From: Rosa - 15
Date: 7/20/00
Time: 2:17:46 AM
A voice cut into the air. The taunting chant of Pig-Didi, ‘Shame on you, shame on you, you are Step-Hen, second wife of the cock! Shame, shame, Step-Hen, Step-Hen, second wife of the Cock!’ No doubt a verbal retaliation against his Rooster-Go after losing out on some fraternal skirmish.
A loud sobbing drowned the air. It continued long enough for Mamma to rush upstairs. She pushed open the door which had been locked to find the floor strewn with clumps of hair and Pig-Didi staring at himself in the mirror, face streaming with tears and a head of uneven stumps of hair. Rooster-Didi had persuaded Pig-Didi that playing at barbers was a wonderful game if he could be the barber and Pig-Didi the customer. When persuasion failed he had locked the door, put on the trappings of his imagined role and executed his task all the same. Mamma had to take Pig-Didi to have the little hair left on his head evenly trimmed. He came home, shorn and forlorn. Another look in the mirror, more tears.
Such were the antics of my beloved brothers at home. Outdoors, more imaginative escapades took place. Riding a bicycle by candlelight and the dire consequences which have become a stark family memory. Other undetected delights, such as singeing the cat to see how well the creature would leap and putting insects into airtight jars to test their endurance in an oxygen-less space.
Sometimes the outdoor pursuits had their beginnings indoors. We came home from school and found the sitting room scattered with chairs with a gluey string trailing from one to another. Rooster Didi was making kite string sharpened with a paste of ground glass and glue smeared on it for his kite fights with the neighbourhood boys, and until the string was dry and cuttingly sharp, we could not move the chairs. Flooding the floor with the hosepipe and running out with the pipe spurting water everywhere was an indoor-outdoor game for him.
Going wild outdoors was not the preserve of the boys. Daai-Ga-Je, the leading light, devised the game of lighting bonfires. Not for her was the mild imitation of walking on hot coals, a la the tranced worshippers at temples, but daring leaps across the flames. This was a favourite game whenever enough wood could be found to make a bonfire but I did not take part in them, preferring the excitement of a Famous Five adventure story under the bed to the excitement on the sandy patches by the mining pools near our house. But there was once when, perhaps having run out of books to read, I decided to join in. It was exhilarating indeed, lining up and taking turns to leap the flames, again and again. Ah Koong had seen us and complained (told tales, we agreed was the correct term) to Papa about the dangerous games we were playing. As we made for home, flushed and happy, we saw Papa standing by the door, cane in hand. We each had a flick on our legs as we entered. My sisters expressed sympathy for me, I did not deserve to be punished, it was my first game, Ah Koong was wicked.
Nor did Daai-Ga-Je loved playing with fire alone. She was a child of the air as well. The older four of us walked home from school, the nearby Convent at Peel Road. Every day we hid among the bushes on the roadside dodging Koko, who taught in the same school, until she had passed by on her bicycle, and then scrambled to a garden where there was a swing. Again taking turns, we soared into the air, higher yet higher. Dare-devil Daai-Ga-je excelled in swinging so high that her body was parellel to the ground. Thump! One of us (I think it was our leader) had fallen heavily on the ground. We were stunned with fright for a moment until she got to her feet, none the worse for her frightful fall. That did not stop us from going to the swing the following days.
It was a wonder that it was not I who had fallen. Perhaps the hours curled up under a bed had retarded me, but I was well known for my lack of physical coordination. Mamma, even now, reminds me that I could not be trusted to walk safely across a room with a cup in hand. The painful result when I learned to cycle was a fall under the bicycle and finding that I had lost the gold necklace I was wearing. But nobody had warned me of the extra challenge of learning to cycle on sandy ground, I protested.
Daai-Ga-Je led in good ways as well. One Christmas (I must have been about twelve years old) she decided that it would be very sisterly of us to buy presents for the four younger ones. We spent weeks saving our meagre pocket money. The shopping day that we had planned was a wet and windy day but, undeterred, we four donned our plastic macs (two in green and two in pink, the standard fairness of Mamma and Papa had seen fit), went to the shops and after careful choosing came home dripping wet but with the best gifts that our money could buy. Busily and watchfully we wrapped them up. On Christmas Eve, we proudly placed the parcels at the foot of the tree and danced around them in great joy. Papa returned late from duties at church, and, seeing us still up and so happy, gave us each a big kiss. This was the most memorable Christmas of my childhood. The other Christmases have become a blur of yearly invitations to the aunts, uncles and cousins in Mamma’s family and while poor Mamma slaved in the kichen getting ready the meal for so many and also snacks for Papa’s friends, we children ran riot upstairs, round and round from one bedroom to the other, our feet thundering on the wooden floor.
