Sir/hello

I know you are surprised to receive a letter from a stranger. However, it must be a joy to think you are not forgotten at all.

This letter is not a fan mail; my apologies. Just a raking of old skeletons which you played a big part. It is about you and me, us.

It was February 1959. When you were scheduled a trip to Miri, you must be horrified. “What the? No way! Over my dead body! Where the hell is this awful place? “ But life isn’t meant to be easy, sometimes, even for a royal. You take the good with the bad.

Miri was a little isolated humble village town. The only trace of industrialisation was our connection with the oil rigs, the silver pipe lines, and the refinery, the torch, burning off excess gas, forever lit up the town. Something that we Mirians were incredibly proud of despite our ground being constantly covered by crude oil spill.

I don’t blame you if you can’t recollect even a glimmer of it. After all, you merely did the dragonfly touch and go, in one single day.

Let me refresh your memory, from the start. Miri was a remote town in Borneo Island. An oil town run by Dutch Shell – it contributed a lot of money to your family’s coffer. I guess for that reason, you had an obligation to fulfil, however reluctantly. Not treating the trip as a duty cum holiday because there was no “Pomp and circumstance” and neither a lavish gala dinner, was understandable. If you had asked me then, I would have suggested you spend more time in Miri. Guaranteed you would return to Buckingham Palace with an enviable suntan from our dazzling hot sun; a splash in our untouched beautiful South China Sea; relaxing on the beach where sand felt like talc powder. And let your gaze sail into the beautiful sunset. Unlike England, being constantly covered in goose pimples. No comparison.

I was not even 7 years old, attending the local primary school called Pujut Primary school. It was situated half way between Miri and Lutong, the oil refinery. The only airport belonged to Shell Company where upon disembarking, you would be chauffeured to Miri. The principal of our school told us you might do a half-way stop to inspect us. To welcome you, we had to dress respectfully, with clean shoes and white socks. You couldn’t have imagined what poverty was even though you really didn’t care. After WWII, children were popping out like peas. We were all born into the “battler” background. We never wore socks to school. We never could afford socks. We had holes in the soles. Toes being burnt by the melting bitumen was not something to whine about. We wore uniforms three sizes bigger so we could grow into them. Our newly washed white tops were muddy from well water. We had dirt under our fingernails, and messy hair with lice. There was no tap water and no electricity in Pujut, our village. It sounded like we were a bunch of kids with runny noses and wormy bellies, escaped out of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. I know you don’t like listening to this crap.

When I told mum to buy a pair of new socks, she talked to me like I was an adult. “If he is Dr. Sun Yat Sen, (孫中山國父）I buy you socks.” I didn’t know what happened between you and him. Dr. Whoever and Prince Something? Why did the two of you have to stand between me and my socks? Without a question, you were not a big deal to my mum. I pushed a little harder. Mum pointed to the front door, “Aiyah yah yah! You think money blow into our house by wind? You want, you get?” I hated mum’s talking like that because I never got what I wanted.

“Why don’t you tell me to pick the moon and the stars for you?” I hated her even more when she accused me something I had never done. Even so, I begged by tugging at the corner of her blouse. Mum came out with an unbeatable pragmatic reason: “White socks? You wear it once. Why waste money?” Mum was the ultimate law enforcer. She ruled with iron fists. She had the last say for every thing. Gravity tugged the corners of my mouth. I cried. I hold you accountable.

I knew I wasn’t getting a pair of socks. I got out of bed the morning with trepidation. Mum handed me a pair of socks, which I wished she hadn’t. A pair of old yellowish socks worn by my dad. I looked at them, old stuff with hardly any life left. I gave up believing in God, Jesus and Mary.

So old they had lost their whiteness; moth eaten; retained none of the original elasticity. This was too much for me. Tears started swimming in my eyes. The second time I cried because of you. Any one could see they were too big for me. Mum used four elastic bands to secure them on my little feet. One on the front to shorten the length, one above my ankle to stop it from flopping downward. A simple make-do-and-mend. “One blink and one bite of your teeth and it will be over! Don’t worry. Don’t worry at all. Go, go, go. “ I went to school that morning with the false belief: find strength in adversity. Be resilient.

That very morning, all kids at school wore white socks with dirty canvas shoes. An unusual sight. I couldn’t bear to look at their feet. I was jealous. I was angry. I didn’t like myself at all. I wanted to dig a hole to bury myself and never come out. No. I wished for a hidden trap door on the floor. I clicked my tongue and they disappeared altogether into a dark hole forever.

Now, do you have anything to say? You probably are trying to suppress your laugh, and e-hem, clearing your throat and muttering something like, “Actually, well…tell me more, cry baby.” It is okay. I didn’t dig any hole. No one was killed that day, fortunately.

The principal, a very impatient man, with a perpetual twitch of the left corner of his mouth, took the matter very seriously. Like a sheep dog, he rounded over a hundred of us, into a phalanx of 10 rows. Each was given a paper Union Jack. He reminded over and over that we must wave the flags vigorously, smile broadly, and sing the Sarawak State Anthem at the top of our voice when you alight from your black limousine.

The mid-morning sun was boiling down, melting us like candles. I forgot how many times we rehearsed. Every one was giving the best attention therefore no one bothered about my socks. To kill time, we rehearsed and waited. We waited and waited and we rehearsed and rehearsed.

Cometh the moment. Cometh the prince. I felt giddy from waiting. My feet were like pork buns steaming in a pot and they started vaporising from the yellowed socks. You didn’t show up.

The principal and the teachers’ faces were dripping and their clothes were soaked with perspiration. The principal, an old man, finally buckled under the heat. The twitching of the corner of the principal’s mouth gathered speed until he couldn’t take it anymore. He blew his whistle, FWEEEET, DISMISS! Stay in the front balcony of the assembly hall. No one is allowed to go anywhere. So we scattered here and there on the balcony, chatting, leaning on the balustrade…

See, it was, without a doubt, your fault. You were late. How late? Since your British etiquettes place so much importance on punctuality, you being late for more than even one minute is beyond forgiving. Not to mention an hour or so. Your Big Ben famously keeps your punctuality. In Miri, we had a humble hooter from Shell that at 11.00 am sharp, it would hoot like a constipated elephant, religiously. BOOOOOOO…….and the housewives of the whole township would start cooking rice on their stoves. Keeping time was our habit. It would be nice if you arrived at our school on the dot. Standing still for hours under an oven, feet rugged up by the chunky pair of socks, eye lashes dripping in sweats, meeting a punctual frog was better than a late handsome prince.

That was when my nightmare began. While we were relaxing in the coolness, one idiot noticed my socks. Very soon, I was surrounded by a group of merciless bullies who gave excessive and intrusive attention to my socks. Yes, about my socks! What else! Are they socks? They don’t look like socks. Why are they so big? Are you wearing your father’s socks? Why do your socks don’t look like socks? You have funny socks!

Get me out of here!

I lowered my head, so low my chin touched my heart. I felt ugly, useless, worthless and disabled. I bit my teeth as advised by mum and fought back my tears. At that very moment, the principal appeared in front of me like a ghost.

WHAT IS THIS? He twitched his mouth and stared down at my socks with narrowed eyes. I hated this old fella. He made me lost my composure. I blinked my eyes as advised by mum. Big mistake! A floodgate was opened. The tears, fighting to stay in the corners of my eyes for quite sometime, gushed down like a leaky gutter. (Crying for the third time.) My immediate reaction was to cover my face and start sobbing. Right at the very moment, we heard approaching vehicles from far. Then a convoy of police motorcycles followed by a few black sedans, a black limousine which I suspected was your car, appeared at high speed and within seconds, gone.

Through my tears, it was slow-motion in swimming water colour. The principal ran out from his office, shouted commands: WAVE, WAVE, WAVE! By that time, it was all too late. The road was eerily quiet as if nothing happened.

I am sorry I didn’t have time to pick up the flag I left on the ground while I was crying. I did feel I missed the opportunity to welcome you. Here is an important thing I have to remind you: never speed in front of a school zone, especially a primary school. If you still adamantly shake your head, “When? Eh?” You have to come clean. I also have a photo of you posing like Napoleon minus his sabre in a sports car in front of our old Chinese Chamber of Commerce building. I came, I saw, I conquered. Crowds gravitated round you like you were a superhero. It was on the front page of our Sarawak Gazette. See, you don’t illegally park anywhere you like in our town centre. Sigh…I am not being petty. But you certainly infringed our traffic rules, again.

Being a fair person, your turn to point your finger.

“Aha, ahahaha..a sad story about a little school girl with some old socks! Let me tell you. I have seen black African running – bare bottoms, bare chest, and bare footed in Kenya, chased by a deadly wildebeest. Tsk tsk tsk ! You don’t know how lucky you are.” Enough, enough. I don’t like lecture, sir. Do enjoy guzzling whisky while blowing smoke rings from your cigar. HACK, HACK, HACK… oh you poor thing. You are not choked by your cigar, are you?

We have an old Chinese saying: 宰相肚裡能撐船，將軍額上能跑馬 . In simple terms, it means a great minister’s belly is broad enough for poling a boat; the general can race horses on his forehead.

You must be big hearted and magnanimous to forgive my pettiness. Not sure if you still are a prince in heaven. I wish you long life and prosperity.

Regards.

Yours sincerely

Anonymous

P.s. By burning this letter under the open sky, it is guaranteed to reach you. My mum told me so. And she was never wrong.

Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for me present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going? – Tennessee Williams

The sprawling lalang with their sharp blades and pale yellow tails stood as tall as men. This was the typical Miri lush lalang land. The sun shining so high up lit up every blade. The breeze came, hammering the tip to bend downward. Each spike scrambling to fight the weighing down. They hummed softly, sow sow sow sow…. The crowns of the stalks tumbling forward one wave after another as if a gigantic snake was trapped under this expanse of blanket, rolling, wriggling, twisting, shifting…As soon as the wind settled down, the tail lifted its warring head, swaying, entangling, colliding, clapping each other, creating a pulsing tug-of-war.

There was a gramophone playing an operatic tune from the house across the road. The head of the family was a high school teacher. Their teenage son always waited alone for a bus to take him to a catholic school in town. They are the church-goers, the elites of the village. Every one in the village called the wife ‘先生娘” meaning ‘the wife of a teacher’ with due respect.

I scrambled up onto the wooden railing of the veranda. Like the box seat in a concert hall, it delivered the best amplified acoustic. Sitting astride, I pretended that I was on a bicycle, working busily on two imaginary pedals. This was the highest point from where I could see the house with a tin roof in the hazy distance.

When the wind rushed onto my face, my ears tried to catch the sound from the gramophone, which segued without hesitation. I was helplessly hoping for the distant wind to swallow the sound, bring it to me, spit it out and let it erupt in my ears.

Hear me. Hear me.

Oh, so I heard.

