The Catherine Lim Collection (37 page)

The Vice-Consul’s aides are worried. They
get together in urgent, secret consultation. What are they to do? Should they
report the matter to the President? Or should they directly confront the
Vice-Consul and ask him why he is making such a fool of himself in public?
Perhaps they should warn him that the media, who have up to now been very
co-operative in leaving out the jokes in their reporting, are not likely to
continue to do so much longer. Already there is a reporter from The Straits
Times, a very brisk, no-nonsense young lady who is giving hints that here is a
possible scoop.

The aides recount the occasions of these
temporary aberrations of the Vice-Consul. There are three separate occasions,
and all three are big public events, involving the diplomatic corps, the elite
of the civil service and the leaders of the business community.

There is the occasion when the Vice-Consul,
in his capacity as Patron of the Society for the Promotion of Confucian Values,
stands at the podium, addressing a gathering including the world’s most
distinguished Confucian scholars. The Vice-Consul, in order to correct the
wrongful impression that Confucius was prejudiced against women and that the
adoption of Confucian values will mean pushing Singapore’s women back to where
their mothers and grandmothers were, begins to defend the sage against possible
feminists in the audience. Indeed, according to Confucius, the Vice-Consul
says, with a benign smile at the row of serious-faced women in the front row,
women are the foundation of society. At this point, the benign smile suddenly
changes into a lascivious leer, and the Vice-Consul, looking straight at an
amply endowed female in a cheongsam in the front row, adds, “But men lay the
foundation, you know,” and then bursts into raucous laughter, “Yes, we lay the
foundation don’t we, Ha! Ha! Ha! Hee! Hee! ” There is stunned silence; the
female in the cheongsam uncrosses her legs and glares at the Vice-Consul. The
Confucian scholar from Taiwan, a very imperturbable elderly gentleman with
heavy hooded eyes and bushy eyebrows, nevertheless lifts both in a questioning
frown.

A week later, the Vice-Consul opens the new
wing of a hospital for children. The wing is a donation from Her Ladyship, a
formidable dame whose millions have benefited homes and orphanages. The
Vice-Consul is a personal friend of Her Ladyship, mainly through his friendship
with her late husband, and apart from a small squeamishness each time Her
Ladyship brings her lacquered head to rest on his shoulder, or lays a hand on
his, he has really nothing against her. In the privacy of his pure thoughts, he
cannot bring himself to surmise about the behaviour of the apparently
love-starved, long-widowed lady. But on this occasion, the sight of Her Ladyship’s
heaving bosom, this time laden with rubies as she stands beside him, nodding
with approval, as he makes his speech, seems to trigger something in him, so
that the advent of the Filthy Joke is much earlier than usual. The seriousness
of his mien dissipating in a hundred crinkles of merriment, the Vice-Consul
says, in a booming voice, “Now I suggest that the excellent X-ray facilities in
the New Wing be made use of, by Her Ladyship herself. I can imagine her after
each X-ray, running out and exclaiming, ‘I’ve been ultra-violated!’”

A loud guffaw, from someone at the back, is
the only sound to break the shocked silence; moving eyes in unmoving heads are
directed at Her Ladyship to see how she has taken this public assault on her
honour. Her Ladyship, whose very limited knowledge of English precludes
understanding of any joke above the purely basic and demonstrable, looks around
sharply, sensing something not to her advantage. As quickly as the bout of
irreverence has descended on the Vice-Consul, it disappears, and now he is
covered all over with confusion, as he murmurs, “Sorry, that was a temporary
aberration,” and resumes his speech on what a wonderful thing it is for
Singapore to have magnanimous people like Her Ladyship.

The worst temporary aberration is yet to
come.

The Vice-Consul is the Guest-Of-Honour at a
grand cultural event, at which all the glitterati of Singapore are present. It
is a play, in which Singapore’s leading actress is the heroine. She is a most
beautiful woman, but the Vice-Consul’s pure morals will allow him to look only
at her face and neck, below which all her luscious beauties are laid out, right
down to her dimpled toes. This most beautiful lady compels all attention when
she is on stage; now clad in a long, strapless, black velvet gown and reclining
on a couch in a way as to provide a glimpse of very fair legs, the lady tries
to dampen the ardour of a wooer, because she is already betrothed to another.

