Following The Wrong God Home

by Catherine Lim

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A wonderful new novel from Catherine Lim - a modern love story of east meets west set in the author's native Singapore. Never before has Yin Ling appeared in such splendour. Perched in the bridal car with her mother-in-law to be, in layers of unaccustomed make-up, bedecked with the jewels of her fiance's family, she is about to marry into one of the richest and most influential clans in Singapore. But on the way to the ceremony the car passes through a destitute area of the city and Ling catches sight of a scene of death - a terrible omen for a bride. Instead of looking away, Ling stops the car and goes to look. It is a dead baby, abandoned. Despite her finery Ling picks it up. So begins Catherine Lim's new novel. Ling - poor, beautiful, an outstanding student and a poet - is to marry Vincent Chee, a rich PhD student from a very traditional, upper-class family. She will become a dutiful wife, not the existence of her dreams, but the Chees' money and influence is essential, for her mother has cancer and they cannot abandon a faithful old servant, Ah Heng Cheh. However, the mapping out of Ling's future doesn't proceed smoothly. Almost against her will, and through her poetry, she meets outspoken American professor, Ben Gallagher, who threatens to overturn everything. Ling must make her choice: east or west, head or heart. The birth of a son makes her moral predicament even more agonizing.

Release date: September 22, 2011

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 380

Sample

From the sky, a tiny blob of something fell and made a small whitish splatter on the front of the gleaming silver Mercedes,
narrowly missing the bride and groom dolls perched on the nose amidst a froth of white and pink tulle. The chauffeur, Arasu,
who had been patiently waiting for the last half-hour, got out and looked up to see a wildly fluttering dove in clumsy flight.
Doves were lucky for weddings, shit was not. The luck and the shit cancelled each other out on the bridal car. The bride was
beautiful, so much so that Arasu wanted to compliment her, being almost part of the family. But he held back. Later, he was
to reveal to close friends, in a whisper, ‘She looked sad.’


On her wedding day, on her way to church in the gleaming silver Mercedes 350 that drew admiring looks all the way down Pek
Kiew Street and up MacGregor Road, Yin Ling felt an overwhelming sadness. It threatened to spill over in tears and spoil the
meticulous makeup that had taken the beautician a full three hours that morning, at a cost of a cool five hundred dollars.
The tears rose dangerously; in alarm, she beat them down and the expensive mascara and rouged cheeks were saved.


But only for a while. The sadness would not go away. It had come many times in her life, but not as stubbornly. It swirled
inside her, a turgid stream seeking release. She had to do something quickly, or it would rise again, flood her eyes, splatter her cheeks, melt the five-hundred-dollar makeup, reduce the glory of the bridal ensemble of chiffon veil, duchesse
satin gown, satin shoes, lace gloves and lilies that had cost three thousand dollars to a grey shambles of crushed dreams.


Concentration always did the trick. She focused her attention on the first object before her eyes: the bald patch at the back
of the chauffeur’s head. Smooth and gleaming, like polished brass, it had at its centre a few very fine almost invisible hairs,
which she now studied intently, noting how, paler and softer than baby down, they trembled in a current of air coming from
somewhere. She watched them sway and dance. The tears receded. She was saved – for now.


Her mother-in-law, who had insisted on accompanying her to church, had not noticed anything, fortunately. She was preoccupied
with a full surveillance of the bridal gown. A perfectionist, she had efficiently divided the map of surveillance into precise
grids for exhaustive checking, so that her sharp eyes, proceeding systematically from one square inch to the next, were able
instantly to detect the smallest faults and her expert hands to effect the necessary correction. Thus, in quick succession,
she saw a loose thread on the left sleeve, which she snipped off with the miniature scissors she always carried in her handbag,
some specks of talcum powder near the neckline, which she deftly dusted off with her handkerchief, a hair caught in the fine
lacework of the bridal glove, which she extricated.


Her mother-in-law, who seldom paid compliments, said, ‘You are very beautiful today. I am not saying this because you are
my daughter-in-law. Everyone knows Mrs Chee always speaks from the heart.’ She had picked up from somewhere the magisterial
habit of referring to herself in the third person.


