From: Rosa - 18
Date: 8/4/00
Time: 3:00:18 AM
M for Mahjong, Mamma and Much More: a Twentieth-Century Daughter Muses
When a mother has lived through almost a century, especially a century that has seen so many landmark changes to the lives of women, it is quite natural for a daughter, when she looks back on her mother’s life, to link these changes with it. And so I found some of my thoughts of Mamma intermingled with the larger theme during the days as I sat bent over my desk, decorating the chopsticks and doing other preparatory work for the celebration of Mamma’s ninety-first birthday which was to be held in April 2000 in Kuala Lumpur.
Mamma was at that time staying with Saam-Meimei and Saam-Mui-Fu in Adelaide, one of the stops in the peripetatic life that she now lives since Papa died seven years ago. As I cut the squares of red paper and wrote on them the Chinese characters in gold for wrapping round the chopsticks, my mental picture was of Mamma mostly whiling away the weekdays by herself, reading and dozing, and livening up on weekends when Saam-Meimei and Saam-Mui-Fu would indulge her with her favourite pastime by organising mahjong sessions to which their friends, all very fond of Mamma, would gladly make up the numbers. In my mind’s eye I saw Mamma, eagle-eyed studying her row of tiles, alert to every throw, quick at calculating the kind of hand to play. Bright and in her element.
Mahjong has become associated with Mamma. It is now her game of choice, age in no way diminishing her agility of mind to play skilfully a game whose chief attraction is its intricate possibilities. Few can get the better of her and she is such a deft hand that we teasingly accuse her of cheating and changing the rules to her own advantage. She would laughingly protest her innocence and ask for another game. As so we all indulge her. We proclaim that it is an act of filial love that every grandchild learn the game (and the scoring method so as not to be cheated!) to play with Mah-Mah/Popo, and so they all do too. Wherever she is, whoever she is staying with, we would organise mahjong sessions for her as much as possible. There is a set of mahjong in every household that she spends time in. We have even travelled with a set, playing the game with her at a makeshift games table in hotel rooms in Ottawa and Quebec City. She is notoriously, incorrigibly addicted, we tease.
Yet Mamma came to mahjong late although she has always known how to play the game. During the long, sad and anxious months of Papa’s terminal illness we thought up the idea of playing mahjong with her every evening as a distraction. In the months after his death when her grief was still raw and the loss a chasm she still had to bridge the game was continued to assuage her sorrow and brighten the new life that she had to adjust to. It is now become an amusement in her old age.
Her enjoyment of mahjong and her appetite for it we see as a prerogative of her age. When she was much younger, playing mahjong was the preserve of Ah Koong and Ah Mah. The fact that she had many calls upon her time apart, there was no place for her at the mahjong table which was taken up by the friends of my grandparents. The scenes in my mind of Ah Koong and Ah Mah with Ng-Ah-Poh (so called because she was someone’s fifth concubine), Din-Che-Poh (Mrs Motorcar) or Gei-Hei-Poh (Mrs Mechanic) (what a pair of names, I always thought) sitting long hours at a mahjong table, the sounds of the shuffling tiles mingling with comments on the last game, the party being served tea and titbits, did not include Mamma. I suppose there must have been some occasions when she was called upon to make up the foursome when there was one person short but these were not many. When she did play but not as a substitute player was years later in Ipoh where Ah Koong and Ah Mah did not friends for the game. Until then, at all times there was an unspoken understanding that mahjong was for the respected elders, a leisure to which the daughters-in-law of the house were not invited.