Sometimes so soft so faint, barely audible. When the wind stopped, the sound disconnected like a snapped violin string. Followed by a stillness, as if wiped down by one big sweep of a giant soundproofing hand, dampening over the top of the lalang. Maybe that was how silence should sound like. I didn’t have to wait for long. The wind came back with more indulgence, thick and fast. The vibrato of the female voice burst in my eardrum. Then it floated, soared and ebbed. Creepily haunting and dreamily beautiful. If only I could gather it in a bottle for future listening. The wind was crying to the sadness of the voice. The lalang sang, sow sow sow sow…. bowing and drooping forward and sideways like the delicate arms of the Swan Lake ballerinas. Elegantly synchronised. It was an orchestrated simple symphony. I was about six years old, straining my ears to catch this broken chain of notes from afar. I cherished this first outdoor symphony of minimalist music of my life.

There was not much of a recollection of the song. But I remember very well a sensation, a pressure that was rising up my body, like a balloon without a string and thoughts like: When can I grow up? Can I grow up faster? How tall will I be? When can I wear a pretty dress like a pretty bride, with hem laced and golden frills like the sparkling lalang? Hair studded with shiny hair pins adorned with a red hibiscus. I couldn’t wait to grow up, very badly, and taller so I could ride a “real” bicycle. I wanted to wear white pointy leathery shoes with heels. Of course I was a mere kid who had barely started schooling. Words didn’t come in this order. Not in sentences like these. More crummy mumbles and jumbles. But the longing was clear. Was life worse than the treacherous birth canal I escaped from? Maybe my age was the wrong age?

Sometimes a bird, locally named Bird of Blind Woman flew over the lalang. With dinner for its chicks in its beak, it stitched swiftly into the thick lalang like a dress maker’s sewing needle pulling a black thread, disappeared under the lalang fabric for a while. I waited patiently for the thread to emerge about two to three meters away from the original spot, up and away, it dissolved into a little black speck. Not after long, she was back again, skydived in at a different spot and lifted itself up from another point, and out of sight.

I leapt down from the railing of the balcony and ran towards the lalang. I knew there were baby birds nests in the boggy ground. I was told that the mother bird left herbal twigs around the nest, which acted as a deterrent against predators like snakes. They displayed extraordinary intelligence by landing a few metres away from the nest and emerging a few metres the opposite direction. This is a choreographed tactic to confuse human interference. But humans are cunning. They will do a reconnaissance of the area for the chicks. Upon capture, the chicks will be steeped, with the feathers, into whisky to make tonic.

Under the glare of the sunlight, I stood at the fringe of the lalang landscape, thinking. One step forward would take me to the quest of an odyssey. A little girl with straight spaghetti hair, crudely cut by her mum; ghastly short above my ears, bare footed, sun tanned face; an under-sized dress, patched up by two different materials, which I had long grown out of.

Frustrated very much as I stood pondering at the edge of the lalang, watching its depth and breadth morphed into a deep and remote jungle. Those beautiful swan necks turned into horrible hissing monsters. The lalang looked so wild. I was so unnerved and hesitant to draw the thick curtain, which was spookier than I imagined. I intended to hide myself in the lalang so cousin Pi couldn’t find me. I wanted to punish her. I wanted her to miss me. Life without me would be miserable. But without her, I dared not put one step forward. I remembered the tadpoles in a jar, those we caught in the stream days before. The legs had started growing. I decided I would never show her.

The first time I noticed the blood stain on cousin Pi’s skirt was a complete shock. I thought she had a big haemorrhage, that she was going to die. I demanded a show and tell. Lift your skirt up. What happened? She said it was an adult thing. You don’t understand. 大人的事！Crap! You are not an adult！ We were playing skip, giggling and squealing, next to the the guava tree as normal children did. The minute I noticed the stain, she manoeuvred herself up so many rungs and qualified as an adult! Remember we were always shooed away by our pohpoh if she had some adult things to tell mum?

“Kids are not supposed to know everything. Go go go, go and play outside.” Mean as it sounded, I strictly adhered to this rule. As a lesser being, I should only use my ears and not my mouth.

What maddened me was cousin Pi suddenly behaved like pohpoh and my mum, wearing an aura of superiority and seniority. I felt we were not together anymore because we were not equal any more. She stood so aloof inside the circle while I felt so pathetically small and secondary at the fringe.

Upon pressing, Pi said to me, “one day you know”. Tell me and tell me NOW! When you grow up. You mean I have to wait? I don’t want to wait. For how long? When you grow up.

EH! I twisted my face.

I could accept when pohpoh and mum said it. But coming out from cousin Pi’s mouth? It was not fair!

Nonsense! Nonsense! Nonsense!

So I ended up on the rail, listening to the broken tune and watching the lalang dance, wishing so badly to grow up. All by myself. I felt a hard lump in my throat. The lalang field turned into an abstract pattern of frothy water bubbles shimmering in a pot. My eyes were filled with tears. Suddenly I heard cousin Pi yelling from a distance.

Little Nail, come and eat fresh coconut I just picked.

哦！ Right away.

I hurried back to the house, grabbed the jar of tadpoles and walked as fast as I could to cousin Pi, wiping off my tears with the back of my hand.

I was so easily bought by a few lousy coconuts. I held the jar of tadpoles in my hand, careful not to spill the contents.

What is taking you so long?

I quickened my pace and some water spilled from the jar onto my skirt. I checked to make sure all the five tadpoles were still there. I could see little hind legs.

Cousin Pi, the tadpoles have to go back to the stream. Their hind legs are out. I yelled.

哦！

I can’t possess moments. Nonetheless writing the contents down is a way of safe keeping these moments temporarily. No matter how trivial, nonsensical or tasteless, I would not let it tiptoe away, or be forgotten effortlessly. In the younger days, living life could compare with being loaded in a fast train through a dimly lit tunnel. I wasn’t worried the past going up like a puff of smoke. I believed somewhere in my occiput was a compartment for storage, highly compressed and methodically classified .

When did the past appear so faint and hazy, almost impossible to extract, like sorting out a million pieces of jigsaw puzzles. It happens more often than ever before. My memory bank balance is running at a critically low level. It is in crisis. Some memories were neither inside out nor upside down. Others are blur and abstract. A few are like old clothes still hanging neatly in the closet, smelling of mothballs, too good to throw away yet unfashionable to wear. Some as clear and crisp as the pitter patter of raindrops on the windscreen of the car, congregate momentarily, drain away and disappear. Now that I no longer have a career, I stop to smell the flowers as well as pull the weeds. I decided to paint the colours of roses and jot down the feel of thorny weeds in the middle my palms. So here I am, accounting little events of each day as follows.

Came my annual eye check today. It wasn’t the young optician I used to see. An older man took over. He politely offered me to take a seat. Seeing that I was still clutching my carry bag in my lap, he kindly suggested to leave it on a nearby chair. As he took my glasses from me and read the private information regarding the health of my eyesight on his computer, I began to evaluate him, judge him from my perspective; something I do when I am bored. Yawn. I covered my wide open mouth. Another yawn. Pardon me. There isn’t any air in this room. Isn’t air supposed to be a free commodity?

Elderly in his sixties. Bespectacled. Not an ounce of fat. The kind of enthusiast who gets up at the crack of dawn and jogs round the park. Good complexion. Certainly no health issues like diabetes or high blood pressure. Besides a few age lines, I can’t see any stress lines; definitely no stomach ulcers. Eats well and plain; reads a lot; well informed; high IQ. A perfect family man. Married. Children, two but no more than three, most probably are doctors, lawyers or opticians. Verdict: A prudent man who probably never saw a speeding ticket.

Enough of this analysis, most probably all rubbish. I yawned a long yawn and turned my head to the wall. I couldn’t help noticing three simple paintings on the wall. Paintings? It is not the normal optician’s consult room that is wallpapered with large gruesome graphic prints of the cross sections of eyeballs, optical nerves, retina or horrible examples of glaucoma ravaged lens.

I asked if I could get a closer look. He said, “go ahead.” At a close look, the pictures are made of sketches of cut-outs. If you are not careful, you would be mistaken they are painted directly on. Every sketch has a pair of glasses, if not, an eye ball. I asked who the artist was. He said he did it. YOU? Of course, YOU was only sounded in my head. What came out from my lips was a quiet “Wow”.

He said I was the first person who “wows” his works. “Could be the last.” He chuckled. He confessed he had a few hung on the wall of his family lounge. No one, for that many years, bothered to stop for a second to take a look. The honesty of his admission made me sit straighter with enthusiasm. Such a brutal blow! Was it my imagination that he suddenly dimmed and aged in front of my eyes?

Poor man. I felt sympathetic for his sob story, I could have jokingly said something like: I really need my eyes checked today. Your works will certainly look even more artistic if I have my glasses on.

Every painter/writer, good or bad, has an imposter syndrome. To erase this undesirable feeling, one has to be told someone is doing worst than yourself. I was ready to turn his day into a better day. Saying something like: my paintings are so bad that my husband does not want to see any of them on the wall. Not the toilet’s.

“Can you put your chin on this stand? First I want to see your right eye.” For a moment I was awoken and remembered why I was there for. He had no empathy at all!

It is only end of January. There is an unseasonal autumn chill in the air. But the deciduous tree in my backyard is easily fooled and decides to shed its leaves. Wrong season. Wrong timing. Time, like the Terminator in the movie, kills everything. It doesn’t need timing.

With the help of the breeze and gravity, a brown leaf swirled down gracefully, hesitated for a moment and finally landed on the vegetable patch. It kissed the soil, snuggled closely to its shadow, as if deserving a curtain call. Not for long. A light breeze started flirting with the strewn leaf, rustling, turning and rolling until it hit the corner of a brick wall. It eventually got entangled among an abandoned cobweb. (An abandoned cobweb is a dead web.) So viscous and elastic; To scoop out with one’s hand, you can almost hear a weak resistance from the cobweb, like the pulling of mozzarella cheese to maximum away from a hot pizza. It keeps stretching and stretching. Now no matter how hard you fling your hand, the cobweb and the rotten leaf adhered. So you use the other hand to get rid of them, eventually. Thank god I was born with two hands!

I have a vegetable garden. I pick the older leaves of spinach, kale and so on to feed the chooks. When they don’t grow fast enough for my girls, I resolve to the local supermarket. Behind the supermarket is the loading dock for delivery trucks. And where bins are kept. The bins are colour coded. Green for fruits and vegetable scraps. The yellow bins are laid with putrefying slabs of uncooked meats, chicken, lamb and beef, processed or non-processed, all types of cheeses and bread, plain or gourmet. I opened it once. The stench was enough for a dead man to come back from hell. This horrid smell grabbed my face like the arms of a life octopus. I immediately clattered the lid loudly back, feeling drugged.

I met a few times an old man picking vegetable scraps like me. He looks Italian, with a furrowed face. He comes with a hessian garden bag, folded into a flat neat square, anchored tightly under his armpit.

