| July
1997
The Mun Dispensary years, part 2 This is Part 2 of the story spanning the three decades my paternal grandfather lived in Singapore, which were also my own father's growing up years. It may not make much sense if you haven't read Part 1 first.
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The Second World War
hit Singapore on 8 December 1941 [1]
when Japan declared War on the Allies, and launched its bombing raids from
airbases in Southern Vietnam. Simultaneously, Japanese troops landed in Southern
Thailand and the Northeast coast of Malaya, and over the following 2 months,
routed the British defences with amazing speed. By the end of January, they had
come all the way down the peninsula, and were poised to attack Singapore.
The Japanese advance had been so rapid that there were hardly any preparations to defend Singapore island. The British had no naval or air cover to speak of. Australian and Indian regiments, together with local volunteers, ill-equipped and barely trained, were rushed to the swampy Northern coast of the island to do what they could. The first enemy landings took place on 8 February, and immediately the retreat resumed, more chaotic than ever. After a week of heavy bombing, artillery fire, and infantry combat in the jungles, farms and then the suburbs, the British surrendered. It was Chinese New Year's Day, 15 February 1942. Few people alive today anywhere in the world would have first-hand experience of an occupation army seizing a city. This is what my father wrote about the morning after [2]:
There was worse to come. Three days later, the Japanese launched Operation Clean-up:
One in ten would mean something like 25,000 to 30,000 male Chinese [3]. There was never a final count. Years later, we would find their remains, in mass graves on the beaches, in the hills and forests. They had been bound, lined up and machine-gunned within the first two weeks of the Japanese occupation. For the mass screening of Operation Clean-up, my family, which was then living in a terrace house at 301 Clemenceau Avenue, was ordered to report to an area bounded by River Valley Road, Read Street, the Singapore River and Clemenceau Avenue. Today, Liang Court and the tarted-up Clarke Quay entertainment district stand there. Tens of thousands were gathered in the streets under the relentless sun or in the stuffy shophouses. Nothing happened for a day and a night. My grandfather and his sons slept (or tried to sleep) outside in the arcaded pavement, but a kind shopkeeper let my grandmother and her daughters into his premises for the night. The following morning, the women were told to leave but the men waited on. Finally, in the late afternoon, it was my family's turn to join the snaking line shuffling past the Japanese. A 20-year-old Chinese male, as my father was then, would have the highest risk of internment. The Singapore Chinese community had given enormous support to China in her war with Japan for the previous 5 years, including fundraising, propaganda work and even enlisting in the Chinese army. Furthermore, young men were most likely to organise resistance to the Japanese occupation. You join the line with a good chance that it would lead you to torture and death. My grandfather led the way, followed by his 4 sons, all in a fearful daze. They went down a street into a barbed-wire enclosure and continued past some Japanese officers at the exit. No questions were even asked. My father believes there was an informer hidden in the shadows behind the Japanese, and on his word, the soldiers would pick out the unlucky ones from the line [4]. It appeared quite arbitrary, with the brawnier suntanned ones more likely to be singled out. He still thinks the so-called informers were merely settling personal scores. Those who were pulled out were ordered into lorries, and that was the last their friends and relatives would see of them. Our family was lucky. Everyone came out unscathed, and they walked 2 km home, up River Valley Road, and through Killiney Road. Just a few weeks before the British surrender, a Lim Kok-tung and his family fled from the surrender of Penang, to Singapore. They sought refuge with their Singapore friends, the Tans, who were next door neighbours to our family. However, the Tans had no room in their house, so the Lim family moved into ours. Now Lim Kok-tung had been born in Taiwan (then a conquered territory of Japan) and was a graduate of Tokyo University. He spoke fluent Japanese, and in the chaotic early days of the occupation, was a helpful intermediary for the family. The Japanese however, also thought he would make a useful interpreter, and before long, poor Lim Kok-tung found himself drafted by the Kempeitai, the Japanese secret police. He had to assist with their interrogation sessions at the Coconut Grove, previously a nightclub, but now one of the detention centres the Kempeitai set up around Singapore, and which was just 4 doors away from the family home at Clemenceau Avenue. He had to watch while fellow Chinese were being brutally tortured and at the end of each day, he would stumble home, nauseous and pale, "I can't take it any more!". It was bad. My father remembers hearing the searing screams day and night from the Kempeitai centre, and it was distressing that no one could do anything to help. And then there was the family's double-barrelled shotgun, used for protection against wild boars whenever my grandfather visited his rubber plantation on Karimun Island, about 50 km West of Singapore. The Japanese required all weapons to be surrendered, except that grave suspicion would fall on anyone who might even HAVE a firearm to surrender. Taking it in would risk immediate arrest. But not surrendering it would guarantee execution by decapitation. What sort of choice was that? So reluctantly, my father and his elder brother went to the Mun Dispensary where the shotgun was kept in the backroom and, accompanied by Lim Kok-tung, they all went tremulously in a trishaw to the Japanese headquarters. The family was to be eternally grateful to Lim for explaining the situation, and getting off with mere formalities. For the first month of the Japanese occupation, there was nothing to do (unless you were being tortured) and my father went around visiting friends. All schools and colleges were closed, on Japanese orders, and my father's final year at Raffles College was interrupted. Then about a month into the Occupation, the Japanese required all unemployed young men to join their labour gangs, which would work at the wharves or in their factories. My father didn't relish the thought of hard labour, and certainly didn't want to assist the Japanese in any way. But to escape the draft, he needed a job. Fortunately, offices and businesses were beginning to reopen, and his classmate Kip Lee's father was a manager of Estates and Trust Agencies Pte Ltd., From him, my