The Catherine Lim Collection Page 2

  Luckily I have Mooi Lan, sighed Angela. And for the hundredth time she wondered: Why did the foolish old one add to her already heavy burden by adopting this idiot? She had four sons herself; why adopt an imbecile, known to be an imbecile from birth?

  “Another story,” she told Mee Kin. “I’ll tell it to you one of these days. How I wish my mother-in-law were like your mother, or even my own mother.”

  She went back to the main table.

  The 75-year-old celebrant looked wan and tired. Old Mother sitting beside him, stiff but smiling with a force of will each time somebody bent over to speak to her or put food in her bowl, looked sad and tired too.

  A fine thing! – $5,000 for a 12-course dinner in the best restaurant in Singapore, to expose two sad-looking fools to the public, as if they had been ill-treated by their children and grandchildren all their lives! On Old Mother’s ear-lobes glittered the diamond studs that Boon and Angela had given her on her 70th birthday; on her finger the gold ring given by stingy Chinaman and his wife. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it were some inferior grade of gold, or silver washed in gold,” Angela had said to Mee Kin.

  Old Mother’s eyes, heavy with bags, were downcast, moist.

  “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.”

  Chapter 2

  “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.”

  “We were standing at the edge of the pond when Ah Bock saw a fish, tried to catch it and fell in. I yelled for help. Luckily, Uncle was nearby and pulled him out.”

  If he had died that day, it might have been more merciful. Look at him now – a 30-year-old man-child that’s a burden to an old woman. This was not said, only thought, and in this Angela and Gek Choo were one. Both felt sorry for their old mother-in-law. Oh, the burden of it all.

  Michael trembled with agitation. He held Uncle Bock’s hand. The message was in the big timid eyes: I love you. I’m glad you didn’t drown in that mud, and I hate that pond and the pond devil.

  But the idiot one was not capable of understanding thoughts. He only understood touch, and when Michael held his hand, he gurgled with glee and began chattering excitedly.

  “It is far better,” said Mark at a school debate at which his mother was present, “far, far better for a child, if the doctors know that he is going to be sadly deformed, to be aborted than for him to grow up and be a burden to his family and society.”

  The debate had been televised; Angela had shown the videotape of it at least a dozen times to her friends.

  “Poor Mark,” she said. “He didn’t have the courage to mention that there is a living example in his own family. Do you see the strange-looking little metallic cylinder on a red string round the idiot’s neck? There’s a so-called charm in it, prescribed by the temple medium.”

  “You know how much the old one paid for it? Two hundred dollars. She wouldn’t tell me, but I got the truth from Ah Kum Soh. These temple mediums are cheats and swindlers. I don’t know what else she’s got from them for her idiot foster-son. I dare not think. Now you know how she spends the $400 my poor Boon gives her monthly, and why she keeps stretching out her palm for more.”

  “Uncle Bock laughs one minute and cries the next,” giggled Michelle.

  “He’s not our uncle, don’t call him uncle,” said Mark sternly.

  “It’s true, I tell you! He laughs, then cries
. He can cry nonstop.”

  At the old man’s death, the idiot one cried for a long time.

  Chapter 3

  The old man died at home, a week after he was brought home from the hospital. He asked to be brought home; he was no longer capable of speech, but by signs, frantic gestures and the tears that flowed each time home was mentioned, he got across his message. “Oh dear, what about things like medication and the oxygen tent? How on earth do we manage – ” But a nurse came in to manage, and Angela sighed in relief.

  Only Old Mother, Ah Kum Soh and the idiot one were with him when he died, but within an hour, the two daughters-in-law, Angela and Gloria and the three sons were present. Gek Choo stayed away, being seven months pregnant. (They’re trying again for a son, this Chinaman brother-in-law of mine desperately wants a son to carry on his Chinaman ways.)

  “When I grow old, I’d rather conk off quickly than be a burden to the children and grandchildren,” Angela had said, chatting with her friends in the Royale Coffee House, months before the death took place. The best cheesecake in Singapore was to be found there.

  Mee Kin’s sister-in-law’s mother dragged on for two years on the sick bed. “A real burden,” Mee Kin said. “Everyone in the family had to take turns in nursing her. She wetted the bed, had to be fed intravenously, talked in delirium for hours.”

  “You couldn’t imagine the strain. My sister-in-law lost twenty pounds. $90,000,” said Angela. My neighbour’s father-in-law – he had cancer of the throat, and demanded to be in St Luke’s. You know the enormous medical fees there, so many thousands for an operation, another few hundreds for medication, a dollar for a miserable Panadol – at least four or five hundred dollars a day. But the old man was rich. He owned many properties. He could afford this kind of thing. My father-in-law is as poor as a churchmouse. Every cent has to be taken off Boon.”