Rambling around my ancestral Hainan

Page 1-15

Chapter 1
The Forgotten Years

My slim body slumps snugly onto the soft, upright seat.  I stretch my legs.  But the legroom on Jetstar Airbus 320 is slightly narrower than that on Boeing 380A, my recent flight from Sydney to Singapore.  A little discomfort is the price I pay for the cheap fare.  It will be only three hours before we land, I console myself.  On my left is eighty-year old Mum.  Three months back in October 2010, she has visited Hainan Island.  

I miss my wife.  Ever since our marriage twenty-six years ago, we have travelled together.  Her high fever has subsided but the bout of flu lingers.  And her body is aching.  She will be travelling five days later.  Two days ago, I had rushed to travel agency Target in People’s Park to change her flight as well as pay the necessary fees.  Their administration charge was $25, Jetstar’s flight amendment charge was $60, and the fare difference between the off-peak and peak seasons was an additional $5.  

Mum is accompanying, to introduce us to her late brother’s family members: his wife, children, grand-children, and great grand-children.  Born in a remote village on the northeastern coast of Hainan in 1930, Chiang Heng Zee (张卿玉; Zhang Qing Yu) is the second child in her family of six.  There she would have remained to this very day if history had taken a different course.  And I might not be weaving this narrative.

My graduation in 1971; Mum Chiang Heng Zee
我在1971年毕业; 我的母亲张卿玉

 

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Qing dynasty was expiring.  Founded by their disciplined Manchu forebears from the cold northeastern homeland two and a half centuries earlier, successive imperial courts and ruling elites irresistibly succumbed to creeping corruption and malaise, thus enfeebling the “Pure” empire and indirectly facilitating their country’s subjection to foreign economic exploitation.

Seething hatred, bottled up for so long, finally stirred the nationalistic spirit of the long-suffering people, sparking the unsuccessful Boxer Rebellion in 1900.  Ambitious military generals vigorously endeavoured to enlarge their spatial domains.  A brief period of internal turmoil followed, mirroring the external global tensions that preceded the 1914 First World War.  Chinese territorial unity was threatened.

One man sought to make a difference before the ensuing chaos.  He sought to overthrow the tainted monarchical political system.  He sought to realise a China united and committed to the people’s welfare.  Born in 1866 in the Xiangshan county (now Zhongshan City) of Guangdong Province, Sun Yat-sen had endured the humiliation of the unequal treaties imposed by the militarily superior invaders on his defeated country after the 1839-42 and 1856-60 Opium Wars and the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895.  Disillusioned by contemporary reformists’ unsuccessful attempts at achieving piecemeal socio-economic changes, the medical doctor formed the United League in 1905 with like-minded revolutionaries and travelled abroad to solicit funds to promote his radical republican cause.

Patriot Soong Qingling with Sun Yat-sen; Charlie Soong
    爱国者宋庆龄与孙中山; 韓教準 (Han Jiaozhun)

 

Covertly supporting him was a Hainanese from Wenchang.  Han Jiao Zhun is better known to the world as Charlie Soong.  To the great anticipation and trepidation of the downtrodden Chinese, 1910 witnessed a profound political revolution, a series of unsuccessful uprisings against the Qing rulers.  In failures, success emerges like a soaring phoenix.  Sun’s charisma and idealism attracted a young teenager from Wenchang to Guangzhou, a Chen Ming Tang (later nicknamed in Cantonese as Chan Chak; pinyin: Chen Ce). 

 

At the Shagang Village (Huiwen Town) home of Admiral Chen Ming Tang, aka Chen Ce
在会文镇沙港村长家将军陈明唐, 又名陈策

 

On the first of January 1912, forty-five year old Sun, who had been recently elected as provisional president by provincial leaders, solemnly proclaimed the birth of the Republic of China.  Less than three months later, he magnanimously relinquished the leadership to Yuan Shikai, the northern general who had successfully extracted the abdication of their Manchu emperor.  Skilfully veiled, the warlord’s lust was the establishment of another empire, not a republic.  In December 1915, the Hongxian (Constitutional Abundance) dynasty was odiously foisted upon the bewildered people.  Fortunately, his stillborn tyranny lasted only three months.  Another three months later, the budding oppressor died at the age of fifty-six from renal dysfunction.

