It was the beginning of NS in Singapore.
Nineteen sixty-seven was a truly dramatic year, with all sorts of developments. Philanthropist Mr Lee Kong Chian, well known for his contribution to our society, died. In Malaysia, silk magnate Jim Thompson walked out of his house in Cameron Highlands and was never seen again. But there were pleasant happenings too. In December, the first supersonic aeroplane, the Concorde, was unveiled in Toulouse, France. The Concorde was narrower than the other airliners, could travel at incredible speed and would take only four hours to get from London to New York. It was a stupendous moment in aviation history.
My father had bought our first TV set in 1965 to watch our weightlifter, Tan Howe Liang, in the SEAP Games. If he were still alive, Ah Tetia would certainly have glued himself to the TV to watch the news about Singapore’s 13-year-old swimmer, Patricia Chan Li-Yin, swimming her way to victory in the 1967 SEAP Games, which were held in Bangkok. She earned her moniker, Golden Girl, for her haul of gold medals since she started competing when she was just 11. This year, she shone again and made our new nation proud, with a record-breaking 10 gold medals!
1 The term “spastic” was an internationally and widely used term in those days. People with disabilities today will prefer to be described first as a person or an individual followed by his or her disability if it is relevant. >
Sunshine Opportunities
(1968)
WHEN I was a child, I was nearly always hungry. In our household, we had to share one mackerel with eight people! Some days, there was only boiled rice with soya sauce and one fried egg. The fear of not getting any food for the day manifested itself in my nightmares, and haunted me till my adulthood. There was no logic in it, but it was a hunger that could not be assuaged, even after I had money in my wallet.
Our family never took food for granted and hated any wastage. It was the same for the majority of our kampong neighbours. When the gnawing in our bellies became unbearable, the other village children and myself used to raid the dustbins of the English at Atas Bukit where we might find an apple or pear, some unspoiled biscuits and cakes, and especially stuff that the English bought at Cold Storage on Orchard Road, where we could not afford to shop. If that failed, we would resort to the countryside. Our wild fields of lallang, ponds and river were a sunshine of opportunities to find food: eggs from chickens and ducks who strayed from their coops, fish from the river, eels from the river banks or monsoon drains, edible frogs in the marshlands, tapioca or ubi kayu and sweet potato or keledek with their leaves from the grasslands. When we did manage to uproot some sugar cane, we dragged the long leafy plants home in a community spirit of gotong royong, singing as we went along, probably one of P. Ramlee’s songs. Our mothers would skin the sugar cane, then cut the long cane into chunks, and then into short strips. Boys who liked to think they were macho would keep their cane about a foot long, so that there was a dramatic effect when they bit into the stem. Often, you would see small groups of kids, mostly barefooted, looking like street urchins, chewing and chewing the juice out of the cane until it became fibrous and pulpy.
The village road also provided unexpected sustenance through its road kill, or using a Malay expression, mati katak, or the death of a frog (that had been run over by vehicles!). When a bullock cart, motorcar or lorry ran over a chicken or duck, we village children would scramble to the road after the vehicle had moved on, to see if the dead animal was salvageable. As long as the domestic animal was not diseased, it was potential food—never mind if it was a bit squashed!
“Saya punya! Saya punya!” the first child who reached it would claim ownership and was entitled to take home its remains for mother to cook!
When you were poor, you couldn’t afford to be proud or choosy.
But I was now a teenager, so I left the mati katak scramble to my younger neighbours. I was now waiting for my Senior Cambridge School Certificate results so that I could start working to contribute to the family’s finances. I had already started by giving English tuition to the village children. Most of the time, payment was in kind—some rambutans, chikku or cooked food. Ah Tetia’s retirement and subsequent death had put a strain on Mak. Now that she had Robert to manage on a daily basis, she could no longer wash clothes for others, nor did she have time to make any more nasi lemak to sell. It was up to Third Elder Brother and myself. Elder and Second Brother did continue to contribute but they had to put their own families first. Third Elder Brother did not have any ambition for material success so he plodded on at odd jobs. But he was a good son; he gave everything he earned to Mak. My mother, in turn, would give him back what was enough for his bus fare to work and back. This was an accepted custom in our time. Every day, Mak would cook him his lunch and put it in a two-tiered tingkat
