The Catherine Lim Collection (45 page)

On your point that a spittoon may be a
demeaning reference to Asian culture, may I make bold to point out, Sir, that
at a recent Christie’s auction in London, a spittoon from an imperial
bedchamber was sold for $1.2 million. It was described as exemplifying the finest
in the art of that period.

DETAC replies:

‘Dear Catherine Lim,

We accept your explanation for wishing to
retain the spittoon in your story. However, we would insist that instead of
making it a cheap enamel spittoon, you upgrade it to porcelain.’

Catherine Lim replies:

Dear Sir,

I am very happy with your suggestion that I
upgrade my spittoon. I have made the necessary revision, and the spittoon is
now no longer cheap enamel but fine porcelain. Moreover, the inside rim is
inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

The Department of the Inculcation of True
Moral Values (DITMOV) writes:

Dear Catherine Lim,

We have just fine-combed your story and found,
to our satisfaction, that the Asian value of Filial Piety is dominant. May we
congratulate you on your awareness of this important Asian value. It is
precisely because it is so important that the examples and illustrations
provided must have maximum impact. We have found that the examples in your
stories are too weak. May we suggest that you bring in the well-known Confucian
story of ‘The Young Man and the Mosquitoes’. In case you are not aware of the
tale (and clearly you are not, otherwise you would not have omitted it in your
story in the first place), may we briefly tell it: There was a young farmer who
was extremely filial to his old mother. He was so filial that every evening, he
would take off his shirt, and exposing his bare body, call out in a loud voice,
‘Oh, mosquitoes, Oh, mosquitoes, please come and bite me. Bite me all you want,
have your fill of me!’

Now when the mosquitoes had had their fill of
him, they left his mother alone, so that every night, she could sleep
undisturbed.

We suggest that you take note of this most
inspiring anecdote, give it a Singapore context, and incorporate it in your
story.

Catherine Lim replies:

Dear Sir,

What a wonderful story that was. It was a
serious omission on my part, but now I have made up for my negligence by
incorporating the anecdote fully into my story. I have described in detail the
swarm of mosquitoes, and the vicious bites and welts they left on the filial
young man’s body. I have also taken the liberty to add a detail that was not
found in the original Confucian tale, namely, that the young man slept with a
cherubic smile on his face, that reflected the deep satisfaction and peace
experienced as a result of filial piety.

DITMOV writes back:

Dear Catherine Lim,

A cherub belongs to Western culture. Please
delete the reference from your story.

Catherine Lim replies:

Dear Sir,

I have replaced “cherubic’ with ‘fairy-like’.
Fairies belong to both Western and Asian cultures.

Catherine Lim then gets a letter from the
Ministry of Environment:

Dear Catherine Lim,

We are not happy with the reference to swarms
of mosquitoes in your story. This is a gross inaccuracy. There are hardly any
mosquitoes in Singapore today, owing to the assiduous cleaning up operations of
our Ministry. We would therefore urge you to remove that anecdote from your
story; otherwise Singapore will have a very poor image as a dumping ground.

Catherine Lim replies:

Dear Sir,

I am really at a loss about what to do. Could
you please liaise with the Department for the Inculcation of True Moral Values
and let me know of your joint decision? Needless to say, I will go by that
joint decision.’

The Ministry of Environment and DITMOV
reply:

Dear Catherine Lim,

After much discussion, we have both agreed on
a compromise. The anecdote may be retained but ‘mosquitoes’ should be replaced
by any insect whose presence, even in swarms, does not reflect poorly on the
hygiene of a country. Needless to say, flies, lice, bugs, ticks, fleas, leeches
and chiggers are OUT.

Catherine Lim replies:

Dear Sir,

Will bees do? There are some Chinese legends
which show bees in a very favourable light. In fact, there is one in which the
Queen Bee is a reincarnation of a most august warrior princess.

The Ministry of Environment and DITMOV
reply:

Dear Catherine Lim,

Bees are okay.

Catherine Lim sighs with relief. The story
is finished at last. With much trepidation, it is presented at the
International Writers’ Conference in Oslo. Alas, to Catherine Lim’s intense
disappointment, it receives no prize. Indeed, it is not even deemed fit for the
Honourable Mention list. The writer is crestfallen and is about to rush out to
send a telegram home, apologising for failing her country, when her attention
is suddenly drawn to the words of the chief judge on the flower-bedecked,
light-filled stage.