Jostling to fill the political void were three groups: the resurgent warlords in several provinces, the Kuomintang (“Guomindang”; Chinese Nationalist Party) formed by Sun in 1912 and based in Guangzhou in the south, and the Chinese Communist Party formed in 1921 and based in Shanghai in the north.  With funds generously donated by overseas sympathisers, Sun enjoyed an initial advantage.  Upon his death in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek assumed the mantle.  The following year, the latter’s forces marched north to Shanghai, vanquishing warlords along the path.  In 1927, Shanghai fell to the Communists, who had also trounced the local gang leaders.  Despite a prior agreement, Chiang massacred the Communists when he was welcomed into the city.

While the rest of the world was groaning in depression and watching with anxiety the military rise of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler in Europe after the first modern war fought on western soil from mid-1914 to November 1918, Mao Zedong and his nascent Communist Party were engaged in relentless battles against Chiang’s predominant Kuomintang (KMT) for control over China.  During the anarchical interregnum from 1927 to 1945, many Communists fled, some to the relative safety of Hainan Island.  But the steady stream of disheartening news on mainland China continued to alarm the Hainanese.  From the small number of emigrants during the Ming dynasty, an annual ten to twenty thousand departed between 1884 and 1898.  In 1927, an unprecedented forty-eight thousand seven hundred and forty-four left.

Those tumultuous events of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties shaped the future of the Zhang family and numerous others living in the southern provinces of China.  They reached the painful decision of leaving their kin and kith to seek employment and a permanent home for their immediate members in Southeast Asia.

Born around 1890, maternal grandfather Zhang Yun Zhou (张运周) was one of those intrepid villagers who ventured south in the early nineteen-twenties.  He was soon followed by his younger brother Yun Jing (运经).  In colonial Malaya, his name, verbalised in Hainanese, was transliterated by the custom-and-immigration officer as “Chong Joon Chiew”.  Having established himself, he sent for his only child.

Fifteen-year old Zhang Jia Chun (张家春 or “Chong Kia Joon” in Hainanese) was accompanied by a courier to Kuala Lumpur in 1928.  Prudent living permitted diligent grandfather Yun Zhou to return occasionally to Hainan to visit his parents and wife.  Mum and her younger brother were born.

With mainland China wrecked by internal schism and bloodshed, opportunistic Japan, itself a victim of foreign rapacity less than a century earlier, invaded Manchuria in September 1931.  Easily capturing the territory five months later, its forces then cautiously tested the severely disunited Chinese with minor skirmishes over the next six years.  By July 1937, when Europe was mired in internecine war and disarray, they unexpectedly advanced and overran Beijing and Shanghai.  Fright triggered flight.  A total of seventy-seven thousand Hainanese fled Hainan Island in 1936 and 1937.  Moving south, the unhindered modernised Japanese army effortlessly seized Guangzhou (Canton) a year later.

Initially, the conquerors had no serious design on Hainan because of the 1897 French-Qing Agreement and 1907 French-Japanese Agreement which, explicitly or implicitly, recognized the strategic island as a French protectorate.  Indeed in June 1938 the Japanese foreign minister had publicly announced that Hainan would not be invaded, although his declaration was overturned a few days later.

Against local subconscious hopes for peace, their regimented naval convoys landed in Haikou the following February, overrunning the port, Qiongshan district, and Ding’an within a single day.  After consolidating their gains, they gradually marched inland to capture Wenchang, Qinglan Port, and Qionghai.  For six years, despite resistance from local guerrilla fighters, one of whom was Feng Baiju, they freely expropriated the rich human and natural resources to accelerate their territorial expansion.

