Miss Seetoh in the World (17 page)

Maria said ‘Yes’ dispiritedly and the
principal was emboldened enough to administer a sharp pinch to the vanity of
his best English language teacher who could also be the most difficult, by
saying with a casual laugh, ‘Mrs Tan, all those grammar mistakes in vivid
pictures that you have on your classroom walls. I find it difficult to believe
that as a strict English language teacher, you can tolerate, even encourage
Singlish!’ He waited for a response, ready to turn the compliment he regularly
paid this teacher for achieving good examination results into another sly
deflation of her ego.

But Miss Seetoh said nothing. It would have
entailed just too much energy and patience to explain, much less to justify,
the use of Singlish to this most conscientious of civil servants. For him, the
linguistic villain stood irredeemably condemned, first because denounced by the
great TPK, and second because embraced by the opponent, V.K. Pandy.

It was only to Brother Philip that Maria
could show that brilliant play by Mark and Yen Ping. ‘I read it again last
night,’ she confided, not mentioning that she had to get up from the bed very
quietly so as not to wake her husband, and slip into the spare bedroom to give
the script the full attention it deserved, ‘and I think it’s a real pity that
such a clever little play can never be staged because the dialogue’s in
Singlish.’

Brother Philip said with a smile, ‘They’re
unusual, aren’t they? Commerce students who have a love of literature and
theatre. Fortunately, there’s you to keep their talent alive.’

He had been long enough in Singapore to have
picked up Singlish, with its plethora of easily identifiable interjections,
inflections and hybridised innovations, which he sometimes used to amuse his
students. ‘Aiyoh! Why you all so bodoh, ah? Or you got no moral values, is it?
I give up, lah!’ In the atmosphere generated by the aggressive national
campaign to eradicate its use, it would be unwise even to use it for
light-hearted exchanges.

He and Maria had hilarious tales to share,
in private, about the inevitable excesses when a whole nation was galvanised
into instant action by the great TPK’s warnings. The newspapers ran guides for
Singaporeans eager to improve their English, by pairing each expression in
Singlish with its proper, standard British counterpart, duly checked with the
British Council, helpfully indicating each error with a large cross and its
correct form with a large tick. TV presenters, in the mistaken notion that if
Singlish pronunciation was bad, then foreign pronunciation must be good,
accordingly read the news with exaggerated American or British accents. All
over the island, schools took the battle against Singlish even into the canteen
and playground during recess.

Meeta and Winnie became language vigilantes,
moving among their students at Palm Secondary School to listen to them and
impose fines of five cents per Singlish expression. Meeta said in confidence to
Maria, ‘Winnie – and a whole lot of others. All making grammatical mistakes
right in front of their students without realising it. I had to pull her aside
and quietly point out her errors.’

The fear was that students from
English-speaking homes might notice the mistakes, report them to their parents
who would write irate letters to the newspapers about badly trained teachers
being the source of all the trouble. One mother had written a letter that was
both a complaint about a teacher and a compliment to her young son, aged six:
the teacher had told her students to close the tap, and her little boy had gone
up and said politely, ‘Miss, the correct expression is ‘Turn off the tap’.’

She was so glad that Brother Philip’s call
had come when her husband was not yet home. He had called her on impulse, he
said; their discussion that morning of the effectiveness of Singlish in Mark
and Yen Ping’s play had suddenly given him a thought which he now posed to her
as a challenge: would she collaborate with him in the writing of a play (the
moral message, incumbent upon him as the moral education teacher, would be
incidental only) in which the monologuist was someone like herself who was
familiar with the whole continuum of English language varieties, from formal
and literary to colloquial and low marketplace, sliding in and out of each
variety with ease, as the situation required. Brother Philip got more and more
excited as he elaborated on his idea.

He said, ‘I can already see you, Maria,
speaking in correct formal English to a team of visiting inspectors from the
Ministry of Education, then sliding down to a less formal form with your
students, then to pure Singlish as you whisper some urgent instructions to the
school gardener Ah Boy who can be very slow-witted, and then back again to
standard English as you once more face the principal and the inspectors. Can
you see what a hilarious play it will be? Just right to make the concert a
lively event!’ The normally soft-spoken, urbane Moral Education teacher was
displaying the refreshing enthusiasm of a schoolboy about to work on a pet
project.

 It was difficult to keep the thrill out of
her voice even as she said No. No, the principal would never approve of such a
play. She left unsaid the fearful thought: a collaboration with him,
necessitating hours spent together, including on the phone, most likely in the
evenings when her husband would be home, would be an utter impossibility. She
looked at the clock: at least ten minutes before he was expected home, a
precious stolen ten minutes of happy, spontaneous chat. She told Brother Philip
about her small, secret collection of stories that a local publisher said he
might consider publishing.

His call, inducing a very happy mood in her,
soon induced a clever idea of her own. It had all the promise of sparkling
mischief, inspired by a recollection of something she had once read which had
amused her greatly. A writer who could not spell, simply got round the problem
by writing a story that was written by a writer who could not spell, thereby
legitimating all the spelling mistakes in the story, indeed investing them with
a kind of lunatic brilliance.

She would write a short story entirely in
Singlish. It would be in the form of a monologue by an uneducated taxi driver
who had learnt English by listening to it as it was used in the streets. The
monologue would alternate between complaint and exultation, as the taxi driver
talked gloomily about the tedium of his job on the one hand, and eagerly about
how easy it was to overcharge the tourists, on the other.

