The Catherine Lim Collection (3 page)

“I know who she’s thinking of,” whispered
Angela to Mee Kin. “That useless youngest son of hers who’s been in Australia
these 10 years at least, studying, he claims. A law course, he says in his
letter, and then I hear he’s switched to Interior Designing or something like
that. A real parasite. Chinaman will not fork out a cent, so guess who’s
supplying the cash? My poor husband, of course. Boon doesn’t tell me
everything, I know that. He knows I’ll jump. And the old ones speak of him as
their Hope, their Saviour, their Comfort in their old age. She never stops
talking about him. It’s ‘my Ah Siong, my Ah Siong’ all the time. She keeps
hoping for his return. Then all her troubles will be over, she says, as if
right now, her other sons are ill-treating her. Do you know, my poor Boon
spends at least a $1,000 a month on his family? I don’t mind really; money’s
not the problem, but at least have the decency to show appreciation. That
wastrel – I don’t know his latest escapade in Australia but somebody who’s just
come back says he’s living with an Australian woman, a divorcee. I don’t care
to know. I only pray he doesn’t kill his poor old mother, that’s all. She keeps
waiting for him to come back, and weeps over the letters he sends her. Do you
know he gets somebody to write the letters in Chinese? But he’ll never come
back. Why should he? He’s being very clever. Money from kind Eldest Brother
every month, so why come back and work? The old fool is going to come to grief,
I tell you. But I shall not bother about that. I’ve got too much to bother
about already.”

“Noodles mean long life for the Chinese
people,” said the knowledgeable Mark, and he expertly lifted the birthday
noodles with his chopsticks, showing their length. “I read about that in the
Bilingual Page of The Straits Times. You’re not supposed to bite off the
noodles, you’ve got to swallow them in their entire length, otherwise you’re
biting off the long life.”

He proceeded to demonstrate, amidst an
explosion of encouraging cries and giggles. “Mark, he’s the cleverest boy in
his school,” said Michelle who adored her brother.

The signs of death were there, at the
birthday dinner. The old man nearly slipped and fell on his way down the steps.
A bad sign, somebody said. And worse – he began speaking about the dead brother
again. He took to his bed a few weeks after that; and Old Mother’s time was
completely taken up in nursing him. The sons and daughters-in-law visited
regularly, sometimes with the grandchildren, usually on weekends; the illness
dragged and became irksome to everybody.

“Why does Grandpa smell so?” asked Michelle,
and her mother said, “Shh.”

A long illness of an aged parent – a most
terrifying thing.

“Do you know,” said Angela, half laughing,
half angry, to Mee Kin on the phone, “do you know my mother-in-law actually
blames me for the illness of her husband? She said it was my white dress at the
birthday dinner – white, colour of death, colour of mourning. Would you believe
it, Mee Kin? Would you believe anything like it! I was in that off-white, pure
silk suit that night – remember? Would you call something as expensive and
modern as that, mourning? But I should have known. Everything is always blamed
on Aun-jee-lah. Always the villainess. And guess who’s going to be the busiest
now, to run around, pay medical bills, take the brunt, now that the old man’s
bedridden? Aun-jee-lah.”

“My son’s going to die, he’s going to die
very soon,” whimpered Ah Kum Soh, and indeed the feeble cries of the small soft
body in the sarong cradle strung from the ceiling were disappearing into the
silence of death.

“Take the child out of that cradle, put him
on the bed,” advised Old Mother with the authority of one who knows.

Ah Kum Soh lifted the sick baby – its
enormously large round head lolled on the thin, soft body, like a pitiable rag
doll – and laid him on the plank bed with the coconut-fibre stuffed mattress,
weeping loudly.

“His useless father,” she wailed, “the child
is dying, and he’s away, God knows where.”

“Wrap him warmly,” said Old Mother, “and
I’ll give him the medicine I gave Ah Boon. He had the same symptoms. It is the
same sickness.”

