You Can Beat Drums with My Bones

Today is Chinese New Year eve (tomorrow will be year of the Dragon) and time for families to get together for reunion dinners. For me, it is time to reminisce. Usually, this time of year is hot and dry but as I write this with a heavy heart it is raining quite heavily outside...


From age 8 to 20 (when I left for university in Singapore), my family of 7 stayed in a 2 bedroom 1 toilet walk-up flat (no lift) of about 500 square feet in KL (San Peng Road) that my parents bought for RM 9,000. It was on the back half of the top (4th) floor and thus the cheapest unit.

Every day father would carry the bicycle he used to go to work up and down the stairs because anything left on ground floor would be stolen (he lost one when he left it downstairs while home for lunch). I did the same when I got my own bicycle when I was 14.

[My first bike was a small red one that mom 'bought' from her cousin for $10. They lived in a landed house near our flat where we used to go in the evenings so that we could watch TV. That bike was hanging high in their kitchen wall - was their sons' but they had all grown up - and I had been eyeing it for some time. One day I pestered mom to get that bike for me so that I could cycle to school. I was walking 30-40 mins at very fast pace to secondary school 2.5 km away in Kampung Pandan and wear out a pair of shoes every 2 months or so.]

My father initially did not want to buy the flat because he was afraid he could not pay for it. But he relented because of mom's urging (her view was it was better to buy our own house rather than to rent which was what we had been doing) and because his brother used to admonish him for many years in front of their elder sister whenever she visited from Taiping and had been saying that he could help out by lending some money if father did not have enough.

For a year or so when I was still too young to understand all this, my father used to take me on his bicycle every few Sunday or so to visit his brother who co-owned a coffee shop along Pudu Road opposite Pudu Jail. I looked forward to those trips because that was when I got treated to a glass of soft drink! (the only other time was Chinese New Years).

It did not occur to me then that father was making those trips to try and get his brother to lend him some money for the flat as he said he would do. But I did notice that something was not quite right. On those trips, father was very quiet and seemed to be in deep thought as he would open and re-grip his fingers on the bike handles every once a while. (When young, we kids rode in front on the horizontal bar of father's bike which he wrapped with a piece of used blanket as cushion)

Years later I learnt that everytime father went, his brother would give some excuse why he could not come up with any money to lend to father but might be able to do so some time after. That was why father kept going back there with me in tow. After some time we never went back to that coffee shop and father never got any loan from his brother.

Father's view was that his brother did not want to lend him the money because his wife disapproved of it. Father therefore became very bitter with both his brother and sister-in-law. Since then father would never fail to talk about it whenever his elder sister visited or when we visited her in Taiping. That continued until I was over 35 years old.

It was on one such trip I made with father and mom to Taiping that I finally told father off for complaining about what his brother and sister-in-law did to him so many years ago. I told father that he should have ticked them off back then instead of talking about it with others for so many decades.

The analogy I used was 'if a dog keeps barking at you, you should just give that dog a good whack there and then, and the dog would never dare be funny with you again. No use just talking about that dog to others all the time'.

(That trip to Taiping was also one of the last I made - Taiping auntie passed away a few years after that).

Without his brother's help, father was probably desperate but was fortunate that his ex-sifu Low Chow offered to lend him some money (father must have confided his problem to him). In return, my parents offered to rent a room to him (perhaps as surety that we cannot run away).

Mom earned additional money from Low Chow by cooking his dinner and washing his laundry. I used to help mom out with the washing in the small area just outside the small toilet in our flat - with pails around there was barely enough space to squat.

Low Chow came from China when he was a young man and never got married. He used to be one of my father's senior (sifu) when father was a young engineering workshop apprentice many years before that. By the time he moved in with us he was already 50+ years old but still working. In a way, he was very nice to help us out. That money was probably part of his precious retirement savings.

From the beginning we treated him as part of the family and he would go along with us to movies (many times his treat) and family outings.

The good thing about renting the room to Low Chow was that during the day we got to use it to study or catch a nap (he was nice enough not to lock his room when he went out). We would make it a point to leave the room before 6 pm each day before he got home from work. On occassions when he returned early or we overstayed, we would hurrily rush out of the room upon hearing his name being called out by others when he was at the gate (it takes a short while for one of us to open the gate for him - always long enough to vacate his room).

At night, I slept in the living room while the rest of the family slept in the other bedroom - 3 on the master bed, 1 on single mattres in the floor between the bed and the clothes cabinet and 2 on double mattress on the floor at entrance to room. Somehow, all that fitted just right into that small room. Because my bed was a mattress on the floor of the living room, it was sometimes very hard to fall asleep with TV on or others moving and doing things.

In the first few years we did not have a TV and we kids would stand in the corridor outside our flat and peep across the airwell and through the window of our neighbours' flats to watch (4 units - 2 sets of front & back - shared one corridor). 2 neighbouring families were very nice and would usually invite us to watch inside their small flats. We got to watch TV at home years later when mom bought an old black/white TV for $40. It was not in perfect working order and we would occassionally have to turn the knobs to and fro or bang on it to get it to work it but it was still a luxury.

One of the nice neighbours who most frequently invited us into her flat to watch TV was an old lady we called 'Ah Poh' (Chinese for 'granny' or 'old aunty'). Ah Poh was slim, of slight build, cheerful and a very nice woman (I regreted that I never had a picture of her but then we seldom took pictures in those days. Father had a camera but the 120mm films were expensive and picture taking was limited to special occasions only).

