The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds Read online

  Our last days in Songkhla were a blur. One minute I was happily collecting butterflies, the next I was gathering my belongings together. In no time at all we were in dense jungle, rocked by lumbering beasts and bitten by leeches. My elephant was called Thongkum and he was bald, like the monks in Songkhla. The journey took such a long time that by the end the leeches no longer bothered me. When we finally arrived at Province Wellesley in the Straits Settlements, I bid farewell to Thongkum and faced, across a narrow strip of water, the island that was to be our new home.

  It loomed out of the sea, its hills curved like the back of a pig: Pulau Pinang, which in Malay means ‘the island of the betel nut palm’.

  At our first glimpse of Penang, we children jumped up and down, pointing repeatedly. ‘Look, look! Over there!’ Father and Mother, though, were silent. They stood staring at the island across the water. The decision to leave Songkhla had been theirs, but at the moment when a new life beckoned they became wary of taking the last step.

  Eventually Father hired two sampans, small wooden ferries, to row us across. Each had a large eye painted on its prow – just like the boat his ancestor had sailed in. Our sampans were steered by Chinese men, two in each boat – one at the front, the other at the rear. The men wore conical hats, inverted like bowls. On their scalps hung pieces of rough cloth, stained brown from years of faithful use, which shielded their necks from the sun.

  It was late afternoon when we set off, but our rowers began wiping their sweat after just minutes. For us passengers, though, the ride was magical. We sat low in our boats, lulled by the soft, rhythmic flapping of oars, which made me feel a kinship with the ancestors who had once crossed waters.

  When we came close to shore, the strong smell of mud from mangrove swamps tickled my nose. And then I saw them – the betel nut trees which gave the island its name. They emerged like a dream, fringing every bay and cove. Their trunks swayed lazily, slowly left, then slowly right, as their long leaves were swished by the gusts blowing in from faraway seas.

  By the time we rowed into George Town, the waters had turned blue-black, but the jetty, made of stone, was still teeming with life. The Chinese labourers whom we referred to as ‘coolies’ scurried about, moving gunny sacks and crates that filled the air with the familiar aroma of cloves, pepper and drying coconut. Indian men sat forward on bullock carts, touting for business. Everywhere there was yelling and jostling and bartering, yet a strange order prevailed, as if the goods and people and animals moved to unspoken rules.

  A sheltered waiting area stood near the water. It was a large room flanked by brick arches and an attap-thatched roof, where Father’s relatives stood waiting. Distant aunts and uncles who smelt of fresh soap and powder came to greet us. My younger brother, Chong Jin, and I stumbled out of our sampan, so tired we had to be given piggyback rides to the home of a friend of Father’s, where we would remain until we found a house of our own. Through a haze I saw that the broad streets of the town were lined with betel nut palms and rain trees. In the distance an imposing square mansion with many windows stood apart – the town hall I learnt later. Until my arrival in Penang, I had never seen anything so grand. It even had its own grounds, on which the grass was neatly trimmed, like a green rug.

  I have only one clear memory of that first night – the bath Mother gave me. I was exhausted. In my mind Mother’s shadow, cast by the single kerosene lamp in that strange kitchen, has mingled with soapy water. I can still picture the bright moon visible through the open air well, hear the clack-clacking of lizards scuttling about dark walls. In the rooms beyond chattering voices reverberated, while around me, stacked neatly on the floor and on wooden cabinets, were the utensils that would one day be my weapons.

  2

  Shortly after our arrival in Penang, I met the ting-ting man.

  Then as now, travelling vendors would battle heat, rain and tropical thunderstorms to ply their wares. Every hawker had a signature call which told us exactly who had arrived. The poetic cry ‘Walk faster-lah, wei!’ meant we would see a devil with thick eyebrows curving into bushes at the sides who touted Penang’s famous prawn noodles. The sound of Chinese castanets – of wood beating against hollow bamboo pole – heralded wonton dumplings. The simple clanging of a porcelain spoon on a bowl announced that soft-boiled bean curd was at hand, always doused in sugar cane syrup by the thin hunchback who sold it.

  The ting-ting man brought with him a new sound, a metallic banging I had never heard before.