Japanese 1939 invasion: some important dates
日本1939年入侵：一些重要日期

 

                                           

Hainan war hero Feng Baiju (海南战争英雄冯白驹; 1903-1973)

Sailing southwards from Samah (now Sanya) Harbour in December 1941 under the command of Lieutenant-General Tomoyuki Yamashita, their nineteen transport ships, escorted by light cruisers and destroyers, were reinforced midway with troops from Indochina.  A few days later, more than five thousand of them successfully beached at Kota Bahru on the northeastern shore of Malaya to begin their unstoppable drive over the peninsula and into Singapore Island, the “impregnable” British fortress in the Far East.

With its colonial master in Britain focussed on confronting Nazi Germany’s military might, a virtually defenceless Singapore was easily subjugated in February 1942.

Mum was only nine years old and her younger brother was about two when Japanese soldiers appeared.  Naturally, these unwelcomed foreigners were greeted with sporadic armed resistance, however ineffective, during their six-year occupation.  They were ruthless, executing swift justice – or, rather, injustice – on uncooperative residents deemed guilty of perpetrating resistance.  For the first six months, Mum lived a life of misery and uncertainty, not knowing their intention.  Would she be killed?  Would she be molested?  Sharing her vexations, her kin in the adjoining house, a Zhang Jia Guang (张家广), led her and his family to quiver among the thick mangroves two kilometres south of their Xiayang Village.  They only sneaked back at night to sleep before repeating the grim routine the following dawn.

Path from Xiayang Village to the coast south, and rice fields along the way.
路径从下洋村海岸南部和稻田沿途。

Zhang K.K.'s family & Mum hid among this mangrove swamp 2 km south
of their Xiayang Village, evading Japanese search troops' random bullets
张家人和我母亲在这红树林沼泽躲到,这是他们下洋村南2公里,从日本兵逃跑

Mangrove swamp 2 km south of Xiayang Village
这红树林沼泽是下洋村南2公里

 

Work was hard to come by.  The yields of fields and fruits of farms were prey to the interlopers, who stole an estimated quarter of a million water buffaloes.   Resisting villages were looted and then burnt down, and their inhabitants killed or raped.  When they were finally assured of their personal safety, Mum and her fellow villagers worked as unskilled labourers in the military administration, building roads and offices in their rural town of Huiwen for more than one and a half years.

Buffalo at Shagang Village, Japanese troops stole 250,000 buffalo during WW2
水牛在会文镇沙港村, 日军二战期间窃取了25万水牛

 

To supplement their diet, they collected the clams and other shellfish sporadically flourishing in the sandbanks at the mouth of the river that runs through their coastal town.  When she was about twelve years old, Mum nearly drowned in the swirling currents when the primitive boat, overladen with twenty eager persons, leaked. 

Mum nearly drowned at the river mouth south of Xiayang Village (above); fishing there (below)
我母亲差点淹死在河嘴南部下洋村(上); 那里钓鱼(下)

 

Shortly thereafter, her relatively serene world crumbled when her mum and younger brother left with twenty or thirty other villagers on a sailboat for Taiwan.  Their ultimate destination was Nanyang (“South Seas”, that is, Southeast Asia), via Hong Kong.  Being a female, teenage Mum remained with her paternal grandparents.  Meanwhile, life in Malaya too was not blissful for her father and elder brother.  Daily, they feared indiscriminate detention by the Japanese commanders.  Mum’s youngest brother was born in Malaya after the fleeing members were reunited with their loved ones.

Two years after the end of the 1945 Pacific War, maternal grandmother and her eldest son returned to Hainan to settle some unfinished family matters.  One was the traditionally arranged marriage of Mum.  She was eighteen years old.  Having completed the chores after two months, maternal grandmother returned to Kuala Lumpur, the capital also of the subsequently enlarged Malaysian federation.

Fortunately or unfortunately for his descendants, Mum’s older brother made the fateful decision of remaining in Hainan.  He married a beautiful, slender young girl, who is seventeen years his junior.  From a wealthy family, Tao Ai Qing (陶爱卿; Hainanese: Hao Ai Heng) bore him three sons.  Until his demise seventeen years ago, they raised their children in his ancestral village southeast of Wenchang town.  