Daai-Ga-Je could be strict. Each night before we went to bed we had to lay out our sets of uniform, ready for school the next morning. And when Ah Mah had a severe attack of asthma she would rouse us from sleep to pray, kneeling before the altar, that dear Ah Mah would not be taken from us. The Convent, well known for putting sports as a low priority in the curriculum, decided to introduce hockey. Even I was delighted when Papa (or was it Koko) bought us brand new hockey sticks. I soon abandoned mine but Daai-Ja-Ge and Meimei#3 became very good at the game. They played hard, flourishing their sticks up and down the field. After a good game Daai-Ga-Je would summon us to attend to her bruises. We were invited to press hard on the blue lumps on her sticky, sweaty legs, hard until she squealed (the treatment was then effective and the bruises would disappear). We duly obeyed.
As we did obey when she directed us to partake of the potion that she had discovered which would improve our Chinese calligraphy impressivly. The four of us locked ourselves into the little storeroom whose wall separated it from the adjoining bathroom but which did not reach up to the ceiling. Climbing on to stools that we had stacked up, we threw our toy buckets, tied with strings, over the wall and drew water from the bathtub. A few drops of water on to the ink slab, furously grinding the ink stick, and we drank the foul-tasting ink. A test was carried out by writing a few Chinese characters. There, our writing had already improved but could be better if we drank thicker ink. More furious grinding and we swallowed the thick black mess. Daai-Ga-Je was certianly wise, our calligraphy did look good.
But she did not impress us as much with her clever idea when she decided that our beautiful clay doll (which Ah Koong had bought for us at a Convent fund-raising fair) needed a bath. The poor thing became perpetually crippled in her limbs and neck and from then our our playing house had to be imagined around an arthritic doll.
It would do well to form a secret society on the model of Enid Blyton’s schoolgirls, she declared. We roped in our good friends, got their mother to cut out and sew for us hooded cloaks based on our rainwear. Suitably cloaked, we exchanged passwords, held secret meetings (away from the prying eyes of our didis), carried out missions.
So many were the pranks we four older ones got into. Some are quite unprintable. We did have our squabbles and when they became serious we were punished in the way that punishment was meted out for all serious misdemeanours. Mamma and Papa would not listen to the rights and wrongs of the case but as impartial judges would punish all the participants who were all equally guilty. The punishment was cuts with the cane, either on our outstretched palms (if we missed a stroke by withdrawing our palms, we got two) or on our legs where it hurt but did not harm. The cuts also left embarrassing marks on our exposed legs for all at school to see. Snivelling, and united again in grief and in sisterly solidarity, the quarrel forgotten, we huddled together for mutual comfort. We also knew a way to make the red marks fade, by rubbing talcum powder on them. True enough, the ugly marks were already fading, we saw through our tears, and then together we gently rubbed the legs of the ones whose marks were still a glaring red.
The time that we were truly united in a grief of adult proportions was when Koko got married. She was an indulgent, loving aunt whom we loved dearly and Daai-Ga-Je was especially attached to her. When we sensed that Uncle Tony (but we refused to call him that, but ‘that man’) was courting her, Daai-Ga-Je led a boycott. We certainly did not give that man the time of day and turned down his little bribes, such as offerings of jumbus (which were from our tree anyway), and also snubbed Koko for intending to desert us. Ah Mah and Mamma ticked us off when they were told of the boycott. Koko did get married to that man, of course. On the day of her wedding, when the party was over and that man had taken our Koko away, the four of us sat on the floor of Mamma’s bedroom and cried hopeless, inconsolable, bitter, angry tears.
Despite being enclosed in the good (and bad) times together, we the older four did not forget our beloved brothers and the two little meimeis. They were around too much to be forgotten anyway. Meimei#7 was ‘Fei-Mui’ (‘Fat Miss’ as she was a chubby thing with layers of fat round her chin, like her ugly, fat nursemaid, we unkindly said) and Meimei#8 was ‘Daai-Ngaan-Mui’, Big-Eyes Miss. The nursemaid of Meimei#7 was ‘ugly and fat’ and much disliked because while we were at school she had the habit of opening our individual drawers and taking out our personal favourite belongings for Meimei to play. We also had a grudge against the general maid of the house which we had to keep silent about because she would tell on us if we baited her. Our grudge was that she was very short and bad-tempered with us while indulging Rooster Didi. She would not do a thing for us but would pander to Didi’s whims by taking his breakfast egg from the dining area to the sitting room and back again. We plotted revenge by hiding her ceramic Chinese pillow and she could not prove that we had done it.
The younger ones had their uses at times. When Papa was not in a good mood to take us on our weekly visits to Ah Koong and Ah Mah or to see Popo, we sent Daai-Ngaan-Mui to plead with him to take us as he was more likely to indulge the baby of the family. Papa would sometimes get out of his mood to buy us the siu-yeh of fried noodles, the customary end to such evenings. Didis and meimeis needed to be defended too. A ‘ruffian’ from the neighbourhood attacked Rooster Didi by gouging his cheek with the nail of a top during a game, and we marched en famille to sort out that boy. For once even Mamma and Papa, who were prone to give the benefit of the doubt to others at Didi’s expense, recognised that Didi had not deserved such a savage attack. Meimei #4 had fallen out once again with the girl from across the road and so the hapless girl became once more our common enemy, to be snubbed. Our sisterly concern for the four younger ones saw us, at some stage, taking personal responsibility for them in the matter of their cleanliness. Once more under the direction of Daai-Ga-Je, we each adopted one of the younger ones at bath time and vigorously scrubbed them clean.
