The Song of Silver Frond

by Catherine Lim

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

An exotic, beguiling love story set in 1950s Singapore. 'It was a special protection from the gods that Silver Frond's beauty manifested itself only after the barbarians had left? A beautiful child-woman, in that intriguing in-between stage when people could not tell where innocence ended and seductiveness began, and were charmed by both.' One morning in Singapore more than fifty years ago, The Venerable One - a wealthy, respected, handsome Chinese patriarch, head of a large household of three wives and many children and grandchildren - takes a walk by a cemetery. There, a young village egg-seller, Silver Frond, is amusing herself with a comic song-and-dance act based on popular gossip - about him. The meeting instantly changes their lives. Is he not too old? Is she not too young? Are their worlds not too far apart? With characteristic verve and wit, Catherine Lim traces the struggles of an unusual couple through the jungle of human quandaries and predicaments created by the force of tradition, and celebrates the ultimate triumph of an even more extraordinary force - love.

Release date: September 22, 2011

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 398

Sample

In the months following the end of the war and the devastation left by the hated Japanese, the people in the little village
of Sim Bak, instead of starting on the massive work of repair and rebuilding, began to interest themselves in a sordid little
family quarrel. It was none of their business, for the family was not even one of their own, being from a neighbouring village.


Besides, the quarrel was not even remotely scandalous. A father had accused his son of stealing some money. But when the people
of Sim Bak heard that it would be resolved by no less than the ceremony of the truth cockerel in the Yio Tok Temple in the
town of Nam Kio, they knew they could not miss that spectacle of high drama in which the gods themselves would be called upon
to bear witness to human veracity.


A child had reported seeing the cockerel that the accused son had bought for the ceremony – a pure white bird, without even
a speck of colour in its feathers. The purer, the more potent. Also, the more expensive. The child said breathlessly he had
seen the young man take out a lot of money from his pocket.


Soon, details about the other requisites for the ceremony were also reported and spread excitedly – a brand new chopping knife,
which would remain in its paper wrapper till the moment of use, to prove its newness, and the special yellow trousers and
white headband, borrowed from a temple medium, which the accused would wear when he performed his act.


Silver Frond, aged thirteen, a girl soon to be visited by first blood and therefore not welcome at a holy place, asked her
father to take her to witness the ceremony that everybody was talking about. By then, she was already showing the unusual
beauty that would be both promise and danger, sorrow and joy to herself and others.


Her two younger sisters, Silver Flower and Silver Pearl, as unlike her in appearance as raw earth and shining sky, rough weed
and delicate blossom, as their own father would say with poetic unfeeling, stood by grinning, not daring to join in the request,
content to get the story from her afterwards.


‘Of course! Of course!’ said Ah Bee Koh, with hearty affability, wheeling out his bicycle. The bicycle had no pillion, so
his daughter would have to sit across the bar in front, which was wrapped thickly with gunny sack, to ease the bumpy, half-hour
ride to the temple in the hot morning sun.


‘Mad! Mad! Both of you are mad!’ shrieked his wife. ‘You want to get into trouble?’ Gods were averse to the desecrating presence
of females in the uncleanness of parturition or monthly flow, and could punish severely. Some years ago, an unclean woman
had gone to worship in the Bright Light Temple during the festival of the Nine Emperor Gods and had been struck down.


Ah Bee Soh wanted to make sure that her daughter, with breasts already beginning to bud under her blouse, would stop going
to places visited both by gods and men, to avoid annoying the first and arousing the second.


But her husband and daughter had already left.

A large crowd had gathered at the courtyard of the Yio Tok Temple. The accused, a young man in his thirties, wearing only
a pair of loose yellow trousers and a white clothband, which was tied tightly round his head, stood facing the crowd, barefoot,
his head bowed in grim, silent prayer to the gods. In his hands, clasped tightly together and raised to the level of his chin,
he held a large cluster of lit joss-sticks, sending up clouds of smoke. The smoke rose heavenwards towards the gods with the message: Get ready to bear witness.


