Love and Vertigo Read online

  Slowly, he straightens to his feet, takes off his heavy-rimmed glasses, pats his pockets and pulls out a handkerchief. He wipes the tear smears off the convex curves of glass, mops his face and blows his nose—a fierce trumpeting sound like a bugle announcing war.

  ‘Everybody at the wake gets one cup and one cup only,’ he announces.

  My family. We are all so absurd in our grief.

  SONNY, THE COD GOD KILLER

  When Sonny Tay was conceived in 1968, momentous events had been taking place around the world: the Prague Spring, the Paris May Days when trade union workers struck and students proclaimed that it was forbidden to forbid, civil rights marches and the death of Martin Luther King, the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and the slaughter of protestors in Mexico City just before the ’68 Olympic Games. On the day of his birth in May 1969, violence broke out once again—in Malaysia this time. Malay Muslims, incited by the youth of the United Malay National Organisation, went on a jihad against Malaysian Chinese and Indians, murdering some and maiming others. The killing spree had been organised according to a precise cafe colour scheme: after susu (the milky-white Chinese) then kopi (the coffee-coloured Indians).

  The Patriarch and his wife were living in the one state in Malaysia where the Sultan forbade violence against any ethnic group. This may have been because his dentist and tennis partner—the Patriarch—was Chinese, while his physician and golf partner was Indian. The Patriarch was especially favoured because he was in possession of a rusty tub of a boat in which he would chug upstream to the various kampong villages along the river, tending to toothaches, enduring halitosis, extracting teeth and plopping them into a small Kraft peanut butter jar he kept for that purpose. The teeth would later be sold to the universities to supply dental students with real teeth to work on. (‘Those Malays had real long curved roots to their teeth, I tell you,’ he’d say admiringly. ‘Ai-yo, real hell to extract.’) The Sultan used to hijack the dental boat for occasional fishing trips because it was the only vessel in his state with a tiny toilet on board. The Patriarch was naturally invited to join the Sultan’s fishing parties. There was little skill involved; some of the Sultan’s servants would be sent upstream with explosives. By the time the fishing party arrived, dead fish would be floating side-up on the muddy ripples of the river. The Sultan would then take his royal fishing net and grandly scoop out of the river the desired number of corpses before the whole party floated back downstream. The Sultan’s dependence on the Patriarch and Dr Gupta for his dental and physical health, as well as his recreational enjoyment, probably led him to regard Chinese and Malays sympathetically. Whatever the reason, while Chinese and Indians were being sliced with sharp-bladed parangs in the streets of Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya, my mother was screaming from the pain of childbirth, safe under the Sultan’s protection, while my father hunted durians.

  She thrust her child into the world and was delighted to find it male. She immediately assumed that her son, conceived and born in the crucible of social change, in the Chinese year of the cock, and in the western astrological month of the bull, was destined for great things. She name him Augustus Tay. When the Patriarch returned from his durian hunting, he was instantaneously and incurably jealous of the little Great One. He immediately shoved Augustus back into his proper filial place by calling him Sonny.

  Everyone assumed that, like most Chinese fathers, the Patriarch would have been ecstatic that his child was a son. But the Patriarch didn’t like other males. He had grown up in a household where he had always been the centre of all female attention. He was the first-born son and heir and, until he was sent to an exclusive Anglican boys’ school in Singapore, he had no conception that he might not be the sun around which other worlds revolved. At school, he instantly felt that other men were in competition with him for every woman’s attention, though he would learn to overcome this sense of threat and form fragile friendships in his sober student days. Even when he met and courted his wife, he rapidly became the favourite male in her household. But when his son popped into the world, he immediately recognised that he no longer held first place in his wife’s life. It was an intolerable situation, even if only a temporary one. How such an Oedipal situation could have arisen in a Chinese household always remained a puzzle. For a man who venerated his Chinese culture, this rejection of his first-born son was distressingly un-Chinese.