Every week Ah Poh was sure to bring us some treats - sometimes a few times a week. Although in those days it was not uncommon for neighbours to occasionally share treats with each other, Ah Poh still stood out. Whether it was something she cooked for her family or some treats her adult children bought for her, she would share with us. Other than very occasionally, she did not do the same with the other neighbours who also had young kids because I think she knew we were poorer and she took pity on us.

When she came calling, she would announce it by calling out my name. On hearing that, we kids would rush to 'welcome' her (and what she was bringing). For us kids, many of her treats like chocolates etc. were things we seldom got to eat. She made us happy. Years later, I wondered to myself what her children thought about her continuously giving things to us.

I will forever remember Ah Poh's great kindness. Nowadays, when I have a good meal I would think of her and her kindness and generosity. When I see a poor women (you can tell) on the streets, I would pass them some money and say to myself 'Ah Poh, that is in memory of you'.

Ah Poh is one of the reasons (my mom being the other) I believe that women are special. They have a natural selfless instinct to share with and take care of others esp. the less fortunate that men do not have (at least not to the same extent).

While speaking to Ah Poh on one trip back from Singapore, somehow the topic of me getting married some day came up and I said that I would invite her to Singapore when that happens. She laughed and said 'by that time, you can beat drums with my bones lor!' Other than vague memories of her looks and the sound of her voice when she called my name, those are the words I remember of her now. To me, those were her last words to me. My eyes get wet whenever I think of her.

About 10 years after we first moved into our flat, another nice neighbour staying on 2nd floor (Mr Gan) who worked for a housing developer offered to help us get a 'medium-cost' terrace house in a project (Taman Maju Jaya) his company was undertaking in Cheras. In Malaysia, every housing development project are required by law to set aside a certain proportion of units as 'low-cost' and 'medium-cost' housing for less well-to-do families. For obvious reason, those 'special price' units are always in great demand and interested and qualified buyers have to go for ballots unless one got help from the inside. Mr Gan got a unit for us - it was opposite the unit he was buying for his family (we are still neighbours).

Low Chow contributed RM10,000 for that house and moved in there with my family too (he stayed there rent free). By then I was already studying in Singapore. But I spent my last uni holidays at the new house sand papering the wooden parts and painting it to prepare for the move in. Being 'medium cost', quality of things and work were not great.

The house was built on used tin mine land about 1.5 km from the main Cheras road and it was the first housing development in that area (between Cheras and Ampang). So there was no bus service etc. Only other thing there were some squatter run vegetable farms. Weekdays I would go there on bicycle to do the work by myself. On weekends, the rest of the family would get there with me and my father ferrying them from the main road using our bicycles.

6 years after moving there, on one of my trips back home I heard from my parents that Low Chow had claimed that he owned half of the house and wanted my parents to pay him half the market value or something like that. My parents suspected that he had lost a lot of money playing mahjong (his past time at the Selangor Engineering Workshop Employees Association in Jalan Sultan. It later shifted to Pasar Road near Pudu).

I then spoke to Low Chow in private and explained to him that he could not claim half of the house because he contributed only RM10,000 while the price was RM28,000 (and I was then still helping to service the loan). I said that as appreciation for the kind help he gave my family when we needed it most, I would pay him back his RM10,000 plus compounded interest of 10% per year (and we will not collect rent from him for all those years). I calculated it on a calculator for him - it was about RM18,000. Low Chow agreed and I then wrote him a check for that sum.

Some time after that (when I was working in Indonesia) he left our house and we never heard from him since. My parents thought he might have gone back to China where he still had relatives. Once a while I would still think of him and wondered, if indeed he had lost a lot of his savings on mahjong, whether what I paid him was enough for him to live through the rest of his life as a single old man (especially considering that the Malaysian Ringgit had started to drop against Singapore and Brunei dollars since 1983). It still bothers me.

Note: Malaysian Ringgit used to be on par with the Singapore and Brunei Dollars from the beginning (1965 or so). But in 1983 because of mismanagement, Malaysia could not maintain that parity anymore and the Ringgit started to depreciate against those currencies. Today the exchange rate is almost 2.5.


Life Lessons:

Always remember the people who have been kind to us or helped us before. We may not be able to repay them but we can always 'pay forward'.

The Chinese tradition of the Reunion Dinner is such a big thing that every year, almost every true Chinese regardless of where they are (even thousands of miles away) would make their way home to have that important meal with the whole family. Tradition is essentially a collection of 'best practices' of a people. The Reunion Dinner is a reflection of how important the practice of having meals together was to our forefathers. Over thousands of years, they had 'burnt' it into the soul of every one of their young.


Grameen Bank (Bangladesh):
Mohammad Yunus who started the use of micro-credit to help poor women start businesses (soon followed by UN and poor countries) said that he adopted that approach because he found that women are more reliable with money and will use them to benefit their children.

Barefoot College (India):
Founded by Bunker Roy, it teaches women from poor villages around the world solar powered electricity and cooking. Women trainees who are 40-50 years old and selected by their fellow villagers will return to run their villages' electric power system. http://www.barefootcollege.org/sol_approach.asp