The human tragedies and sufferings in China resulting from the Japanese invasion and civil war finally saw a reprieve with the victory of the Red Army in 1949.  

As plump Mum struggles to secure comfort in her seat, my mixed feelings surface, feelings of excitement tinged with apprehension.  For a year, I have been spinning stories to my wife about the interesting places that we could visit on the island.  Sanya was the venue for the Miss World contests for the fifth time in 2010, the organizers evidently overwhelmed by some special features of that city.  What are they?  Hainan has its own species of deer.  Perhaps we could see and even touch them?  And nestling high up in misty Wuzhishan are picturesque and unique Li or Miao thatched homes among the pristine forest trees.  What are they like?  Huge extinct craters and caverns in the Haikou volcanic park are not far from the city.  Won’t it be exciting to go on an exploration?

After all my hymns in praise, will Jo’s heightened expectation be fulfilled?  Or will she be left bitterly disappointed?  What will I feel when we slowly crisscross the land that I have left many decades ago?  My son, who is turning twenty, will not be there to share our emotions.  The bright lights of Thailand attract him and his Australian friend.

Jetstar Airbus 320 is small.  On either side of the aisle are thirty rows, each with three seats.  Amazingly, the plane is about ninety-five percent full.  Only ten or less empty seats are scattered among the one hundred and seventy or so passengers.  As the young flight steward readily assists in lifting heavy cabin bags to overhead compartments, five charming stewardesses are patrolling the aisle, adjusting them when necessary and enquiring if further assistance is needed.  The nimble ladies wear dark uniforms with orange borders.  One looks like a Malay.  Three Caucasian passengers are on board.  One seems to be a Spaniard or Argentinean; he sits alone.  My mind ponders.  What are they doing in Hainan?  Are they businessmen?  Or are they tourists?

Three hours earlier, the sparkling clean NTUC taxi took forty-five minutes to whisk us from my parents’ flat in Serangoon North Avenue 1 to Changi Airport.  The fare was $14.  At Terminal 1, the thirty or so eager passengers patiently guided their bags and luggage into two orderly queues at their check-in counters.  Their formalities done, they moved to the waiting area, where three pilots were chatting.  Two are Europeans.  With nothing else to do, I started counting silently.   At 1.15 pm: fifty passengers.  

More trickled in over the following fifteen minutes.   The crowd on that day, a school day, surprised me.  A young couple sturdily grasped the pram, which safely held their infant.  An elderly lady in her early fifties was carrying her young granddaughter.  She is dark, like an ethnic minority from Hainan.  Her Hainanese accent is sharper.  I could not understand some of her words.  Her son and daughter-in-law would be joining her in Haikou during the later part of the month for the Chinese New Year celebration, she said.  She had stayed with them in Singapore for more than a month.  

Other faces appeared familiar.  Their owners were mainly adults and the elderly.  Were they now free to roam because their children or grandchildren had just started their school term and were under the care of attentive Filipino maids?  The chatter too was familiar.  They were conversing in Hainanese.  My mother-tongue.  A tingle of transcending bond ran eerily through my vein.  Even though I do not know them, we are kin, with a common root.   Hainan Island.  Some passengers, I suspect, have lost their knowledge of the language, conversing so articulately in English. 

At 1.45 pm the plane was not even ready for its scheduled departure.  But when the announcement finally came, we sluggishly strode our way across the aerobridge and into the aircraft.  I was glad we had not booked a Tiger Air flight because at the Budget Terminal all passengers scrambled up mobile ladders like in the old days, heaving their overweight cabin bags.  Located in a less grandiose section of the renowned international airport, that terminal has been catering to budget travellers on regional airlines heading to less populated destinations since 2006.  (It was closed in 2012, its site undergoing reconstruction into Terminal 4 to be opened in 2017.)