  But in corrupting Augustus to Sonny, the Patriarch had either demonstrated great prescience or a characteristic determination to predestine his first-born to a life of ridiculous banality. There were to be no great surgical skills nor sporting prowess, no gifted musical abilities nor even the comfort of middle-class mediocrity for Augustus. The only great thing Sonny ever accomplished was when he slew Uncle Winston Lim’s priceless, much-revered, prosperity-producing Amazonian cod on the second day of our mother’s wake. Sonny’s genius lay not in the actual cod-killing, but in ridding himself of the burden of half of our relations, and alienating the rest for many years, in one spectacular stroke.

  The Lim clan mostly professes to be Buddhist, but superstition is the main religion. They avoid addresses and car number plates with ‘4’ in them if possible, because it is a bad number. Phonetically, ‘four’ is a homonym for ‘death’ in Cantonese and might bring bad luck. Similarly, they paid through the nose to drive around in a car with ‘888’ in the registration number because the word ‘eight’ is a tone variation for ‘prosperity’. My grandmother Lim had once won a cheap porcelain statue of Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy, in a raffle to raise money for the Anglican Chinese girls’ school in Singapore. She immediately associated mercy with money and set up a makeshift altar in the kitchen, festooned it with red crêpe paper streamers, and placed a dish of mandarins, cups of tea and a jar for joss sticks in front of it. Each day she would knock smooth wooden rods together, clasp smoking joss sticks in her hands, and bow up and down in front of the goddess, chanting and praying that she would win at mahjong that night. My generation was not exempt. The Lim cousins encouraged the breezes of fortune to blow through their high-rise offices by calling in the geomancer to move around office furniture and determine the correct feng shui for their interior decoration. They scried the future in spinning spears of tourmaline crystals, consulted the local Chinese fortune-teller, visited the Fu Kay practitioner for automatic writing prophecies, and read the Financial Times on top of all that.

  These were our relatives who worshipped and bowed down before the Amazonian cod for no other reason than its sheer monstrosity and diabolical ugliness. Uncle Winston had bought it for five hundred and eighty dollars, and it had grown and grown and kept growing until it was now worth about four thousand dollars. Surely something that big, that black and that beastly must be evil and, hence, possess dark powers. As such, it had to be appeased with the usual plates of mandarins and small bronze urns of smoking joss sticks. Appeasement gradually transformed into cautious petition when it was seen that no actual harm had come to Uncle Winston as yet. Uncle Winston’s petitions were trivial at first: finding the only pair of nail clippers in the flat; praying that his wife Shufen would miss her bus so that she would be late in getting home; curing his constipation as he strained and heaved over the toilet, full of sound and fury signifying nothing; and granting cosmic enlightenment as to how to program the new video recorder so that he could tape the weekly variety show and surreptitiously watch slim and beautiful Malay boys swaying and lip-synching to Boy George’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ when Shufen was not around. Then he pushed his luck and petitioned the Amazonian Cod God for a twenty-dollar win at mahjong. Twenty grew into fifty, a hundred, two hundred until, finally, Uncle Winston won seven hundred and thirty thousand dollars in an illegally run bookmaking syndicate.

  For a while, exhibitionist pride warred with miserly discretion and fear of the taxation office. He agonised for months over whether he should move into a new semidetached house in Yio Chu Kang, or perhaps a pristine ninety-nine-year leasehold luxury apartment. He yearned
to display his newly acquired wealth and success visibly, triumphantly. On the other hand, he thought that he should perhaps hide all signs of his wealth in case his numerous siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews suddenly tried to be nice to him and sponge off him. In sheer desperation, he went to the temple to pray to the gods. He bought holy oil from the monks to be burnt, offered joss sticks and fruit to his favourite black-faced god, then shook the container of fortune sticks until one fell out. The Chinese hieroglyphics decreed that he was not to move out.

  Auntie Shufen begged and cried, she threw his favourite set of golf clubs out the window—the first of many objects to fall from that apartment block—but Uncle Winston was adamant. Instead, he gave her a gold credit card to shop for new furnishings, thereby appeasing her desire for ostentatious display. Then he secretly bought a small, one-bedroom apartment on the west coast of Singapore and moved his latest mistress into it. In his Housing Development Board apartment, he built a huge aquarium for his Cod God and set up a gilt altar before the glass wall of the tank. Rumour of his good fortune spread and the relatives flocked from the ends of the earth—Sydney, Melbourne, San Francisco, London and Jakarta—to prostrate themselves before this monstrous marvel.