She leant forward to speak impatiently to the chauffeur, who had turned on the car radio to catch a pre-election speech by
some politician. ‘Arasu, turn that off,’ she said, and none other than the Founder of Modern Singapore, the great MTC, Mah
Tiong Chin, known only by the awesome initials, was cut off in the middle of a sonorous denunciation of all those who would
seek to harm the city-state: the Communists, the trade-union activists, the religious ultras, the racists, the subversives,
the leader of the opposition, V. S. Ponnusamy.


The cheek of the man. Turning on the radio for his own entertainment, in a bridal car. She would have to complain to her son,
Vincent.


A slave to her perfectionism, Mrs Chee had not slept all night, worrying about the smallest details of the wedding. At one
point, she had got up to check that the longan tea, which was to be used for the tea ceremony after the church service, had been brewed properly by the maid. It was of
the best quality, imported from Taiwan.


And would Luan remember to use the red satin pouch for the receiving of the ang pows from the guests at the wedding dinner, instead of some ugly cash-box with a slit in the centre? Her sister tended to be forgetful.
Really, the bride’s side should have offered to help in the preparations. But one could expect nothing from Yin Ling’s cold,
uncommunicative mother. Oh, oh, not the ordinary red satin pouch but the one with the dragon embossed in gold thread. She
must remember to tell Luan.


Mrs Chee’s memory, ever efficient, stacked up this extra reminder. She took out of her handbag a small bottle of Tiger Balm,
which she rubbed delicately on each temple. Then, with eyes tightly closed, she inhaled its soothing pungency. It was a small
interruption only; soon she was back at her work of inspection.


Only vaguely aware of the fussily adjusting fingers moving all over her, Yin Ling submitted meekly to the next stage of the
checking process, which concerned the bridal jewels. She had no idea what had been put into her ear-lobes, round her neck,
at her chest, wrists and on her fingers by her mother-in-law that morning; she had only a faint recollection of a tingling
sensation as enormous, blindingly sparkling diamonds were snapped, clipped, clasped, pinned, slipped and hung on her. Someone
had stood her in front of the mirror to see the overall effect. She remembered thinking, I look like a Christmas tree, but
of course said nothing, not wanting to sound ungrateful. The jewels had been taken out of her mother-in-law’s deposit box
in the bank vault only the day before, and would be duly returned, presumably after the gala wedding dinner at the Grand Winchester
Hotel. For other occasions there were exact duplicates in paste, which could be worn freely and without fear, even on holiday.


‘You want a robber to rip off your ear-lobes or chop off your fingers for paste?’ Vincent had teased.

‘At least the real things will still be safe in the bank for posterity.’ She had laughed. It was a practice universal among
the rich and bejewelled in Singapore. Mrs Chee, who had the pleasure of seeing her prized collection on display only rarely,
maintained a dignified restraint, adjusting the huge dangling ear-rings only once, the enormous star-shaped pendant twice.


If Yin Ling were to carry out her own surveillance of her wedding apparel, she might find something secretly sewn into the
hem of the skirt – an amulet blessed by the priests of the Kek Lok Thong Temple, or a tiny roll of prayer paper conferring
luck, health, prosperity, progeny, long life on the wedding couple. On her way to the Cathedral of the Divine Saviour for
her wedding, she wore, hidden in her dress, the powers of ancient, pagan gods.


‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ her mother-in-law would be sure to say, with a quick laugh and a wave of the hand, if discovered and confronted,
as had happened years ago when her son had located and ripped out a tiny jade amulet sewn into the seam of his trousers, on
the day of his final-year university exams. Once powerful, Mrs Chee’s gods were now made to work in stealth, stitched into
the clothes of the unsuspecting, ungrateful young. Her son, now waiting for them in the cathedral with Father da Costa, basking
in the warm glow of joyous Christian hymns, might be pretending not to notice the small, hard lump in a corner of his suit
pocket, the ancient gods’ promise of many sons. A god’s tear-drop. It did not matter, as the amulet, blessed by the temple
priests, was prized by its intimate association with divinity.


‘My mother’s usual nonsense,’ was Vincent’s usual explanation. He spoke with the highest filial regard of his mother’s nonsense,
for he was able to separate the pure gold of mother love from the dross of absurd traditions.


False gods, true gods – Yin Ling would concentrate on anything to keep back those tears. For she discovered, to her dismay,
that Arasu’s bald patch was losing its hold – and one by one, each alternative subject that came into her mind, soon fell
away from it.