My sensory perception seems sharper.  The plane slowly moves away from the tarmac.  On my left is the forest and on my right are buildings.  At the sign “4000 m”, it turns and takes off, rocking and shaking as if it has encountered potholes.  Is that usual?  I am slightly alarmed.  It is 2.15 pm.  With the air-conditioning system in full blast, I am feeling cold.  The Changi Airport Control Tower diminishes in size; many SIA planes are parked near it.  As the jet climbs, I recognize Johor Strait on my left.  I am in Seat 7B.  

Within a few minutes, we are floating among the clouds.  Airbus A320 is noisy, the grinding of its engine contrasting with the silence of SIA Airbus A380 from Sydney to Singapore.  After the seatbelt sign has been switched off, the sales pitch in English and Mandarin for duty-free items blitzes the airwaves.  But it is indistinct.  Two ladies and a gentleman unbuckle their seatbelts and head for the amenity room.  

Higher up in the stratosphere, the ride is smooth.  The noise changes; it echoes like the gushing of wind through the plane.  The humming of the engine is suppressed.  No air turbulence disturbs the crew or passengers.  A stewardess hands out the Immigration Form.  It is simple.  No information is requested on the length of stay, previous or next destination, criminal convictions, contagious diseases, and whether one is carrying drugs, unlike the Custom Declaration Form, which all passengers, including Australians, are required to fill for Australian airport quarantine control.  The duration of the flight is three hours and the temperature on arrival is twenty-seven degrees Celsius, the pilot announces.

After an hour, the steward and stewardesses push the food trolley along the aisle.  The menu is brightly coloured, the dishes tempting.  The Hainanese Chicken Rice set has four generous cuts of chicken.  At $10, it is inexpensive.  Adding another $5, I also get a drink of my choice and a dessert.  I glance at my watch.  3.20 pm.  I sit back, relax, and reflect.

 

Lost memories of early childhood

 

I was born in Hainan Island (海南岛; Hainan Dao).  With an area of 33,920 square kilometres, the second largest island of China is only slightly smaller than 35,980 square-kilometre Taiwan, in fact, less than six percent smaller.  At half the size of Tasmania Island (62,400 square kilometres), it is slightly larger than Vancouver Island (32,134 square kilometres) and the state of Belgium (30,528 square kilometres).

“Hainan Dao” literally means “Sea South Island” or, more elegantly, “South Sea Island”.  To emperors sitting on their thrones in the northern capitals of China - Beijing (“Northern Capital”), Hangzhou (“Boat Land”), Kaifeng (“Opening Up New Territory”), Luoyang (“North Side of Luo [River]”), Nanjing (“Southern Capital”), or Xi’an (“Western Peace”; later renamed as Chang’an or “Perpetual Peace”) - over the last two millennia, the description was apt.  The island lies to their south, beyond the sea.  So far from the ancient Chinese capital, whether Xi’an or Nanjing, it once was China’s Siberia and gulag! 

Until 1988, Hainan Island and its surrounding islets constituted a county within Guangdong Province.  With China’s rapid economic liberalization and globalisation, its strategic location nudged the central government towards its political enhancement.  The county became a separate province as well as a Special Economic Zone.

The province is not an ordinary Special Economic Zone like Shenzhen on the northern border of Hong Kong.  It is, more importantly, a “special” Special Economic Zone.  The whole province itself, and not just a district or region, is a Special Economic Zone. 

Hainan Province takes its name from the largest island.  Its capital is Haikou, which now exercises jurisdiction over two hundred surrounding and far-flung islets, including Xisha (literally “West Sands”; Paracel Islands), Nansha (“South Sands”; Spratly Islands), and Zhongsha (“Central Sands”; Macclesfield Bank).  Excluding the four municipalities, five autonomous regions, and two special administrative regions, Hainan Province is the smallest of the twenty-three provinces of China.  And it is also the most southern region.

Authors often use the term “Hainan” loosely to refer to the main island itself and occasionally to the political unit, Hainan Province.  And that is how I shall use it, which makes for easier reading.