“We must make special mention of the entry
from Singapore. Although it has not been placed, we must congratulate the
writer for a story that was so unique as to defy all easy categorisation for
judgement. It makes use of disparate elements, so disparate and opposed that it
has required a feat of imagination to pull them together into a story. The
concrete and the abstract, the real and the imaginary, myth and fact, the
arcane and the ordinary – all these have been brought together in a narrative
mode that fits no existing category. For instance, there is a reference to a
spittoon, mysteriously crafted so that while it serves some mundane purpose,
its interior remains pure inlaid mother-of-pearl, And there is a strange bird
that is a mixture of earthiness and ethereality, of the crude sounds of the
earth as well as the brooding silences of heaven. The symbolism is tantalising,
and has so far eluded the judges. We would like to say that the fact that the
Singapore entry has not been placed does not reflect on its quality; it simply
reflects the judges’ inability to comprehend its full meaning. Therefore, it is
our pleasure to award a special prize to the Singapore participant, a prize for
creating a new genre of the short story, and for opening up new vistas for
creative exploration which we hope other writers will be inspired to emulate!”

I listen and
hear her voice
which she tries to keep steady with
resoluteness of purpose but which is dangerously close to a sob.

“You held out your hand for an egg,” she
says, “and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your
fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind; in
time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the
squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned a great lesson: how to
endure without a sob.”

And it is invariably at this point that I see
her tilt her head backwards, a simple action which has the marvellously
manifold function of suppressing the sob, setting a final stamp of defiance on
her little speech and preventing the secret tears from spilling out of her
eyes.

This admonition to women saddens me. It
conjures up for me images of suffering women for all time, beginning with,
appropriately, that of the female skeleton in a Stone Age settlement with a
stake driven through where the heart was, and a little pile of bones between
the parted skeleton legs. The archaeologist’s surmise was that the woman had
been found by her husband to be with child, not his, and in the tribe’s ritual
of punishment reserved for such faithlessness, he had driven the stake through
her and the child out of her in a simultaneous panging of birth and death.

I see also the Victorian woman in long black
dress, gaunt after eight child births and soon to die from her ninth, and the
Chinese peasant woman, sick with anxiety as the mid-wife pulls out other yet
another girl-child, and she knows she has lost the last chance to redeem
herself with her husband.

A woman’s fears are inseparable from her
fecundity; she dies in childbirth, in more than one sense of the word.

And now I see the Indian Suttee Woman, the
African Infibulated Woman, the Chinese Bound Feet Woman. Sarojini, hair
streaming, in her widow’s white sari, leaps into the flames engulfing her
husband’s corpse as it lies on the pile of wood, and after her, a whole line-up
of white-clad widows, freed from this barbarous custom, but burning themselves
in perpetual suttee in their extreme poverty and isolation. Onika, the
girl-child whose lips are sewn together for a man’s pleasurable bursting on the
wedding night, and which will be sewn up again, whenever he is absent as
assurance of his exclusive rights to her body. My great grandmother who is told
to kneel down before the ancestral altars in thanksgiving for the great good luck
of being sold as a child concubine into a wealthy family. I see Great
Grandmother’s little girl body convulse in pain and hear her screams as they
bind her feet tighter and still tighter, her mother bending to hold and comfort
her: “Hush, little one, you mustn’t cry. Think of the time when you will be a
very beautiful woman and all the men will be asking for you!” And perhaps she
is already thinking of the Old One, very wealthy indeed, whose particular
delectation is to see the young white bodies, naked except for their little
dolls’ feet in silken dolls’ shoes, come swaying towards him like flowers on
stalks.

The images will not go away. More come
crowding into my mind, in a crazy scrambling of time and place, for neither
history nor geography has been protective of women.

The slave girl in the cotton plantation
carried to the bed of her coarse owner who will then signal for his son to
carry her to his; the ten thousand women and girls whose brutalised bodies are
anonymously swept under the blanket term of ‘The Rape of Nanking’ in the
history books; the equally nameless Indian women whose dowries are inadequate
and so they are burnt by their husbands who then go to report kitchen
accidents; the little 11-year-old girl from Hyderabad whose name Bina is known because
on the plane with the 60-year-old Arab to whom her father has just sold her in
marriage, she has dared to sob out her story to the stewardess who alerts the
police; my grandmother whose feet were never bound but whose life was; the
little Singapore schoolgirl Pei Yin who died from a very messy abortion and
whose father went scot-free.

Scorpion-receivers, all, and Charlotte
Brontë’s advice is for them: endure.

The receiving and enduring could begin very
early; in Pei Yin’s case, it was about the time she sprouted breasts and became
a woman, and in Bina’s case, even younger, for she was only 11 and probably had
not yet had her first menstruation. Indeed, it could begin before the girl’s
life could begin, and I am now thinking of the newborn baby girls in China,
strangled with bare hands, suffocated in trays of ash, thrown into wells,
thrown into rubbish dumps or the mud of rice-fields, because the new population
policy allows for only one child, and parents’ hopes for a male child are
pinned on that one chance.