Taking advantage of this murmur of rebellion, 400 anti-government rioters staged demonstrations in Geylang, Aljunied and Chinatown on 1 May, Labour Day. Many of them were protesting against the Trade Union Amendment Act. Our country’s unrest continued into June, when another 100 protestors including young girls, suspected to be from the Chinese schools, raided the Central Fire Station at Hill Street. They set fire to it and to hapless motorcars that happened to be parked nearby. Some smashed into the US embassy and tore down the American flag from its flagpole. But those rebels quickly wised up to the fact that it was not advisable to mess with this government.
In another sector, Thailand was restricting the export of rice because of poor yields. Rice, the staple food of the people of Singapore, especially for the ordinary working majority, became expensive. So the government started the Eat Wheat Campaign, churning out posters for island-wide distribution which said, “Wheat is good for you” and “Wheat gives you a variety of food to suit every taste”.
“Cham lah, Ah Phine,” Third Elder Brother said to me. “You are such a Peng Thang, Rice-Bin. I can’t see you convert readily to wheat.”
Rice was indeed my daily fix and I could not feel replete if I did not have at least one plate of rice a day. So its shortage was indeed one of my darkest hours.
This was followed by another, one which, without sounding callous, I had not anticipated to be a dark hour. I had dreamt for so long to be free of my father’s tyranny that I was shocked by how much I was affected by his loss when my father, Ah Tetia, died. Since his retirement, he had been stricken by abdominal pains. Of course, he had been a chain smoker all his life, filling our house with the horrid smell of stale cigarette smoke. But that would not have affected his stomach, we thought. For one who had consistently carried weights with the other kampong lads, Rajah and Salleh, and who was so healthy to be able to ride his bicycle from Potong Pasir to William Jacks at Upper Bukit Timah Road, his deterioration was rapid. He started having trouble keeping his food down. He used to have such a voracious appetite but now, nothing seemed to satisfy his palate.
“I feel as if a metallic taste has coated my tongue,” he moaned.
His belly had swelled to incredible proportions and he was immediately hospitalised at Outram Road General Hospital, ORGH. We didn’t know until after his death that he had abdominal cancer, still a fairly recent medical discovery at the time, so there was no hope for a cure. As his final days approached, our family took turns to be at his bedside. I had always harboured anger towards him, for hurting my mother, siblings and myself with the rotan cane and his belt. He had been merciless during his mad rages and tempers. His ugly words about my worthlessness were a pickaxe that had permanently damaged my self-esteem. I had lived under his continual threat of marrying me off when I reached 17. Now his imminent death would mean that I would be freed from this Damocles’ sword. Yet it brought me no joy. A father was still a father. He looked pale and shrunken on his hospital bed. Only as he lay dying did I recall his good side, his laughter as he tickled my toes to wake me up, our good times at the movies, his great love for films which he passed on to me, sharing his love for his favourite actor, Boris Karloff, who had a physiognomy which suited the horror films he starred in. I remembered how I used to wait for Ah Tetia to come home when he had been out for his leisure activities. I would whoop for joy to announce to the rest of the family if he was carrying an upeh packet, a skein of folded palm bark, which kept the food hot: char kway teow, hokkien mee, chye tow kway, mee goreng…
“Ah Phine ah,” he said feebly, when I was on the watch by his bedside. “Ah Lao Ee is calling me.”
Lao Ee was my grandmother, his mother, who had lived with my rich cousins in town and who had frequently made pork rissoles to give to him for us. But she had passed on the previous year. I knew that he had missed her terribly. When he uttered those words, all my hair stood on end. I felt that the spirit of bent old Lao Ee, in her kebaya panjang, our Peranakan costume for elderly ladies, was indeed standing there at the foot of his bed. Of her four sons, he was always her favorite. It would make sense for her spirit to accompany my father’s to the next realm. I knew then that it wouldn’t be long before he too would depart.
There was something I had to do before he died.
Fortunately, I had saved money from my recess allowance and from giving English tuition to the kampong kids. I would buy my father the fish and chips he always bought for us when he got his Christmas bonus from William Jacks. It was one of the lovely things my father did, though his mad rages had obfuscated the memory of that gesture. STC bus number 18 went from Neil Road near ORGH to Serangoon Gardens. This area was home to many British officers and their families. That was where Ah Tetia used to take me to buy one packet of fish and chips, wrapped in newsprint, to be shared with the whole family. The fact that the chips were soft and