There were many more unspoken rules in those days for young women finding themselves in the not unusual domestic arrangement of living with their parents-in-law. Theirs was to learn to go by these rules and part of early married life was to get used to them. Such too were the adjustments that Mamma had to make. She tells of an early instance. Knowing that Mamma had been the much pampered eldest daughter in a well-to-do family, Ah-Mah said to her in the first few days after the wedding that she should feel free to have the nightly siu-yeh that she had always had. Papa and Mamma happily went out for two evenings to get siu-yeh, first consulting Ah Koong and Ah Mah what they would like to eat. On the third evening when Ah Koong was approached, he replied, ‘Nothing for me, I’m not used to such a luxury’. ‘Since then’, Mamma told us, ‘I didn’t dare have any more siu-yeh’. Mamma was already learning the part of many young wives of her day, to read innuendos and to act on them. Had Ah Koong and Ah Mah discussed her reaction they would have been pleased that she showed indications of a pliable daughter-in-law and that her mother had brought her up well.
Ah Koong and Ah Mah were not as feudalistic as parents-in-law could be. Mamma addressed them familially as ‘father’ and ‘mother’ as Papa did and not the formal ‘lou-yeh’ and ‘nai-nai’. She was required to carry out the custom of bringing them their wash-basin and serving them tea only for three mornings after she was married instead of the usual one month. Still, she was quick to be sensitive to the unspoken or hinted expectations of her as daughter-in-law, knowing that her role was to be quietly acquiscient on many issues. Perhaps she remembered the Chinese saying that when one draws a tiger one does not draw its bones. Mamma’s name ‘Suk’ (Sook) means ‘womanly virtues’ and while she duly conformed to the ways of her upbringing she was by no means totally submissive. Even now she recalls with anger and resentment at some of the more unreasonable demands made of her but which she dutifully carried out. When Ah Koong became outrageously unreasonable she was spunky enough to stand up to him. She recounts with triumph the time she beat him to it by taking the bus all the way to Kuala Kubu Bahru ahead of him to warn Sei Yi, her dear sister, that he was on some rampage for which she would be punished undeservedly. However, her rebellion was always short-lived as she always had to back down, to admit wrongdoing in order to placate Ah Koong and save Papa from the uneasy position of piggy-in-the-middle. Her relationship with Ah Mah was an easier one, now fondly recalled as times of a companionship where mother-in-law and daughter-in-law laughed at jokes, shared an interest in the everyday doings of the household, exchanged reminisences. Even then she had to be habitually on guard against not doing right by Ah Mah whose method of reprimand or disapproval was in the use of a tongue which could be sharply effective with sarcasm.
As a child living through the scenes brought on by Ah Koong’s melodramatic, violent outbursts, I was terrified and felt mutely indignant and angry on Mamma’s and Papa’s behalf. As I grew older I wondered with amazement, then later questioned with the arrogance of the liberated young woman, and much later finally understood with the maturity of years why Mamma had to be so conforming about so many things. There is also the triumphant delight that she was not always so conforming. There is also the relief and the thankfulness that times have changed for me and other women. I shudder, as it is not difficult to imagine, at the constraints and the lack of independence, material and of the spirit, when one’s husband’s earnings were handed over each month to his parents who held the family purse strings. As Mamma told us happened for not a few years. The adjustments I would have had to make, I thought, if the situation had persisted.
What I do wonder at a great deal and admire immensely and with gratitude was how marvellously Mamma adjusted to the financial changes in her life upon marriage. My admiration is all the more for the many stories that we have heard of her pampered life of ease and plenty told to us by Mamma and her sisters. Je-Gung, a businessman, was wealthy enough to open a school for poor children where Mamma later became the headmistress. As such, he had the means to indulge his favourite eldest daughter. Mamma had her own maid servant-in-waiting, she together with her sisters, but she especially, were dressed in the richest silks, adorned with jewellery, had only the best. Whereas everyone among them had ten cents a day as pocket money, Mamma received a dollar a day from her doting father. ‘And she would spend it all’, said Yiyi with awe at her sister’s extravagance, ‘asking for extra toppings to bowls of noodles, buying pretty trinkets, spending every cent she was given’. Mamma’s friends confirmed this, ‘and she was so generous to us’. She was a bright and talented girl too, despite being very laid back, leaving school work always to the last, freely spending her money and time with her friends. She always topped her class in exams, excelled in sports, played the Chinese lute, drew and painted beautifully and was deft with the needle, the evidence of the last in the exquisite embroidery in the bedcover, pillow cases and cushion covers she made for her wedding.