On one side of the man stood a temple priest in a saffron robe; on the other, his assistant, in the same ceremonial trousers
and headband, struggling to hold down a furiously flapping and squawking cockerel. On the ground at his feet lay a brand new
chopping knife, its blade glinting in the morning sun. At the back, against a red pillar, stood a large golden urn with a
giant joss-stick spuming huge billows of pungent smoke, which stung human eyes to tears and sweetened the path for gods’ arrivals
and departures.


When the man finished his prayers, he looked up, turned and walked to the urn to arrange the joss-sticks in it. He walked
back slowly, with deliberation, to take his place once more between the priest and the assistant. He stood very still, his
cheekbones standing out in cold white fury amidst the dark shadows of his face. Once again he bowed, this time to acknowledge
the presence of witnesses, both mortal and divine. Throughout he maintained total silence. Words of denial and protest were
no longer needed, neither was the presence of the accusers. The man’s family, it seemed, had refused to come.


The appointed moment, which everyone was waiting for, had come. But the man, relishing his central role in the high drama,
would delay it further. He continued to stand very still, as the crowd watched in total silence. Now he was murmuring something,
and the crowd strained to hear. Suddenly, with a piercing cry, he dropped to the ground on his knees. Then, with another cry,
he seized the cockerel from his assistant, pressed it to the ground with one hand, picked up the knife with the other and,
with one mighty blow, struck its neck.


The cockerel gave a last angry squawk as its head flew up, together with a powerful squirt of blood, both making a graceful
double arc in the air before falling with a plop at the man’s feet. The crowd murmured with satisfaction. Then they laughed with delight as the cockerel’s headless body,
with blood still gushing from its neck and splattering its pure white feathers, sprang up, ran hither and thither with lunatic frenzy, before finally collapsing in a heap by the man’s feet.


It was said that, in the old days, the gods struck dead those who had dared to abuse the ancient rite of the truth cockerel.
As the blasphemer’s knife fell, so would he, struck by a lightning bolt hurled from heaven to shrivel up his lying tongue.
The gods seemed less recriminatory now; perhaps they were waiting to visit the retribution upon later generations.


The man stood up and wiped his hands on his trousers with a theatrical flourish, leaving long red streaks. He was panting
heavily, as he gazed reverently upon the bloodied knife, head and body on the ground, noble instruments of justice.


Now a roar of admiration and support rose from the crowd. The man smiled and waved, a temple celebrant in full glory. Thus
he stood vindicated by gods and mortals. Henceforth, he was free of all taint of shame. He had sought in vain to convince
his family by protests, pleas, tears. His father had persisted in the accusation. In desperation, he had even sworn on an
ancestral tablet. But the gods were more powerful than ancestors. He could go back home now, completely exonerated, and silence
his accusers for ever.


As soon as Silver Frond returned home, her sisters ran to her, demanding to be told. But the truth was that she did not like
what she had seen, and was sorry for the poor cockerel. How it had clung to life, down to the last breath thrashing about
so desperately inside the headless body! She felt sorry for all mutilated creatures. If she were one of the temple goddesses,
she would have given the cockerel a new head and set it free.


Goddess Pearly Face, the kindest and most powerful goddess in the Yio Tok Temple, could surely have intervened? It was not
at all a comfortable feeling – disappointment with a deity. Silver Frond had gazed at the goddess on each visit to the temple
with her mother, and been struck both by the kind look on her face and by her beauty, especially her skin, which had the translucence
of pearls. Perhaps even gods and goddesses could be forgetful and careless.


Disappointed wish combined with fervid imagination to produce a compensatory flow of sparkling narrative, making up for the
remissness of gods. Silver Frond’s eyes shone, her cheeks glowed as she sat cross-legged on a mat, facing her giggling sisters.
‘The truth cockerel’s white feathers had turned all black from taking on the man’s lies – for indeed he had really stolen
his father’s money. Then I saw the Goddess Pearly Face come down and scold the man. She was not at all afraid of what he would
do to her, for she was a goddess. She said, “You liar! The poor innocent cockerel has died for nothing. You ought to be ashamed
of yourself!” Then she directed her powerful fingers straight at the head lying on the ground, and it shot up and attached
itself back to the cockerel—’


Her father laughed and said, ‘My daughter is not only beautiful but a clever story-teller! She is even better than Liang Por.’