They were many other instances of us en famille. We shielded one another from Papa’s temper which was easily stirred by any untoward behaviour or failure to apply ourselves at school. When Papa was in a bad mood and handed out our weekly pocket money accompanied by cutting remarks, we shared sympathetic exhanges and the burden of a black cloud, often coupled with remarks that he was unjustiably crusty and unnecessarily hurtful. Together with the younger ones we joined forces against Ah Koong in reaction to his fearsome ways and by baiting him to avenge ourselves. The rows among the adults, usually surrounding or brought upon by Ah Koong, were frightening and we sought security among ourselves. In a more playful but serious way, together we buried our dog Roger in a sombre ceremony in a spot in the sand stretches near the pools where we played, and planted a cross on his mound.
The range of ages split us naturally into groups but did not prevent us from sharing many enjoyments. The first signs of Chinese New Year were when Popo sent two crates of fizzy drinks and a box of iced cakes. We prepared for New Year by helping Mamma to take out and clean the beautiful glass tulips in a specially designed vase for use as decoration. ‘Bai nin’ to Ah Koong and Ah Mah, properly dressed in sam-fu. Changed into the new clothes that we really thought beautiful, we made visits first to Popo’s and then over the fortnight to various relatives and friends. We did Mamma and Papa proud by sitting demurely in various sitting rooms, sipping our drinks and eating all the delicious seasonal snacks with decorum. We knew which great aunt specialised in making the best of which cookies but took care never to appear greedy. We listened politely to remarks on how good we looked dressed alike and how we had grown. We knew never to open our hung bau in front of the givers, but once inside the car we calculated how much we had accumulated. We knew ahead who the mean ones were and anyway we could tell because their envelopes were weighed down by the coins in them, unlike the promisingly light ones with dollar notes. A not-to-be forgotten Chinese New Year was when we were quite young, before Papa had a car. He borrowed a van and we sat in it, each with our own little rattan chair, tumbling and laughing as the vehicle swayed. Papa drove all the way to Kajang (where a satay treat awaited us ) and to Seremban to visit Mamma’s uncles and aunts, out kau-gungs and kum-pohs.
Christmas had the noise of so many people at our house and the fun of the cousins. But it did not stretch as long as Chinese New Year. And we were always taken much too early to church. Papa had his duties as a church warden. Besides he was a compulsive earlybird and the church on Christmas Eve would be especially crowded. So we sat, hours too early, in the semi-lit church, ‘feeding mosquitos’. This always premature arrival at church was repeated at the services over Easter but then we recognised the solemnity of the occasion and silently trooped from church to church on Maundy Thursday to kneel at the side altars before the sacred host.
The Moon Festival was heralded by the arrival of Yiyi with gifts of colourful lanterns in fascinating shapes from Popo (the tradition that Moon Festival lanterns are always the gifts of the maternal grandmother). After dinner every evening we went on a walk in the garden carrying our lanterns which would sometimes catch fire in the breeze. Tears and comforting noises. On the night of the festival, Mamma set out a table in the garden, laden with the seasonal goodies and told us moon stories under the stars, waiting for the brightest moon of the year to appear. We listened, with our lanterns beside us, sang moon rhymes and ate the mooncakes, little yams, ling-kok and pomelo.
Papa could not afford to take us to the pictures often as, being deligently fair, he would always take all among us of the age to appreciate a film; none of us was selected for a treat, neither was the outing used as a reward nor as a punishment of those undeserving ones left behind. A picture treat was quite a special outing and the films were chosen with care for its educational contents and appropriateness. This included some Chinese films, sad tales about family love and sacrifice. We enjoyed them and cried with Mamma. Other treats like visits to fairs and rides on merry-go-rounds took place more often. Exhibitions in town were en famille enjoyments. For weeks before the coronation of Elizabeth II, the town was ablaze with lighted decorations and the large buildings were splendidly and glowingly dressed up. Whenever he could, Papa borrowed a car to take us into town for ‘roundings’, ending with packets of noodles for siu-yeh. Poor Papa and Mamma hardly had a holiday by themselves. On the first occasion that they went away to Penang by themselves, we were taken to the airport to see them off. The memory stands vivid: the four younger ones dressed in the uniform of their Chinese kindergarten, protectively stood over by us the older four, all eight waving a tearful goodbye. We were not used to being left without Mamma and Papa.
Papa got his transfer to Ipoh. I was at college and Meimei#3 had just returned from a teacher training course in England. After college I stayed on to work in Kuala Lumpur and home became a gradually distancing place from beloved brothers and sympathetic sisters. Beyond replacement, I missed out on some of the growing years of the four younger ones. Our spirited, inspiring, mischievous Daai-Ga-Je developed the affliction of an illness which is a dread-filled, deadening infliction on her agile mind, and a lifelong, sorrowful burden, a constant pain and heartbreak on Mamma and Papa. We share that pain and that heartbreak constantly, en famille 19 July 2000