  Meanwhile, the Cod God stared unblinking and unmoving from behind his glass prison, only showing signs of animation when Uncle Winston climbed up the aluminium ladder beside the aquarium to throw in scraps of raw meat and smaller, undeified fish. There was no doubt that Uncle Winston shared a special, privileged relationship with this fish, for the Cod God would even, on occasion, allow him to caress its slimy black back. Proudly, Uncle Winston perched atop the ladder and thrust his right hand into the tepid water, feeling the silky current of water sliding against his hand as the Cod God stirred itself and paddled to the surface to rub its scaly ridged back against those water-wrinkled fingers.

  It was against this Amazonian Cod God that Sonny struck on the second day of our mother’s wake. The Lims had dominated the first day’s activities, going to the Chinese temple to organise a ritual burning for my mother. They had gone to great lengths to purchase from the monks colourful wads of Bank of Hell money, and papier mâché houses, cars, stereo systems, microwave ovens, mobile phones, computers, VCRs and Sony play-stations. These they then burnt in a solemn ceremony led by the monks, sending them off to hell where my mother now presumably resided, so that in death she would be surrounded by all the technology that had bewildered her in life.

  Donald Duck had also organised for everyone to wear white cotton shirts and white shoes, with white bandannas wrapped around their foreheads so that they looked like photo negatives of Ninjas. This he did because he was convinced that it was the tradition of their unknown and largely unremembered ancestral village in China, from whence his grandparents had emigrated to Singapore at the turn of the century. How Donald Duck found out that this was their village custom was a mystery to everyone since none of their clan had ever bothered to return to China to rediscover their roots. Still, they obeyed because he was the Eldest Brother and Head of the House of Lim.

  The Patriarch saw this ceremony as an outrageous challenge to his fundamentalist Christian beliefs, which is why, on the second night of the wake, we now sit, reluctantly and uncomfortably, at the interminably dull prayer meeting he has organised. Sonny shifts restlessly beside me, clutching his heavy bronze trumpet for comfort, expertly fingering melodies that only he can hear. I slap at mosquitoes and think about the conflagration in the temple courtyard yesterday. Christian hellfire and holiness have not the hypnotic attraction of heaving papier mâché Porsches into terrestrial flames.

  And then it happens. I am jerked awake by sudden commotion. I don’t know what Sonny has been doing, but all at once he grabs his trumpet, roars with incoherent rage and rushes over to the lift, stabbing maniacally at the ‘up’ button. The lift door opens and he disappears.

  ‘Sonny, where you going, uh?’ someone calls out inanely to the closed lift doors and winking floor indicator lights. Someone else jabs the button uselessly.

  ‘How ’bout the stairs?’ Cousin Adrian suggests.

  ‘Ai-yo, my knees,’ one of the aunties moans.

  When we finally get up to the eighteenth floor, we can hear the destruction before we rush into the flat.

  Sonny is magnificent in his rage. He lifts his trumpet and heaves it repeatedly against the glass wall of the Cod God’s aquarium. Crack, crack and smash. Dank, turgid water floods out and drowns the pungent joss sticks and rotting oranges. He lifts his battered trumpet and smashes more glass. The outraged Cod God slides out with the dark tide, thrashing wildly, and impales itself on one of the gilt spires of its altar. Sonny flings aside the trumpet and tries to grab hold of the Cod God. He hauls it off the spire. It slaps him in the balls with its black tail and jerks out of his hands. Left hand massaging and clutching his crotch protectively, he dives onto the sodden leather sofa, right arm outstretched for that football of a fish. His fingers slide off that sleek body as it wriggles and leaps onto the camphor wood chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl. A mighty battle of epic proportions ensues as Sonny and the fish flop and slither and splash in the flooded living room. Those who are present—and most of the relatives have now crowded in—are stunned into a disbelieving stupor, only able to watch as, with another despairing bellow, my beanpole brother finally digs his bony fingers into the Cod God’s slimy, well-fleshed body. Man and fish god wrestle wildly as Sonny staggers over to the open balcony.