The story of Mamma meeting Papa is a much loved family tale. To augment his income, the young man from a poor family took on the job as home tutor in English to the younger son and six daughters of a wealthy businessman and fell in love with the eldest and best loved daughter. And she with him. Like all lovely love stories, the young people were put through the test in the opposition from the girl’s many uncles (not her parents who took to the honest, straightforward young man) on account of the young man being poor and a Catholic. Like all lovely love stories they withstood the opposition and were married in a wedding that was as splendid and as lavish as Ah Mah could engineer, making it the wedding of the year.
Like all lovely real love stories, the magical wedding over, the young man and his bride took on the real world and settled to living on a clerk’s salary in the home of his parents. Mamma, her father’s princess, was not a fairytale princess, but a brave and strong young woman who passed the most demanding test of all, a test that lasted the years that her eight children were growing up and was only over when they became independent adults. As she did in school but much more admirably, she unfailingly retained her position in coming out top in the lifelong test of adjusting her habits and wants for love’s sake.
I often try to imagine the adjustment that it must have been for Mamma. It is so difficult for me to imagine as she did not make it easy for me to do so. It is not easy because she did not let us know how much the adjustment cost her. Through all my growing years I have not heard her complain of the huge financial disparity before and after her marriage. Her stories of her glidingly easy girlhood were just happy stories of a happy bygone. Although I was aware that there was never much money to spare at home I never had to feel the weighty anxiety of money nor the embarrassment with friends of having less than they. In fact I often felt I had more than they. Mamma had lost much spending power and hence had to curb her spending habits but she never lost her sense of quality. We did not have new clothes and shoes all the time but we had them regularly and they were regularly of the best quality. An abiding memory is of us with Mamma going into Robinsons, Whiteaways, Gian Singh, Doshi, Majeed in search of the best and latest Tootal cotton, silks, voiles and going to the best dressmaker in town to have our clothes made. Between her and Papa they always made sure that we started each school year with the full sets of books for everyone and likewise all our needs were provided for. We did not have as many treats as some children might have but we had sufficient for us to remember our childhood as a happy time, exposed to all that were thought important for our growing up. All this at what sacrifice to themselves I can only imagine.
But some of her habits Mamma could not give up. When it came to certain chores she remained the laid-back schoolgirl who left homework and revisions for exams to the last minute. One of the stories that Papa brought on the rounds with him to amuse himself and his listeners on our bai-nin visits was that Mamma was so diligent that she was at the sewing machine throughout the year. This was true enough as he explained that each year, when she could not proscrastinate any more, she would hasten to finish sewing our sam-fu suits on new year’s eve, completing them in the early hours of new year’s day. I remember that when we were older Mamma passed on the tops to us as she finished each, for us to sew on the buttons in time for us to wear the outfits when we bai-nin to our grandparents on new year’s morning. It always was that last minute! She has also retained her love of reading even now and is totally lost to the world when immersed in a book. We were quick to seize the advantage of this and would approach her for permission to do things that we knew were forbidden. Without fail she would absently nod her approval. When she later discovered what we had been up to she had no cause to reprimand us as she had indeed given us her approval.
When I reached the age to know that a pregnancy takes nine months, a mental scanning of our dates of birth and I realised that poor Mamma spent many years incessantly either being pregnant or nursing babies. I did not pause long to question why the modern means of contraception were not resorted to. A strong image I have is of Mamma prostrate and wretched with retching morning sickness. For all her pains Mamma did not even enjoy the close, cosy convention of family life with her husband and eight children, an arrangement that young women now take for granted, as Ah Koong and Ah Mah, Koko, and Paul Suk’s family were part of our domestic setup at one stage or another. Not surprising then that, except for a period of very early childhood, a time of lovely bonding which I tenderly remember, when I cast my mind back in search of the Mamma of my growing years she did not appear the prominent figure that mothers now are to their young children. There were the large personality of Ah Mah, the domineering presence of Ah Koong, their joint dominance in the life of our family and the many adults that seemed to flit in and out of our lives. For my parents, frightful as it strikes the modern woman, there was no expectation of marital privacy in terms of physical, mental and emotional space. Coping with and functioning within an extended family at close quarters was just another dimension of married life, a concept so alien to us now.
