Black Cloth Street

Black Cloth Street,’ shouts the driver with a laugh, as he heaves his lorry to a stop.

Black Cloth Street. That is the only conversation that passes between Little Jade, Siew Yoke, and the lorry driver. Throughout the month Siew Yoke’s been on the work site, it’s the same laugh, between a guffaw and a snort, and every day she laughs along with the driver. Except today. She clambers off the lorry in silence and walks off in a huff. Black Cloth Street, nicknamed after the women from Samsui, or more specifically the colour of their sam-foo – jacket and trousers. Black their outfit might be but weren’t they more commonly called Hong Tau Kan, Red Kerchief, after their distinctive red headdress.

So why not pick the more auspicious red? Why not call it Red Cloth Street?

‘They wear black because they are mourning the death of the husbands they never had,’ someone remarks on the site today, loud enough for her to hear it. Is it unnatural to not want to marry? She brushes the thought aside. She has her independence now and regularly sends money back to China; enough for her father to forgive her for running away; enough to even save them from the last drought.

Being married is to be controlled by a husband and his in-laws. No, I don’t want that. No, I don’t want to end up dead like elder sister. Yes, it’s better this way. Definitely better.

Today’s the last day on the building site, this site at least. There will be another site tomorrow, with more bricks that need carrying. This has been her life since she stepped foot on the island in 1940, a human pack mule for the city-state’s builders. She spots something on the street; just under her bare foot; a lump of dog turd. She jerks her foot forward in mid-step, and her heel lands hard just in front of the offensive lump; she stumbles and grimaces as her foot scrapes the tarmac. With the pain, a sudden thought. She plunges her hand into her quilted cloth shoulder bag; the faded multi-coloured bag painstakingly hand sewn from discarded cloth scraps. She finds them. Two comforting lumps in her hand; two pieces of rubber cut from an old discarded tire. She will trim them down to size after dinner tonight, and with a strap fitted, a new pair of sandals to replace the pair that gave way today. She looks back at the lump on the street, another reminder. She smelt before she saw it this morning.

That son-of-a-diseased-whore tipped the night soil bucket again as he was going down the stairs. Wasn’t his tip big enough? Or is he doing it because there are all women on this floor?

His incessant complaints about the probability, the very high probability, of incurring bad luck when sixteen women are staying together. ‘The more women, the higher the chance of me coming in when someone is having her period,’ is a constant refrain from him.

So what if we are all women? What did he think his mother is? Would he treat her the same way? Isn’t she unlucky for bearing a son who carries other people’s shit for a living?

The hawkers are starting to converge, pushing their carts before them to their designated spots at the side of the street; demarcations tacitly agreed upon, and enforced by the triads, to ensure the harmonious commerce that has been exercised for years on the streets and back lanes of Singapore’s Chinatown. Ah Soon, the dumpling hawker, has already planted himself and his cart outside the narrow staircase leading to the upper floor of a terraced shophouse on Upper Nankin Street – Black Cloth Street; Siew Yoke calls a little cubicle she shares up there with two others Home. Ah Soon’s smile is permanently imprinted on his round, cherubic face, at least that is what Siew Yoke likes to think. The smile that has been greeting her everyday since she left home; first as a child helping his old father man the cart, and now as a young man who has taken over his father’s trade. The smile that breaks out on a face hardly aged whenever it sees her, even though she seldom buys anything from him; the frugality of her existence deems even his simple fare an extravagance.

‘Ah Soon, tai-pau, big dumpling,’ she calls out when she’s within earshot of the hawker. She decides, on a whim, to put her daily fare of rice and vegetables, frugality, aside for one night. It would not put a dint on her remittance to her father, especially not after the pleasant surprise today: getting a personal ‘thank you’ from the normally gruff site foreman and a little bonus with her daily wages.

‘Wah, strike lottery today ah? Siew Yoke,’ he jokes as he hands her his most expensive fare – a large steamed pork dumpling.

‘No, boss smile at me, same thing,’ she answers back jovially as she fishes coins out of her purse.

She spots the dried faeces on her way up the narrow staircase and curses the night soil carrier again.

Dog fornicator! What choice have we got but to increase his tip, again!

The three temporary beds are already set up and occupied in the upstairs hallway. The three brothers look on in silence as Siew Yoke manoeuvres around the occupied beds to her cubicle. She sighs as conversation between the brothers start up. The landlord told them: either let the three brothers in or he will increase the rent. Anyway, he assured the women, they’ll be working in the day and will only be here at night, to sleep, they will be no bother. She misses the nights when the women from the six cubicles would congregate in the hall to talk about their day. All she hears now are the three brothers bragging about their exploits with the sing-song girls in local bars; how they would not be staying with sixteen women if not for the cheap rent; or like now, groaning about how hard their lives are. ‘Singapore is so complicated. In China you don’t meet the Hokkien, Teochew, or Hainanese. Everybody speaks the same dialect as you and life is so much easier,’ moans eldest brother Beng Sua.

Life is difficult, yes, but it is worse in China. I might be dead now, like eldest sister.

Eldest sister’s arranged marriage was a difficult one, she had to work the fields like any man as well as look after her in-laws; indulge their whims as required of a good daughter-in-law. Siew Yoke still feels pain when she thinks about it: how eldest sister had to work out there in the fields until the last day of her pregnancy. It was such a difficult birth, the baby survived but not her. That heartless husband of hers hardly mourned, before marrying again. A fate Siew Yoke did not want to share. She’d made a run for it before her father could find a husband for her.

