My grandfather Kung-kung was a quiet man and paid me little attention, but he let me sit in the corner of his bedroom to watch him smoke his opium, which he did every night after dinner. Kung-kung’s bed was his special place, made especially for smoking; there were elaborate carvings on the headboard and on a rosewood panel at the foot. Instead of a mattress, a closely woven rattan mat fitted over the frame. Every night after dinner he would spread over it a piece of heavily stained canvas to catch the tiniest drop of spilt resin. On top he would place a teacup-sized oil lamp and his polished black pipe, which was two feet long with a wooden bowl at one end. When everything was ready he would unwrap the packet of precious opium pellets and place one in his pipe. Then, stretched out comfortably on his side, he would rest his head on a porcelain-block pillow, and begin to smoke.
As I sat watching him from the floor, I would enjoy the aroma of the opium, a delicious roasting smell. Later, when he had finished, he would unscrew the bowl from the pipe, scrape the residue into a container, then painstakingly retrieve every speck of opium that had fallen on to the canvas.
One evening Kung-kung returned home after another hard day’s work on his stall. After he had eaten, he hurried to his bedroom and I followed. Sitting quietly on the floor, I watched him make his usual preparations and start to enjoy his pipe. Before he had finished, Popo marched into the bedroom with fire in her eyes. ‘Go and smoke in the opium den down the road,’ she said. ‘I cannot stand it any more.’
Kung-kung looked at her in amazement and I could see that he was angry. ‘I have smoked it all these years and now you cannot stand it?’ he said, through clenched teeth that the opium had stained brown.
‘I am thinking of the grandchildren,’ said Popo, looking at me.
‘So it’s all right for them when the tenants smoke – or will you tell them to go to the opium dens too? Why don’t you tell the truth? I’m not stupid. You’ve made life miserable for Poh-mun, forcing him to hand over his wages, and now you want to do the same with me. I will go to the opium den, but you will regret it.’
Kung-kung never thought of himself as an addict, even though he had smoked opium since he was a young man. ‘It is for medicinal purposes,’ he always said, reminding everyone that, as a herbalist, he knew what he was talking about. He smoked at home because opium dens were expensive. I heard him complain to Father that the beautiful women who worked there encouraged him to gamble and that this made him smoke more. The dens were dangerous too, he said, and under the protection of the tongs who took a percentage of their takings and beat up any addicts who did not pay. Popo knew that the dens were guarded by the tongs, who sometimes fought territorial wars; she even knew some of the gang members and could interpret their secret hand signals but, as she told her chimui when they discussed what she had done, she was glad to have Kung-kung and his opium out of the house.
After Kung-kung had been forced to abandon his carved bed for the opium den, word spread that he was under the thumb of his wife. He nurtured a silent anger, and spent less and less time at home. Instead he wandered the streets and sat in coffee shops. Some weeks passed and then one day, just after we had finished our dinner, he came out of his bedroom with a suitcase in his hand. ‘Take this,’ he said to Popo, and handed her a wad of banknotes.
‘Where are you going? Where did you get this money?’ Popo cried.
‘I’m going away and that is all you need to know. Don’t wait for me to come back.’
With that, they parted for ever.
After Kung-kung left, my mother went to Trengganu Street where he had had his herb stall to ask the other stallholders if they knew where he had gone, but nobody would say anything. She thought Kung-kung must have asked them not to tell his family. Weeks passed but she didn’t give up hope. She returned to the street every day, at different times, trying to find someone who would tell her where Kung-kung was. As she walked up and down, she would think of her journey with her father on the cargo boat, and how the churning sea and the smell of dried fish had made her seasick, and how Kung-kung had taken care of her. She grew more and more distracted and Father became so worried about her that he went to a seamen’s club to see what he could discover about Kung-kung’s disappearance. When he returned he told us that Kung-kung had met an old friend called Chow, whose ship was in dock for repairs. Chow had told Kung-kung that he had made his home in San Francisco and had offered to get him a job working with him in the ship’s laundry.
Popo behaved as if she had done nothing wrong in causing Kung-kung to leave Singapore and his family. With my father’s monthly wages and the rent from her lodgers, she had plenty of money, so she spent even more time playing mah-jongg with her friends from the temple and with other immigrants who had come to Singapore across the tumultuous South China Sea.
Aunt Chiew-foong was nearly twenty and still unmarried. She had a dark complexion and was less than five feet tall, but she looked even shorter because she walked with a stoop. Compared to my mother she was no beauty, but she liked to smile and show off her decorative gold-capped front teeth. Her voice was high-pitched and shrill, and she would imitate the screeching calls of hawkers, peddling their noodles and chicken congee.
When my mother gave birth to her fourth child, plump and happy with stiff black hair and a chubby face, we nicknamed her Wang-lai. It means ‘pineapple’ and we thought she looked like one. While Mother tended Wang-lai, Aunt Chiew-foong looked after Beng, Miew-kin and me. She liked to play with us – she was still a child at heart – but Popo couldn’t forget that she was still single with no children of her own. She worried that her daughter never had any boyfriends, and I often heard her complaining to her chimui about the hard task of finding a husband for her. ‘Daughters must be married by sixteen, when they are like flowers coming into full bloom and can fetch large dowries,’ she said, ‘and parents can have the choice of suitors. At twenty, women are past their prime. Over twenty-five, they are old maids. Then we must pay the costs of marrying them off in whatever way we can.’
According to Popo’s calculations with the Chinese calendar, one year had to be added to my aunt’s age because she had been born just before the New Year, which made her even older than she was. ‘Time is not on your side, you should already have many babies, like your sister,’ Popo nagged, day in, day out. ‘You wasted many years at school. What work can you do? You can’t read or write. You have no luck with matchmakers. How will you find a good husband?’
‘Why don’t you tell brother-in-law Poh-mun to find one for me, Ma?’ Aunt Chiew-foong asked.
My father was persuaded to invite his bachelor friends home at weekends for lunch, in the hope that one might become Aunt Chiew-foong’s husband. Sometimes three or four young men would join us, and every week there would be new faces. They enjoyed the food but had no idea why they had been invited. Popo was a good cook, with a discriminating palate, and she had taught my mother and aunt well. Now our Sunday lunches became more and more sumptuous and the menu was planned meticulously days in advance. There were always tasty bowls of thin noodle soup, flavoured with herbs, steamed fish, pork or chicken and sometimes snake, bought live from a stall in Chinatown. After dinner on Thursday or Friday, Popo, my mother and my aunt would begin to discuss their strategy.
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