The crowded years in the first house in Kampong Pandan crowded out many of my recollections of Mamma as a mother figure. Fortunately as I got older our family began to take on more the semblance of a nucleus family and Mamma entered into my mental scene as a more active and positive figure. Little precious memories such as the one of her taking us to market regularly and leaving us at our favourite laksa stall while she did her round of shopping. Sometimes side-tracking into textile shops to look at, ponder over and perhaps buy pieces of cloth for extra new clothes. At other times going to matinee film shows and returning home in time for Papa. Visits to hair salons to pretty up.
Besides a family life peopled by many who were always on the scene, my sense of Mamma being dwarfed also has to do with the quality that she has by nature, a quiet personality. There is no loudness about her, not in speech or self-projection or manner of dress. Nor has she the extrovert expression of Sei Yi. I associate her with a steady calm wherein her emotions are not easy to read even by those closest to her. Even into her old age she does not exhibit her greatest joys nor betray her deepest sorrows.
This does not mean at all that Mamma is passive. Far from it. While she and Papa always shared the belief that we their eight children are the most important in their lives, to be given the possible best, and were in total agreement with regard to the values that they would like us to grow up with, they sometimes differed in their approach and their methods. Mamma is by far more imaginative and creative, more flexible than Papa and sometimes would want for us what Papa thought were of secondary importance, or wanted things for us not in Papa’s manner of doing. Papa’s love for us and for Mamma was a very protecting solicitude which we at times found cramping and stifling. While Mamma donned the conforming straitjacket of a daughter-in-law of her time with equanimity she often found the mould of Papa’s making too narrow to pour herself into. As Papa could sometimes be unbending once his mind was made up, Mamma devised her own tactics for dealing with the situation. Most of her striking out was on our behalf but this difference became their chief area of conflict. Papa sometimes was so unyielding that after the tactic of kid gloves was abandoned and even the strategy of baan-ju-juk-lou-fu failed, Mamma as a final measure resorted to doing it her way willy-nilly, either without consultation or ignoring Papa’s restrictions altogether. Depending on the gravity of the matter, the result was a tiff or a row. ‘Constance, why are you always doing things behind my back’ was always Papa’s aggrieved complaint. When the matter was less serious and he was exasperated rather than angry, ‘Constance, you wonderful woman!...’ he would exclaim. Mamma’s assertively guerrilla-type blow for independence has remained one of her modi operandi with us when she does not wish the advice of her children for whatever reason. Like Papa, we find it most annoying and exasperating but while I fume I also secretly recognise and appreciate that sometimes she needs to be obstinately not consulting.
A buried habit of Mamma’s which I am only too happy that she now has the means to let surface again is her love for spending. The free-spending girl in her did not perish under the heavy weight of parental responsibility but has been in deep sleep all these years, obeying the commanding spell of such a responsibility. That the need for severe self-denial is now lifted and she can rekindle the spark of her free young days is a matter of loving joy on the part of all her children. We are most thankful that she can once more visit places such Po Chan the jewellers and freely spend and enjoy herself so much doing so. For our wonderful woman deserves all her pleasures indeed. Characteristically when she now freely spends at Po Chan it is to buy for her children, daughters-in-law and grandchildren.
Her place at a mahjong table is also now hers to request and we are always so pleased to give her yet another pleasure she so deserves. I see a symbolic significance of her at the mahjong table. She is now the much loved, much respected and much honoured matriarch of the clan. She has not inherited the position as a matter of automatic succession but has earned it by the person she is and has been put there by all in her extended family who love and cherish her. Her position at the metaphorical mahjong table and in the hearts of many remains unchallenged.
3 August 2000