My home is not in Hainan.  My home is in Sydney.  The latter is the most beautiful city in Australia.  It is a city where tourists flock to gawk at the Opera House and frolic at Bondi Beach.  That phrase “the most beautiful city” reveals my bias and sentiment - after eighteen years of uninterrupted habitation.  Friends from Melbourne frequently tease with an identical remark about their city, adding Sydney is crowded, its roads narrow, and the morning and evening traffic frequently caught up in snarls.  Yes, I must admit, Melbournian streets are spotlessly clean, and their long and winding coastline is fabulously scenic.  Who can forget the miles of spectacular cliffs along Great Ocean Road and the weather-worn Twelve Apostles?

I was only a young kid of four when Mum and I disembarked at the port in Singapore - on the last day of August 1953, according to a list of significant dates recorded by me when I was in my teens.  How I derived that specific date was lost to me in the passage of time.  I remember boarding a big boat crammed with people.  In my juvenile imagination, it was a sailing junk.  A steamship, Mum later explained when I asked her a couple of years ago.  Was it really crowded?  Had I been on that boat for five days or so?  Mum could not even remember.  That would have been the number of days a steamship took to sail from Haikou to Singapore.  What were the living conditions on that floating platform? 

“What are the names of our ancestral villages?”  I repeatedly probed Mum.

In our Hainanese dialect, she uttered, “Ow Leah Swee” and “A Yeo Swee”.

“What is the name of the nearest town?”

“Boon Sio.”

They were meaningless to me because I did not know their Mandarin equivalent and hence I could not pinpoint them on the Google map.  Fruitlessly inferring from the pronunciation “Ow Leah”, I suspected Jia Lai (加来) Village in Lin’gao County as my ancestral village. 

“How far are they from Haikou?”  

“About an hour by car.”

That village is about an hour’s drive southwest of Haikou downtown.  I showed her a map of Hainan. 

“Did the car go east, south, or west?”

She stared at it, and appeared confused.  I only recently learnt from my maternal niece the Mandarin names of our ancestral villages, and I only recently learnt from Mum that we had sailed through Qiongzhou Strait on Hainan’s west coast from Haikou even though a port was located near our village on the east coast.  Qinglan Port was the escape route for thousands of villagers fleeing the 1939 Japanese invasion.  It remains a major fishing port.

 

Qinglan Port: refugees fled in similar fishing ships during the Japanese 1939 February invasion
清澜港：日本1939年2月期间入侵, 难民类似的渔船逃到

Vehicle-carrying ferry crossing Bamen Bay to Qinglan Port (Qinglan Bridge is 300 m to the right)
车辆运载船穿越八门湾到清澜港 (清澜大桥右侧300米)

 

Born in Hainan before the end of the nineteenth century, paternal great-granddad Feng Yun Ke (冯运科) went to Singapore at the start of the new century.  There he worked as a clerk in a firm at Shenton Way for the princely salary of $15 per month.  He regularly returned to Hainan to visit his wife who, suffering from vertigo, was unable to travel too far. 

Raised there, their four sons - Zhen Jia (振佳), Zhen Ji (振起), Zhen Xing (振兴), and Zhen Dian (振典) - migrated to Singapore at different times.  Except for my granddad Zhen Ji, they were accompanied by their wives.  Great-granddad later returned to Hainan and remained with his wife, both passing on in 1956.

Granddad Feng Zhen Ji was working in North Vietnam during the nineteen-thirties when he died under mysterious circumstances and his body was buried in a grave, the location of which remains undiscovered.  A young boy, my father came under the guardianship of his eldest uncle, Zhen Jia.  Dad had his primary education in English but his education was interrupted by World War II.  When it ended three years later, he grabbed the first available job.  The British masters were restoring the Singapore administration disrupted during their ignominious rout.  

Dad returned to Hainan to marry Mum as traditionally arranged by their parents.  Their families had lived about three kilometres apart, the Feng (simplified Chinese: 冯; traditional: 馮) or “Pang” (in Hainanese dialect) in Houlingcun and the Zhang in Xiayangcun.  The three Chinese characters 厚嶺村 (Hou Ling Cun) on the village signboard may be literally translated as “Thick Mountain Range Village” or, more elegantly, as “Profound Mountain Range Village” while those in “Xia Yang Cun” (下洋村) may be literally translated as “Below Ocean Village” or, more elegantly, as “Village before the Ocean”.

