Among the White Moon Faces

2. War and Marriage

CHAPTER TWO War and Marriage When I was six and comic-crazy, running out of the house to stand by the Indian newsstand and browse through the comics clipped to the stand's ropes for an hour or more (the Indian newsman later charged me five cents for the privilege ofreading each time I came by), something was misfiring at home. First, Father went to the hospital. He was pale when I visited him after the operation for appendicitis.The cold glass offresh-squeezed orange juice on the bedside table confused me.Why was it there? Why hadn't he drunk it? Then I was sent to play in the sun room, where I found omnibuses of Reader~> Digest novels shelved and free for the taking. Superboy and the Phantom obsessed me then; still, I was impressed by these books, free to the public, not in a stand or store beyond one's ordinary reach. Father's hospital stay introduced me to Auntie May, a young buck-toothed nurse. After his return from the hospital, some evenings he took me, without my mother, for a car ride. We drove to the hospital which was about ten miles out of town. We picked up Auntie May, who sat with my father in the front passenger seat while I sat in the back, contented with the breeze blowing through the open window. She was kind to me in an absent-minded manner. We children called every adult "aunt" and "uncle," and Auntie May seemed like a real aunt to me in her odd familiarity. I was comfortable with her presence, and believed we three belonged together in a special way. When these evening drives ended, Father began to take the family out to Coronation Park, a couple of miles across town along the shoreline. There, as the evening swiftly gave way to tropical night, my brothers and I tumbled about in the cooling grass, chased each other through the spookily darkening space, 29 Among the White Moon Foces and ate boiled peanuts, fried legumes, and steamed chickpeas that Father bought from the peddlers who lined the roads under the flaring fluorescent street lamps. Sundays were the best days of our life together. Father worked six days a week and late on Saturday night when families shopped for shoes and entertainment. But as a British colony, Malacca observed the blue laws. My parents were Westernized although not Christianized. When many of their friends were dressing for church, and our relatives were resting at home, we were packing up for a picnic by the sea.We fought over the Sunday newspaper, particularly who got to read the Sunday comics first. Then, all seven of us squeezed into the car and drove to Tanjong Bidarah, stopping to buy some coconut-steamed rice-nasi lemak--for lunch. The sea was always a visual shock to me, the waves of the Malacca Straits slapping gently and unceasingly against a sloping gritty beach. Something about the sun shining on such immensity excited me. I was afraid of the water but in love with its sensation. I had just read in John Masefield's poem, "The sea, the sea, the open sea, the fresh, the wild, the ever-free," and I lay in the water as it ran down the sand ridges and murmured over and over again to myself, "The sea is my mother, the sea is my mother." And so I wanted to believe. Was it because my own mother had already withdrawn from us that I loved the sea so extravagantly? I have no memory as a child of the kind of warm physical affection with my mother that I felt with my Primary One teacher, Sister Josie. Emak appears in my child's album as a self-absorbed driven creature, continuously pregnant-six babies with only a year or so between each of them. My mother may have resolved on escape long before she left us, but she shared nothing of herself with us in those final years. She was already absent, a weeping woman stripped slowly to some unknown other whose ultimate departure came to me as no surprise. My images of her in the painful years of uprooting, in 1952 and 1953, are dulled, as if the imagination had leaped forward and already registered Mother as gone, not so much lost or misplaced as deliberately disappeared. Maternal abandonment is unthinkable in human culture. Maternal malice marks a boundary humans can hardly bear to...