Few could match that weaver of glittering tales on Singapore Redifussion who had thousands glued to their radios every day.
It was said housewives neglected housework to listen to his magical tales of long ago and far away.


‘Enough, enough!’ cried her mother and hurried Silver Frond to the well, where she washed her hair and face with water purified
by scented flower petals.




‘Once upon a time, a very long time ago …’ Liang Por would begin, and instantly Silver Frond would stop whatever she was doing
– sweeping the floor, feeding the chickens, separating the good grains of rice from the husked ones, collecting eggs from
the henhouse – to listen spellbound.


Once upon a time, a very long time ago, there lived a man who was less poor than many others in his village, so that occasionally
he would spend a little more money on food for himself and his wife, though pork, chicken and large prawns were only for very
important occasions such as the New Year, and abalone and dried black mushroom were of course out of the question.


One day, the man went to market and saw a very leafy, succulent-looking vegetable that he liked very much. Moreover, it was
affordable. He bought a large bundle to take home to his wife to cook for their dinner. Now, unfortunately for the wife, the
vegetable was the kind that shrank to a tiny fraction of its size when boiled or fried. It was just the nature of the vegetable;
no skill in cooking could prevent the shrinking. So when the wife placed it before her husband on a plate, he saw only a very
small portion of what he expected.


He stared at it. ‘Is that all?’ he asked incredulously.

‘That is all,’ said his wife.

‘You’re lying!’ shouted the man. ‘I bought a huge bundle!’ He demonstrated the size with his arms encircling a huge amount of space.


‘I’m not lying,’ said his wife.

‘I know what you did,’ said her husband. ‘You took half of the bundle and either secretly sold it for money, or you slipped
out and gave it to your parents for their dinner.’


‘I did not!’ protested the wife. He did not believe her and began to beat her soundly. He used his fists and then a stick.
Whack! Pok! Krak!


‘Help! Help!’ she screamed, as he chased her all round the house.

From that day, the vegetable became known as Pah Bor Chai, Beat-the-Wife Vegetable, which, on principle, no man should buy, even if it is cheaply and abundantly sold in the market.


Silver Frond said, ‘I’ll never eat that horrible vegetable as long as I live.’

Silver Flower said, ‘Even if you are very hungry? Even when you don’t have a single mouthful of food for dinner?’

Silver Pearl, enjoying the hypothetical situation, carried it to its extremity. ‘Even if you are starving and don’t have a
single grain of rice for the whole day?’


Silver Frond replied loftily, ‘I told you I would never ever touch it. And I’ll never marry a man who goes to market to buy
it.’


Her mother laughed and said, ‘We can’t afford it anyway.’



Ah Bee Soh said that her greatest relief, when the foreign enemies came to invade and stay, was that her eldest daughter was
still a child. It was a special protection from the gods that Silver Frond’s beauty manifested itself only after the barbarians
had left. It was miraculous, but true. One day she was this ordinary-looking child, no different from the other village children,
and the next, she was in first bloom, with promise of much more to come. A beautiful child-woman, in that intriguing in-between
stage when people could not tell where innocence ended and seductiveness began, and were charmed by both. The period would
be brief, but it shimmered with possibilities, and stirred expectation and hope.


The people of Sim Bak Village and the town liked to stop and look at her, commenting on her eyes, skin, hair, mouth. They
said she looked like the famous actress Ling Ling in her younger days.


‘No, no,’ Ah Bee Soh would protest laughingly, deflecting all compliments as modesty and decorum required. If the special
ardour of a compliment called for some balancing criticism, she would say, ‘Ah, but what’s the use of having a pretty daughter
if she is stubborn and wilful and talks back to her mother? I scold her with one word, and she answers with ten!’


The kind gods had covered the growing bud with their hands, delaying awakening. Then when they saw that the evil foreigners were truly gone, they touched it into instant bloom.
The brutal conquerors could so easily have extended their rapine to beautiful child-women.