“Oh, my heart is already taken!” she says
mournfully, bringing up a graceful arm to touch the left side of her bosom, and
it is at this point that the Vice-Consul leaps up from his seat among the most
distinguished guests in the front row and exclaims in a voice vibrant with
eagerness as he catches yet another glimpse of those smooth white legs, “Your
heart may be taken, lady, but he isn’t aspiring that high, you see. Ho! Ho! Ho!
Hee! Hee! Hee! ” Then he sits down quickly, suddenly looking very confused, as
he sees a hundred incredulous faces turned towards him. He mutters, “So sorry
... a temporary aberration,” but knows that this explanation is no longer
convincing, least of all to himself.

The Vice-Consul, to his aides’ great relief,
is ready to talk to them about his problem.

“You have been noticing some very strange
things happening to me,” he says, with some degree of embarrassment. “I myself
cannot account for them. It is as if each time I make a speech, something
suddenly happens to my mind and I say something unrelated to my character, to
say the least. It is as if I am temporarily possessed by some evil demon, for,
as will be obvious to you by now, those things are obscene in the extreme, and
totally alien to the moral rectitude and propriety that I have always been
proud to be associated with.”

The aides nod in agreement. They are
tremendously relieved that the Vice-Consul has chosen to confide in them,
because they fear the eventual downfall of the Vice-Consul through this
increasingly bizarre behaviour. They had earlier surmised that the behaviour
was due to temporary possession by evil spirits. There had been cases before of
perfectly innocent men, women and children whose minds were temporarily taken
over by these obscene spirits and who accordingly uttered obscenities, often in
coarse, guttural tones. Was the Vice-Consul being followed by these mischievous
spirits who waited for him to make his speeches and then swooped down to
disgrace him? One of the aides had said excitedly, “It is the evil spirits! Do
you notice that all this is happening in the month of the Hungry Ghosts? There
are ghosts all over the place!”

“But they are hungry ghosts, not obscene
ghosts,” said the second of the aides, “And anyway, even if they were obscene
ghosts, they would be making obscene dialect jokes. They would not be capable
of those high-class puns in English of the Vice-Consul.”

So having failed in their surmises, the
aides are only too happy that the Vice-Consul has decided to enlist their help
for a solution to the very unusual problem.

“Don’t make any more speeches,” suggests the
third aide.

“That will not be possible in my position,”
says the Vice-Consul coldly.

“But, Sir, it’s just for a while. Perhaps
that will cause this strange whatever-it-is to go away, and then you can resume
making your speeches,” says the first aide.

The Vice-Consul ponders about this for a
while, and decides that he will give it a try. He is becoming tired of these
weird lapses in his behaviour, and he dreads the prospect of going down in
history as the most dirty-minded Vice-Consul. So at the next function which he
will grace with his presence, that is, the opening of Community Sharing week,
he will not make a speech. He will merely express his pleasure to be there, and
then sit down. There will be no risk of any ‘temporary aberration’.

The aides watch him closely, as he rises to
the sound of applause, amid the popping of flash-bulbs, and says serenely, “It
is my greatest pleasure ...” A sudden impish leer crosses his features at this
point, the aides gasp, “It’s got him again!” he continues, “and it has been my
greatest pleasure since I was 15! Ho! Ho! Ho! And,” waggling a finger at the
Chairperson of the Organising Committee, a grey-haired lady in her 50s, he
continues, “And I’m sure it has been yours too, my dear! Hee! Hee! Hee! You
look it! Hee! Hee! ” There is mild pandemonium, for the lady, quite unused to
such blatant public questioning of her morals, faints and collapses upon the
pots of orchids and chrysanthemums.