Standing next to each other on two empty milk crates, in close claustrophobic proximity, leaning over and inhaling the invading smell of scraps was awkwardly odd. Both taking part in the same ritual with the same goal and identical theme. Silence is loud which makes me either want to stop breathing or have a cough. Imagine sitting in a concert hall, when the soloist is pulling off the last note, so deliberately slow, taking all his time in the world; the last note, the last breath, vibrato to diminuendo to nothing. I have to take a deep inhalation.

So I muttered something! “You keep a lot of chooks?” I asked in the midst of picking up a half rockmelon, with fur growing on the surface. I couldn’t throw away this mouldy monster quick enough to a far corner of the bin. Well, a casual question requires only a simple answer. Social etiquette. Hurry up!

After a million years of silence, he coughed out the words, phlegmatically, “too many!” Hooray! He was finally out from his coma. I understood our rivalry concerning some lousy cabbage leaves. I filled up my plastic bag and left the bin entirely to him. I even bided him a farewell. “see ya!”

The next time I saw him, he had his hessian bag slung heavily over his left shoulder. It was not a fat mountain goat inside the bag. Obviously he had achieved great success scavenging whereas I was about to embark. “Someone has come before us. There is nothing left. Go home.” He was talking to me.

Someone? Who can it be? Being a typical sceptical woman, I hear what I hear but I believe only my eyes. I lifted the green lid up. LIAR! YOU DIRTY LIAR! He probably could not hear me as he faded quickly out of sight.

I would love to be a grandma. There is this Sri Lankan neighbour living back to back. The grandma always popped her head over the fence to chat while I swept the chook run. I guessed she was standing on something, be it a stool or pieces of bricks. Her grandson who was a thumb-sucking, tooth-cutting toddler then, adored my chooks. Grandma put him high over her shoulders while he, pointing at my chooks, yelled with excitement, bah bah, bah bah. It wasn’t babbling. He was speaking proper Sri Lankan. Bah bah is chicken.

Let me fast forward to the present. The little boy who “bah bah” my girls is to embark on his academic journey. He is a respectable kindergarten boy, with an Anglo Saxon name, Danny. He calls my girls, “CHOOK, CHOOK”. His dad has finished building a chook house, complete with three laying hens which he and grandma proudly showed them off over the fence. He is no longer interested at my bah bah. I don’t see him over the fence anymore. Instead he continues to remind me of his existence by throwing over the fence empty yogurt container, half eaten apples, broken toys and even his little tooth brush

I yelled back: “Danny, I am dialling 911 now.” (Forgive me for watching too many American NYPD on Netflix. I truly don’t know the emergency numbers of Australia off the top of my head.)

Another empty yogurt container swooshed down over the fence, missed my head by the width of a hair. Such improved accuracy! Right, young man. This is as far as you can go. You think I am going to stoop and collect your yogurt containers, broken toys, apple cores, etc. for the rest of my geriatric years? You are wrong!

The fence certainly makes us see our world differently. His understanding was since she is sweeping, one or two empty yogurt cans will not hurt.

I have a totally opposite view. I want the brat here not the litter, and I will peel his head off like an orange and put our old Confucian teachings into it: (1) Do unto others as you would have others do unto you; (2) Do not mess with fire, water and women. They are dangerous, especially elderly women who lack tolerance.

Of course, I won’t peel his head off. He is such a cute little fella. Big bright eyes, thick black hair, with a cute voice, and an abundance of life. While I was sweeping, (yes, sweeping again), leaves from the front driveway, Danny, with his helmet on, was careering on the pavement his new flashy kid scooter in the reserve opposite my house. The trundling of the concrete wheels sounded like a violent thunderstorm reverberating in this quiet reserve. I could hear him shouting to his sister, “I am coming! Out out out of my way! Idiot, give me some space!” Gaining speed and volume is fearsome. When he saw me, he slowed down and stopped. Then a big smile. Hello! He wanted me to compliment his scooter.

“Can I borrow your scooter, Danny?”

“Nope. It is too dangerous!”

“I will be careful.”

“Nope, you are too risky for my scooter.”

“Maybe I shall ride my broom with you!”

“No, you don’t look like a witch, and I am not afraid of witches!” He growled. But I couldn’t miss the momentary fear on the muscles of his face. To compound his woes, I cackled. Heh, heh, heh, trying to sound extremely spooky. At such a tender age, there is no fine line drawn between reality and fairytale.

He obviously cannot stomach the image of my silhouette riding across an illuminating full moon or my shadow stencilled on his window. Hee, hee, hee, even wickeder and more theatrical if only my front teeth are missing. Let him shiver with trepidation under his blanket; let his blood coagulate in the veins. Kakakaka Kah. I would cackle like a hen after laying an egg.

I took an affectionate look at my flying machine, a cheap broom, nothing fancy. Not flashy.

Old people don’t look quite human most of the time; wrinkles and wormy veins, sparse grey hair, sunken cheeks, corners of mouth arch downward with lips disappearing into mouth cavity. Who says looks don’t matter? Danny called the ceasefire. I believe fear works better than negotiations which require long-winded gives and takes and complicated backward/forward steps. Fear is , simply, fearful. That is why I like the Old Testament about a deadly crunchy apple, contrary to what doctors believe today. Pity the broom was never mentioned in the Old Testament. So so good for a child’s positive development.

Danny’s older sister loves singing in her backyard. Some Sri Lankan songs. I can hear her sweet voice while I sweep up the chook poop. She reminds me of my childhood. One day while she was singing, the little brat yelled for her attention. She kept singing. He kept yelling, louder and louder, drowning her voice. Until a harsh thunderous high pitched “W H A T!” erupted from her diaphragm. Wonder if she was about to lose her voice. It is sharp enough to make my eyebrows tingle and my middle ears break.

She was going strong with a string of fiery words interlaced with Sri Lankan and English mishmash. Here is my rough summarised version.

mm hm, Shut up you little fool what do you want you idiot go away, deedle dum deedly , deedly dee….don’t talk to me I hate you I don’t care pah dah pah dah pah….I could hear shoes stomping and chuffing followed by the stomping up the steps to the house, at a cyclonic speed, then the fly screen door swinging back and forth, rusty hinges squeaking painfully. A moment of Sh sh sh. Then the beautiful Sri Lankan songs resumed. Ah, I think I like Danny even more.

I am a two-year-old brown miniature poodle. Sex? Unfortunately my manhood was surgically uprooted when I was a pup. Mama told me my root is in an orchard farm, Murray Bridge; confused and lost in the transition from a place with picturesque fertile rolling greens to a suburban dwelling no bigger than a chessboard-size backyard crammed with vegetables and fruit trees. My first family: an Australian woman with a large physique, holding and squeezing my tiny body against her opulent chest while I gasped for air between her XXL size bra, gulping in mouthful of her sweat mixed with odd body odour. To set free, I wriggled my body and tried to bite and tear her bra. The man of the house treated his torso like a piece of canvas, tattoos stenciled with busy murals; a beer bottle grafted permanently in his hand. What about the kids? What about? The teenage son can never finish a sentence without saying the F..K word. The daughter articulates by rolling her eyes in search of words seemingly orbiting somewhere in the galaxies. Amid the constant hot-blooded swearings, there was never a dull moment.

It was Ger Ger (elder brother) who drove a long way to Murray Bridge from Adelaide and adopted me. It wasn’t love at first sight. He had to decide between me and my slightly skinny brother. He named me Murray. I joined this Asian family, still a roly-poly bundle. Being a 2 -month-old puppy, getting up the only step from the kitchen to the sitting room was an insurmountable task. Stumbling and fumbling, I rolled backwards and ended up crying. Looks are skin deep. As time evolves, they found me destructive to catastrophic.

I grow very fast into a high-voltage four-legged canine, wrecking anything that obstructs my way. A straw coloured cow was battered and ravaged in minutes. Its stuffing strewn on the carpet floor. I yanked out the button eyes. Finding them hard to chew, why not swallow them? So I did. The four limbs, jagged and torn, each vanished neatly under the sofa. I chased after the synthetic fibres that bulked up this, this despicable ugly toy. Then I engulfed the head in my mouth and brought it to papa, wet with my saliva, with glee. Papa yelled something that didn’t make sense to me. He pointed his index finger at me. “You know how much this fluffy cow costs?” He tried to snatch the head from my mouth. I wrestled by jerking my head from side to side, and growled. Swell! Such fun.

The family clearly saw investing in fluffy toys was like burning banknotes to light up a cigarette. To find something value for money, I was given an unattractive but durable pig ear; tough, sinewy, chewy and leathery. The taste, delectable.

“Savour it.” Papa gave my head a pat. A week later, papa found that the pig ear reduced into a bit of fibre, just enough for forensic DNA testing. Index pointing, papa hissed between his teeth, “Congratulations! Murray! This pig ear is too tender. I know exactly what to get you. An elephant hoof!!!”

Mama saved a big pork bone for me to play in the backyard. Valuing it like a prized possession, I headed to one corner of the garden, stashed it away safely. Inexperienced me piled it into a sand hill, or a miniature pyramid at gestation, conspicuously next to the rose bush.

“Murray, where is the bone? It was there 5 minutes ago? Don’t leave it lying around. It attracts ants.” The next day, I went to resurrect the bone. Mama was right. Ants rushing in and out of tunnels, clogging up highways and forming gridlock bottlenecks. Ants marching over ants, salvaging the very last traces of meat and perhaps bone marrow. A chunk of sinews moving forward like a heavy vehicle, steadied by a battalion of ants. They, like me, like to hide their food. This is not a safe place. I picked up the bone and moved it to another location, classified as a highly sensitive restricted zone; where not a soul should know. Only then I feel secure.

“Murray, look, you have ants crawling on your muzzle? Oh dear!”

Burying a bone in Ger Ger’s apartment is building a castle in the air. There is a plant looking half alive in a pot at Ger Ger’s balcony. I buried the bone in the pot leaving too many clues around the rim. The dead plant, the potting mix, not to say my paw prints were all over the place.

Why do I have to mention Asian Chinese? Because they have their ways of bringing up dogs. The house, like my former owners, was filled with loud sounds every day. Different from the swearing I am used to, though. These is great classical music streaming from the radio. Sounds that are soothing to my ears. I can nap through the music without being startled. Other adaptations by the Chinese family include the compulsory rule for my paws to be washed and dried before I get into the house. Bum cleaned after every poop. I yelped and used my teeth and paws to protest against such hospital cleanliness. Soon I learned to tolerate. Now this routine has turned me into a class above all dogs in terms of hygiene.

The family looks after their dollars and cents. No one drinks, smokes, gambles nor speculates in the share market. They go to bed early and rise early. Boring! Very very very! Mama is a frugal woman who fills up her freezer with salmon heads, pig trotters, ham bones, chicken feet, giblets, livers and hearts; all the cheap off-cuts. Back from the market, she triumphantly announced, “See, see, 5 salmon heads for the price of 4. Big size! Can’t resist. I saput (Malay word for leave none) all of them.”