Oh, Ben, Ben.


In desperation, she looked away from her mother-in-law and out of the window. She saw a succession of images, increasingly
blurred, for the tears were filling her eyes now – the Cathay cinema advertising some John Travolta movie, a McDonald’s restaurant
crowded with boys and girls in white and brown school uniforms, a lifesize cut-out of the celebrated ‘Singapore Girl’, advertising
Kodak films, with her radiant smile and demure batek sarong-and-blouse, a skinny, sunburnt trishawman trying to coax an oversized tourist in Hawaiian floral shirt and bermudas into his vehicle, a newly opened noodle bar, its front adorned by a row of congratulatory
bouquets ostentatiously mounted on tripods, a shop sign in awful English – ‘Sale! Best bargain! Customer not satisfy, money
will return!’ – a young woman in a black power suit and high heels, carrying a black leather briefcase, hurriedly crossing
the road, a huge signboard with a picture of a lung in the last stages of cancer, a warning to smokers.


The Mercedes glided past three young motorcyclists, each with a female pillion rider, all wearing identical glittery crash
helmets, all with the air of excited expectancy at the start of a race. One of the happy pairs was likely to end up smashed
on the road – the accident statistics were high for reckless motorcyclists. One of the pairs looked up, saw her peering through
the car window, smiled, waved and shouted something – probably ‘Good luck!’ or ‘Congrats!’


Now her mother-in-law saw. She said, frowning, ‘What’s the matter?’ A young girl about to marry Vincent Chee Wen Siong, who
had been included among Singapore’s Fifty Most Eligible Bachelors by Lifestyle magazine and singled out for grooming in public service by the Minister for National Development – who was probably among
the waiting guests in the cathedral – this young girl, who came from a family of low status, whose deceased father, a known
gambler, once went to jail for his debts, whose mother was unfriendly and sour-faced, who had nothing to recommend her beyond
a university degree and moderate beauty and who stood to inherit all those jewels now on loan, had no right to look unhappy
on her wedding day. With a snort of pure pique, the future mother-in-law might even have been provoked to say, ‘It’s my Vincent
who should be crying!’ or ‘It’s Mrs Chee who should look unhappy, I tell you!’


Mrs Chee had known only a little about Yin Ling’s troubles of the preceding months, for as she often complained, ‘My son never tells me anything.’ But she knew enough to decide now,
on their way to church, to deliver a bright, sharp little lecture to this new member of her family. ‘We have a good family
name. When Vincent’s father was alive, he was one of the most respected members of the Chee clan. He was a personal friend
of the late Sultan of Johor. His sister married the late Attorney-General. You are marrying into our family. Vincent has chosen
you. I don’t know what happened, and I don’t want to know.’


Of course she knew what had happened. She knew of the ang moh involved, for Mrs Chee kept her eyes and ears open at all times. If she had had her way, any girl who got involved with any
of those white foreigners, with their drinking and womanising, would have been instantly eliminated as a potential daughter-in-law.


‘I leave it to my son to tell me what he wants,’ she said. ‘You young people have your problems, I have mine. All I want is
for you to remember that, as Vincent’s wife, you have to preserve the good name of our family.’ She broke off and said irritably
to the chauffeur, ‘Arasu, why are you taking this route?’ It had occurred to Arasu to take a different road to avoid the traffic
jam that always formed along Orchard Road at this time of day and he had to take part of the blame for what happened next.


The Mercedes was negotiating a narrow road called Hin Ngiap Lane that skirted one of the oldest housing estates in Singapore,
soon to be redeveloped in a major upgrade of government property. The multi-storey block of flats stood in its present dereliction
in the desolation of a children’s playground vandalised beyond all repair. Its inhabitants were mainly old and retired or
young and embittered. There was an old metal rubbish skip, painted green, next to the playground, and near it a crowd had gathered, forming a circle to look at something on the ground. Their serious expressions, the quiet
whispering among them, suggested a discovery of tragedy, their inaction that there was nothing to do but wait for the police
to come. Meanwhile, they gazed with undisguised fascination at the dead body on the ground. A woman came running up to pull
away a man, presumably her husband, clearly fearing messy involvement once the police arrived and started questioning witnesses.