  ‘No! Wait!’ Horrified realisation of Sonny’s intent snaps Uncle Winston into belated action. He wades fatly through the muck of his living room towards the balcony, his chest pumping with painful sobs. ‘Ai-yo, ai-yo. Sonny, what are you doing? Stop!’

  ‘Sonny, have you gone completely mad?’ the Patriarch barks out rhetorically as we surge in a wave towards the balcony to prevent ichthyocide.

  But it is too late. Panting hard, his skinny chest rising and falling quickly like an accordion, Sonny heaves and hurls the Cod God over the blue-tiled edge. We can only look down incredulously as the Cod God bounces off several colourfully painted bamboo laundry poles—complete with fluttering flags of underwear—protruding from the seventeen balconies below. Finally, the Cod God thuds onto the bonnet of a mustard-coloured Mercedes, dents it, bounces heavily once and rolls limply to fall off onto the asphalt and weeds of the car park.

  Up on the eighteenth floor, the relatives watch in fear and growing outrage as Sonny the Cod God Killer punches his way through our ranks and steps back into the soggy apartment. The telephone in the kitchen begins to peal shrilly. Irate calls from the neighbours below, no doubt. He spies his trumpet, picks it up and shakes it free of water. He sinks down onto the broken glass, hiccuping with tears and laughter as he tries to dry the bowl of the trumpet with his soaked shirt.

  We are silent. We don’t know what to say.

  When the convulsions of hilarity subside, he raises the battered trumpet to his lips and, in a moment of Chinese melodrama, he huffs out a discordant, waterlogged version of the ‘Last Post’. And then he begins to cry, jerky, painful, coughing sobs that rack his chest like tuberculosis.

  We stand there, up to our ankles in stinking water, in mind-numbed silence. Many of the relatives will never see Sonny again, so utterly and irrevocably has he wrenched himself out of the close-knit fabric of extended family life.

  Auntie Shufen holds onto Uncle Winston’s arm and unsteadily wriggles out of her bright red Ferragamo pumps. She hands the shoes to her maid, giving her instructions on how to dry them. Then, in her stockinged feet, the stiff black hairs bristling through the beige hose, she wades through the room and slowly turns around. She looks at the wreckage of her living room and she turns to Sonny.

  ‘You are cursed, Sonny Tay,’ she says. ‘You and your mother both. Cursed from birth, cursed in death.’

  PANDORA OUT OF THE BOX

  On an airless, muggy Singapore afternoon in February 1942, women gathered in an open concrete courtyard
at the back of a ramshackle, flaking colonial terrace. Someone was chanting and praying, rhythmically clicking wooden rods together. Smoke from joss sticks curled in silvery-grey arcs in the hot, wet air, while the scent hung heavy and low.

  The women’s attention was focused on my grandmother, Mei Ling, who lay spread-eagled like a sacrifice on the round granite table where the family usually had dinner. The plate of kang kong fried with chilli and shrimp paste, the fried fish and the tureen of white carrot and pork bones soup had been hurriedly swept away from the table when, in the middle of lunch, Mei Ling had suddenly grabbed her distended belly and cried out that her waters had burst.

  ‘Ai-yo, so painful,’ she moaned now, crying loudly. ‘I’m going to die from this bloody child.’

  Her younger sister, Madam Tan, scolded her in a sibilant whisper for jinxing herself and her child by voicing such thoughts. Bringing a child into the world was a difficult enough endeavour with mischievous demons hovering unseen everywhere, waiting to play a trick on the newborn baby by slashing the mouth with a harelip, adding an extra finger or toe, or maiming the child with countless other physical deformities. Demons’ ears prick up at the faintest whisper of news that a human child has been born, but sometimes they can be fooled if friends and family keep their heads and address the newborn as ‘pig’ or ‘dog’ or ‘shitface’. But to invite curses openly as Mei Ling was doing—what folly!

  ‘Keep your voice down, Ah Ling,’ Madam Tan said urgently. She turned to the servant. ‘Por-Por, get the Tiger Balm and rub it over her stomach.’

  Por-Por grudgingly gave up her place by Mei Ling’s side to Madam Tan, who dipped a grey towel into a small basin of tepid water and sponged Mei Ling’s face. Madam Tan took a grubby, dun-coloured bolster from another woman and eased it under her sister’s head.