He wore a store-bought shirt and shorts, and real leather shoes with socks, probably purchased from the English department store, Robinsons, at Raffles Place in the city. Next to him, the village children looked like street urchins with their bare bodies and bare feet, clad in homemade drawstring shorts. Their parents, like Pansy’s, could shop only at Robinson Petang.
“My mama said thirty packets of your best. We have a very big house on Emerald Hill. Mama is going to give one of her big parties and she wants the house to smell really nice.”
Pansy could not afford to react to the boy’s ill manners. Ten dollars was an incredible sum. Their house rent per month was five dollars. Haji Kahar, who was from Palembang and had bought thirty acres of a nutmeg plantation in Haji Salam Road across the river, was a benevolent landlord, and had charged his tenants only fifty cents a month, until his death in 1940! So ten dollars was not to be sniffed at.
“You’ll have to wait a bit, as I don’t have enough and will have to make some more,” she said, with a strained note of politeness.
“Don’t take too long,” he said. “I haven’t got all day.”
Pansy had a mind to chuck his money back into his face but restrained herself. She grumbled under her breath as she went to pick more flowers to make up the order and diligently proceeded to cut more sheaves of pandan. The sun was rising higher into the sky as she toiled and she could feel beads of perspiration sliding down her back. The boy watched her with his beady eyes as she worked furiously, her hair falling across her face now and then, which she pushed away to tuck behind her ears. He folded his arms across his chest and heaved several audible sighs as if to show he was fed up with waiting. His mouth shaped into a pout and when he pressed his chin down, his neck crumpled into various folds.
“Are you a Peranakan? Like us?” he asked as he picked his nose.
Obviously wealth did not necessarily breed good manners or sophistication.
Pansy didn’t trust herself to speak so she merely nodded.
“So how come you have to sell things? Like a low-class hawker?” he sneered. “I thought all Peranakans were rich?”
Chapter 4
Pansy could have throttled the rich kid. It was not an incident she could have shared with Kim Guek without hurting her. Kim Guek might think that Pansy was complaining about being poor and living in the kampong. Of course Pansy had heard of the rich Peranakans, living in their luxurious mansions on Emerald Hill or Katong. Who hadn’t? Many of them consist of landowners, businessmen, literati and even members of the cabinet. Several of them became wealthy through sheer hard work, emigrating from China, hungry and penniless to build thriving businesses or became landowners to own gambier, rubber or fruit plantations. The ones who married Malay or Javanese women were the progenitors of the Peranakan race unlike the sinkek who remained staunch Chinese by not assimilating any local culture. Some became rich through association with the colonial masters, and others, rumours were whispered darkly, through working for the Japanese during the war. But even rich Peranakans have poor relations. And Pansy was one of those, though she had no relations to speak of, her parents not disclosing their history from Malacca where they had hailed from.
In her fury, Pansy cycled fast, perspiration pouring from her brow. She had plaited her long hair, so that the wind could not take it. Short hair was not yet the fashion. The Malays and Indians, like many Peranakans, still insisted on their women on having long hair. It was considered a mark of femininity. Her sarong impeded her movement, though she was fortunate that her father had bought her a lady’s push-bike, without the cross bar. She must broach the subject of wearing modern slacks to Kim Guek. Certainly her father would not have approved, as he felt trousers directed attention to the female body’s intimate shape between the legs, especially for those who had pronounced mounds.
“Tak seronoh sekali,” Hock Chye had said when he saw a woman wearing a pair.
“Tak seronoh” was her parents’ frequent remark about something they were averse to. It could relate to any trait that was graceless, unfeminine or coarse, applied whenever her parents were displeased with any sort of behaviour.
“Aiyoh!” Kim Guek occasionally lamented in Malay and Teochew simultaneously to Pansy—a common trait of the Peranakans, to mix languages in one sentence. “Jangan dudok terkangkang! Mai chor kah kwee-kwee! Don’t sit with your legs open-open!”
Her parents’ admonition would be accompanied by the rapid clicking of their tongues, sounding like an over-active chichak on the wall. To them, it would not do to have a bra strap showing, or petticoat peeping out, or to walk past an adult without bowing in humility, or to talk to a man while looking him in the face. Intimate items of clothing were not meant to be seen in public, private body parts were not meant to be displayed. That was one of the reasons the sarong kebaya was the preferred mode of attire for Malay and Peranakan women. The length of the kebaya blouse reached the hips, the sarong was underneath, so there was no danger of hinting at or exposing the female’s ‘secret garden’. To wear something low-cut would probably make her parents apoplectic.
The nearest Pansy came to wearing any trouser-type outfits were her school’s PE dark blue bloomers, voluminous shorts reminiscent of their Victorian origins, which were elasticated and gathered at the knees, so that there would be no hint of a girl’s private parts—or accidental glimpse of inner thighs. But some of her convent classmates had boasted of wearing trousers out of school, proud of being avant garde. Most of her schoolmates came from well-to-do families who wanted their children to benefit from English educators. So