 

Houling Village (厚嶺村) sign, motorcyclist on 201 Provincial Rd heading to Huiwen Town
厚嶺村路标, 在201省道骑摩托车去会文镇

 Xiayang Village (下洋村), lane to my mother's home behind the trees
下洋村, 车道到我母亲家, 就是在树后面

 

Confusingly for me, the Chinese character for “hou” inscribed by the Houling villagers differs from that given on Google Map, namely, 后, which, my Oxford Chinese-English Mini Dictionary tells me, means “behind”.  Is there a mountain range behind my village?  I later learn that, although “hou” (后) acquires its current meaning under the 1949 language reform, its earlier referent was “sovereign”.  Thus, “Houling Village” may actually have a refined connotation: my ancestral village may be “Sovereign’s Mountain Range Village”.  Google Map, I suspect, retains the correct original Chinese character, although not its previous sophisticated meaning.

Thanks to the detailed maps easily accessible on the internet, I am able to calculate these approximate distances: Houling Village lies sixteen kilometres south of Wenchang town; Fengjiawan (冯家湾; Feng’s Clan Bay) lies seven kilometres south of Houling Village; and Qinglan Port lies fourteen kilometres northeast of Houling Village.  

Only flashes of solitary scenes of Houling Village nurtured me through my early years in Singapore.  They were tantalising glimpses.  I was crawling under my grandfather’s wooden chair, and the next vision I recapture was a scolding.  My misadventure caused a ruckus for reasons unknown to me.  I caught a cicada from a tree in our back yard – or was it the front yard – and tied a string to its leg.  What occurred next?  I cannot remember.  I was walking behind Mum along a wide, dusty, reddish-brown untarred country track, which was elevated.  Were there paddy fields on my left?  Or just a barren patch of land?

Six years of primary education in Pasir Panjang Primary School flew by, as the idiom goes, with a twinkling of an eye.  They were years wasted in catching male fighting spiders, members of the Salticidae family (scientific name: Thiania bhamoensis Thorell 1887 Fighting Spider), living among the overlapping aromatic leaves of Pandan (Screwpine) plants cultivated in a tapioca plantation at the far edge of my school field.  Daily, we enthusiastically shared anecdotes on means to enhance their strength.  To produce champion fighters, two classmates dote on their adoring pets with the blood-ridden bugs lurking in the cracks and joints of our wooden chairs.

 

Six years of primary education in Pasir Panjang Primary School flew by with a twinkling of an eye.
They were years wasted in catching male fighting spiders living among the overlapping aromatic
leaves of Pandan (Screwpine) plants.
六年的巴西班让小学初等教育与转瞬飞过。那些年是年赶上男性战斗蜘蛛浪费,
蜘蛛住香兰 (Screwpine) 植物的芳香重叠的树叶中。

The main building of the former Pasir Panjang Primary School is in front. 
The taller building behind the thick bushy tree was not part of the school during my years. 
Previously about 1.5 metres lower, the field has been filled.
前巴西班让小学的主楼是在前面。厚厚的浓密树木背后的高建筑不是在我多年
在学校的一部分。此前低1.5米左右，现场已经被填补。

 

My potential winner, however, stubbornly refused to sink its fangs into the bloated victims I offered, despite the fact that I had - with a cruel streak - deprived it of its usual food for a few days.  The coward lost a couple of fights.  And I lost a couple of bets!  Each loss was costly - a five-cent stone marble.  That was one-quarter of my pocket money for recess refreshment.  I envied the two classmates who could magically coax their protégés into a stinking feast and transform them into gargantuan warriors. 

