Lucy Lum - The Thorn of Lion City - A Memoir

Then Popo said I needed a treatment called mungsa , which means to ‘draw out the sand’. My heart sank. She had done this to me before and it had been very painful. I put on a cheery face and lied: I felt much better, I said. Popo was not deceived. She summoned Sum-chay and told her to hold me down on the bed. She dipped her fingers into a bowl of salted water and began to pinch me, starting at my neck and moving gradually over my chest, my waist and along my ribs to my armpits. I screamed and kicked, but Sum-chay held me fast and Popo kept up the pinching for more than an hour. When she had finished my skin was red and sore.

I knew that for seven days after a mungsa treatment I would only be allowed sweetened condensed milk, soda biscuits and fruit, and prayer water from the altar mixed with specks of ash from burnt joss sticks. I would have to embark on this regime the next morning. When day dawned, my fever had not subsided despite the bowl of herbal brew. ‘It serves you right for playing with water, Miew-yong,’ my mother scolded, and as I lay there I remembered how Mother and Popo doted on Beng when he was ill. As my fever worsened Father became very worried about me, but Popo forbade him to call a doctor. He watched me anxiously, but when I looked up at him his face swam and I wondered who he was. He pleaded with Popo to try something else and finally she prepared a different remedy with rhinoceros horn. As she squeezed open my jaws and forced the liquid into my mouth I heard her scold, ‘Don’t spit it out, Miew-yong. This medicine is very expensive.’

Popo was worried, not for me but for herself. She was concerned that I would die and she would be held accountable, but she was still determined not to call a doctor. My mother followed her orders and together they made sure my father did not find out that I was dangerously ill. They massaged me with pungent red-flower liniment and waited. Two days later I woke with a burning sensation all over my body and began to choke at the suffocating scent. My mother was standing next to my bed. I looked up at the woman from whose body I had come, in the blink of an eye, into a world fragrant with a hundred spices, and she gazed back at me with no joy in her eyes. ‘Are you hungry?’ she said flatly.

A few weeks later my mother had her fifth child, a son. When he arrived, he did not cry until the doctor had held him upside-down and smacked his bottom. Popo said it was a sign that he would grow up to be stubborn. Father said she was happy to have a second male grandchild, after three girls, and she carried him in her arms whispering her pet name for him, ‘Little Cow’. ‘Sai-ngau, Sai-ngau,’ she would say, ‘you will grow up to be big and strong.’

Seven

As my father’s grasp of dialects and languages grew, so did his wages. When I was six we moved to Paterson Road, opposite the police station run by the English officer, the red-haired devil. As soon as I saw it I loved that big house, with its many windows and wide verandas. The first thing Popo did when we moved in was call in the feng-shui master to inspect it. He arrived wearing a Chinese jacket and looked very wise. For nearly an hour he spoke with Popo and my mother, pointing from time to time at a list he had placed in front of him on the table. On it were the names of each member of our family with the time, date and name of the animal year in which each of us had been born. I was curious about what he would do next so when he went out into the garden I followed him. I watched him take out of his jacket pocket a small, octagonal block of wood carved with elaborate decorations and with a compass set in the centre. With outstretched arms he held it out, turning in various directions, and mumbled, ‘Too many tombstones, too many tombstones.’ With a frown, he replaced it in his pocket, took out a piece of paper, made some notes, then walked to a different place and did it again.

While the feng-shui master made his calculations Popo walked round the garden, followed by the gardener, to look at the flowers and fruit trees. In the far corner a bush of mauve bougainvillea had been trimmed into a ball, and was surrounded by orange bird-of-paradise, motherin-law’s tongue, gladioli and spider orchids. Gladioli and spider orchids were Popo’s favourite flowers for the altar and she told the gardener to put plenty of cow dung on the beds where they grew. When she got to a huge cactus, with flat fleshy stems and deadly needles, she said: ‘Ah, palm of spirit. How useful. I won’t have to travel to Chinatown for dried ones now.’ She used it to treat the sole of the foot for aches and pains. She would clip off the spines, roast the stems on charcoal and lay them on newspaper. The patient would stand on the hot cactus flesh while it drew the unhealthy wind from the body.

There was another useful tree in the garden, the papaya. Popo did not like the fruit, but she used the leaves when she made a stew of pig’s stomach, garlic, tofu and mustard greens in dark soy sauce. She used them to scrub the pig’s stomach and remove the lining of slime and the nasty smell. We often ate pig-stomach stew. When Popo and Kung-kung had arrived in Singapore with little money, she had searched for the cheapest food and discovered that Europeans, Malays and Indians did not eat pigs’ stomachs, which could be bought for next to nothing. Of course, she never served such cheap food to guests.

When the feng-shui master had finished in the garden, he returned to the house and went from room to room, pointing his compass. I wanted to follow him and watch everything he did, but one glare from Popo told me to stay where I was. I wondered whether he had come to cleanse the house of the spirits from the cemetery, but when his inspection was complete, he sat with Popo and told her that he had calculated the lucky date and position for the setting of the altar, then wrote a list of other things Popo had to do around the house so that we would enjoy the beneficial effects of chi . After he had gone Popo followed his instructions to the letter.

I found that by climbing over the verandas I was able to get in and out of the house without using the front or back doors, which meant I could come and go unnoticed. While my brothers and sisters stayed at home, I would sneak off to the police-station courtyard to play with the policemen’s children. The station stood on two acres of ground at the corner of Orchard Road and Paterson Road. The main building was a typical two-storey colonial-style structure, bordered by verandas on all sides. The charge room, cells and some small offices were on the ground floor, and upstairs the offices of senior policemen and the administration staff, including my father. The red-haired devil’s room was the largest, and just outside his veranda a Union flag fluttered on a long pole. Apart from the main building, there were living quarters for about sixty policemen, the prisoner interrogation rooms, the canteen and the recreation hall. In the middle, screened from public view, was the quadrangle where the policemen had their daily parades and drills.

When the drills were taking place, children were not allowed in the grounds, so I would watch from my friend’s house close by. As I looked at the policemen, sweat dripping down their foreheads and drenching their shirts, I wondered why they wore such warm clothes for their parades. Eventually I learnt from Father that they had to wear British uniforms – bluish-grey shirts, khaki shorts, knee-high woollen socks and woollen berets.

When I was not at the police station or playing in the garden I would wile away my time on the veranda, watching the lorries pass with their loads of tin, rubber or timber on their way from the plantations in Malaya to the wharves where they would be loaded on to ships for export to Britain. I could always tell if a load of rubber had gone by as it gave off an unpleasant chemical smell that stayed in the air for a long time. The timber lorries carried huge logs held together with a few ropes, and a man sitting precariously on the top log. I thought those men deserved extra wages for being so brave, but my father told me they sat on the load because they had no choice: they needed the work. One day, walking home with my father, we saw a timber lorry brake suddenly and swerve to avoid colliding with a car. As it screeched to a halt, the man on the top log was thrown on to the road and, a split second later, crushed to death under the load of timber that followed him.