The Catherine Lim Collection (2 page)

All, all fled – at the first sign of
trouble.

That Wee Tiong and his wife – please,
please, the very thought of those vipers will make me lose my calm all over
again. They have their houses and their stocks and their gold bars intact –
good luck to them.

As for Wee Nam and that helpless, hysterical
wife of his – I wish them well in their new home in Canada. One of these days
I’m going to find a letter in Boon’s pocket that he’ll not dare show me –
another letter begging for money. You mark my words.

I’m left alone to pick up the pieces, to
clear the mess.

Everyone’s gone.

And that Wee Siong – I shall thank God to my
dying day that he never came back. He would have killed the old one instantly.
He wouldn’t have let her die in peace in her old age – he, the darling of all
her hopes.

All, all fled, and I’m left to put things in
order again.

You speak about my calm, my courage. But you
don’t know my dreams. I haven’t begun to speak about the torments at night yet.
They return, you know, the demons return in the dreams, and they howl at me.
How can I ever forget the old man’s coffin knockings and the old woman’s curses
charged with thunder and lightning?

Last night, I had the dream again – the
wooden house in Changi – you remember the big old wooden house in Changi? Only
it wasn’t in Changi but in some graveyard, and she was there – she hit me
across the face with a bamboo stick –

I can’t afford to remember.

I’m the only one left to clear the mess.

I’ve just about cleared the mess, thank God.

The signs of
death were there already,
months before it took place,
at the birthday party itself. There was the laboured breathing as he was helped
up his chair to thank the guests and acknowledge the
yam sengs
; his
voice was barely audible and the stiff wispy beard on his chin quivered as he
rasped his ‘thank you’ and sat down again. There was the strange brief fit of
crying – fortunately, so brief that only those at his table noticed it; he had
begun to talk of a brother long since dead. It was strange, for he had never
referred to this dead brother before
.

Signs of death – but they went unnoticed in
the loud festive atmosphere of the restaurant, the best Chinese restaurant in
Singapore. Twenty tables booked for the occasion, the menu carefully chosen by
Angela herself, offering the famed restaurant’s most expensive delicacies.

“I’m sick to death of the usual sharksfin
soup and spring chicken and steamed pomfret,” she had said and proceeded to
order 12 dishes, each more exotic and expensive than the preceding one.

The cost, the cost – it was just like the
stingy Wee Tiong and his equally stingy, spiteful wife to worry about costs for
an aged parent’s 75th birthday dinner. The brothers always shared out the costs
of the birthday dinners and the costs of medical treatments of the old ones; it
was a vague, understood thing from the time each brother had started working
and drawing a salary.

The cost – Wee Tiong had been most concerned
when Wee Boon told him that it would be at the Shanghai Restaurant.

“I thought we had agreed it would be at the
Kai Leong Restaurant – ”

“I know, I know,” said Wee Boon, “but Angela
said the food there is no good, and for a 75th birthday dinner, it might as
well be the best.”

And at this point Angela had stepped in and
said, with the casualness of a well-rehearsed response, “You needn’t worry
about the extra cost, Wee Tiong. Boon will see to that. You pay your original
share, that’s all.”

The shifty eyes behind the thick lensed
glasses had glanced up sharply, the muscles on the long narrow face tensed to
deflect barbed words, but Angela had wandered off, leaving behind a faint fragrance
of Helena Rubinstein, to talk to Mee Kin, to discuss the relative merits of yam
pudding and red bean pancake for dessert.

Later, at the dinner, Angela saw him, this
most detestable of her brothers-in-law, a true shifty-eyed grasping Chinaman,
down to the absurd Chinaman haircut where the razor ran close to the skin at
the back, but left comically sharp wedges of hair at the sides. He was
whispering to his wife and both smiled their sardonic smile of criticism.

“I suppose,” she told Mee Kin later, “they
were saying that we were showing off, that we had deliberately set up an
impressive affair for the benefit of Minister. Whatever Boon does, he
interprets as currying favour with Minister; he can’t accept the fact of his
elder brother’s superior education and personality. I think when Boon becomes
Member of Parliament he’ll die of envy, bite on his tongue in jealous hatred
and swallow it. There are no brotherly feelings between them – they are worlds
apart, you see, and it’s the fault, if you analyse things carefully, of my
father and mother-in-law.”

Angela’s intense dislike had infected the
children; they did not like Second Uncle, they were cautious when he spoke to
them, for he spoke to them always with a laughing, goading contempt, his eyes
glinting
behind his glasses, his neck twisting. “Ah Mu-ck, Ah My-ker, Ah Mee-sae” he
called in imitation of the grandparents’ struggling efforts with English names,
and then he laughed a sharp, malicious laugh and shook his head.

“Those who follow Western ways are those who
eat Western shit,” he once said, to nobody in particular. “Western followers,
Western shit-eaters!”

His own four daughters were named ‘Chwee
Kim’, ‘Chwee Sim’, ‘Chwee Lian’ and ‘Chwee Hwa’.