To be honest, I must not conceal the joy of scooping up with a crude home-made net, or with my bare hands, numerous hardy guppies merrily canoodling in the stagnant drain near my school.  The females were plain and pale while the males were smaller and colourful.  In an empty peanut bottle filled with clean tap water, a single pregnant female eventually bore many guppies.  Although I had generously supplied them with ample bits of bread, the young ones vanished daily.  The naughty house gecko had snatched them, I hissed.  As prevention, I covered the bottle with a perforated page of our discarded newspaper.  When the solution failed, it dawned upon me that the mother was carnivorous.  I carefully separated her from her off-springs.  And they thrived, incestuously reproducing when they came of age.  I was perplexed when I discovered with much happiness some swordtail guppies when none of the parent guppies was a swordtail.  Where did they come from?  I quietly asked myself. 

Yes, that rose or wax apple (Syzygium) tree in the compound of a bungalow along the narrow Pepys Road [sic: Yew Siang Road] leading to the school gate.  Bless the owners.  I have fond memories of that tree.  The overhanging branches.  The fresh smell of the little flowers drifting slowly down on my head...  An accurate throw of a fallen broken branch brought a few luscious fruits onto the wayside.  I eagerly rushed to pick them up.  Gently, I wiped their glossy skins against the side of my shorts to remove the visible girt.  The sweetness of the porous flesh remains with me till this very day.  Truly, there are some things we cherish even though they are free. 

 

 ….that rose or wax apple tree in the compound of a bungalow (near the dark-green
rubbish bins on the left in this picture) along the narrow Yew Siang Road
leading to the school gate…I have fond memories of that tree. 
.... 那水莲雾树在一所房子的复合 (附近的这张照片左边的暗绿色的
垃圾箱) 沿着狭窄的有祥路通往校门口.... 我有树的美好回忆。

The main gate to former Pasir Panjang Primary School
正门前巴西班让小学

 

The main building of former Pasir Panjang Primary School: the Concert Hall was on
the ground floor immediately behind the potted plants (on the right of this picture).
前巴西班让小学的主体建筑：音乐厅是在一楼，立即盆栽背后 (这个图片的右侧)。

 

Mandarin lesson was optional.  A few friends and I left the classroom to rejoice in an hour of games and fun.  If it was not my favourite table-tennis, it was football or badminton.  That was better than the smack on the palm dished out by the austere-looking middle-aged language teacher with her wooden ruler.  How could my brain remember the strange sound when 我 (wo; I) is pronounced as “War” and 你 (ni; You) as “Knee”?  I was thoroughly mystified. 

Neither of my parents is Mandarin-literate.  In my pocket was a neatly-folded sheet of paper in which I had transliterated Mandarin characters into English.  But it was of no help since Mandarin characters have four tones.  My deepest regret was to come later when I searched for my lost heritage.

They frequently teased me, yelling “Chinaman, Chinaman”, after my Form (Year) Five teacher had rhetorically exclaimed during the annual profile update for the new class register, “So you were born in China?”  

“Ohh ... China”, they gasped in astonishment.  

I had a sinking feeling that I was an alien from outer space.  Those Singaporeans!  After the history lessons on the Mongol invasion of China, they did not cease making fun of me again.  “Kublai Khan!  Kublai Khan!” 

When I closely scrutinised the portrait of the great emperor in my textbook during the privacy of my home, I detected a slight resemblance between us.  His face is round; he is plump.  I secretly harboured the thought that I would be as famous as him ... one day.

My siblings - two brothers and a sister - came along, and the four years in a nondescript secondary school went by, and I was none the wiser.  Pre-class time at the adjacent Pasir Panjang Beach was most memorable.  The refreshing unhurried coastal walk, the cool salty breeze, the regular lisping waves, and the occasional sandpipers: these were my reassuring companions.

Twenty minutes later, some schoolmates interrupted my solitary musing.  Sitting on the temple bench, they gambled, betting away their tea-break money.  A few fights erupted.  None was deadly, just a few bruises and injured egos.  I disliked formal education.  I was restless.  In other words, my grades led me nowhere.  I was in a quest for the “meaning” of my life.  

 

Copyright 2015

Trip 1: 2011 January, spring