“Bargains!” Resonates papa. Filet Mignon? Salmon steak? Lobsters? Are you kidding? These are for special occasions! And special occasions never come.

So imagine I have never tasted canned food from supermarket shelves. I salivate at the TV advertisements for dog food, Bow Wow, A La Carte, My Dog, Chum…all claim to be top-rated, premium quality. This family doesn’t believe in food that come from a tin. My diet is freshly cooked meat plus steamed rice, carrot, potato, sweet potato, pumpkin etc. After dinner I am treated with fresh fruit, banana, apples, oranges. When I am lucky, even durians.

Ger Ger bought me some cheap yellow tennis balls from Kmart store. Before I knew how to play with it, I took it apart into two halves. This was nothing compared to the iRobot. While it navigated noisily on the carpet floor, I rendered it beyond repair only with a few moves! Papa gave up. He didn’t wave his index finger at me. What is the point! He was mortified. Being a canine, I am capable of demolishing almost anything, a chainsaw, a food processor, three brooms, perhaps a lawnmower (I shan’t admit to this). It was too painful for the family. The money they saved up for rainy days. Now it poured. No one even wanted to talk about it. When the grieving was over, papa bought a new but much cheaper robotic vacuum cleaner from the Internet. It sits quietly and neatly at a corner of the wall, constantly being charged. Never see it get off its butt to do any chores. Wonder why.

Mama loves to tell long-winded stories. I listen and remember. My mama told me she, as a kid, was not allowed to be near a dog, to touch it is to get whacked (she, not the dog). As if she just squished a blob of poop, her mum would scream, “go wash your hands, NOW!” And she told me how she was bitten on her hind leg by a pack of dogs when she visited a friend. It was a hot day. She carried a little umbrella. Shielding herself with the umbrella didn’t offer much protection, it bent outward and twisted into scrap metal. Blood oozed down her sweaty thigh. She threw the umbrella away, squatted and screamed as loud as her lungs could. The dogs stopped the attack, backed off , stood round her and continued barking. Her screams would be most unpleasant to the dogs. Ever since then, she was biased against dogs. And her mum stopped talking to this particular neighbour. “Why didn’t they do something to rescue my poor girl?” her mum said. I gave mama a few licks on her chin. Poor mama!

In winter months, my fur grew unrelentlessly. More a grizzly bear than a hairy doodley thing; tail like a feathered duster; ears like Pom-poms. My fur was thick and dense, curly and knotty. My eyes were hardly visible. An appointment was made with a dog groomer. Ger Ger left me in the salon. I was chained to a high work desk. I felt ok because this wasn’t the first time I was being groomed. A creepy groomer in complete black attire was assigned the job. She was either in mourning or black was her preferred colour ; a long flowing black gown, black mullet hair-do, black nail polish, black lipsticks so thick that her teeth , the black keys of the piano; black smoky eyeliners, black long eyelashes that drooped like the eaves of a roof. Like a wicked witch I once saw on TV. On her wrist was a black dog collar, wider and meaner than mine, adorned with cold shiny studs and a big buckle. Her big cross pendant couldn’t stop gyrating and dazzling my eyes. I grabbed it with my teeth to put an end to this flickering. Needless to say, the trimming and clipping was not a smooth ride. This was not my first salon trip. I had better ones before. This witchy witch was so rough. An amateur and a lousy one!

Ouch! Her pointy scissors caused a sharp pain on the base of my penis. I yapped, wriggled, turned my head with threatening growls. To vent my spleen, I yanked my sharp teeth on one of the pinkies of her witchy hand. Blood seeped out. Lucky for her. Her chunky ring saved her finger; it would have dislodged like a sausage. She threw the scissors down onto the floor strewn with my cut fur. Quick as a flash, she smacked my nose. Picked up the mobile and called Ger Ger. In her throaty smoky voice, words gushing out: “Your bloody dog bit me. I can’t finish the job. Come and collect this piece of shit now.”

How dare you? Bitch of whatever! No one hit me before!

When I returned home, first it was the shock, followed by humiliating laughter, then sympathetic “oh dear, oh dear.” “They turned my poor baby into a lion with a mane, hahaha, more like a lady wearing a hooded faux fur.” Mama held me on her lap. As if she has eyes that can see through my skin, she examined my wounds. There was a laceration on my genitalia, so straight it looked like it was done with a ruler and a red marker pen; and two more on my elbows. Mama squirted some antiseptic cream on the cuts. But, she didn’t do anything for my wounded pride.

The mane had to go. The next day, with papa’s help, Mama used a pair of ordinary scissors and lots of treats to calm me down in order to get the job done. Something she had never done before. So gentle and careful. Finally I turned into a complete baldy. All my curly locks disappeared. Mama said I looked ugly. I didn’t care. I never expect my picture to appear in the front page of a dog salon magazine. Never pretend to be some handsome dogs when I am not. I have no such ego.

THE FRIGHTFUL INCIDENT: mama had both her hips operated. When she was well enough, she took me for a stroll in the park in front of the house. With a walking stick going tock tock tock on the pavement, she was too slow for me. I quickened my pace and the leash jerked off her hand easily. I was overtaken by a burst of exuberant energy. Liberation! I sprinted down the footpath which came to an abrupt end. I was near the kerb. Something across the road beckoned . Mama was yelling, “Murray, stop! Murray! Come back!” My head was boiling with excitement. I rushed across the road to the other side of the neighbourhood. I lost my bearings. Where am I? Finally, mama caught up with me. “Sit, Murray, sit!” No way! I am a dog. Therefore I follow my nose. I sniffed and sniffed, here and there, just to avoid Mama.

Then I heard an oncoming car. Yeah! I started chasing the car down the road. It defensively increased its speed and sped off. What the? Before I could wink or blink, another car approached from behind. Yippee, I did the same; ran after its tail. It accelerated then screeched to a stop. I was whipped onto the bumper, stuck there like a bat for a milli-second. BANG! and immediately my body bounced off and flipped over like a pancake on a frying pan and landed on the bitumen. Imagine this graphic details in slow motion.

Then the car sped off. Mama yelled a long piercing NO! Unable to run, she struggled with big strides, expecting to see me gasping in a foetal position; my chain of vertebrae dislodged into little nuts and bolts; my leg bones ground into pulp. I was truly in fright, in pain and above all, in utter embarrassment. With my head hung low, tail tucked between my hind legs, I got up, crossed the road and walked slowly down into the pathway of the park, and headed home. Mama finally caught up with me. She stroked my head, ran her fingers over my spine to check the extent of the injury. Lucky for me, every groove was perfect like the corrugated tin roof; not a bone protruding. She held me close, almost in tears: “never run after cars. You understand? Only a stray dog has this surviving skill. You are a pet dog.” I understand every word she said. Stay with the mothership!

I wanted to tell her how sore my whole body was from the impact. I couldn’t. So I buried my head in her armpit and whimpered. The next few days, mama would feel my body over and over. Checked my eyesight by holding a treat in front of me. Checked my hearing by whistling in different volumes. She told no family member. Ger Ger would not forgive her for such carelessness. Papa would tell relatives over the dining table how irresponsible mama was. This story would be told, edited and exaggerated. The story would change from grim to funny until it lost its credibility. I am a good secret keeper. This secret between mama and me would be buried in the closet forever.

I know I am an intelligent dog because I can tell what is going on. When mama and papa behaved sneakily, murmured to each other, or when mama wore her favorite perfume and papa opened his wine fridge, scratched his chin to decide, mmm, how many bottles of wine, pondered between red or white, Shiraz or Chardonnay and what vintage. During those moments of anxiety, I would stay close to papa’s legs. He would coax me by putting food in my bowl. While I am eating, he would sneak out with mama already waiting outside the house in her high heels. I took one sniff of the food and they were gone. I whined quietly and sat myself at the front door and waited for their home coming. Once I hear their car arriving at the driveway, the feeling is as if I have missed them for aeons. Every piece of my anatomy is so exaggeratedly excited. I jiggle my buttocks, wag my tail, and jump up and down for cuddles and make a yapping noise. When I was pup, I would pee uncontrollably during such excitement.

Once, they took longer time than I could bear. I have an in-built clock. It accurately crosses off the seconds, minutes and hours; tick, tick, tick…X X X …It was a Saturday morning. Mama didn’t wear her perfume nor put on her high heels. Papa didn’t open his wine fridge. That caught me off guard. Next thing they were gone. I heard the Honda rolled down the driveway. I waited at the front door looking through the lead light glass that went all the way to floor level. I cried to sleep, woke up and found them nowhere in the house. They should be home by now. What is taking them so long? I wept some more. Being abandoned, neglected, rejected and angry; I was steeped in the smorgasbord of sad feelings. Many hours later, the sound of car wheels gritted against the driveway. I started dancing, scratching, whining, yelping at the lead light glass. Once the door was unlocked by mama, I rushed out to the driveway. The back door of the Honda was wide opened. I jumped on to the splitfold seat and sat glued on it. Today, I am going nowhere!

Papa said “Murray baby, we missed you” while he unloaded more stuff. A wheel barrow and a lawnmower. No wonder it took them so long. They went to the local hardware store. Mama now appeared from the house and said, “Murray, get inside. Too hot in the car. I don’t want a burnt hot dog!” She then disappeared into the house with more shopping. Minutes gone; she stuck her head out of the door and said to papa, “Take him for a ride round the block. Maybe he will feel happier.” Papa did. He thought that would even out everything. While trying to take me out of the car from the driver side, I growled and threatened to bite his fingers. I even moved to the passenger side of the car so he couldn’t reach me. When he opened the other car door, I moved back to the original position. It was grilling hot inside the car. Papa was sweating. My tongue sticking out while my whole body was heaving. Papa became impatient with me. He slammed the car door. “Be a hot dog if it pleases you.” Poor papa with sweat dripping from the furrows of his forehead, closed the front door and disappeared into the house. I started to regret for my stubbornness. It must be 50 degrees Celsius inside the car. Hot enough to make popcorn explode. After a long while, Papa emerged from the front door with a big cushion, my comfy bed. He opened both back doors. From one side he used the cushion to force me out. I hid my tail between my legs and ran as fast as I could into the house, straight to my bowl of water amid the “you stupid dog! So stubborn! “ and mama’s “he needs a cold shower!”

I stay at Ger Ger’s apartment four nights a week. I follow him to his office on Tuesdays and Fridays. He works hard like a dog, whereas I snooze and nap like the chairman of the organisation. My colleagues dote on me. When they need a little break, they come to me, rub my ears, chuff under my chin, tickle my belly, or take me for a walk. The people in the neighbourhood know me from when I was a wee pup. I always stop for hellos and strokes. They call me the Pin-up Boy of Gilbert Street. My colleagues titled me the Employee of the Year. Well, I can’t help being popular. Can I?

