Having a TV at home was progress. Of course, we shared it with our less fortunate neighbours. Instead of congregating outdoors after work to chat, tell stories and sing, as we did before, we now gathered indoors to discuss the latest episode of Sea Hunt, Z Cars, Bonanza and Peyton Place. Mak laughed at the antics of the Teochew comedians Wang Sha and Ye Feng. Our home became a mini-cinema auditorium, with neighbours bearing gifts of epok-epok and kachang putih. The Radio Television Singapore, or RTS, telecast commenced at 6pm in the evening, with the national flag waving in the breeze as the national anthem played. Locally, instead of using the word “anthem”, the villagers just referred to it as “Majulah”.
“Hurry up!” people would yell enthusiastically. “Majulah is on already!”
Our neighbours sat on the cement floor or on empty wooden fruit crates, whilst our family sat on our beds. Everyone cheered as the four presenters in their cultural costumes appeared on the screen, greeting everyone with Good Evening and welcome in the four official languages. There was only one channel.
PAP had been fulfilling its 1959 rally promises. First, it filled the potholes in the kampong road, though it was still not tarred. This meant that when the monsoon rain came, it would dislodge the packed sand and create new potholes. Secondly, PAP supplied us with electricity. But, we were still waiting eagerly for taps to be installed in our attap houses and public bathrooms. And we were beside ourselves with joyous anticipation at the thought that we might get flush toilets in the very near future, so that we no longer had to tolerate the disgusting, horrid smelling jambans, with cockroaches, centipedes and rats running all around, below as well as in the cubicles of our communal wooden outhouses.
“Imagine if we had flush toilets, I wouldn’t have to empty the tambui anymore,” Mak said wistfully, using the Teochew term for a chamber pot.
Our Sennett Estate neighbours across Upper Serangoon Road had flush toilets, and the village kids had devised a game of listening for the flush. The first one to hear it received a prize of one boiled sweet in its shiny, crackling paper! By now, I was one of the privileged few, as I had access to flush toilets in school. It was a monumental feat to save my “big jobs” for school! It was my very first effort at self-control. But my poor mother did not have such a privilege, except when we visited my rich cousins in town, which was at Chinese New Year and Christmas, in the days when my grandmother Lao Ee was still alive. Twice a year, Mak would have the sheer luxury of squatting in a clean cubicle to do her business. I so dreamt of giving her a life of ease, where she could use the toilet in comfort and had soft toilet paper, instead of our squares of old newspaper. Once, I had stolen some from school for her, but she had said I should not have stolen it, though her telltale eyes were moist with emotion.
My family was in the minority group of Peranakans who were Teochew, since Peranakans were generally Hokkien. The Peranakans were themselves a minority group within the Chinese community due to our mixed heritage of Chinese and Malay/Indonesian, with possible traces of Portuguese and Dutch, the latter two having colonised the seaport of Malacca, where the majority of Peranakans in Singapore originated from. Other groups of Chinese Peranakans came from Penang. My own maternal grandmother was Portuguese, with some elusive Dutch connections.
It didn’t seem appropriate for Mak, still slim and elegant in her sarong kebaya at 51, to be performing such an inelegant chore. Though the enamel tambui was pretty, with a shapely white body painted with pink peonies and green leaves, its contents were not. The chamber pot was not only her curse, it was mine too. It was supposedly for the use of my younger siblings at nights so that they didn’t have to traipse in the dark to the public toilets, courting the danger of falling into the hole in the platform of the cubicle or being bitten by a rat, centipede or scorpion. Or encountering the python on its nightly ramble. But my father often used the chamber pot in the night for his big job, and its stench would linger all night throughout our house which had no proper bedrooms. Wooden walls separated the kitchen from the bedroom and living room; fabric curtains served as doors. It was my mother’s task to empty the chamber pot each morning. Since my father had refused to educate me and would beat Mak if she used the housekeeping money for my schooling, she had taken in the neighbours’ washing, plus made and sold her nasi lemak so that I could go to school. To repay her in some way, I took it upon myself to take over her unpleasant task.
Mak had lost daughters and sons to the Japanese Occupation, poverty and disease, plus some were stillborn, an unspeakable pain which she would not divulge, so we never really knew the exact number