The black, bitter herbal juice splattered on
the child’s chin and down his neck; one feeble fist had mustered all its
strength to knock off the spoon with the liquid.

“My Ah Boon was cured,” said Old Mother and
proceeded to administer another spoonful. “And stop wailing about the useless
father. We women, we must be strong.”

The child grew worse; Ah Kum Soh went to the
temple to consult the temple medium. She came away relieved. The temple
medium’s advice was simple: the baby and his mother were ill-matched, their
destinies clashed, and each would be the means of misfortune to the other. She
was to give him away in adoption, and he was never to call her ‘Mother’ but
‘Aunt’. Moreover, his name was no good. ‘Ah Hai’ meant ‘water’; the child was
drowning. Change the name to ‘Bock’ – wood, dry wood.

These two requirements were fulfilled the
very next day. The child was taken to the temple and renamed Ah Bock. Old
Mother tied a piece of red string round his wrist: she was now his mother. The
moment he learnt to speak he was to call her ‘Mother’ and his natural mother
‘Ah Cheem’.

The illness left him.

“Whyever did she adopt an idiot? She must
have known he was an idiot right from the start,” said Angela. She remembered
she posed this question to her husband before they were married – the only time
she could have asked it, for Boon hated to answer such questions about his
family and showed his reluctance by maintaining a stoical silence or picking up
a newspaper or magazine at hand.

“Whyever did she adopt an idiot? She had had
three sons already by that time. The huge lolling head and those dreadful eyes
– you told me about them yourself. So why on earth did she do a thing like
that? Not adopt him in name only – that would have been all right – but
bringing him up, spending money on him? That Ah Kum Soh is the most
irresponsible shirker I’ve ever seen. Leaving your poor mother to take care of
that imbecile while she plays mahjong all day or gossips about.”

“It’s her kindness of heart,” Boon had said,
and then with sudden inspiration, “milk of human kindness.”

All the questions about his family he had
answered willingly enough in the easy expansiveness of courtship; now he
clamped up and always picked up those hated newspapers and magazines.

“It’s ironical she cares more for her
adopted son than for her real son,” Angela had persisted. “I’m referring to Wee
Tiong, the black sheep. How come all of you had an English education, and he
got sent to a Chinese school? It’s really painful to hear him speak English
now. Poor thing, so different from the rest of you. Such a dreadful inferiority
complex.”

There had been some quarrel, Boon explained,
between his parents. His father wanted to send all his children to English
schools, his mother wanted Chinese. “A child from a Chinese school is more
filial to his parents,” she said.

“How come he got beaten more than any of
you?” Angela asked. “You told me your mother was always knocking her knuckles
on his head; your father beat him with his walking stick.”

It could have had something to do with his
father’s gambling fortunes, Boon had explained. He remembered his mother
telling him that on the day Wee Tiong was born, his father lost a lot of money
at a gambling den.

“This child brings you bad luck,” the
fortune teller told him. “He will continue to bring you bad luck.”

The father was in a rage about the baby. He
was generally a quiet man who spoke little, so his rage was all the more
terrible to behold. For a time a relative in a small village took care of Ah
Tiong, and then later he was brought back, an ugly undersized child with the
hatred always burning in his small eyes, but the father only beat him
occasionally now, and the mother only when in an irritable mood.

“The injustice of it,” said Angela. “The
irony of it. Doting on an adopted idiot son and ill-treating the natural son.
These fortune tellers and temple mediums deserve to be skinned alive. The lives
of innocent little children are at their mercy.”

“I have four uncles,” Michael said, holding
up his hand, four fingers outspread. “Three of them are all right, but one of
them is not so clever, and cannot earn any money. But he makes me laugh and he
catches birds and grasshoppers for me and carries me on his shoulders. He is my
favourite uncle.”

