Calling from Suzhou

Once again, I was out of Singapore for my father's birthday. This one was his seventy-fifth, and I was 3,700 kilometres away, in a small city in China. On the eve of his birthday, I called home.

My mother picked up the phone, "Oh, hi there, son."

"Where's Dad? I want to wish him Happy Birthday," I said.

"He's in the bathroom."

"Oh dear."

"Give him 5 minutes," she suggested, "or maybe we can call you back. Are you at home?"

"I'm in Suzhou."

"What? My goodness! I thought you were at home!"

"It doesn't sound any different, does it? The wonders of modern telecommunications!"

A few months before my mother was born, in 1927, her parents came to Singapore from China, via a few years in Hong Kong. I'm not even sure if I can use the word "migrated". They came as refugees and I suppose, in varying degrees, they must have kept alive the hope of going back to the old country sometime.

My mother's family was a large and complex one. Her mother, my maternal grandmother, was born Lee Tohkuen in the very same Suzhou to a poor family, in 1900. She was given away as a servant girl, almost a slave, to a slightly better-off family in Guangdong, and with that she lost contact with her biological family. Needless to say, she never received an education, though she eventually learnt to read but never got as far as to write.

My maternal grandmother, called "Fourth granny"

It is impossible today to imagine what life must have felt like to be given away as a servant while as a child and then to grow up illiterate. We are so far removed from that kind of society that I am not even sure what impact these facts will have on the reader. But it is precisely because the three generations in Singapore have seen so much change, that I feel there is a story to tell.

One has to be very careful with context. The culture was not entirely inhumane. The host family had certain obligations to treat their servant girls as sort of family, and between growing up destitute and a beggar, and being given away to a family who can at least feed and clothe the child, the latter might have been the kinder option. Many years later, after Grandmother Lee had moved on to Singapore and when my mother was still a child, the son of that host family visited Singapore, and my mother recalled that they treated each other as step-siblings, and she was told to consider the visitor as her uncle. Clearly, there were bonds from even those inauspicious beginnings.

Another social obligation on the host family was to arrange a marriage for the servant girl when she reached her twenties. Naturally, with such a background, the options were limited, and Grandmother was married (if one can even use that word) as the Fourth Concubine to my Grandfather Wong Karjun.

Traditional Chinese families were as polygamous as money could afford. Grandfather Wong, who came from a relatively wealthy family in Zhongshan, near Guangzhou, collected 2 wives (the second one after the death of the first), and 5 concubines, simply numbered Second to Sixth.

In the early twenties, soon after my grandmother was hitched to Grandfather Wong, they moved to Hong Kong. There, grandfather set up a photography shop, and put his concubines to work. The talented one was the Sixth Concubine as she had a flair for developing the photographs just right. Then somehow, Grandfather got mixed up with the political currents of China -- he was an activist in the Kuomintang (the Chinese nationalist-republican movement) -- and soon had enemies coming after him.

The family had to flee to Singapore, leaving whatever fortunes they had behind, and my grandfather took the assumed name Wong Lanson. That was 1927. The family consisted by that time, of the second wife, the Concubines 3, 4, 5 and 6, and their children. The first wife had died in China well before as had Concubine no. 2.

A few months after arrival here, my mother was born.

Grandfather had been, before the stay in Hong Kong, a salesman for Singer sewing machines in Shanghai, and in the course of that business, had learnt some men's suits tailoring. With that, the first business venture he set up in Singapore was, oh no, nothing so commonplace as a tailor shop, but a school for men's tailoring. I'm not surprised it failed. I think it was ahead of its time, as life was still very basic in those days.

After that, Grandfather busied himself with a shop offering home-made cures. It is not at all clear where the expertise came from, and my father remembers with some amusement the old Wong's exaggerated claims about being able to cure breast ulcers (or were they breast cancers?) with some powders. If you listen to my father, you get the hint that the ulcers or cancers were not the point, the breasts were.

