2. How My Family Shaped My Childhood and Beyond

Adding to this landscape of such hard times, I had a hard and unhappy childhood. Although I was born the first child to my father, I had an older sister who was my father’s treasured daughter.

Kian Ling is my adopted-sister. Her birth certificate reflects my first mother’s name although Kian Ling looks nothing like us. She is rumoured to be the illegitimate child of my father. She was born on 4th January 1940. I was told that my first mother was a midwife and she said that she brought Kian Ling home because her birth mother did not want her after my first mother had delivered her.

I was born on 18th August 1942. I am supposedly the only one born to my first mother, who died in 1944. Her tombstone has both Kian Ling and my names on it. But my second mother, who is my first mother’s younger sister, insisted that she was the one who gave birth to me, not my first mother. I am just told these stories and I don’t know whom to believe. My parents believed in ancestral worship and Buddhism, and so that was all I knew as a child. There was a family altar in the bedroom with the picture of my first mother on it. When I used the stairs to walk up and down from the house, it would be dark because there were no windows. Between the first and second floors, I would see an apparition of my first mother standing in the corner. Many others also remarked that they had seen her frequently and so it was well known that the staircase was haunted by my mother’s spirit. I wasn’t frightened. One day, I just told the apparition, “Mama, m ho hak ngo” (Cantonese for, “Mother, please don’t frighten me”) and the apparition disappeared. Her apparition appeared for many years. My father installed lights in the staircase and the apparition did not appear as much. Looking back, I realised that she might not have had a peaceful death causing her spirit to appear many times over many years.

There were two other sisters born after me, one in 1945 and the other in 1946. Both were given away immediately after birth to the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus orphanage along Victoria Street, which was a five-minute walk from our house at Loke Yew Street. The sister born in 1945 died three days later in the orphanage and I do not know what happened to the other one. When I was sixteen, at the insistence of my second mother, I went to the orphanage to enquire after the other sister and was told that she was given away.

Hon Shiang was born on 18th December 1947 and Hon Ming was born on 17th February 1957. They were the treasured sons of my second mother. Kian Ling and my second mother could not get along and fought often. In one of the fights with my second mother, Kian Ling pushed her in the squat toilet and she fell down into the toilet bowl. This caused my second mother to miscarry Hon Ming and my second mother had to take medication to save the baby. At birth Hong Ming was a breach case and needed pincers to be pulled out, resulting in his head becoming elongated.

With the birth of the first son, my father was happy because he finally had someone to carry on the family name, which was important to the Chinese. My second mother contracted tuberculosis sometime after giving birth to Hon Shiang and was isolated for a while for fear of infection. So, while I was only five years old, my second mother had to ask me to look after my brother and to help feed him. I also did the housework. By eight years old, I started to cook. By ten, I did the marketing. I also started giving Hon Shiang tuition in his studies then. I quite enjoyed doing the housework because life was boring at home.

My father was a scholar and my second mother would bring the two brothers out to buy books and that’s why they have a love for books.

My father was the eldest son and he brought his third brother (Hon King’s father) and seventh sister (Wai Hong’s mother) and eighth sister (Kennan, Queenie and Wai Kuen’s mother) to Singapore. Hon King’s father contracted cancer and died in Singapore. We all lived in the same apartment.

Through my childhood, I learned how to pace myself. I would be blamed for anything that went wrong in the house, and get beaten for it. I would be given $3 to buy food for the whole family. It was difficult to buy enough food for everyone with so little money. Whatever I bought was not good enough. I had to plan the food for each day. At first, we had only two meals but my parents realized that it was not enough for us, so we had porridge and salted egg for breakfast every morning. We had no fridge, so I would go almost every day to the street market at Hock Lam Street (where Funan Mall is now). I would buy vegetables and a bit of meat. I would buy the intestines of big fresh fish and I would bring them back, clean them up, marinate them and eat them with you tiao (Chinese flour fritters) steamed with spring onions and ginger and egg – it was very delicious and the whole family liked it. When there was meat, my brothers would be given the fillet. But my parents would give me the bones to eat, with a bit of meat on the bones. I grew up chewing on the bones of meat and fish, and came to love it. To this day, I still enjoy chewing on bones and look for the fish skins and fins.

When I started work and had saved up enough money, I bought myself an entire roast suckling pig from the famous Westlake Restaurant at Farrer Road and brought it home to eat all by myself. It took me the entire day and the next to finish it, and I enjoyed myself so much.