless immigrants and after Ah Koong’s failed attempts to work on the railroads because of attacks of malaria and after a spell when they had a stall selling cooked rice by the roadside, Ah Mah had the brilliant idea of asking the French nuns at the Convent school on Bukit Nanas for permission to operate the tuckshop. She talked Ah Koong out of his many reasons why it would not work and having got his agreement, set to carrying out the first step herself. She did her sums, then asked for a meeting with the reverend mother.With no English and speaking in her faltering Malay, she convinced the good nun of how economically sensible her proposals were and promised to run the tuckshop along the lines she had sketched. It was only after she got the agreement that she then sent big parcels of food (which she could ill afford) to the orphanage which was part of the Convent. They were Ah Mah’s gestures of thanks; never would she be accused of bribery as that was too precarious a move. She and Ah Koong worked the tuckshop to very high standards, and came every Christmas and the saint’s day of the mother superior and there would be generous gifts to the nuns and the orphans. Just the other day, while out walking, I saw some turkeys, birds I had not seen for a long time, and they reminded me of the turkeys that Ah Mah used to fatten as fitting gifts for the nuns at Christmas. Ah Koong and Ah Mah soon secured the tuckshop of the nearby boys’ school run by the La Salle Brothers and both businesses became the family’s reliable ricebowl, seeing Papa, Paul Suk and Koko through school.When the time came to decide the children’s careers it was once again Ah Mah who had the clear vision, the belief in the possible and the determination to make the possible. But this time, even with kid gloves on, she had to apply the female touch with more tenacity. Ah Koong, pleased that the two tuckshops were doing well, was very keen to preserve the status quo and was quite ready for his sons to take up petty businesses. Ah Mah saw a more exciting, more expanding future for them and once again through her planning, her contacts, her working round Ah Koong, got a desk job for Papa, a place at Raffles College for Paul Suk and saw Koko through teacher training. My grandparents continued running the tuckshops up to the time when we were old enough to remember. Many are the family anecdotes, some very hilarous, of this period of my grandparents’life in which Ah Mah emerged as the leader, the thinker, the initiator, the doer, trailing behind her an acquiscent Ah Koong.
Mamma and Papa did not have any differences of purpose with regard to us as their common and steady goal was to do provide the very best for the eight of us at the expense of their own needs and comfort. So we always had the very best that their money could buy and their sense of fairness, of treating us all equally, ensured that we looked the same in dress. We never used hand-me-downs. Our annual new clothes were bought at Christmas, with the addition of new pyjamas and a suit of samfoo at Chinese New Year, with more new clothes at Easter. We were always dressed alike – the older four in similar dresses made of the same materials, cut in the same style, with the same kind of shoes and socks and hair ribbons; the two boys in matching outfits; the youngest two in their own look-alike dresses. We happily accepted this parental display of fairness until we were older and saw ourselves, four replicas walking down the street, with four bobbing ribbons on four heads, as a picture too funny not to be laughed at or commented on. Our embarrassment caused us to rebel against being so dressed. Mamma and Papa were indeed together in many aspects of our upbringing. But Mamma’s kid gloves were sometimes put on for good use. This happened when she and Papa had different ideas of what they thought was good for us. An outstanding example in my memory was the question of Chinese classes for us. Mamma, herself educated in Chinese and a schoolteacher, wanted us to be literate in Chinese and had found a school which ran classes in the Chinese language only, tailored for English-school-going children, at which she wished to enrol us. Papa thought that attending classes straight after school and the burden of two sets of homework was too much of a strain. The matter was not settled for some time until Mamma used her female touch with kid gloves and soon, with the exception of young Meimei #7 and Meimei #8, we were all being ferried to Chinese classes by Papa every afternoon. I remember with gratitude that I owe my literacy in Chinese to Mamma donning her kid gloves on this occasion and applying her female touch.
When even kid gloves fail to work on the unseeing, unreasoning men, the Chang women resort to a method known as ‘baan-ju-juk-lou-fu’, diguised as a pig to trap a tiger. I am not sure if this phrase exists in the Chinese language or if is one of Ah Mah’s many colourful coinages but it is certainly a graphically apt expression. Ah Mah used it a lot, both the phrase and the technique. A variant of its use was when Ah Koong took a concubine openly and insisted that she lived with them. Ah Mah grandly and with unsurpassed generosity of spirit invited her home and even to share a room with Ah Koong, but with one stipulation - that the room be the inner room to the one that Ah Mah would sleep in, which guarded access to their room. Not the best example of the baan-ju-kuk-lou-fu technique but the picture of the philandeering lou-fu and his mistress trapped in the room is irresistible. The pure form of the technique is when a woman uses not trickery, as that is regarded as an inferior method, but her wit to achieve what she wants. It is a way of doing so subtle that it is difficult to teach so that almost the only way to learn it is by osmosis.
One of the very successful exponents of baan-ju-juk-lou-fu of my generation is my Meimei #3 Angeline, having, no doubt absorbed it from her paternal grandmother (our Popo, I think, was too straightforward a soul to know anything of it) and her mother. Many are the instances she gleefully narrated to us in which she got Saam-Mui-Fu to either agree with her plans or agree that they were brilliant plans after she had carried them out.
But there was an occasion when Meimei #3 was caught out. This happened during the gathering of the Changs in Kuala Lumpur in April 2000 on the occasion of Mamma’s ninety-first birthday celebration. Mamma had wanted to make one of her compulsory trips to Po Chan, the jewellers and among her entourage was Meimei #3. At lunch at the Shangri-la Hotel later, in the presence of her husband, Meimei #3 excitedly regaled us in a language, understood only by the initiated, her exploit of the morning and we, in the same language, congratulated her on her success. As we stepped out of the lift on our floor and walked towards our rooms along the passageway which divided to the other rooms, Meimei #3 triumphantly exclaimed, ‘Silly old Cheng Hai still doesn’t know that I have bought a very expensive piece of jewellery!’ ‘What did you say?’ boomed a voice behind her shoulder, for, unbeknown to her or to us, Saam-Mui-Fu had not gone down the other passage but was right behind her, sensing that he had once again been the lou-fu to her ju. We collapsed with laughter, cautioning Meimei #3 that expert in the technique she may be but, to use an English phrase corruptedly, she should look before she speaks.