Mrs Chee said sharply, ‘Arasu, drive faster.’ Even the faintest glimpse of death was bad on a wedding day. When she had got
married, thirty years ago, the car taking her and her husband to the photo studio for their bridal photograph had had to make
a detour to avoid a funeral procession. She had heard the clashing of cymbals, the wail of trumpets, had caught sight of the
huge, flower-and-banner-bedecked lorry carrying the coffin, but, fortunately, not of the coffin itself. Still, her mother
had afterwards made her wash her face in water purified by prayers and flower petals.


Mrs Chee said, ‘Arasu, I told you to drive faster.’

Yin Ling leant forward and said, in a voice shaking with urgency, ‘Stop!’

Arasu said, turning slightly, ‘Eh, madam? What?’

Yin Ling made the puzzled Arasu stop.

‘What are you doing?’ gasped her mother-in-law, but Yin Ling was already out of the car making her way towards the crowd near
the rubbish dump, holding up her long wedding dress with both gloved hands.


An elderly man and a woman next to him were the first to notice her. They stared; the woman nudged her neighbour who also
looked up. She was joined by two others, one of whom pointed and said something excitedly. In a short while, everyone in the
crowd had shifted their attention from the body to the beautiful bride in their midst. A stunned silence fell as they fixed their eyes on her.


Men in rough T-shirts, shorts and sandals, women in cotton blouses and trousers, an old man in a white singlet and faded pyjama
bottoms, carrying his lunch in a brown paper packet tied with string and looped around two fingers, a child with a dribbling
nose and a Mickey Mouse cap on his head all stared at her, in her bridal gown, her jewels sparkling, a visitor from the other
side, who had succeeded in moving out of the dank, dismal flats into a gleaming new house with a garden. She merited more
stares than the dead body on the ground. Half expecting to see a camera-toting television crew emerge, set up their equipment
and bark instructions to the bride-model, they began to realise that this intrusion was real, not make-believe.


Ignoring them, Yin Ling stood over the victim laid on a spread of newspapers. It was a tiny newborn baby, still with its umbilical
cord attached, its face blue, its little naked body remarkably well formed. It lay peacefully in its crumpled nest of old
newspapers, its head blocking out the smiling faces of George and Barbara Bush, its bottom a fiery speech by MTC to the Workers’
Union, its tiny toes touching the beautiful face of a young model in a Triumph bra. An abandoned newborn, one of a number
regularly left alive on doorsteps, at bus-stops, outside hospitals, or thrown down rubbish chutes or into garbage dumps, probably
still alive at this point but not likely to survive cold, hunger, the impact of flung bottles, cans and boxes, the attack
of scavenging cats and rats. Somebody must have found the baby, raised the alarm then laid it on the ground, afraid to do
anything further while waiting for the police. A still alive baby would have been wrapped immediately in a warm towel and
taken to hospital for compassionate attention; a dead baby merited only curious, pitying stares before being taken away by the police.


Yin Ling stooped down and picked up the body. She held it in her arms, moving aside the enormous, star-shaped pendant to let
it nestle, unobstructed, on her chest. A fly buzzed on its left eyelid, and she brushed it off. The crowd watched silently.
If she had looked up then and asked questions – who found the baby, when, where, how? – they would have fidgeted, looked down,
remained silent or slunk away.


Yin Ling never looked up. She continued to hold the baby and look at it. She thought its mother was probably a frightened
teenager, one of the hundreds of students or factory girls who had been made pregnant by boyfriends, strangers, fathers. She
thought of sex: she had a vivid image of the precise moment of the baby’s conception, a moment of raw, brutal passion when
a man, in the stealth of night, broke through his daughter’s resistance and small, fragile body, then got up, zipped his trousers,
warned her not to tell anyone, and left the room. Reports of such brutality sometimes surfaced in the National Times. She saw the girl getting up, pulling her clothes tightly around her, going to the bathroom to wash out the red, searing
pain. More sex – the man, meeting no resistance, came the night after and the night after that.