As it was, they had only been interested in the farm produce of Sim Bak Village. At that time, the village boasted some of
Singapore’s best vegetable gardens, worked by men and women who had made the long journey by ship from the ancestral country
in search of fortune and ended up on farms even more demanding than the ones they had left behind, because the sun in the
new country blazed all the year round and made their skin as hard as leather. Ah Bee Soh’s grandparents, who had come from
southern China, had been among these hard-working and hardened farmers; her own parents fared only slightly better.


Ah Bee Soh remembered very clearly the day the Japanese plunderers made their first appearance. The rapacious troops rolled
up in a truck along the dirt road leading to the village, jumped down with their guns and bayonets and summoned the frightened
villagers to make their demands. Hak! Hak! Hoik! They were quick with the conquerors’ language for rounding up the conquered, but did not know the local word for ‘fowl’
and so went through a comical routine of clucking, quacking and flapping their arms. A child laughed out loud and was instantly
silenced by his mother’s hand clamped upon his mouth. An hour later, the men rolled off, with a full truckload of vegetables,
fruit, chickens, ducks and even a pig, which they had made the pig farmer Old Ah Song slaughter before their eyes.


‘Better our livestock than our sons.’ The conquered sought solace in a lesser loss. Old Ah Song reminded all of what had happened
to the nearby village of Chu Tian. The Japanese, seeming to know where sons could be in hiding, had searched under beds, behind
doors, in cupboards, then had gone out to the pig-sties, woodsheds, even the lavatories and wells, and had hauled out the
terrified young men. The men, whimpering, pleading, were taken away in trucks, thrown into jail or put to work on massive, cruel building projects and never seen again.


Old Ah Song had been instantly and severely silenced. Such loose talk! Such foolish tempting of fate! If indeed, the Japanese
soldiers had returned for the young men of Sim Bak, he, the oldest and the most respected person in the village, would have
stood accursed for the rest of his life.


When she heard that the war was over and the enemies properly vanquished, Ah Bee Soh spat on the ground, rubbed the spittle
into the dirt with a triumphant heel, then went to wash her hair at the well, with water freshened by flower petals, to signify
the beginning of a new life of hope. She grew a jasmine bush beside the well, to provide the sweetness in water both to wash
away evil and attract good. She said that at last they could all think of bringing up their children in a decent way.


Their farm produce should bring good money. Besides selling it in the mornings at the market, they could sell it in the late
afternoons to those families who happened to need fresh vegetables for the evening meal. Soon she and the more enterprising
of the villagers began a competition for the business patronage of those families in the town who had somehow not only survived
the war, but had benefited from it, thus having ample money to spend on food.


The Wee family, for instance, had managed to run a small groceries shop very successfully. Just months before the war ended,
they had the foresight to use the profits, wads of Japanese currency notes tied up with rubber bands and stuffed into six
canvas bags, to buy up whatever articles of worth the townspeople were selling in order to buy food for their children. The
five members of the Wee family fanned out, paying three times more than usual for small gold ornaments that were the last
to go, such as newborn babies’ First Month good luck anklets, bracelets and rings, old women’s jade hairpins, sewing machines,
radios, gramophones, clocks, solid pieces of furniture, good quality batek sarongs, which the proud Nonya women sold only in the stealth of night, chilli grinders, a rice pestle and mortar, even a child’s wooden rocking horse. The Wee family accepted anything, anxious to get rid of the six canvas bags of money.


When victory was finally declared and the enemy’s money became useless overnight, fit only for burning or for wiping backsides
in the most vivid demonstration yet of the people’s hostility, the Wee family laughed, celebrated, and soon prepared to sell
back the entire stock of their new possessions. Expensive roasted suckling pig for celebration meals was a rarity in the restaurants
in those early post-war years, but the Wee family bought one to offer to the temple gods, then took it home to carve out for
the most joyous family meal ever.