“Stingy Chinaman,” Angela said to her
friends, “Counting every cent. Living in that miserable two-room HDB flat in
Geylang so that he will always have the excuse not to be able to take in either
of the old ones, when the time comes. But do you know he has a bungalow in
Victoria Park, rented out to an American family for $3,000 a month, and an
apartment in Wan Yu Heights, also rented out to foreigners? He gives $100 a
month to the old couple – I believe he recently reduced it to $75, I must check
with Boon – and the ang-pow for Chinese New Year, and his share of birthday
dinners, and you can’t extract a cent more. Why the Shanghai, not the Kai Leong
Restaurant? Why Peking Duck, not Spring Chicken? I’m sick of his calculating
ways; my Mark calls him ‘Uncle Abacus’. I believe Mark wrote a humorous
composition once on ‘My Relatives’ and then he suddenly decided to call his
Second Uncle, Uncle Abacus! The teacher got him to read the essay to the class.
I’m sick of his stinginess to the poor old couple and in the end, I always tell
Boon, forget this sickening nonsense about your share and my share. We pay. We
pay for everything. We can’t afford to lose face. You attend a dinner for a
friend’s parent at the Shanghai or Imperial and then you call them for a return
dinner at the Kai Leong or some dingy stupid place? No thank you. We pay,
that’s all. Money’s no problem.”

That was evident from the diamond ear-studs
– “1.02 carats per side,” Angela confided – the diamond and jade necklace, the
diamond rings. They were brought out from the bank vault for special occasions
like these. “Imagine wearing them at the Kai Leong! I would look out of place,”
said Angela laughingly.

She bustled about, the hostess, diamonds
sparkling, the silk dress and jacket splendid on the slim figure. She moved
deftly from table to table, the consummate hostess, urging everyone to eat
more, heaping spoonfuls of steaming food into the bowls of old men and women,
friends and relatives of the old couple, amidst timid, laughing protestations
that they had had so much to eat already. She spoke to Wee Tiong and Gek Choo
for a brief while – for the sake of propriety, for the family must not be seen
to be divided in a public place. She spoke amiably to them, exhorting them to
try more of the jellied prawns, patting their daughters on the heads and
cheeks, noting later to Mee Kin, “Even on an occasion like this, she was too
stingy to get a decent dress – did you see that outmoded shift, and those ugly
home-made shapeless dresses on her daughters? Such pretty little girls too. A
pity.”

She spoke with greater amiability to Wee Nam
and Gloria. Third Brother was less spiteful, Gloria did not have a quarter the
malice of that Gek Choo with the shifty eyes and tight mouth – “husband and
wife were looking more and more alike every day,” she laughed to her friends.
Typical Chinaman and Chinawoman. Wee Nam and Gloria were less repulsive – “but
one of these days,” said Angela with a sigh to Mee Kin, “one of these days, I
shall tell you about this wastrel brother-in-law of mine, always stretching out
his arm for loans from Boon. Loans, he calls them. I wish he could be honest
and say ‘gifts’. He’s been owing Boon money since 1976, while my Mark was still
in primary school. Flitting from job to job, business to business. His poor
wife a nervous wreck. But that’s another story. You’ll hear endless stories
about my in-laws,” she said with a sharp laugh.

She urged them to eat, heaping food on their
plates and into bowls. Gloria’s people, Angela whispered to a friend as she
moved on, were the lower class Eurasians in Singapore: her brother was a
drummer in a seedy night-club, wanted by the police for drug-taking on a number
of occasions, her two sisters had married common English or American sailors
and gone abroad, her mother helped out in her church for a pittance.

She moved from the Eurasian table, jewels
sparkling; she had noted how Gloria’s mother’s eyes had travelled, dilated in
disbelief, over the necklace, ear-studs, bracelet, rings, in the brief while
she was at their table.

She was glad to go to the children’s table.
She surveyed her children proudly, dressed in their best. Mark was reading
aloud to the other children the signs on pillars and walls in the restaurant
and in the menu, in both English and Mandarin. He was on his way to being the
best bilingual student in his school. The others listened, awe-stricken or
giggling. She went up to Michael – Michael, the only child who gave pain; what
wouldn’t she give to have him like Mark? She went up to him and asked, “Are you
eating, Mikey? Would you like more soup? Here, let Mummy help you to more
soup.” But the boy shook his head and looked, pained, into his empty bowl. My
best-looking child, thought Angela sadly. Friends have remarked on his handsome
features, his beautiful long eyelashes. Why is he so difficult? But now she only
smiled at him and joined in the merriment of the other children.

She whispered to Mooi Lan, “Keep an eye on
Michael, see that he eats well. Make sure the idiotic one does not come to give
trouble.” She trusted the girl whom she could never refer to as ‘servant girl’;
Mooi Lan was the children’s ‘chae-chae’. Mooi Lan was the only one who had ever
seen her weep over Michael; she would remain the only one.

The idiotic one, the imbecile foster-son,
did come over to the children’s table but he did not make trouble. He merely
stood there, grinned at the children while they stared back or giggled, and then
he clapped his hands excitedly, as if he had discovered some wondrous thing. He
stood beside Michael, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Thirty years old, a
brutish hulk of a man with a seven-year-old child’s mind and a child’s endless
capacity to embarrass and irritate.

Mark shifted his chair, displeased. The
idiot slobbered, saliva flying; Mark moved his chair further away with a snort
of disgust. Mooi Lan got up and tried to direct the idiot back to his own
table, the table of the inferior relatives. He resisted; he persisted in
standing beside Michael, now two hands gripping the boy’s shoulders; he talked
to the boy in his slobbering way, painful to see or hear. Michael was about to
get up and be led by him to the inferior relatives’ table when Mooi Lan
adroitly intervened, put the boy gently back in his place and led the idiot one
back by the hand to his table. Then she returned, looked across several tables
to Angela who was watching all this time, tense, and received a nod of
approval.

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.