  We were living on Ah Kwee Street, in one of those old brick shophouses with an open verandah – called a five-foot way – in front and a door which opened on to a street at the rear. The five-foot ways were corridors running down entire streets of shophouses, five feet in width, which became a life unto themselves. Five-foot ways were used by everyone for everything: by the nosy for gossip, by children for their games, by hawkers to sell their wares and by vagrants for shelter.

  The windows at the front of our house looked out on to the five-foot way. Our windows were mere holes in the walls but beautifully finished, with wooden burglar bars running vertically downwards and outside shutters painted in light blue. The shutters were carved with the motif of a bird, its wings outstretched – free, like my younger brother and the neighbourhood boys. I, in contrast, was imprisoned once we reached Penang. I had to content myself with peering out on tiptoe, which I did so frequently that Mother would yell, ‘Stand there some more, you get stuck to the window. Come inside-lah!’

  The evening the ting-ting man came, I grabbed the window bars as usual for balance. I must have appeared strange from the outside . . . half of a little black head bobbing unsteadily, a pair of almond-shaped eyes beneath, the dark seeds in their middle darting from side to side, observing everything. Those eyes were what I was known for along Ah Kwee Street; it was said they could pierce a person when focused. ‘Your daughter-ah! So small yet so big courage. Not scared to look,’ the neighbours would tell Mother. This, I knew, was no compliment. More than once Mother had scolded me, but my curiosity proved impossible to curb.

  The ting-ting man, with the enormous tray over his head and a metal hammer and chisel in his hands, was a tantalising sight. Children and their mothers trailed behind him like cows behind a cowherd. The man shuffled to the five-foot way on the other side of our street, where he perched on a stool. It became difficult to see much else, though we still heard his jangling. By then everyone had joined me at the window, including Father.

  ‘Mother, that person selling what?’ I asked.

  It was Father who replied. ‘I think it must be some kind of sweets,’ he said in his deep voice, looking not at me but at the ting-ting man. ‘Not good for children.’ With those words Father turned, and his tall figure disappeared back inside our house. This was typical – Father had made his opinion known and saw no reason to discuss the matter further. The buying of sweets was neither important nor interesting to him; it was a ‘woman’s thing’, best left to Mother while he took a second look at his newspaper. That’s what Father did in the evenings: reread part of the paper while there was enough natural light. Papers then were just a handful of sheets. Father told me he read the Penang Gazette, and on the few occasions when I walked with him to buy the paper, I realised he was one of a handful of locals – mainly Baba men – who read it to improve their English.

  After Father had gone, I noticed Mother glancing at me. I only had a fleeting glimpse of her face, but I sensed we would soon be going outside. She looked relaxed: her thin lips were loose, hinting at a smile. ‘Go look only, maybe no harm’ was all she said.

  It was a lovely evening. We were still at that magical hour just before darkness falls in Malaya when the skies are a pale blue but the heat of the day has already subsided. The streets buzzed with people out on gentle strolls, all relaxing, or ‘eating wind’ as we liked to call it. As we approached the group opposite, Hean Lee, a tall boy my age who lived a few houses away, was already heading home. Like his mother and sibli
ngs, he held a brown paper packet in his hand. Hean Lee gave me a wide grin. There was a glint in his eyes, and his face seemed more puffed up than usual. He was red from ear to ear, as if he had just seen something special, like stars dancing.

  I squeezed my way to the front of the crowd. There in the middle sat a man with a wrinkled face, chipping away at a layer of hardened brown sugar on a tray. Its colour reminded me of gula melaka – a deliciously sweet, viscous ingredient I often saw in our kitchen and into which I would dip my fingers when no one was looking. With his metal tools, the wrinkled man broke off small natural rocks of roughly equal size. Ting-ting . . . Ting-ting. The sound of his tools was what we had heard in our house. It was a slow, laborious process. My eyes remained glued to the man’s hands. Down went his hammer, the chisel hacking into layer after horizontal layer, pieces shearing off as his fingers moved down, down, down, then up again, his rhythm unchanging, the pace uncompromising. I was amazed at how he used just a hammer and simple chisel to carve off sugary rock, each piece small enough to fit into a child’s mouth and each more or less of the same size.

