But Pansy hadn’t minded, had loved it in fact; the diverse cultures did not clash, they enriched her. For a girl living in a small, isolated kampong by the sea on the East Coast of Singapore, with little possibility of travel, it was wonderful to be exposed to a different country right across the other side of the world, to its culture, lifestyle and literature. This was the era before mobile phones, the Internet, computers or easy air travel. There was only one phone box in the entire village that was the villagers’ means of communicating with the outside world. Pansy loved English poetry, especially poems that described nature and brought the English outdoors to her in Kampong Tepi Laut. The village’s Malay name aptly described its position by the sea, straddled as it was between the rivers, Sungei Bedok and Sungei Ketapang, one of the many places which had fallen victim to the land reclamation project. After the reclamation, even the two rivers had been redirected from their natural flow to pour into Bedok Canal, before they were permitted to reach the sea.
Pansy enjoyed poems which painted the colour and glories of seasons absent in the tropics. They taught her to be sensitive to the nature around her, alerted her to the changing moods of the clouds and sky, opened her ears to subtler sounds. Sister Catherine was largely instrumental in showing her how carefully selected words framed in verse could transport her into exalted experiences. It was Sister Catherine’s very English, Home Counties’ voice, scaling the poetic metre and enunciating the words ever so properly, that converted Pansy into a life-long disciple of poetry.
“Round your ‘Os’ and end your words clearly, Pansy,” she said. “Don’t talk like the rat-tat-tat of a gun. Hear the rhythm of the verse in your inner ear. Don’t rush! Linger over the meaning of a word. Experience the emotion of the word. Feel with your senses!”
Poems like William Wordsworth’s ‘To the Small Celandine’ or John Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’ offered Pansy a virtual experience she would otherwise not have had, except for that moment which George had shared with her when they were teenagers. She loved learning the poems by heart and reciting them, resonating with their rhythm and cadence as if she were recapturing a memory of an earlier life incarnated in Britain.
Even though the poetry was from and about England, there was a universality about it that transcended race and culture and touched the human heart deeply. Another poem that moved her was ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake. The majesty and awe of the tiger had come alive for her in Blake’s telling, and the sense of the Creative Power inspired her:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
“Listen, listen,” Sister Catherine’s voice comes to Pansy again. “Pay attention to Blake’s choice of words. You can almost hear the heartbeat of the tiger…”
Beloved Sister Catherine, her unfailing moral support. Pity they never met up after she left Singapore. Despite her age and failing memory, Pansy can still recite the poem in its entirety. Except that these days, she cannot find any listening ear; people nowadays are always in a hurry, too busy and too preoccupied.
“Aiyoh!” her son Anthony said when she grumbled, “Who can be bothered to sit and listen to poetry these days? We don’t even teach literature in our schools lor. Do you know that ten years ago we had forty thousand students studying literature but this year only three thousand students offered it as a subject…?”
“That’s so sad…” Pansy started to say.
“That’s logical what…” Anthony’s wife, Emily, CEO of Tiger Global Investments, interrupted. “Literature very hard to score ‘A’ what. What for waste time memorising such things? Doesn’t bring any benefit or pay the bills what. Remember what LKY said when he was trying to build a nation: ‘There is no time for poetry…’”
“Are you sure he said that?” Anthony said. “Hey, don’t misquote the guy…”
LKY. Lee Kuan Yew. Now ailing and nearly ninety. The present Prime Minister’s father. Builder of modern Singapore. Gutsy. Formidable. He built a wealthy nation from a land of mudflats and swamps, without natural resources; pulled up a post-colonial struggling country up by the bootstraps to shape into a First World nation. There was much to thank him for. There were also dissenting voices who levelled barbed remarks.
It followed that none of Anthony and Emily’s three daughters studied literature in school. Emily had named all her daughters after famous film actresses, called actors these days, so as not to be sexist—Goldie, the eldest at twenty-six, followed by Winona and Andie, all two years apart from one another. Nobody speaks of it now, but Andie was the result of Anthony and Emily’s last attempt to have a boy.
“I hate my name,” Goldie used to whisper to Pansy. “Mum is obsessed with film stars. I feel ridiculous when my hair is so black and I’m so brown!”
Pansy couldn’t let on that she disapproved of Emily’s choice of names as she would have preferred more traditional ones that had reference to the family clan. At least if she had to choose modern names, why not beautiful meanings and positive attributes rather than names of actresses? But then who was she to comment when her own mother had given her an English floral name that was non-traditional too? To console her eldest granddaughter, she merely patted Goldie’s hand.
It is true that in an era when information can be