Yin Ling held the baby, aware now that her overwhelming sadness was in some way connected with it and its desperate mother,
its savage father. Suffer the little children: ironic use of the word. The dead baby in her arms proliferated into a hundred
dead babies and living children who might have been better off dead, away from the crushing weight of pain and deprivation
on their young years. She remembered a visit to a neighbouring country with Vincent and his mother only the year before, where
dirty, skinny children with matted hair followed them everywhere. She remembered a hungry-looking little girl carrying a naked baby on her thin hip, both covered
with sores. One of Vincent’s mother’s rings could convert into several years’ freedom from hunger for her and her baby brother.
The arithmetic of guilt must have hit all three of them at once, for together they had flung handfuls of coins into the crowd
before fleeing back to their hotel. She was the worst of them all because she had been the first to flee from the horror and
the pity. Better off dead? She had seen the small son of one of Vincent’s cousins, replete with toys, cry miserably for a
special fire engine that happened to be out of stock, and she had seen a magazine picture of a group of children in a war-torn
neighbouring country all horribly maimed by landmines, happily kicking a football and smiling for the camera.


She looked up for the first time at the circle of faces watching her and was aware that the sadness was connected with them
too. The men in the rough T-shirts and dirty sandals – what sort of lives did they lead? The old man with his lunch dangling
from his fingers – could he be the man she had read about in the newspapers some time ago, who had gone eagerly to China to
find a young wife, and had come back, sad and bitter, cleaned out of his entire life’s savings? The old man would probably
be dead in a few years, dragging his dream with him to the grave.


She looked beyond the crowd, fixing her eyes on the decaying flats in the background, where men and women would continue to
have sex, have children, have their children fulfil their dreams of moving out into the promised land of bright houses and
condominiums and swimming-pools, have children who would turn out cold and callous, dashing their dreams, hurrying them towards
that moment of fatal decision by the railings, that desperate plunge down ten storeys to the ground below. Those tall Housing Development Board buildings – what hadn’t they seen in their time? In her own block of flats,
there had been two suicides: an old woman, suffering from cancer, had lit a last joss-stick to honour her gods before leaping
from the twelfth floor; a fruit-seller whose wife had left him and their two small children threw down one child, then the
second, before plunging to his own death, from the eighteenth.


Birth, sex, life, death, betrayal, pain, hope. The gods brooding in the darkness of their shrines, temples, churches stopped
their ears against the cries and said, ‘Don’t blame us.’ No longer an abstraction, no longer a topic for cosy discussion in
a café or for the writing of clever poems in Yin Ling’s elegant, gold-embossed black notebook, the suffering poor came together
in a shrieking coalescence and hit her hard, so that she had to steady herself and make sure she did not drop the baby.


She heard shouts and turned to see her mother-in-law running towards her, panting and gasping, holding one shoe in her hand
and waving it wildly so that the crowd moved out of range of its menacing power. But there was no menace, only fear. Mrs Chee
had scrambled out of the car, broken into a run and tripped on the high heels newly bought for the wedding. One shoe had fallen
off and she had picked it up and continued her run to reach her future daughter-in-law. Her fear centred on the Chee jewels:
she had to prevent them being snatched off by the hostile crowd in the slummy area to which the girl – insanity of insanities
– had exposed herself. All those diamonds from her safe-deposit box, in the midst of a hungry, rapacious, thieving crowd.


Seeing the dead baby cradled against bridal white, Mrs Chee let out a scream. The fear, this time, was a greater one, rooted
in the deepest core of a thousand-year-old tradition that required the living to respect the dead, but to avoid, at all cost, the taint of death’s touch, especially upon a bridal
day.


Mrs Chee dropped the shoe and rushed forward to prise bride from dead baby. Within a few inches of them, she stopped and backed
off: she, too, must be protected from harm. She turned to face the parked Mercedes and shouted to Arasu to come and help.
Only vaguely aware of the faces crowding in upon her, she screamed at her daughter-in-law to put the baby back where she had
found it and get back to the car. Watching the girl lay the dead baby gently back on the newspapers, the long diamond ear-rings
shaking with her movements, Mrs Chee was seized by a return of the first fear and started screaming again, for a quick return
to the car to save the jewels. Overcome by both fears, she burst into tears.


By that time, Arasu had come up. With admirable calm and cool efficiency, he waved away the still staring crowd and guided
the two women back to the Mercedes, only pausing to pick up the shoe, which Mrs Chee had dropped in her confusion.