father got a job as a typist. He had already taught himself touch-typing, banging on his elder brother's typewriter at home before the war, but in that job, he perfected his typing skills. To this day, he types better than I, and remains most comfortable striking hard at manual typewriters, none of these electronic keyboards the present effete generation uses. By 1944, he had worked himself up to Chief Clerk, even though he was just 23 years old. The Japanese instituted a food rationing system, but supplies were always short. To supplement the rations, the family planted tapioca in the railway embankment behind the house. But there was no meat. Lim Kok-tung then used his contacts with the Kempeitai to get permission to enter Cold Storage. Now, Cold Storage had been the premier importer and supplier of food and provisions for the White expatriates during the British period, but was now commandeered by the Japanese. He took my father and uncle (my father's elder brother) with him. It was just a short walk to the old Cold Storage along Orchard Road (Centrepoint stands at that location now). Lim Kok-tung went up to the guards, convinced them that he was authorised to draw provisions, got a nod, and shepherded his two accomplices into the freezer room. There were boxes and boxes of rabbit, rabbit and more rabbit. Rabbit then, it would have to be. So the three of them took as much as they could carry, as fast as they could go. The family had never been confronted with rabbit before, and there wasn't a recipe in sight. They made a stew out of it, and loved it. Tasted like chicken, my father recalls. Incredibly, they went back to Cold Storage a few more times, to get more. Next, they felt they weren't getting enough greens, and decided to go foraging. Again taking advantage of Lim Kok-tung's travel privileges -- everybody else would have difficulty getting past the sentries stationed at all major road junctions, sentries who would beat you for the slightest reason, like not bowing at the correct angle -- they bicycled to Evans Road, in Bukit Timah, the nearest vegetable farms they could think of. They got off their bikes, walked non-chalantly onto the farm and pulled vegetables out of the ground as if they owned the place. The farmers saw them from a distance, but didn’t challenge them, thinking that the three guys were Japanese. After all, only the Japanese were allowed to roam around Singapore through the numerous checkpoints! Meanwhile, my grandfather continued to run the Mun Dispensary. Business was difficult when purchasing power was reduced all around, and the Japanese replaced the currency with their "Banana Dollars", so called because the notes featured various tropical fruit trees. This currency never quite gained the confidence of the people. He was also caught up in the Japanese ransom. This was the demand by the occupiers that the Chinese community raise S$50 million (about S$2 billion in 1997 terms), as the price for leaving the community in peace. All the clan leaders, led by Lim Boon-keng from the Hokkien community, had to pitch in to collect this sum from businesses and ordinary people. My grandfather had to do his fundraising rounds among the Cantonese business fraternity again, this time with anger and humiliation, in full knowledge that the money would only help the Japanese military budget. At about this time, the Mun Dispensary took on its third in-house doctor. Dr Tham (the godsend to the prostitutes) had died, and succeeding him was a Dr Lau Yong-boon, who had previously been an army surgeon with the British Military's Middleton Hospital. Of course, with the ignominious defeat of the British, he was out of a job, and so he went into private practice. Dr Lau's sympathies no doubt remained with the British, and he hid a shortwave radio in his home at Buffalo Road. This was against Japanese regulations; he could have been tortured and executed if they ever found out. (Our own family also hid a Marconi radio at home, but concealed under a 3-step flight of stairs). What Dr Lau did with his radio was very brave. He would tune in to the broadcast by the South East Asia Command, transmitting from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to the occupied territories. He took down onto little scraps of paper, news of Allied campaigns and victories. The following morning, he would bring these scraps of paper to the Mun Dispensary, where my father and his brothers would drop by when they had some free time. These young men would then commit the details to memory, destroy the paper evidence, and go out spreading the news. By these means, they countered the propaganda of the Japanese, and told their friends, and friends' friends about the Battle of the Coral Sea, Iwo Jima and the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was their contribution to keeping up the community's morale through the very difficult three and a half years of occupation. The family survived the war intact, but unfortunately not for long. Just a few months after the Japanese surrender, my grandfather died. He had gone drinking with his friends, and somehow collapsed in the toilet. My father's younger brother fetched him home, and he seemed not too badly hurt, being able to walk unaided into the house. He went to sleep soon after, on his favourite canvas bed in the ground floor parlour. It was a cooler there. But in the middle of the night, he was breathing unusually loudly and throatilly. My father went down to check on him, but found him dead, and when he lifted the older man's head, he saw the dark purplish blood clotting under the skin at the back of his neck. He had haemorrhaged internally. The family pulled connections, and got his death certified as a cerebral haemorrhage -- natural causes -- so that an autopsy would not be conducted. With his death -- and my grandfather was only 54 -- the family lost their main breadwinner, and despite surviving the war, they were thrown back into financial difficulties again. They couldn't even afford a coffin, and my grandmother pleaded with the Waterloo Street branch of the family for a loan. They were parsimonious in their offer and ties were irrevocably strained. Furthermore, there were grievances over the
inheritance of the Mun Dispensary. While it had been founded by my great-uncle,
and hence, strictly speaking, it would go to his heirs, my grandmother felt that
my grandfather had contributed to it as an equal partner. In addition, when
times were bad, she herself had sold her jewelry to help keep it afloat. But
unfortunately, the arrangements were not documented, and my grandmother, a
cultured woman, did not want to make a scene. So that was the end of it. Our
family would have no further connection with the business from that point on.
© Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
Addenda None
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