Moving In

I cannot remember when we moved into Block 13. When we first moved in, we did not know anyone. My brother and I spent our days in solitary seclusion, playing with each other. Before long, we began to notice other boys of our age living around us. The first was Will, the same age as me. He was not very tall, but not very short either, and was of extremely dark complexion. His parents were seamstresses, which meant that they earned enough to live a relatively comfortable lifestyle.

Will, though a little proud of his moderate wealth, was by no means conceited. On the other hand, George, quite easily the richest of us all, was the show-off, even when it did not come to money, and in spite of the fact that there was really nothing spectacularly amazing about him. I remember once we went to swim, and George tried to impress the girls with his infantile macho tricks: he executed a dive from the springboard – or should I say attempted to execute a dive from the springboard – and failed. Instead, he smacked the water ungracefully face flat, inciting riotous laughter from us all. Yet he persisted in informing us that it was a spectacular dive, despite our disbelief. Another time, barely after we had learnt to ride our bicycles, George decided that he would demonstrate to us his superior cycling skills. While going down an especially treacherous slope, he overtook us all by pedalling furiously, only to lose control of his bicycle. He was thrown off, his back and ego bruised, and his bike bent beyond recognition, his expensive clothes slightly shredded. And yet George was one of us. We were inextricably bound together by our yearning for adventure.

Not as rich as George perhaps, but nonetheless still rather affluent, was Lawrence. He was the best mannered and well dressed of us all, and he was the most innocent, a fact accentuated by slightly round and childish features. We used to take advantage of him because of his trusting nature. For example, we often went to his apartment to play hide-and-seek. If he was the seeker, we would seize the opportunity to raid his fridge, while he remained none the wiser.

David was the most well fed even though he was not the wealthiest. This was attributable to the fact that his mother was Cantonese and therefore cooked very well. He was the last of us to move in; as a result he was often sidelined by us. Soon David became one of us, his integration made even more seamless by the fact that he was terribly good at impersonations – he could imitate Charlie Chaplin and The Three Stooges, all of who we watched at the television (much to our novelty and delight, for indeed televisions were extremely expensive in those days) at William’s place, of course.

While David was talented at acting, Peter, another of us, was talented at his studies. He was most definitely the cleverest of us all. His intellectual capabilities were only matched by his passion for swimming. In fact, he was the one who sparked off our interest in the sport. Because he swam so often, he grew tall and muscular in a short time. His younger brother, Richard, was the comedian. He was always ready to participate in pranks and practical jokes, and he was an interesting person to be with. He was typically attired in a sleeveless shirt, probably because the weather was hot and humid and he wanted to feel cool.

We knew almost everyone and we could walk into each other’s home like we were part of the family. There was no barrier, young or old, rich or poor.

Humble Beginnings

In the beginning I knew only of my brother and myself. We did not use the English names we use now; instead he was called Ah Teck and I, Ah Heo, both of which betrayed our Hokkien ancestry. For my brother his name was of special significance – it means bamboo in Hokkien, and indeed Ah Teck was as thin as his namesake, and I was not much better. Unfortunately we were not of the merchant class; our father was a bus-driver and our family was big, which meant only one thing – poverty. And yet we were not as poor as others were poor, at the least we had a roof over our heads, thanks to the widespread provision of inexpensive housing. Still, in the face of household expenditure, school fees, textbook expenses and spending on clothes, there was rarely enough to go around every month.

Our father did all he could to procure food for us. Rarely did we have anything much more than rice. Our meals were supplemented now and then with ‘phor’, that is to strengthen the constitution, we would buy the cheapest slab of pork liver, layer it with ginger strips and a pinch of salt and blanch the mixture in boiling water to make a soup – the poor man’s tonic.

Our diet was exceedingly meagre, at most thin gruel with soya sauce and occasionally achar, a pickled vegetable or perhaps ikan bilis, tiny silver fishes dried in the heat of the sun and fried with a little chilli.

At times, we slept with empty stomach or water filled stomach to ease the hunger. It was hard for Dad to see us suffer and on the flip side, we knew that Dad borrowed and pawned in order to keep the family.

Chicken is served on the table once a year on Chinese New Year. The prized cut being the chicken thighs were reserved for my third sister and my youngest brother. Both of them, Dad’s favourites - the brightest and the youngest.

Meal consists mainly of a meagre portion of meat and the occasional braised duck and pig. We had coffee shop near Block 13 with a stall selling braised duck and pig. Dad would send us to queue up before the stall opens for business. The standard instruction is to get three duck heads and a dollar of pig head and ear meat. The reason was obvious, they are cheap.

There was the infrequent wedding dinner, where it is customary to bring along pots so that leftovers would be muddled up. The concoction is a superior stew of sorts would last us for days. This was the only luxury, we knew of at that time.

My brother and I will labouriously search through the stew and shout out in ecstasy if we would find a piece of meat or fish.

Those were the days of insufficiency and we learnt quickly to appreciate whatever was placed on the table.