Ger Ger calls himself the Alfa male. I look up to him. I find him inspiring. I want to be like him, an Alpha Dog. When the long day is done, Ger Ger gives out a big yawn. I stick out my tongue and echo a yawn. When he stretches his arms, I do a downward dog stretch simultaneously. I imitate my idol. After work, he takes me to the dog park opposite his apartment. The park is the size of four soccer fields. He is a fast bowler in the style of Dennis Lillee. I feel like I am running at supersonic speed at the direction of the ball to meet it. The head wind glues my ears to the sides of my head. My eyes have to zero in at the ball that is coming down at me at 100 mph and I leap with all fours to catch it in the air with my mouth. That is counted as a perfect score. The rule of the game. If I let the ball drop, then catch it, it is a foul.

Once the ball is in my mouth, I run as fast as my legs can carry, back to Ger Ger and drop the ball in front of him. I take a deep breath, wiggle my tail, bounce backward and forward lightly like a boxer in the ring. I bark once to let him know I am ready. I would bark again to hurry him up.

If mama is there to cheer, I am so elevated with extra springs in my legs and my body changed into top gear. I don’t want to be an underdog in front of mama. Mama was pretty cool. She cheered and clapped whatsoever, score or no score. I was smitten. Like music to my ears, I carried the ball back to Ger Ger marching all the way with eyes fixated at mama; so elated like a cat with a rat caught in its mouth.

The daily sports help develop muscles. Mama proudly felt my pronounced calf muscles and the bulging biceps and said, “bigger than turkey drumsticks!” Well, being a housewife she associates everything with food on the dining table.

Ger Ger also takes me bushwalking on the weekends. Outdoor life was exhilarating! Without the leash, he allows me to go wayward, sniff, snoop, scrabble and dig along the dirt track. If I am slightly out of his sight, he only has to whistle. I like that whistle, high than low, a language spoken between him and me. Like falling into the rabbit hole, bushwalking is exploration of the world of another kind. Once I found under a log a family of sleepy Blue tongue lizards. Among the rattling brushes of bottlebrush, tussock, the rotting leaves and twigs disclosed huge clans of earwigs, ants, millipedes, wood bugs. The earwigs slithered away into the deeper wood in a flash. Now you see it. Now you don’t. The wood bug, like a clumsy old bus, moaned into tiny round pearl and surrendered. The millipede, scurrying like a semi-trailer, gave up very fast, curled itself into brass button. Mama’s chooks can double their sizes by spreading their wings and let their feathers standing out. Maybe when I grow up, I have the skill of turning into a different looking thing when in grave danger.

With dirt, dried leaves, and little purple flowers stuck in my ears and face, I showed Ger Ger a twisted piece of old wood with mildew and wood bugs between my teeth. Sometimes I would find an empty yogurt container which in no time will be crunched into a shapeless piece of artwork. My teeth, despite the dirt, are always white as the ivory keys of a piano. Halfway, we stopped for a water break. Ger Ger has a big flask for himself and a small flask for me. He poured the water into the lid for me. While slurping up the water, I looked at Ger Ger drinking directly from the flask. So cool! I felt the wonderments of my world. Love and be loved.

Since I am walking alongside an Alpha, it feels like walking next to a underworld kingpin. He holds the reins. He doesn’t mince words, always straight to the point. Once, I didn’t know what got into my head. I barked at every passerby, heralding my presence. Worst, I ankle bit one guy in the apartment lift. Ger Ger bought a bottle of expensive whiskey to make peace with him. Punishment is doing time in the dark locked up bathroom. Ger Ger threatens me with “you want to stay in the bathroom?” it equates to “do you want me to shoot you in the head or chest?” He slams the bathroom door. Darkness instantly swallows me. I am a dog. Darkness does not bother me. What I hate is the isolation. Grim! Ger Ger calls it spirit quest. I usually take a long dog nap.

During the covid pandemic, I stayed with mama and papa. The government’s rule is : a dog is allowed to walk next to a human but a human is not allowed to walk his dog in the park. Profound! During that period, papa worked from home. A typical day sees me resting in his arm 9 to 5 except toilet breaks and lunch break. I have an in-built clock, sharp as a Rolex. At 4:59pm, I become restless. I jump down from his lap and scratch his arm for attention. The moment he stands up, stretches, yawns and announces, “Another day, another dollar!” I rush to the screen door, wagging my tail, eyeing him with a sense of excitement. Off we go to the little green in the backyard. I would retrieve my cheap yellow cricket ball somewhere among the ground covers and together we play. In the beginning he would let the ball roll and let me catch it with my mouth. Often, he tricks me by hitting the ball against the brick wall and let it ricochet. The first time I leapt sideways and caught the ball mid-air like a goalie, omg, it blew my mind away! What a circus trick. Now I jump higher and higher, seldom miss. I have a dream. One day I might jump and do a jaw-dropping triple somersault in the air and catch the ball, then cart-wheel back to papa still with the ball in my mouth.

Mama is a very genuine person. She allows me to be a dog. She talks with intelligence and I listen with intelligence. In the steamy summer evenings at nine pm, you don’t know whether to call it day or night. The sky is still bright. She sits me down in the lawn. I make circles round her then snuggle into her lap. Last night, there was a gibbous moon that hung meaninglessly high in the sky, white like the drifting cloud. Only when final darkness fell, the moon turned silvery and bright as if being charged by the turning on of a switch. She told me about the first person who landed on the moon. Not the American. It was Chang Er. A Chinese Goddess. Mama is easy with most things but is very particular about one thing. Clean paws. So I have to be carried to the laundry sink and have my paws washed before I can walk on the floor in the house. When I was little, I sank my teeth into the back of her hand while she cleaned me. She still shows me that white scar among her green veins and compliments how I have grown into a good boy. You are a dog. So, be yourself. But no teeth!

Mama keeps four creatures with ragged claws in her backyard. She named them Reddy, Dotty, Brook and Candy and fondly calls them “my girls”. They have their own house, source of my constant envy. A luxurious grandiose structure with steps leading to the main door. The corners of mama’s mouth curl up into a soft smile whenever she peeks into the nest box. Like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, out comes three, sometimes four eggs. She says thank you to the “girls”. And she takes turn to cuddle each one of them and says how beautiful they are. Errk! I can’t bear the sight! I rush to the fence, bark my lungs out, rub my face against the fence, and act like a complete rogue to shake them up. A few feathers fly in the air and drop gently down like a pendulum arch. Mama waves a stick at me. Not only does she dislike her girls being disturbed but she is most annoyed to see the damage I did to her passion fruit vine.

Mama yells at me, “stop it, will you? They will be too frightened to lay eggs tomorrow!” Then with a more serious tone, mama tells me the rooster crows to wake up the sun so we have a bright day. Be nice. This world without chickens is a world of darkness.

These are my shortcomings and imperfections as a two-year-old poodle, mentally unstable, but affectionate and domestic. Papa , mama and Ger Ger are not just my best friends. They are my family. They dote on me. I trust them. When night falls, and my energy wanes, I snuggle up to mama while she gives the belly rub. I know one day when I develop arthritis, deafness, or blindness, they will still love me and take care of me. I love them with every bit of me.

Take a glimpse into my childhood in the 50’s, life was pretty traumatic on a day to day basis. Every so often I would walk into an explosive land mine. Take the geese in grandma’s tiny farm for example. They nearly deformed me mentally.

My pohpoh reared chickens, ducks and three incredibly noisiest geese in the whole universe. I was merely three, going on four. One particular goose, being the biggest fowl in the farm, enjoyed inflating its body by flapping its wings. I didn’t know what she saw in me. She would followed me around next to my feet, honking like a fire truck. I refused to walk in the compound unless carried by an adult.

Just as scary was pohpoh’s skinny hunching silhouette, in front of the dim kerosene lamp, casting a gigantic shadow ten times her size, quivering big and then bigger on the mosquito net. Pohpoh was always the last one to go to sleep while I snuggled up next to cousin Pi. She was four years my senior. Raised by pohpoh, she felt like an only child and loved my sleepovers.

I watched how pohpoh first un-coiled her hair bun. Then I would hold my breath as she dug from her mouth the plastic teeth. She then dropped the teeth into a glass of water. Pohpoh turned into a complete stranger.

Total uneasiness overtook me while she changed into her sleeveless pyjamas. Out of the corner of my eye, her breasts looked like two upside down shrivelled up guavas. Her arms, forever hidden in the long sleeves of Sum Fu during the day, were grooves and wrinkles; whiter than white paper. They drooped lifelessly like dried preserved mandarin peels. I dared not asked if they could be ironed out with a hot iron. I did not know how old pohpoh was. That moment, she looked more than 100 hundred years plus. In fact, she was in her early seventies then.

Her long hair tumbled down to her belly button. she would then comb it with a rhino comb, part of her dowry she brought all the way from China. She forbade sharing her comb, even with cousin Pi. With due dedication and concentration, strand by strand, she brushed. Then she applied some essence, working with her fingers through and through. I still remember that smell of (花虂水), dew of flower essence, a Loccitane equivalent. After she finished with her hair, she reached into the drawer for the rosary. She whisper-prayed incoherently. Her fingers busy “counting ” the rosary. That would take another long while.

The kerosene lamp was dimmed to a ghostly withdrawn gleam to save on kerosene. The teeth, immersed in the water, seemed to animate; Expanding like popcorns about to spill out of the glass ; A few strides, they would peg on the mosquito net like a big spider!

In this in-between undetermined zone of unsteady glow and darkness, the teeth were eyeing me while my gaze fixated. I was at the verge of freaking out. BOOM BOOM BOOM ……..my heart banging on my chest! I immediately took my gaze away……Then out of curiosity, I looked again to see what they were up to. This time they grinned mischievously, at me.

Come, come, come play with us…..beckoning me!

I glued my eyelids as tightly as I could and covered my face with my hands. Hopelessly inquisitive, I slowly opened my eyes into slits; peeping from the gaps of my fingers. Dak, dak, dak……they were clicking their tongues!

I held cousin Pi’s hands, whispered into her ear, “Did you hear what I hear?”

“Hear what?”

“Pohpoh’s teeth, dak dak dak.”

“Are you deaf? It is the clock.”

Whew! In the spartan lounge, the grandfather clock on the wall was the only prestigious and expensive item. The minute hand was ticking tirelessly in a hollow way. Then without warning, the hour hand heralded the time of night. DONG, DONG, DONG……Each DONG immediately followed by an echo of soft decresendo d-o-n-g. It made me jump out of my wits. Cousin Pi was so quick to show off counting the DONGs. Nine DONGs. Cousin Pi started this “counting” game. I was her only enthusiastic fan and follower. While she was in the advance “Heart Counting” 心算, I was in the elementary finger and toe counting.

