“When I pick up one of Josephine Chia’s books on Singapore’s past, I always know that I’m in for a treat. Josephine brings her readers back to the Singapore of the 1950s and 60s that she grew up in and, in her simple, accessible prose she realistically evokes its sights and sounds and smells. In doing so, she helps us to re-live and re-imagine those days and, in singing her song, she helps us to sing ours.”
- Dr Angeline Yap, lawyer and poet
“When it comes to historical fiction, Josephine Chia is in a class of her own. Combining beautifully history with memory, strong reality with desired fantasy, she has woven a poetical tapestry that proves engaging, even alluring. I have no doubt that this novel will appeal to readers old and young, Singaporean and non-Singaporean for it is, ultimately, about love. Love in its manifold splendour.”
- Dr Kirpal Singh, author of Thinking Hats & Coloured Turbans and Director, Wee Kim Wee Centre, SingaporeManagement University
When a flower dies© Josephine Chia, 2015
ISBN: 978-981-09-6314-9 (Print)
ISBN: 978-981-14-3257-6 (E-book)
Published under the imprint Ethos Books
by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd
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Cover Design by Yen Phang
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Published with the support of
Made possible with the
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National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Chia, Josephine, author.
When a flower dies / Josephine Chia. – Singapore : Ethos Books, [2015]
pages cm
ISBN : 978-981-09-6314-9 (pbk)
ISBN : 978-981-14-3257-6 (ebk)
1. Loss (Psychology) – Fiction. 2. Bereavement – fiction. 3. Spouses – fiction. 4. Singapore – History – 20th century – Fiction. I. Title.
PR9570.S53
S823 -- dc23
OCN918767817
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The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.
—William Wordsworth, 1806
Note from the author:
This is a work of fiction. The main village in this story, Kampong Tepi Laut, is a fictional village and it never existed though it is representative of the seaside kampongs which did. However, all the other coastal villages that are mentioned in this book and which were eventually destroyed did exist both on the east and west coasts of Singapore. The three banyan trees that are featured in the novel are the few vestigial remains of the eastern kampongs. Though based on some historical facts, the unfolding of events is purely fictional.
Note from the editors:
In this book, we made the decision not to italicise terms and references that are at home in Peranakan culture. These would include Malay names and Singlish expressions. The act of italicising words from one’s own culture is also an act of dispossession, and we would like to bring your reading experience closer to life as lived by the characters in this book.
Chapter 1
What a joy it is to come across a host of daffodils here in tropical Singapore! The temperature-controlled Flower Dome at Gardens by the Bay, simulating spring, has made the phenomenon possible—a twenty-first century miracle, surely? William Wordsworth would have been amazed. He had caught sight of his daffodils whilst on his walks in nineteenth century England’s wide-spaced and hilly Lake District in Cumbria. It was his poem which Pansy Chan has always associated with these flowers:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of golden daffodils
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
She was taught the English poem at St Teresa of Avila’s Convent on the old East Coast Road, before land reclamation from 1966 to 1976 stole part of the sea and pushed the coastline out, altering the physical shape of Singapore forever and irrevocably changing the lives of the coastal dwellers. The image of the daffodils had lived in her mind as a symbol of beauty and freedom. And when she eventually saw them for the first time in England, she was smitten, their image instantly becoming a reality which she fell in love with. She would also associate the spring flowers with George, and their constant love for each other. And now to see them here in her own home country was nothing short of a miracle.
Since she was a pre-war baby, in her youth the country was still a British colony and many of the English schools’ syllabi contained references to its rich literature. This was a time when schoolchildren read Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Keats, Tennyson, Shelley, Blake, Eliot, Frost, Auden; the Bronte sisters, Austen and many others. It never occurred to Pansy that it was odd that young Asian children should be reciting Here we go round the mulberry bush when nobody knew what a mulberry bush looked like. Out of school, they read Dennis the Menace and Desperate Dan comics, Postman Pat, Roald Dahl, Beatrix Potter and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Secret Seven and Malory Towers series, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Young girls dreamt about having adventures, falling in love with knights in shining armour, or being free from parental tyranny at boarding schools in the UK. To them, England was a magical country where everybody was rich and children had lots to eat and had flush toilets, where there were no cockroaches or rats