The Bong family claimed a greater ingenuity for the preservation of assets against war’s devastation. His wealth, Ah Bong
Chek said, lay entirely in his two bright sons who ran his charcoal business. It would only be a matter of time before the
Japanese came to take them away. When they went to Ah Bong Chek’s house, they found the two young men in ragged clothes, covered
with charcoal dust, grunting like beasts, sitting on the floor and playing with their own urine. Ah Bong Chek tearfully explained
that they had offended the chief god in the Bright Light Temple and had been struck insane in consequence. They had even tried
to set fire to their mother’s hair. As the older brother stood up and lurched forward, a whiff of faeces hit the visitors’
nostrils. They fled.


Ah Bong Chek said that a fortune teller had told him this would be the last hurdle for the family to clear on the road to
prosperity. Even as they washed the filth from their bodies, his two sons were casting off all the bad luck of the past. The
gods would bless them with enormous profits in their business, and ever true to their promise, they did, as soon as the business
was extended to include kerosene and cooking oil.


Ah Bong Chek’s ruse had certainly worked better than that of the town barber, who had managed a very convincing and grotesque
limp, until an alert Japanese officer spotted him one morning in the marketplace agilely climbing up and down a lorry, unloading
crates.


The fluxes of fortune touched the village people only much later, many years after the war, when the government in its urbanisation and development programmes cleared the villages of the farms and turned them into industrial sites or housing
estates. Some of the villagers were actually able to rise to prosperity through wise use of the compensation money, setting
up modest foodstalls, which later grew into thriving restaurants. Others were not so fortunate, living out their days in misery
in crowded, highrise flats, and missing even the smell of pig and chicken dung.


Ah Bee Koh, and many of his neighbours in Sim Bak Village, died years before the compensation scheme was even thought of by
the government. But that year, when the war had just ended, he was still in good health and spirits, which made him talkative
and disposed to make fun of those townsfolk like the Wees, who had become rich by dishonestly foisting useless Japanese currency
on innocent people.


‘The gods have eyes,’ he said ominously. ‘The Wees will eventually know that the gods see and punish.’

‘Meanwhile, they live in a big house, and their children go to school and do not have to sell vegetables and eggs,’ said his
wife with a bitter laugh, for she had already put her daughters to the ignominious work of selling their produce from door
to door, and tolerating the insolence and unreasonable behaviour of some of the buyers. Silver Frond had come home one afternoon,
her eyes filled with angry tears, because one of the buyers had brutally tried to bargain down the already low prices of all
the vegetables, and then had flung the money into her basket.


‘You think I’m a failure,’ said Ah Bee Koh cheerfully, preparing to go out and spend another idle day in the coffee-and-beer
shop, ‘but one day I’ll be a wealthy man, and buy a big beautiful house in town for you.’


It was more malice than prescience that made his wife say, ‘One day, you’ll still be a failure, but your daughter Silver Frond
will be wealthy and buy me a big house to stay in.’


Better to depend on a growing daughter’s beauty than a husband’s luck at the lottery.

Meanwhile, Ah Bee Soh had to send Silver Frond and her sisters out every afternoon, to the homes of well-to-do people like the Wees and the Bongs, with baskets filled with succulent beans, bittergourd, chillis, yams, brinjals, chye sim and kangkong, but not tapioca, as people had had enough of that ubiquitous war food and never wanted to look at it again. It was said
that some people had gone soft in the bone and in the head from eating nothing but boiled tapioca.




Ah Bee Soh was lucky to have secured, almost from the start, the business patronage of the Great House, which belonged to the
Old One. It was actually a row of four connected shophouses in a long row of twelve that faced King George Road in the town,
with the dividing walls torn down to form one continuous building for the necessary accommodation of the Old One’s three wives,
their children, their children’s children and an assortment of relatives and servants.


In the ancestral land, the houses would have been sensibly grouped around a courtyard, for more effective control, but the
Old One, moving up and down the long chain of houses through a series of tastefully connecting moongates, managed effectively
enough and was able, it was said, to give equal attention to the wives.


Such a large household required a large daily supply of vegetables and eggs. After a while, Silver Frond’s family became the
sole supplier of the eggs.