Pohpoh woke up every morning before the crack of dawn. She let the chooks and ducks out of the shed and then fed them. With the same little kerosene lamp, she started tying her vegetable, picked the previous evening, into bundles by salty weeds. She had a little vegetable store in Lutong wet market. Pohpoh sold spring onions, coriander, chillies, mint and farm eggs. Unlike cucumber and tomatoes, herbs were lighter to cart around and they fetched better money. Her clientele was mainly Dutch housewives who never bargained.

Cousin Pi and I once volunteered to get up early to help, thinking it was all fun. Instead of feeling everything around, pohpoh turned up the kerosene lamp for better visibility. Incapable of maintaining a singular focus, I leaned forward, face over the glass shield of the kerosene lamp, to look closer how to tie with salty weeds. My eyebrows and eyelashes went up in a plume of smoke. Pohpoh brushed my face with the corianders she was just about to tie to smother the smoke. I felt so worthless!

From then on, I was axed from sharp abrasive objects, e.g. Knives, cleaver, sickle and garden hoes; barred from holding things that spilled, e.g. A bowl of hot soup, a cup of hot tea; kept out of reach of matchsticks and kerosene. Banished from water well. It was punishment under the disguise of protectionism! Cousin Pi manipulated her new-found power to run over my life. Don’t touch this! Don’t go near that! Don’t don’t don’t……I blocked my ears with my fingers and stuck out my tongue at her.

Mum once told me a scary story, teeth and claws, about a young child sharing the same bed with his grandma. One night, he woke up to pee. He heard a crunching sound at the end of the bed. He asked grandmother what was she up to.

“Eating walnuts!” It wasn’t grandma’s voice. He dared not climb back to bed. The next morning, there were piles of bones on the bed. Grandma was gone.

As a kid, I loved pohpoh during the day, but was very very frightened of her when night fell.

Back to the damned geese! The sadistic geese loved to bully a cute kid like me. They never did it to Cousin Pi.

Pohpoh’s dunny was a little shed located far away from the house to distance the permeating foul smell. I was escorted there the first few times because of the fear of the pecking geese. Then the adults got tired of my princess-like behaviour.

“Go, go, go! You are a big girl now. After Chinese New Year, you will be five!” They tried sucking up to me. It worked.

Even though the arithmetic was confusing. I was told I was three; fake age, (虛歲) four. Cousin Pi said if I die there and then, I would jump three grades to six years old. I needed to borrow one finger of the other hand to count to six. What an astronomical achievement!

This time, cousin Pi helped shoo the geese out of sight and dropped me like a hot yam to face the first fear of my life, the geese. To start off, I had to descend slowly down the stairs, with no railing, from the upper open veranda/deck down to the sandy ground level. Put on my wooden clogs. I, unlike any village kids, was never allowed to walk barefoot.

If only I had the long legs of my cousin Pi. She was tall for her age; legs like those of a praying mantis. Showing off was her second nature and her favourite pastime. No inhibitions flaunting her tricks in my presence. Particularly speaking the Mandarin she learnt from school; made the words roll off her tongue deliberately to make me look dumb. When asked what the hell she said, she displayed her full meanness.

“不知道！不告訢你！Not telling!”

She could conquer two steps in one stride. Down the stairs. Up the stairs. I tried to copy her once. Instead I rolled down and cut the left eyebrow, leaving a permanent scar still visible now.

Mum, instead of comforting me, shrieked, ” aiyo 慘囉慘囉, 破相囉！(Disaster! Disaster! Disfigured loh!” She kept pressing hard on my cut to stop the bleeding. I struggled to push her hand away due to the pain. The mixture of blood, tears and sweat tasted like spoonfuls of salt in my mouth.

破相 means face broken from accident. I asked mum immediately what was 破相 since she reacted a bit hysterical. She couldn’t give me a straightforward answer. From her tone of voice, I knew it wasn’t good. So I pressed again: Is it bad, bad, bad?

“A scarred eyebrow? On a girl’s face?” A question to answer a question!

She was right. Eyebrows are the expression of sensibility of personality. You can raise, arch, drop, and screw your eyebrows to express feelings. Mum spent a lot of time plucking her eyebrows into pencil thin lines, shaping them like the distant mountains, the new moon, or the willow branches. We both sat on the floor. I, helped holding a hand-held mirror so she could look at her own reflection. When done, the patch of skin became red and swollen.

To pluck or not to pluck? As a three-year-old, my mind was made up instantly: no plucking. I am not a duck! I don’t like pain!

Pohpoh immediately reached into her wicker basket-full of sayings and came out with a smart one: If your eyebrows meet across your nose, you will never live to wear your wedding gown.

She was so eager to find a husband for me ?! Believe it or not, I had received countless marriage proposals from over-keen women/mothers/grandmothers.

Aiyo, your daughter is so pretty. Be my daughter-in-law. How old is she? Three? Perfect! My eldest son, Dog Shit, (狗屎）is one year older. Mary my Dog Shit, ok?

One common phenomenon: every prospective “husband” was dubbed: stone head (石古頭）puppy(阿狗仔）big fool(大儍), small fool (細儍）dog egg(🐶🥚), Big Melon (大冬瓜）. Whenever that happened, I hid my face in between my mum’s long pants, and hush-whispered: Go away! I don’t like you nor your precious son!

I saw it in the Kung Fu picture books mum read. The characters in the book, capable of flying over high fences, walking on roofs and landing quietly like a cat in a moonlit night, fascinated me. To tell cousin Pi about people doing more fascinating actions than her Two-In-One stride, I would risk losing her as a friend and cousin. She would not talk to me forever!

Mum had only primary three education. She could only read simple picture books. Pohpoh believed education would corrupt women. That was a combustible volcanic force between the two. Mum blamed pohpoh’s absurd stinginess. The church sponsored the school fees. Pohpoh was responsible for books and stationery, which was the price of peanuts. Pohpoh was too painful to let go even one copper coin.

Pohpoh, with her full set of poorly fitted dentures, only mumbled incoherently her defence. Always lost for words in mid-sentence.

“I had to jump up and down till my legs break to plea for a few cents to buy a pencil, every morning!” Mum was late for school because of that. Pohpoh, after days of grilling mum, eventually reached into the purse and threw the coppers onto the floor. But it was too late, Mum had decided to give up schooling. Too hard!

To add fire to fuel, Mum said, “If only you let me through one more year to finish primary four, I would be a teacher now and you don’t have to have such a tough life!”

Pohpoh would throw back a very sarcastic remark: “Teacher (先生娘)! Wishful, wishful! There was not a single lucky bone in your body. For three years’ education so you can only write your name!? You wasted the Chinese inks and papers! Heartless and lungless! 沒心沒肺的！”

Back to my trekking journey to the dunny. In my heavy clogs, I would then walk through a sandy open compound, the middle of the surround. It was skirted by a tall coconut tree on the left side. Mum warned me not to walk directly under it. Coconuts grew eyes. They aimed at the heads of kids. Mum wasn’t lying. There were in fact three big black-rimmed eyes in every coconut shell. So I veered away from the coconut tree. Directly facing the back of the house was the chicken hut. Then a little brook framing the right side. To cross the brook was a wonky bridge, the nails of which were corrosion-riddled. Once passed the bridge gingerly, I was right in front of my favourite giant guava tree. Next to the guava tree was an outdoor bathhouse cum laundry, and a wooden well next to it. When the sun got too hot, cousin Pi simply brought up buckets and buckets of cold water from the well and tipped over our heads.

Through the guava tree and the bathhouse, at the very far end, stood the holey dunny. The dunny, made from four panels of old corrugated iron, with a simple roof, was the remotest structure from the house. It looked like a child doodling of a house without windows.

That was not the end of the story. Normally you open the door of the loo, what unfolds is the pit latrine with two pieces of wooden planks for the feet. Here, on the panel of the wall, about knee high, hung a piece of metal wire, the end of which was forcefully bent into a hook. A pile of used newspapers, stencilled office documents, thanks to Shell Lutong, threaded through the hook. They were torn or cut into size of a tiny square handkerchief, for wiping our bottoms. The newsprints were used first as the inferior quality left inky abcd alphabets or Chinese characters on our bottoms. The office papers of better quality were the preferred. Cleaner and more durable, though not very absorbent like the newsprint. Used sparingly. It was as good as we got. The year was 1955. Toilet rolls didn’t exist in our village. Neither was sliced bread.

Pohpoh decided a dunny with raised plateform was safer. The snake in the Bible only coiled loosely on a tree branch while making small talk regarding apples with Eve. The tropical python would swallow Eve with one breath.

The platform was too high to be child friendly. I had to climb with my hands and feet to get inside. And came face to face a hole looking down a pit full of writhing maggots and swarms of buzzing green eyed flies. Someone before me didn’t throw a handful of dirt onto the heap. Anyway the bucket for dirt was empty long ago. No attempt to refill it. Cousin Pi blamed Gungung, our horrible grandfather.

All along, I could hear boom, boom, boom, coming from my chest cavity. I later learned it was my heart.

Pohpoh always complained about Gungung, a heartless person, whom I took it literally there was never a boom boom boom on his chest. For as long as I knew, they were not on talking terms and slept separately. Pohpoh nicknamed him 前世 meaning Previous Life. It was just a short extract for 前世沒修, meaning pohpoh did not do enough good deeds her last life and therefore she ended up with this bastard this life. Even though pohpoh was a catholic, the illiteracy and the time she was born explained her cherry picking from a smorgasbord of Christianity, Taoism, Buddhism and superstition.

Mum told me cousin Pi stayed back every year at school because she didn’t use her heart at all to study. I had a heart. It would make mum very proud of me.

On my way back to the house, there was another imminent danger. The geese! Out of nowhere, suddenly their noisy honking was right behind my calves. Snaking their already eerily long necks; bills doodling lines on the dirt like the heads of vacuum cleaners; advancing menacingly towards me, honk honk honk; so determined to suck me up like a soft boiled egg. I screamed and jumped while they encircled me like sharks. I couldn’t run with a pair of wooden clogs on.

When finally one bill snapped my toe like a pair of scissors, I froze and wailed with full strong lungs, Waaaaaaaah! Every one rushed to the open veranda/decking and watched my trauma on full display, actions with sound tracks! (Wish I can listen to this soundtrack of my childhood).

“They won’t bite!” Very helpful indeed!

“It is eating my toes!” Goodness sake, do something. Don’t just stand there.

“This girl(妹釘)! A useless nail. Never be able to marry her off!”

I was crying while my spectators were sitting on a fence and watching the fire burning. Not that they didn’t care. It was a small matter, sesame seeds and green peas. It needed no commotion! Geese have to do what geese have to do.

The veranda/deck was a very cosy spot. In the morning, it was cool in the shadow of the house. Breezy from the swaying of the coconut feather-like leaves. A split level, the lower deck was occupied by four big used oil drums, thanks to the generosity of Shell Oil company. They were the reservoirs of rainwater for cooking and drinking.