The Vice-Consul withdraws temporarily from
public life, pleading poor health. “Oh, what shall I do?” he wails. “At this
rate, I shall lose all my moral rectitude, and all those admirers of my moral
rectitude! I should die if Singaporeans stopped looking up to me as the ideal
Confucian model!”

The aides discuss the problem with great
earnestness. A solution must be found to prevent all these temporary
aberrations from ever occurring again, to allow the Vice-Consul to return to
his public life. But what?

It is at this point that the very reporter
who the aides suspect may be the first to exploit the situation for a scoop,
comes forward and offers the first real hope for a solution. The reporter,
excitedly taking out a stack of photographs, and pointing to them, asks, “Who
is this man in the photographs?”

“Which man?” ask the perplexed aides.

The excited reporter points to a
serious-faced, bespectacled young man in shirt and tie who appears in every one
of the photographs which shows the Vice-Consul making a speech. This young man
sits in the back row, and his piercing eyes never leave the Vice-Consul’s face.

“We don’t know who he is,” says the first
aide. “We’ve never seen him before.”

“He was present at every one of those
functions when the Vice-Consul suffered the lapses,” says the reporter. “There
must be a connection between his presence and the lapses, don’t you see? We
must find this young man!” Her mind is filled with exciting possibilities for
Story of the Year.

The aides, with mounting excitement, go to
tell the Vice-Consul, and he tells them, “I order you to find the young man and
bring him to me at once!”

The young man is tracked down without
difficulty. He is an engineer in the Public Utilities Service, and he is a very
bright young man marked out for rapid promotion. But he is a sorry sight when
he is brought before the Vice-Consul, for he immediately falls on his knees,
buries his face in his hands and sobs uncontrollably. And this is his tale:

“I was born into a poor family but through
sheer hard work, I managed to excel in school, to win scholarship after
scholarship right up to postgraduate studies in Cambridge, after which I was
put into this much coveted position in the Public Utilities Service. But even
more than poverty, there was something that I was struggling to be free from.
This was a propensity shown by the male members in my family, from my father
right back to the male ancestors in China, a propensity which I must describe
in the harshest of terms since it has brought me so much misery. It is the
tendency of libidinousness – I blush to use the dialectal name of ‘hum sub’
with all its associations of crudity. This tendency is manifested even in very
elderly Chinese gentlemen who must have a young maiden or two about them in
their dotage. It would appear, alas, that the male members of my family had a
greater share of the propensity than any other family. My great-grandfather had
16 concubines, and died at the age of 78, while engaged in the throes of lust
with the newest, a girl of only 17. Fifth Granduncle was called ‘One-Eyed
Uncle’ because he had only one eye, having lost the other when he applied it to
a peep-hole in a lady’s private room, and had it poked out by the irate lady.
The incident, however, did not deter him from using the remaining good eye for
similar nefarious purposes: he used to spend a great deal of his time peeping
at village maidens bathing or disrobing. My own father had, I am sad to say,
inherited the trait in large measure. As a child, I had often observed him
leering at the maidservant behind my mother’s back, and once he gave me some
money to go out and buy some sweets, but I returned very shortly and peeped
through a hole in the bedroom door, and true enough, there was my father
indulging his lust with the maidservant and cackling in most lascivious
merriment.

When we were living in a kampong in Yio Chu
Kang there was an elderly uncle staying with us. He was a thin, shrunken man,
with an enormous Adam’s apple sticking out of his scrawny neck, and he was
always idling about in the house and kampong, wearing a singlet and faded,
blue-striped, cotton pyjama trousers held up by string. I used to be fascinated
by the up-and-down movements of the enormous Adam’s apple: It was only much
later that I discovered a positive correlation between the speed with which
that organ moved up and down, and the intensity of desire felt by Uncle as he
looked upon some sarong-clad kampong belle, the sarong worn pulled up over the
breasts and knotted tightly just above them. And when the sarong got wet at the
kampong well, and the thin cloth clung to the rounded contours of the bathing
belle, Uncle’s Adam’s apple virtually went berserk, as happened on one occasion
when he actually collapsed in a faint and I had to help him home where he sat
for some time slumped in a chair.