At the same time, the old man had not forgotten the tried and tested formula of living off the concubines' work. So in addition to the medicine shop, Grandfather set up the first barber shop in Singapore with lady barbers -- you can guess who they were! -- and it was soon the talk of the town. A little scandalous perhaps, but irresistible to enough customers to make a go of it.

Further diversification led to a restaurant business, under the care of Fifth Concubine, but it didn't do well.

The family was too large to stay together most of the time. They rented rooms in different parts of town, Pagoda Street, Victoria Street and Bukit Pasoh among them, and the women and the children were shuffled about to suit the available space.

The only time they all lived together was in the late thirties and early forties when they rented a large house in Spottiswoode Park. There, Sixth Granny had a pet monkey who kept stealing my grandmother's underwear off the clothesline and scampering off to the roof with them. Despite this, those were contented times. My mother was happy in school and even joined the Girl Guides. Like her brothers, she was, for reasons impossible to explain now, sent to English-language schools, Fairfield and then St Anthony's. This decision set in train the great language shift that occurred in that generation, to be followed by the great cultural shift in mine. But these are themes are for another essay.

Then came the Second World War and the Japanese occupation 1942 - 1945, events which would turn that generation's life upside down. There has been nothing in our times remotely comparable to that; we can't even begin to imagine what it was like. It was horribly disruptive, and whatever momentum a family had built up was wiped out. The family had to give up the Spottiswoode house, split up again, and moved to rented rooms. My Grandmother Lee moved out with my mother, and they never stayed with Grandfather again.

Besides the privations of the Japanese occupation, two of the other women also disappeared. They were my mother's elder sister and Sixth Granny. My mother's sister was apparently an incurable romantic, and just before the invasion of the Japanese, was determined to follow her boyfriend to Johore. 

	"Sixth granny", who was not my biological grandmother

Grandfather's blessings were unlikely, so they stole out in the middle of the night, that is, they eloped. But what was fantastic was that Sixth Granny, concerned for her safety, followed them. Already, something has changed in a generation. From the practice of arranged marriages or being given away as concubines in one generation, we have elopement (and the abetment thereof!) in the next.

Unfortunately, the boyfriend was killed by an artillery shell, and the two women were stuck in Johore, unable to return to Singapore because of travel restrictions during the war. All contact with them was lost. It was only after the Allied victory that they could make their way back. They found Grandfather furious and unforgiving. They put up with it for a while, then my mother's sister got married to another man. Things were too strained for Sixth Granny to stay with Grandfather, and it was my Grandmother Lee who gave her shelter in her room in Joo Chiat. The distance between the old man and the women living out, including my mother, then nearing twenty, widened.

After the war, Grandfather Wong sold his medicine shop, and spent a little of the proceeds to visit China to tend to his family's graves, an important duty for that generation. It was his only visit to the old country since his first voyage out some twenty years before.

My mother became a teacher, and in her first job met my father and they fell in love. At this point, the story is recognisably modern, but the most far-reaching technological changes were still to come. They would revolutionarise just about every aspect of their lives, particularly in communications and travel.

At the beginning of this century, when my grandmother, born in Suzhou, was given away, she lost forever her original family. The distance -- not just the physical distance, but the distance of social class and illiteracy, was unbridgeable. Last October when I telephoned from Suzhou, there was no distance at all. The clarity of transmission was such that my mother thought I was calling from my home, just six kilometres from theirs!

Getting to Suzhou itself the way we do nowadays would have been a miracle to the generation of my grandmother's youth. In our age, we hop onto planes with little more formality than taking a bus. For her, the voyage from Hong Kong to Singapore as a refugee in 1927, was an irrevocable move of a lifetime. And for the rest of her life, she always kept a suitcase in the corner of her room, carefully packed, ready for going back to China. She never did. Never had the chance. She died in 1965.

© Yawning Bread 

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