“Yes, I heard that too. Maybe we can get our old dialect dramas back,” the taxi driver says. “People used to sit in the kopi tiam and listen to Rediffusion as a community…”
Rediffusion was the old cable radio telecast. The transmitter set costs five dollars a month to rent. This existed long before electricity came to the villages and before television came into the country. Pansy has a vision of the coffee-shop in her old kampong, open on two sides with white-top tables and wooden chairs, an enamel spittoon under each table. There the trishaw riders would sit with their legs drawn up on the chairs, their loose Chinese trousers or shorts exposing their inner thighs, pouring their coffee into thick china saucers to cool the coffee before slurping from them.
Don’t sit like a trishaw puller, parents used to chide their children, a saying that began when the rickshaws and trishaws were not mechanised.
Pansy and the taxi driver share their favourite programmes and reminisce about Teochew customs, opera and their cultural foods: Teochew moey, Teochew fish balls, Teochew steamed fish, Teochew soon kueh and many others, as the taxi makes its way down the East Coast Parkway (ECP) and towards the coast.
The taxi driver’s face lights up when he talks about their food and culture. He tells Pansy where such genuine remaining stalls might be—in which food centres around the island. This chatting and sharing makes Pansy feel she is back in old Singapore, the one that she had known, where life was more laid back and people were more friendly and communicative, not staring into mobile phones and iPads, ears plugged by ear-phones, shutting out the possibility of interaction with another human being. Coming from her small English village in Bracklesham where strangers still smile and greet each other or comment on the weather, this enforced distancing, akin to unfriendliness, makes Pansy feel isolated and uncared for in a teeming pool of humanity.
Sitting on a bench at the East Coast Park and looking out to sea and the sky, Pansy’s heart lifts a little. She loves the wind in her hair, the sun on her face, the sounds of the waves rushing up and over the sandy beach. The beauty of it is that the beach is not far from the city centre or any part of the island. There are advantages to being a small country. Being close by the sea makes Pansy feel most alive. She was brought up on it. It takes her back to her youth, to the halcyon days when mechanical and vehicular sounds did not intrude on the villagers’ consciousness. Every now and then, a moment reminds her of that period in Kampong Tepi Laut, daring her to open the sluice gates to her life there. She allows herself a little memory and remembers how she delighted in the sound of the waves as they ebbed and flowed under their house on stilts at coastal Bedok. Gaps in the wooden floor boards allowed her to see the sandy beach underneath if she lay down on the floor, allowed her to watch the moving water that sometimes sent her into a trance-like state. When Anthony was small he had loved it too, so the two of them had lain side by side to try to count the waves. It was a good ruse to put him to sleep! Pansy had felt that she was in a sampan, in a native dug-out, not a house; the shifting waves gave her the sensation of being rocked in a cradle.
After the reclamation project began and they were forced to move, she had difficulty in sleeping without this reassuring constant sound. Fellow villagers, evicted from their seaside kampongs like her, had lamented about this as well, suffering years of insomnia, land-locked in their concrete HDB flats, unable to hear the sea, unable to smell the salt in the air or feel the breeze on their faces. People who have never lived near the sea cannot understand the enormity of such a loss. Sometimes, when George and herself were sitting in their conservatory looking out to Bracklesham Bay with an expanse of clear sea, horizon and sky, which stretched past the Isle of Wight all the way to France, George would recall their attap-thatched home by the sea in Singapore, one of the many which had stood by the water’s edge, amongst the clusters of seaside villages framed by leaning palm trees and long stretches of white sand, the kind of place that might be featured by travel agents in their brochures as a rustic holiday attraction.
“Do you remember us sitting on our verandah looking out to sea?”
“Oh, yes, I can never forget it. Kampong Tepi Laut is stitched into my memory. It can be destroyed physically but it will continue to exist in my mind. There are some things that can never be taken away. No matter how long we’ve been away, Singapore is already in my blood and cannot be siphoned out.”
“Indeed,” George had said, his voice bitter. “Singaporeans think that those of us who stay away from our homeland are quitters. Fancy people using such an absurd term! They think we’ve betrayed our country. But they don’t understand that we felt betrayed…”
“We know what happened,” Pansy said, patting his knee to comfort him. “We know why we had to leave.”
“Who would have thought that our idyllic life would have been shattered so drastically?”
“Yes,” Pansy said. “If not for what had happened, Mak might still be alive…”
“Oh, I’m sorry to have started this conversation …”
George had reached out to hug her then. Talk of Kim Guek invariably brought up that twist in Pansy’s guts. She tried to block out the unspeakable memory of her mother’s last day. Pain might be smoothed out by the whetstone of time but it