Back in the car, Mrs Chee stopped crying, struck by the urgency of a need even greater than that of getting to the church
in time and not keeping the Minister for National Development waiting. She would remember that day, the wedding day of her
son, for the incredible demands made on her quick thinking to avert disaster. ‘You would never, never believe it,’ she was
later to tell her friends. For she had seen the stain on the bridal gown, a small, pale smudge under the left breast. The
blood of a dead child. ‘Arasu, drive straight to the Kek Lok Thong Temple. Tank Road. Quick.’ The temple was at least half
an hour’s drive away.


Arasu said, ‘But, madam—’ and was screamed down.

Yin Ling, noticing the stain, began cleaning it off with saliva.

Her mother-in-law said tersely, ‘It’s no use.’ These would be the only words she would speak to her daughter-in-law for the rest of the day. As for her son, she would wait for the wedding
to be over to tell him of the day’s madness.


Yin Ling had only a vague sensation of being driven along an unfamiliar route. She found herself thinking, in a calm, detached
manner, of the anxiously waiting congregation in the cathedral, of Vincent looking repeatedly at his watch and apologising
to the Minister for National Development, of her mother, in neat, prim cheongsam sitting in the front row, staring impassively ahead. She looked out of the window and read calmly the names of the roads
they passed: Ransome Road, Yusuf Road, Ban Tong Avenue, Mulberry Lane, Empire Road. The ubiquitous Singapore Girl in her lovely
sarong. A florist’s shop, embracing European chic by calling itself ‘De Flower Shop’. A row of grimy old pre-war shop-houses,
about to be pulled down, one already reduced by fire to a skeleton of charred timbers. Old and new Singapore glided by, as
she sat watching in her bridal car.


A little girl with elaborate corn-row braids decorated with multi-coloured beads sitting in the back of a passing car, her
nose pressed to the window, saw her and turned excitedly to tell a woman by her side. The woman held up the child’s arm in
a friendly wave. Yin Ling waved back. She suddenly thought of Ah Heng Cheh, her faithful old servant, who was not allowed
to attend the wedding in case her senility, more troublesome than a child’s restive naughtiness at a public ceremony, caused
her to say or do strange things in front of guests. Ah Heng Cheh was probably asleep in her room at home, or praying to her
god on his altar. Or she might simply be talking to him, as she had recently become accustomed to do.


At the Kek Lok Thong Temple, her mother-in-law led her quickly to an altar, found a bowl of holy water and began to sprinkle her with it. She stood quietly, aware of a few staring faces, of a woman making deep bows before a black-faced deity,
clasping in both hands an enormous bunch of lit joss-sticks that sent up clouds of acrid-smelling smoke. She felt a few drops
of cold holy water touch her face, neck and arms. The evil emanations from the little corpse had been dispelled.


She was ready once more to be driven to the Cathedral of the Divine Saviour for her wedding to Vincent.

Oh, Ben, Ben.

If, years later, after he had left Singapore and returned to his job as a lecturer at Berkeley, Ben Gallagher had been asked
where he and Yin Ling had first noticed each other, he might have got both the place and the date wrong. She would remember
precise details – a Sunday evening in February 1984, exactly a year before her wedding, at the Monckton Food Park, in the
seafood section. Exactly three seafood stalls – ‘Ah Meng Lobster’, ‘Monckton Best Seafood’ and ‘Best Good Luck Hairy Crab’
– had stood between them. The Monckton food-sellers were renowned for harassing customers, overcharging, making rude remarks:
that Sunday a durian seller and his assistants had formed a menacing ring round a couple who had smelt and prodded the fruit
without intending to buy it, and the steamed-crayfish-seller had presented such an enormous bill to a group of Japanese tourists
that they overcame both shock and innate politeness to question and argue.


When the government’s courtesy campaign moved on to target rude shopkeepers and hawkers – surveys had shown that tourists
invariably ranked courteous service among the top three things they looked for – the Monckton Food Park was at the top of
the list. Yet the place unfailingly drew tourists and locals alike, its celebrated steamed lobster and chilli crab, satay,
oyster omelette and roti prata known as far away as New York, Amsterdam and Tokyo.


Vincent was cutting up roasted pork for old Ah Heng Cheh, whose few remaining teeth could no longer manage meat but who rebelled,
like a child, against her regular diet of rice porridge. His mo