Head for Nanyang, the Southern Ocean, she was told. There were a few planning to take flight from a world of drudgery under the thumb of husbands and in-laws. They heard there were opportunities there, and a sisterhood of Samsui women – women from the same district as them – who take care of each other. And it was these sisters who took care of her, arranging for the little cubicle she has called home for the last seventeen years, and getting her started on her first job. These sisters who came before are the ones who comfort her whenever she misses her family in China, or when she has a bad day at work. They only have each other, or loneliness.

The brothers stop talking. Ah Kum enters the cubicle. She too is from Samsui but not of the Samsui sisterhood, the only woman up here who is not. Siew Yoke and her were on the same ship to Nanyang, becoming fast friends on that long journey. Ah Kum came in search not for work, or independence, but for her husband; he abandoned his son and wife in China, coming to Singapore to seek his fortune. He would send for them when he made it, he assured her. But two letters later, nothing. She’d had to leave her son with the in-laws and incur a huge debt for the fare. She’d found him, married again with two children. All she got for her efforts was a brutal beating, and a warning never to bother him again. Siew Yoke and her sisters took her in, bruised and bloodied, nursing her back to health, physically and emotionally. She now works as a Ma-Jie, a domestic servant, looking after children not her own. She still sheds tears for the son she left behind, but she can’t bear to go back and face the shame. Anyway, she doesn’t have the money to pay off the debt, let alone a return journey.

‘Yah, Singapore people are heartless and proud, they don’t even care if you die,’ second brother Beng Hai starts up after a while. Siew Yoke grins as Ah Kum rolls her eyes at the noise from outside; there is not a need for pleasantries when there is a common loathing.

‘Aiyah! Why must the three of you set up your beds so early? There’s no space for us to move and all of us have not taken a bath or cook yet!’ groans Ah Thai as she comes into the hallway. Ah Thai joined the sisterhood late. Her children died young – she blamed the poor positioning of her husband’s ancestor’s grave for this, and after her husband also fell victim to his ancestor’s poorly positioned grave, she had nothing, not even her independence as she still ‘belonged’ to her in-laws. That was when she decided it was time to leave China. A boisterous woman built like an ox, she was the one calling out Siew Yoke’s name for the better part of an hour amidst the human chaos and cacophony of the Port of Singapore. After all these years, Siew Yoke still remembers the voice that called out to her that first day, she has deferred to the owner of that voice as her Tai-jie, eldest sister, ever since.

‘Ooi, you men use up our firewood and don’t replace it, how are we going to cook our dinner now?’ Siew Yoke hears Ah Thai shouting from the kitchen, which is nothing more than a little wood fired stove at the rear, beside the single faucet that supplies water to the entire floor and the bucket toilet. Ah Thai’s talk of dinner reminds Siew Yoke of her steamed dumpling, left sitting on a battered cardboard box that contains all her worldly possessions: a few faded letters from home which she can’t read without a visit to the letter-writer; the clothes and sandals she wore for her journey here, neatly packed away should she need them again; cloth oddments, and a nearly completed quilt blanket hand sewn from cloth scraps salvaged from the dustbins of the tailors nearby; she has sent back one blanket every year to her family in China. Siew Yoke holds the warm dumpling close to her nose, and inhales the last wafts of steam rising from it; slowly savouring the taste of it even before her first bite, not knowing when she will dare indulge herself again.

‘Ah Thai, don’t start. We have no choice. There is no work today so we have no money to go anywhere, or buy firewood. You think we like to spend the night with all you rough women? We walked along the quay but no one was willing to give us work, heartless Teochew scum,’ complains the eldest.

No work, no money, like some of the lean months between building projects. And I spend half a day’s pay on this dumpling. I should have just asked for the plain dumpling.

‘If there is no work at the quay, you can always find work somewhere else right? Why don’t you try the construction sites? They are always short of workers. If you want, I’ll have a talk with my site foreman, he’s Cantonese too, like us, I’m sure he’ll be able to help,’ Ah Thai offered.

Half a day’s salary; enough to feed my family in China for a week, what am I thinking? How can I be so selfish?

‘Don’t waste your time, Ah Thai. Once a Chinese come to Singapore, they are no longer Chinese, they forget that Chinese people remember kindness for a thousand years,’ moans the second brother.

Kindness? Kindness! That word still irks me. If I felt, or even just remembered kindness, I wouldn’t be here, in this strange land with my sisters, would I? What does that dog fornicator know about kindness?

‘Nonsense! Either there is work or there is no work, nobody owes you anything, Chinese or not. Life is hard for people like us, but if you’re not scared of hard work you can survive,’ Ah Thai answers, impatience edging into her voice.

Yes, life is hard, very hard. I had to work on construction sites for a year to pay off the debt of my passage to Singapore. But it’s still worth it, my family is doing better, much better.

‘Old lady, you don’t understand. We are not like you, so willing to do anything. Sometimes I wish I was back in China,’ Beng Tian, the youngest, adds emphatically.

Back in China? I can’t even afford this dumpling back home. I would not have a cent to my name, everything I have, including myself, would belong to my husband and his family; men like those three lazy and whining idlers outside.

‘What are the three of you talking about? Even if you give me a free trip back to China, I don’t want it. Everything’s so hard there. If you need water you have to walk a long way for it, and then you have to carry it back. Here you just turn on the tap and out the water flows,’ Ah Thai heads for her cubicle, exasperated, after this final retort.

Yes, why would I want to go back? I would be considered nothing more than an old spinster; unwanted and rejected, destined to carrying water from the village well for the family kitchen everyday. I have already joined my lot the day I boarded the ship. Yes, back in China, I wouldn’t even have this dumpling to look forward to.

‘Why do you keep staring at that dumpling Siew Yoke? Something wrong with it?’ enquires Ah Kum, snapping Siew Yoke out of her reverie.

‘No, no. Nothing. There’s nothing wrong at all,’ answers Siew Yoke, as she bites placidly into the dumpling.