The drums were placed uniquely in a concertina style. Gunggung was a welder for Shell Company. He cut a slit near the edge in each drum; welded a spout onto it. (That was when he was in good terms with Pohpoh). The rainwater could never overflow. Once the water level reached the slit, it cascaded down to the next lower point and so on. Scooping water out from the drum was not physically backbreaking as the drums were positioned at a lower level.

To collect rainwater from the roof, first you divert the down pipe from the gutter away from the drum for the first 20 minutes, least. Let the rain flush the roof first. Only then you position the down pipe into the highest drum. It would then flow to the second, the third….A corrugated piece of iron sheet was used as the lid for each drum.

Pohpoh put a few drops of kerosene to stop wrigglers growing in the water. The top film of kerosene would be carefully scooped away to make sure the water was fit for drinking. It was primitive. The proper word is water purification!

That evening, we had braised goose with ginger slices, shallots and garlic, richly coloured by sugar, soya sauce, dark soy and home-made rice wine; head, tongue, intestines, heart, giblets, liver, webs, except the feathers. Nothing went to waste. Braised goose cooked by pohpoh was the best in the world!

While I was enjoying the fat goose, I put up three fingers, then took one finger away. Two left to braise. I immediately reminded pohpoh. With my lips smearing with oil, I asked when was she going to kill the two geese. Pohpoh’s answer was too profound for my heart to understand: pigs eat too much to grow fat. Dogs eat too much to fall sick. You eat too much to become stupid!

She could simply said NO without confusing me.

“Why?” I started biting the tips of my chopsticks after I swallowed a mouthful of meat.

“Because too much good food blocks your heart and lungs!”

Gungung was a heartless and lung-less person. 沒心沒肺的!

“Did Gungung eat too many geese?” Opened my big mouth to vocalise my thoughts.

Pohpoh kept quiet by biting her tongue. She didn’t want to have anything to do with Gungung. Except, if she could get hold of his “big-head” photo, she would use it to line her chook nesting box.

Pohpoh took the geese to the market the next day and exchanged for two pork buns for us. So she said. Two geese for two pork buns! Adults made things up. They lied. While Cousin sister and I were happily eating the buns, I counted with two fingers, then bent them for the two sold. I was left with no fingers. I hid my hands behind my back and asked cousin sister what the answer was. Instead of zero, she said we had two. Two what? Two buns!

Hahaha, cousin Pi was so clever that she really didn’t have to go to school at all!

This pain has been gripping me like a vice, held me a captive for a few years. Starting from my lower back, trundling heavily back and forth via the highway down my legs to my ankles.

Whining about a few aches and pains at sixty seven years old? No one in this old-age basket should be spared. Take some ginger tea. It would go away within a week! There was this very trusted brand of capsicum heat pad available in most Chinese grocery stores in Chinatown. Made sure it was “Made in Germany”! Don’t let the Chinese boss talked you into one made in Thailand. Guaranteed your pain would die away.

My neighbour who suffered from chronic pain for years was philosophical. Deal with it! Live with it. Get used to it. Befriend it. Embrace it. Love it.

“How? Start a love affair?” I was joking.

“Yes you must! Not with another man, with your pain! “. You see what damage long term pain had twisted and warped her? Poor thing!

When pain demanded my full attention like a new-born baby, I couldn’t turn a blind eye. I went to sleep with throbbing pain and woke up in the exact position, eight hours later, still with the same throbbing pain. Other times, the legs were numb with no senses. I would scream at old man, “Call an ambulance! My legs are gone!” Gone were the quality of my life and my zones of comfort. It would come a day if I didn’t jump off my roof top to kill myself, I would amputate them.

It happened a few years ago in a Zumba class, I heard a staccato clicking on the left side of my knee after I did a graceful, fabulous skip, hop and land. It was completely fine as I could keep on dancing. No need to hoist me up and tow me away. But, after that, the pain decided to stay. I took it as transitional. After resting in bed for a day for it to subside, it soon crept back in and swallowed me up. The pain came in various forms: sharp wire gauze with pins and needles; a dull numbing sensation; pounding in an unreachable depth of my body; or like a catapult pulled tightly at breaking point!

Before bed, I would apply any Chinese ointment by rubbing, squeezing, slapping and kneading till my skin turned dark red. Occasionally, I ended up with bruises all over. One ointment was made from tiger bone, designed for Kung Fu master, Wong Fei Hung. (黃飛鴻）It didn’t matter is was for Wong Fei Hung or Fei Hung Wong. If it was good for the gander, it was for the goose.

Another bottle was made from seals. (海狗油）It claimed the recipe was handed down generations ago. How they ended up in my drawers was due to my late father. He said keeping them at home was like insuring your house. These ointments for external applications looked after the wellbeing of the family against cuts, bruises, burns, swelling, pneumatic pain, arthritis, snake bites, stomach aches, headaches, even tooth aches. Believe it or not, besides a packet of bandages for the little accidents in the kitchen, there was a small jar of near-empty Tiger Balms and a packet of half-empty Panadol, long past their used-by dates, in the First-aid drawer.

My bedsheets started to smell of Chinese herbs, followed by the whole bedroom with the distinctive odour of a Chinese drug store. There must be countless bedbugs died from inhaling.

I was never a believer in health foods that come in bottles. Fish oil, glucosamine, calcium supplements never win me over. A strong influence from my late mother.

At first, I rarely talked about my pain. I didn’t think it was a happy topic to share unless people were in the same boat.

My sister bragged a lot about Chinese massage. I did mention in my last article the masseur who said nothing about my faulty legs but made a ridiculous insult of my poor ovaries. My ovaries may be kept in the workshop idle. But I still love them.

Then the pain, like a mixture of flour with yeast, a matchstick with firewood, began to expand, loom and grow from a new-born to a brat. Escalating and unbearable. I unknowingly developed the habit of massaging my knees even when I was in any public domain.

I saw myself as a building with structurally unsound foundation. To stand erect, something was giving and something was taking. So my right leg, the good one so far, being a blood relationship of the left, decided to give me the exact pain in sympathy of the left. Being good buddies, they synchronised, reciprocated and spoke in unison.

How many times I almost fell out of bed in the middle of the night! Normally when old man snuggled up like a foetus, too close for my comfort, I would flip him over like a hamburger patty by kicking him with my leg. Not anymore. My kick was too feeble. I hung on to the side of the bed by gripping on the edge, with half my body dangerously midair.

“You need to run! Open air, in the park, with nature!” That was how Old man apologised.

My logic: Too much pain, therefore I don’t run.

His logic: if you don’t run, therefore you are in pain.

The truth: If a train is speeding like a bullet, and I happen to be standing in the middle of track. Either the train pulls an emergency brake, SCREEEEECH……….. or I turn into sausage mince, SPLAAAAT!

I don’t trust any Google doctor, especially old man. Old man, a risk taker, had built a “Make-to-measure” filter kit for our fish pond from one single visit to Bunnings hardware store without a proper understanding or appreciation of physics.

My layman understanding of a water filtration system that works effectively has to do with the water pressure from the pump, which in turn determines the size of the filter, and the size and length of the hose (in fact I don’t know what I just mumbled). Without taking any of these vital data into the model, he built a filter with three spouts splashing good tunnel-like water into the pond. It has lasted more than 15 years and is still going. The water hits the pond with soothing, hypnotic wet sound. The pond water is always sparkling under the sun. This “near good but not good enough” home-made gadget was a miracle of miracles to me. This was one of the things he did right in his life. The other one, needless to say, was he married me.

I went for a second opinion. This time I was seeing a “somebody’ , a very reputable Chinese acupuncturist and herbalist from Beijing university. A professor, under the invitation of the Singapore government. She sold herself to me straightaway. A seventy plus lady, she looked sixty.

“You don’t need acupuncture nor surgery. Surgery will make it worse.”

“But the pain….”

“It is your poor posture. Go and stand against the wall, chin up. Now walk away from the wall. 就這樣。就這樣。(like that, like that) 對了！對了！(correct, correct!). That is how you should walk from now on. It will take pressure off your joints.”

That is so cool! Just do the cat walk!

Took a look at my tongue came her diagnosis: “你身體的濕氣很重.” (Too much sogginess in your body). This demonic chi caused the arthritis. She recommended a concoction of roots, dried flowers, leaves, tree barks, seeds, twigs, some dried slices from animal horn, insect heads and dried earthworm. They looked like dry humus in my backyard in summer time.

This trusty formula with mix-match ingredients would definitely end up in the bottom of the customs bin in Australia. I told her not to bother. I was taking the flight from Singapore back to Adelaide that evening. With the prescriptions, I could source it in Adelaide’s Chinatown. My ignorance of herbalist protocols. This was exactly like snatching a juicy piece of chicken she was about to swallow from her mouth. To stop the chicken from flying away, she masterminded a way around it.

The concoction would be brewed by the factory that afternoon, free of charge, individually packed, sealed, properly labelled, accompanied by a medical certificate of authenticity. Ninety sachets for three months’ supply. I picked up this carton box of substantial weight in the late afternoon. Couldn’t be bothered to count as the smell turned me off. I was sure I would be kissing them goodbye at the Australian customs checkpoint the next morning on arrival. Funny enough, the officer was only curious about the taste. Did they look like a new type of energy drink, Red Bull? or new bubble tea? Its resemblance of the colour of coca-cola drink, with a dark sediment : “Tastes like Coca-Cola ! “. Came my answer.

The pain took a permanent residency, like a hard-to-get-rid-of bad odour. My posture improved no doubt. My steps were stiff and rigid. Sometimes my knees wanted to give way.

Someone suggested physiotherapy. And I listened. I lied on the bed and he asked to do some poses which are basic yoga stretches. To pay someone to do old tricks. I left totally disappointed.

As the pain got more pronounced, I compensated by waddling like a duck. I economised by deliberately taking less steps, or being stationery while others walked around.

Especially on holidays. At the Great Wall of China, I arrived via chairlift. I immediately volunteered to be a solitary sentinel guarding the backpacks of others in the nearest guardhouse. They ran up effortlessly the sprawling terrace of steps with uneven treads. Such gusto, rhythm and gait, and did the selfies with the V pose or cupping 2-leaf under the chin. I could choose to be a sooky lah lah or make every minute and every second useful. I gazed at the breathtaking view of vast distant green hills that rose steeply and fell gently into some hollow vale. Beyond that was the mist-laden air.

My group had been gone for a loooong while. If I kept looking at the same hill one more second, I would go crazy. So I played with my imagination: skateboarders doing complete twists and turns, spins and tricks, airborne, and then ascending gracefully into the bowl of forests.

Or doing a forensic search at every piece of brick, composed of sand, soil, stone, brick mixed with rice water, for telltale signs of skeletons, blood and tears. It was said the constructions were carried out by soldiers, ordinary folks, criminals, carts, ropes and goats. If the walls could talk, I would be hearing a lot of secrets!