  Every time he finished preparing an order, the man would place the freshly cut candy into a brown paper packet. He was happy to sell however much you wanted – even a half cent’s worth, which in those days bought enough for a child.

  I turned around, looking for Mother. She was standing near the back chatting with a neighbour. I was desperate for a taste, but I knew that Mother did not approve of other people’s sweets. I spent a few minutes studying her.

  At the time I was growing up fast. I knew I was the only child who dared ask for things; Elder Sister was less spirited and Chong Jin still young, so they relied on me to take the lead. With Mother I understood I had to choose my moments. That evening my timing could not have been better, because Mother was in a good mood. She had made Father’s favourite dish of Siamese laksa: noodles served in a rich spicy broth, tangy and full of pungent chillies, garnished with leeks and cucumbers that had been pickled in white vinegar for two days. Father had been delighted, so Mother too was happy. But she was pregnant again; with Mother being more temperamental, it was difficult to predict her reactions. Still, I thought I would try. I wiggled my way to where she was.

  ‘Mother,’ I said in the nicest tone I could manage while pulling gently at her sarong. I glanced up obliquely, not wanting to meet her eyes. ‘Mother . . . those sweets, we can try or not?’

  ‘Ai-yahh, Chye Hoon!’ she replied, looking at the man’s tray and at the children sucking noisily on their candy. ‘Eat so many sweet things, your teeth all will rot.’

  ‘Mother, just small piece-lah?’ I persisted. I felt Mother’s hand on my head, stroking my hair.

  ‘Chye Hoon-ah, you listen to me. Maybe next week, okay?’

  ‘Maybe next week’ was one of Mother’s choice phrases. I think she hoped I would have forgotten by the time next week came along, though I never did. The initial no made me even more determined to get what I wanted. That evening I didn’t have to try too hard after all. Flushed from her day’s triumph, Mother soon relented. ‘Okay-lah, Chye Hoon, this week you all good, so you can share one packet. One packet only-ah!’

  It was when Mother started speaking to the ting-ting man that I noticed how ugly he was. He had a terrifying black mole just below his lower lip on the left side, from which three straggly hairs grew, one longer than the other two. With his withered skin and teeth blackened by decay, the ting-ting man was even more fascinating than the devil who sold prawn noodles. He looked old, yet his body seemed strong – which it must have been, given the distances he walked each day.

  When the ting-ting man handed me a packet, I did not take it. I could not stop staring at the hairs on his mole and the pockmarks on his face, large indentations where the skin was no longer smooth but had become grainy like sand. ‘Take-lah,’ he said.

  If truth be told, the ting-ting candy itself was disappointing, but the man never failed to draw us. The speed of his fingers combined with the horror of his face proved addictive.

  Over the years we got to know the ting-ting man. His name was Ah Boey and he came from Fukien province, just like our Chinese ancestors. Ah Boey told Mother he had also been transported to Malaya in a wooden boat, but the journey sounded less romantic when I heard it from him. On his boat the men had to take turns standing during the nights, because not everyone had space to lie down. After just a day at sea he began to vomit from the stench. All they had for a toilet was a single bucket they took turns emptying. When they ran out of water, they relied on the South China Sea for their daily cups of tea. Disease took many lives; Ah Boey himself barely survived. When he arrived in Penang, he crawled off the boat a walking skeleton.

  Even when we knew him, Ah Boey remained skinny. He often walked naked from the waist up, so that his ribs were visible. I once asked him why he did not wear clothes, to Mother’s horror – ‘Chye Hoon, if you no learn better manners, you not find husband!’ Turning to Ah Boey, Mother apologised profusely on my behalf, but Ah Boey only grinned, waving his hand to indicate he had not been offended.

  Ah Boey told us one of his uncles had made and sold ting-ting candy in China. That, he said, was how he had learnt the trade. It had not been his intended business when he set sail for Malaya. He worked at the dock first, loading and unloading steam ships, but he had been a virtual slave, unable to save even a cent, as all his wages went on food. Somehow – Ah Boey did not provide details – he managed to gain release from his boss after a year, and the idea of making ting-ting candy came to him. Ah Boey claimed that his sugar concoction was based on a secret family recipe. I didn’t believe him. Ah Boey was full of far-fetched stories, and it was hard to know how much one could trust him.