It was based on a real conversation with a
taxi driver many years before, and his speech, loud and friendly, came back in
every vividness of detail: ‘Aiyah! What to do, must work hard in Singapore –
pay this, pay that – our government very money-face, I tell you! Lucky got
tourists, easy to charge them more – the Japanese with their yen, don’t know
how to convert to Sing dollars – one day – aiyoh – gave me fifty dollars –’

She smiled as she recollected her encounter
with the shrewdly loquacious cabby, dressed in a T-shirt bearing the proud logo
‘Come to Singapore – Paradise on Earth!’ who apparently made it a point to talk
incessantly with his passengers to size them up. Her mind throbbed to the sound
of his voice, to the robustness and earthiness of the local idiom that would
never go away, despite the official strictures, because, unlike these, it grew
from the ground, spontaneously and effortlessly and thus became part of the
people’s sense of themselves.

As the story shaped in her mind, her
excitement was too great not to be shared. Her husband was on the sofa reading
the day’s newspaper and she was seated beside him; he always liked her to be by
his side as soon as he returned home from work. Her physical presence was not
enough; if she had a faraway look in her eyes, he pulled her back into full
attentiveness to him.

‘What are you thinking of?’ he said, and she
turned to him and said, her eyes sparkling, ‘I’ve just got an idea for a
wonderful story; it’s going to be written entirely in Singlish, it’s about a
taxi-driver –’

He looked at her and said with a puzzled
frown, ‘You mean you’re not aware of the campaign? I’m surprised, you being an
English language teacher –’ From that day on, he took his place with the
principal, with her colleagues at St Peter’s except Brother Philip, with Meeta
and Winnie, with all civil servants, with all publishers who would be afraid to
publish anything if it contained a single item of Singlish, all ranged in a
formidable phalanx of disapproval, facing her as she stood defiantly on the
other side of a wide chasm, ranged with V.K. Pandy and the student pair Mark
Wong and Loo Yen Ping. ‘You snob, you think you’re so clever,’ they shouted at
her, and she shouted back, ‘You herd!’

The story in her head cried out to be
written. She listened for her husband’s snores; they came soon enough, and she
hurried to the spare bedroom and the small table where she wrote furiously for
an hour before she saw him opening the door and standing at the doorway.

‘What are you doing?’ he said. She said,
‘Oh, just completing some school work.’

This would be the beginning of a routine of
small lies, to calm, placate, avert a reproach, prevent the setting in of one
of those bad moods she was beginning to dread.

‘You teachers are given free periods
precisely to complete your work at school and not have to bring it home, aren’t
you? I thought that was the main reason for women going into the teaching profession,
so that they would have time for their families.’

His discontentment with her had already set
in; it was beginning to eat into him. Why couldn’t she be like other wives? Why
did she steal away from him even in sleep?

Would she dare? She would. This time she
shut herself in the bathroom, sat on the toilet seat, and managed to finish her
story before it lost its momentum. ‘What were you doing so long in the toilet?’
he asked. So he was not asleep after all. She chose to say nothing; silence was
less wearying than explanation.

Brother Philip said, returning her the
script, ‘Fantastic. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It ought to be published. Why
don’t you put together your stories and bring out a book? Try a foreign
publisher, if your local one isn’t interested. It will be his loss!’

To her dying day, she cherished the warmth
of the encouragement. She said, suddenly feeling very happy, ‘Thank you. Maybe
one day. One never knows.’

‘Next week, I shall be in Dr Phang’s team on
a very important and sensitive mission to Jakarta,’ her husband said, his voice
a constricted mix of pride in the bestowed honour and disappointment in the
certainty that his wife was not going to be impressed or to miss him.

Other wives waited eagerly for their
husbands’ return from trips abroad; his wife seemed glad of his absence. He
suspected that she would have been unhappy if he had decided to extend their
honeymoon and delayed her return to school by even a few days. Already, for
Bernard Tan Boon Siong, the returns he had expected from his marriage were not
at all commensurate with the vast effort he had put into it; everyday he saw
evidence of his horrible miscalculations.

‘I can see you’re going to relish three days
on your own,’ he said with a sharp little laugh. He came home that evening to
announce something for which he watched her reaction keenly: ‘Dr Phang’s wife
and the other wives will be going. There will be a special programme for the
wives because of Dr Phang’s status. I would like you to come along too.’

There could be one thing he could salvage
from his marriage: its public face. In public, by his side, with her pretty
looks and gentle demeanour, she was the perfect wife and he was in charge.

‘They don’t have to work, I do,’ she said
with some spirit.

‘You don’t have to work, you know that very
well,’ he said. ‘How do you think I’ll feel, being the only man not accompanied
by his wife?’

‘If you like, I’ll apply for leave,’ she
said wearily.

‘Not if you go reluctantly. Do you know,’ he
added, and she knew that the angry frown and the taut white forehead would
remain for the rest of the evening, ‘that you do everything reluctantly where I
am concerned?’

In bed that evening, she had tried, for the
sake of keeping the peace for her mother, Por Por and the maid, to induce a
good mood in her husband. But pretence always took a toll on both spirits and
physical energy, and turned everything into a fiasco.

He snapped, ‘You don’t have to pretend you
like that thing and wear it just to please me. I’m not stupid, you know. I can
see through falsehood straightaway.’

It was an item of lingerie as ridiculous in
its mystique of lace, straps and strings as it must have been in its price. She
had no doubt her husband had bought it upon the insistence, and with the help,
of the incorrigible Mrs Olivia Phang: she could never wear it with a fraction
of the seductive eagerness which that happy woman, never happier than when she
was by her husband’s side, must bring to her entire wardrobe of foreign-made
lingerie.

The sight of the black lacy item on her body
suddenly infuriated him. ‘Take it off,’ he said. ‘Give it to me.’ He got up
from bed and flung it out of the window. She would remember to get up early and
retrieve it before anybody found it.

Maria thought, relieved at not having to
hide her relief since her husband had already left for the trip, ‘Three days. I
shall have time to look at my story again, maybe write another.’