“He’s not our uncle!” protested Mark and
Michelle. Michelle giggled, Mark was angry. “He’s only Grandmother’s adopted
son. ‘Adopted’ means not real. She adopted him because if she didn’t, he would
die. He’s not our uncle. Our uncles are Uncles Tiong, Nam and Siong, Uncle
Siong’s our Australian uncle. But Uncle Bock is NOT our uncle. We call him
‘Uncle’ because otherwise Grandmother gets angry, but he’s not our real uncle.”

“He’s so ugly,” said Michelle. “His head’s
too big, and the saliva comes out of his mouth when he speaks. He laughs and
then the next moment he cries.”

Mark wrote in his composition ‘My
Relatives’:

There is a strange Chinese belief that when a
child is sick, it is because his destiny clashes with his mother’s destiny. Or
it is because there is a devil in him. The devil will go away if the child is
adopted by someone and calls his mother ‘Auntie’, the louder the better so as
to deceive the devil. He calls his adopted mother ‘Mother’, and the devil is
now fully deceived and will not make him ill again. I have such an ‘uncle’ in
my family; he is therefore not my real uncle, but an uncle only in name, as a
result of a superstition. Therefore I don’t have to regard him as my real
uncle, though for my grandmother’s sake I have to call him ‘uncle’.

Thus had the boy exorcised the devils of
shame and resentment in himself.

“He writes remarkably well for a boy his
age,” said his English Language teacher who entered him for every essay
competition as well as oratorical contest. He always showed his compositions –
standing out from the mediocrity of the rest of the class – to the other
teachers, struck by the fluency and originality of his thought and expression.

When ‘Uncle Bock’ slobbered and made a fool
of himself, therefore, he felt less shame, and he was ashamed of his brother
Michael who laughed with this uncle and of his sister Michelle who thought the
uncle terribly funny.

“Mark darling, never mind,” said Angela,
pained for her son, her greatest pride. “Don’t call him ‘The Idiot’ any more,
at least not in Daddy’s or Grandma’s hearing. Okay, sweetheart?”

Years ago, the family had lived in a small
village in Changi. Old Mother grew vegetables in a small plot of land near
their wooden house, to sell in the nearby market. She was stout and strong
then, and could draw bucket after large bucket of water from the well. A large
muddy pond sometimes provided the water for the growing vegetables.

“Come and look at something. I want you to
come and look at something nice,” Wee Tiong said, his small sly eyes smiling,
and the idiot one – he must have been eight- or nine-years-old at the time –
readily followed, his large head lolling on his rounded shoulders. He gurgled
happily.

“Come along, I’ve something very nice to
show you,” said Wee Tiong, his small body taut with intensity of purpose. “Come
along, something nice. Something really nice.”

Once before lured, by a slice of bread with
sugar, to an anthill full of big red vicious ants, the idiot nevertheless
followed eagerly, gurgling.

Wee Tiong led him to the muddy pond, ringed
with tall tangled weeds, slippery at the edges.

They stood near the edge.

“Something nice, see? Can you see? Look
closer. Bend. That’s right. Bend over. More, more. See, something nice. Can you
see it? There, there!”

The large lolling head propelled the body
forward; the idiot one fell in with a splash. He was in the mud at the edge;
the mud rose to his knees and he began to contort his features, slowly, in a
piteous cry.

“Want to get out,” he said, and began to
struggle.

Wee Tiong had expected, not mere mud that
only dirtied the legs, but deep, swirling muddy water that would have sucked in
the idiot one, lolling head and all, in an instant.

As the idiot one struggled to get out, he
sank deeper into the mud.

“Want to get out!” he wailed, and then the
mud was at his waist.

A feeling of panic seized Wee Tiong: he
turned and ran, pale and gasping, homewards.

The mud had reached the idiot one’s
shoulders before Ah Kum Soh’s husband who happened to hear the cries, ran and
pulled him out.

The years had thrown a haze upon the
incident.

“A devil pushed the poor idiot one into the
pond. We had to make offerings of food and flowers at the site and burn some
joss sticks to appease the pond devil.”

“His real father saved him, his real father.
He should have gone back to stay with his real parents. It showed the curse had
lifted.”