  Then Ah Boey stopped coming to our street. There was no warning, no goodbye, nothing to indicate he was going away – he simply disappeared. In time another man took over the sale of ting-ting candy on the island. We found out that Ah Boey had left Penang to try his luck at tin mining. In those days there was a rush to develop tin mines on the mainland. A mass of Chinese men went off to seek their fortunes, Ah Boey among them. I didn’t know then what working in a tin mine meant. In my mind Ah Boey would soon become rich. I pictured him, ugly as ever, in a shiny blue silk suit with a smart Mandarin collar just like the one Father wore to school.

  3

  By the time I was eight, my three younger sisters had all been born. It was thought unnecessary to send any of us girls to school. What was the point, since we would only get married and have children? In our close-knit Nyonya community the emphasis was on us girls becoming skilled in women’s work: cooking, sewing and homemaking.

  One day Mother took me aside and in a firm voice told me, ‘Chye Hoon, you want to be a Nyonya, you have to cook like Nyonya.’ I was still too young to wield a cleaver knife or to light wood fires, but ripe enough for cooking lessons. As Father had turned his hand to small-scale trading, we could afford a maid by then, and Mother wanted me to watch while she and the maid worked so that I could learn to fan fires and practise simple chores. There were many catties of ingredients, all plump and awaiting attention, strewn on the kitchen surfaces to be turned into a feast for our household of nine.

  I hated cooking. I loathed the kitchen, the part of the house where I broke into perspiration as soon as I entered. Its array of mills and grinding stones were hulking monsters fashioned from granite I couldn’t move, let alone lift.

  On that memorable day my apprenticeship began with a mortar and pestle: a deep round bowl in black stone with a matching, equally heavy cylindrical pounder that had a rounded end, tapered to make it easier to hold. The pestles and mortars were Mother’s favourite instruments of torture, used daily to pulverise dried shrimp or garlic or whatever took her fancy.

  I stood in one corner, grumpily watching our maid, Ah Lai. Ah Lai had toasted dried shrimp paste and was transferring it into the round mortar bowl, ready for mixing with the chillies she had already chopped. Ther
e was a pungent aroma in the air. ‘Come closer-lah, Chye Hoon,’ the maid beckoned, wagging her finger. ‘If not, you can’t see.’

  I dragged my feet into the kitchen. My younger brother, Chong Jin, was about to start school, and I wished I could be outside with him instead of being cooped up in a stuffy room full of smells that made my eyes water. When the billowing smoke choked me, it all became too much.

  ‘I not like to cook!’ I burst out, running off to the room I shared with Elder Sister. I resolved never to step inside our kitchen again. Within minutes Mother stormed up and yanked me roughly by the hand. ‘You do as you’re told!’ she screamed, her voice trembling.

  With my heart thumping, I tried to pull away. A scuffle followed. I shouted, ‘No, no, no! I no want!’ and Mother grabbed both my arms while hoping to coax sense into me. We were far from evenly matched, though I must have been the more vigorous, because the sleeves of Mother’s baju panjang, the calf-length long-sleeved tunic she wore, were pulled high up on her arms, exposing naked flesh. It was too tempting. Like a person possessed I bit into Mother’s lower arm, sinking my teeth near her wrist. I still don’t know what came over me.

  When I lifted my head, the kitchen was silent. Both Elder Sister’s and Ah Lai’s eyes were round from shock. My teeth had been on Mother’s arm only for a split second, but there were marks where my jaw had clamped down. Without warning Mother’s hand swept swiftly and hard across my left cheek. Whack! It was the first time she had slapped me in the face. I cried, shaking in humiliation.

  That evening I ate dinner on my own, after even Ah Lai, and was made to do all the washing-up. I worked my way through the countless plates, the heavy wok, the bulky pots and the cumbersome stone implements the maid helped me lift – the pestle and mortar and roller which had been used against the flat grinding stone.