How did these stone wall last so long, despite the story of 孟姜女哭倒長城. (Lady Mengjian’s tears caused sections of Great Wall to collapse). It was a true event according to Chinese historians.

When Lady Meng learned that her beloved husband died of harsh labour building the wall, she travelled through a lot of hardship to look for his body for burial. After failing to do so, she cried for five days and five nights till the sky darkened, the wind whipped and the waves crashed. Then section by section the wall collapsed, exposing all the buried white skeletons. To identify her husband’s remains, she bit her finger and dropped a drop of blood on each bone until she found him.

Is it possible for a woman to cry for five days and five nights? Of course! One great virtue of Chinese women! If you had read one of Chinese greatest classics, “The Dream of the Red chamber”: Women are made of water. The main character Lin Dai Yu ( 林黛玉）cried all the time. Men are made of mud. If this version is skeptical to you, choose Adam and Eve.

As the pain grew in size, I carried myself like an obese woman with a wide girth. Or a snail with its own house strenuously on my back. How far is it? Where is the nearest bench? Where is the lift? Why do we have to take the stairs? Can we sit down and have coffee and cake? I would lean on anything, be it a tree, a lamppost, even someone’s doorway. Getting in the car with ooooohs and getting out with aaaaahs.

Eventually I had acupuncture through recommendations of my sister-in-law’s colleague’s husband’s friend’s wife. My sister-in-law said for an Australian white woman to swear by it, it must have worked.

The acupuncturist was a middle aged woman from China. She was sure it was my tendons. Regular once-a-month acupuncture would solve the problem. In a little cubicle, I lied on my stomach, face down on a message table with a breath hole. That table was soooo comfortable. Or because I was lying on my tummy? It was very quiet besides her slippers shuffling around. After a while, I felt an intense heat. I lift my head to look behind.. she was gone. I was turned into a cactus with needle after needle sticking on my thighs and calves and feet. Simmering under two intense heat lamps, I was starting to hallucinate: camels crossing the Sahara Desert. Slow haunting melodic sound of camel bells……ding ding ding ding……….crawling through deep soft sand, I finally drifted off.

The pain, as obstinate as a bull, didn’t go away.

One afternoon I drove to my GP for an annual blood test, which had nothing to do with the pain. He was old man’s brother-in-law. Always at the same family dinner. Because we know each other very well, I casually brought up the apparent. He gave me the obvious: osteoarthritis on my hips. How could he be so sure? Because I was not able to cross my legs. Only an orthopaedic surgeon could fix.

Driving on my way home, the word “osteoarthritis ” was hard for me to process. The images of my bones in honeycombs shape turned me over hundreds and hundreds of time. Someone had to cut me open…..And I asked myself the same question hundreds and hundreds of time like a cancer sufferer who was told she had only one month left would. Why? Why? Why me and not someone else? Have I done something wrong to deserve this? With tears swimming in my eyes, Not fair! Not fair! I banged on the steering wheel hard with clenched fist!

After I calmed down, my first thought was DO IT! Like the tick on every Nike shoe. From self-denial to steely dogged determination. Pain no more! But I happened to have two pre-booked overseas trips coming. So I had to wait till I came back from the holidays.

It was early August when I met the orthopaedic the first time. He had a verrry verrry long surname and a short first name, Tom. I asked if I could just call him Dr. Tom. He smiled and said okay. My surname is Ng. Maybe he was pulling my leg. He said my surname was not only short, with missing vowel. Hard to pronounce. He would just call me Tai. I smiled and said okay.

He looked at the x-rays, and gave me a bad report card. He said I could have collapsed any time if I didn’t go for surgery. ASAP. The earliest he could operate on me was next year, February or March which happened to be my trip to Southern Europe. He wanted to tackle my left hip first. That was not ASAP enough!

“How soon?”He asked.

“Next week?”

He checked his computer. “Yes, it can be done. I can squeeze you in!”

“What about the right hip?” He asked.

“One month after the left hip.” Mind you, I had no idea how long it takes to full recovery. Too chicken to suggest “ALL IN! Both at same time!” , like a high roller who wagered all the casino chips at one go.

He checked his computer. “Yes, it can be done.”

I was told I was genetically born with a DNA defect of tight hips. Since I was a baby, my mother never did the hip opening exercises for my joints. (God bless my mother in heaven! ). Not my food, not the lack of sunlight, not from over or under exercise, not calcium related. Nothing to do with my three children, each of them still owed me one tooth-full of calcium. The prospect of any of my descendants making a name in the Olympic tracks and fields, winning a medal, was zilch.

On the wall of Dr. Tom’s surgery office, there were two photographs. A ballerina and a footballer. Both in the middle of the most difficult poses. He couldn’t promise me any of that. Nevertheless, I thanked him all the same.

My left hip was done two months ago, whereas my right hip, a mere two weeks ago. My right was running on 80% capacity. The left hip, virtually on empty fuel tank. I was facilitated with a chair for my shower room, a raised frame for my toilet seat, a four-legged frame and a walking stick. Looking at these gadgets, I felt like a hundred years old!

Pain does not have a shape, size or smell. Who could possible describe it?

While standing in a queue in the airport for baggage security check, my memory will naturally orbit back to an event that happened many years ago. Nothing traumatic that scarred me for life. Only the memory haunts me as long as I am in a long queue. The feeling of being herded like wild goats in a chute.

It was my first and only visit to an abattoir or slaughter house in the outskirts of Adelaide. It is not a story that would make your mouth watery.

It was in the 90’s. A livestock company needed a Chinese/English speaking person to be a translator. So I got this one off gig. Little did they know they were in the hands of an amateur.

The group of buyers was from Taiwan. They were looking at buying 2 containers shipment of feral goats. Australians don’t eat goats. They are considered an annoyance by farmers. Pests in plague proportions roaming across large swathes of the outback. Goat meat was considered poor man’s protein in Australia.

Now goat meat fetches a price higher than lamb in the export market. The Taiwan buyers wanted the meat to arrive in time for their Chinese New Year and cold winter months. Goat hot-pot cooked in multiple Chinese herbs is not considered a meat dish, but tonic.

I looked at this gig as a once-in-a-life time opportunity to open my eyes. The meeting was held in the Adelaide office. The leader of the buyers was a woman. Dressed humbly. No makeup. Very down to earth. Very pushy. The rest were four men who hardly uttered a word. The woman spoke very poor English. Like a Chinese abacus, she was very swift with numbers. She would stand up and bang on the table if she didn’t like the price offered. Speaking loudly and incorrectly, jumbling up English, Chinese and Taiwanese dialect incoherently, the boardroom had turned into an Asian wet market. Whenever she wanted my help, she would simply pull my sleeve and say, “告訴他們， 告訴他們!” (Tell them, tell them!”). The Australian counterpart would look at me and say, “explain to her, explain to her.”

As a brief Aussie “G-DAY” style of welcome, our true blue Lamington cake was served with tea and coffee. The potential buyers didn’t even touch it. They were only there to get the best deal.

She, a toughie, brought up New Zealand prices as a bargaining card. The Australian had their homework done. So what if the Kiwi undercut us in price? The freight would not arrive Taichung on time from New Zealand. Australian freight might only be a day or two late, but still a far better option. New Zealand lost the business due to its geographical distance.

After the board room negotiations, a tour to the abattoir was necessary to witness the quality of the goat meat. On the way to the abattoir which was situated on a rural outskirts, some 40 minutes away, the team leader sat next to me. She said she and her husband started as butchers in the wet market in Taichung. After the business grew, they expanded into meat imports. They became the sole supplier for the city of Taichung. I could imagine her skilfully slicing meat from big slabs of carcass. I saw myself as very sheltered and had an immediate respect for her.

The buying team wanted to examine the health of the goats. As soon as we arrived at the abattoir, we were led outside onto an elevated platform where we could see the workers herd the goats from trucks, to pen, to the chute, finally, to their own funerals. Maaah, maaaah..the heartbreaking bleating of the goats. The chute was about the width of the goat body so as to allow single file movement without them turning back.

When they were near the executioner’s trap door, we all moved inside the slaughterhouse. It was not a pleasant environment to work. Odours filled the air like the smell of death. There was a stench of blood and faeces. But I had a very strong stomach. We were like audience standing on ground level, looking up at the slaughtermen performing on stage. Every slaughterman had a very sharp long knife chained to his waist. Despite that, he had a habit of constantly sharpening the knife whenever idling.

The sight of the killing didn’t sicken me. It was those knives. What if someone was upset and he snapped? What if tempers flared after an argument? It was too easy to amputate an arm or a leg, or both.

The first slaughterman, skilfully trained, used a pair of big forceps to clamp on the head of the animal. Electric current was passed to stun and electrocute. His job was to make sure the animal was completely dead, i.e. no twitching or maaah-ing. Then the next guy stabbed a sharp knife into the throat/heart to release the blood. Some of the blood gushed out with such force that it hit the wall of the enclosure first before flowing down into a collecting tank. Immediately after this, a hook on a conveying belt was lowered to pick up one hind hoof. At this point of time, we got a better view of the process. The goat now dangling head down from a supporting gliding chain. The next guy, swish, beheaded the animal. I could hear a weighty object dropped like a brick into a drum.

The chain moved a short distance to the next guy. How and what he did was too quick for my eyes. All I saw was the animal now completely skinned naked. Plop, the pelt fell. Everything happened like a fast forward video.

The chain started moving and stopped. This time the body was slit from rectum to sternum. That was a heavy sound as the whole guts dropped like a gigantic jellyfish. The next guy sliced off the hooves. Then the belt stopped at a much larger area for the jet stream of water to clean the carcass. It took a bit longer time to make sure every bit of impurities was flushed out. Then the splitting of the backbones of the carcass into halves by a portable band saw. A bit of trimming of fat, here and there. Then the two halves disappeared behind a screen, skinless, gutless, headless and lifeless.

Now we entered the screened area, which was freezing cold. My upper teeth hitting my lower teeth or visa versa uncontrollably. The carcass we just saw was snap frozen. SO QUICK, I could not believe my eyes. They now looked more normal? humane? The quick freeze made sure the water molecules frozen inside the meat were of very minute size. Once it thawed the correct way, the meat would not lose any flavours. These were some of the things I had to explain.

The guts and heads made they way into dog and cat can food. The blood and bones are made into bags of “Blood and Bone” garden fertiliser.

Later I found out these meat were bought by the tough Taiwanese woman. All signed and sealed on dotted lines. SO QUICK! Ready for next container shipment. Wow, I saluted her. She didn’t waste any time at all. Great decisiveness! Bang the table and the deal was done!

Laws and sausages are two things people should never watch being made. I can safely add slaughtering too.

In order for me to live, something has to die. In order for something else to live, eventually I die.