Nobody, of course, would have guessed at that time that the lives of the Old One, then already sixty-five and Silver Frond,
then only thirteen, would become so strangely, so extraordinarily intertwined. Neither gods nor demons could have planned
anything like it.


Once a week, Silver Frond, not yet fully showing a woman’s body so that it was still safe for her to go to the town on her own, went to the Great House and always managed to sell the
entire basket of eggs. She came back with the money securely tied in a corner of a handkerchief, which was then folded into
a small square and put inside an inner blouse pocket, safely hidden from view.


It was an unvarying routine her mother had taught her: begin with First Wife, as a sign of respect for her status, and let
her have first choice of the eggs; then go with the rest to Second Wife and Third Wife. Apologise politely if there are not
enough eggs left and promise to bring the rest the next day. Receive the money with both hands and say thank you very respectfully.
Once out of the house, tie up the money in your handkerchief and put it away quickly. But make sure first that nobody is looking.
If the Bad Brothers are watching, just clutch the money tightly in your hand, pretend you have not seen them, and walk away
quickly. And don’t linger to watch the sinseh teaching the Old One’s granddaughters unless they allow you to.


Silver Frond had told her mother enthusiastically of those visits to the Great House when she had heard sounds of teaching
and learning coming from a part of the house sectioned off as a classroom for the numerous granddaughters of varying ages.
The Old One, following the ancestors’ practice of sending sons to school but keeping daughters at home, privately believed
in the value of education for girls, and compromised by employing a well-educated sinseh to come and tutor his granddaughters.


Silver Frond had actually been allowed, on a few occasions, to watch the impressive sinseh, long-faced, with a straggly beard and glasses perched on his nose, reading from a book and making the girls repeat words
of wisdom after him.


He taught them to write the characters for divinely appointed virtues such as right conduct and right thinking. He taught
them to repeat after him poems of astonishing beauty written by classical poets and he listened with pain as the poems came
back, emptied of all their beauty by the Old One’s dull, droning granddaughters.


She had watched, with envy, the granddaughters bent over copybooks with their pencils, the tips of their tongues poking out in intense concentration. One of them, the oldest and the most stupid, was always having either her head or knuckles rapped
with a wooden ruler by the strict teacher, whose reputation was enhanced with each reported act of strictness. Sometimes one
or more of the wives would look in and smile with approval at each rebuke or thwack of the ruler.


Oh, how she wished she could have a sinseh teaching her too! She would not at all mind her head or knuckles being rapped, as long as she was allowed to hold a book
and write in a copybook and recite those wonderful poems.


‘Their world is there,’ said her mother, pointing to the far distance, ‘and our world is here,’ pointing to the hard earthen floor of their house, unswept as yet of the daily chicken droppings. Watching
rich people’s granddaughters being taught by a private tutor was not part of Silver Frond’s routine at the Great House. She
was to concern herself only with selling her eggs to each of the wives in order of status, and then coming straight home.


Fortunately, she could deal with First Wife and Second Wife simultaneously and save much time, because the two women did everything
together, including buying eggs. They were in fact sisters. Second Wife was said to be simple-minded, leaving all decisions
to her older, more capable sister. Silver Frond had observed that she was totally incapable of ascertaining the quality of
an egg by its size, shape and colour. She only watched placidly, like a contented child, as First Wife tested each egg by
rolling it gently on the cheek. Every week, with rare exceptions, the eggs passed the cheek test.


Third Wife, who lived in the last of the four houses forming the Great House, never did any testing of the eggs. She merely
asked Silver Frond, in a rather surly voice, ‘Are they fresh?’


As for the Old One himself, Ah Cheng Peh – sometimes called the Venerable One because of his generous donations to the town’s
temple and the death home for the destitute elderly – Silver Frond seldom saw him. Indeed, he was rarely seen in the women’s
quarters, preferring to keep himself apart and aloof in the front portion of the first house where he and his assistants conducted
his business of managing several land holdings and coconut plantations, and renting out rows of shophouses, as well as a fleet of lorries