The Catherine Lim Collection (36 page)

The Incident of Xiu: Mr Sai Koh Phan gets a
directive that school children should have their names changed to their
Hanyu
Pinyin
forms, in line with the ‘Speak Mandarin, Avoid Dialects’ campaign.
Mr Sai Koh Phan, always careful to set the example, immediately changes his
name to the desired form, posts it up outside his office, and proceeds to
change the names of everyone in his school and household. His two older sons
are aggrieved at the loss of the western names that they have given themselves,
and protest that they will not be known by the new names which they find
difficult to pronounce and which they say will make them feel ridiculous.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” snaps Mr Sai Koh
Phan. “‘Ricky’, indeed. ‘Chester’, indeed. Evidence of the harmful moral
influences from the West. From now onwards, you will respond only to your
Hanyu
Pinyin
names, both at home and in school. Is that clear?”

The younger of the two, a rebellious, sturdy
fellow of 15, ignores the father and runs after his dog, a handsome Alsatian.

“Bonzo! Bonzo!” he calls, pointedly ignoring
his father.

“‘Bonzo’, indeed!” cries Mr Sai Koh Phan,
smitten with guilt because he has not been vigilant enough about his children’s
behaviour, allowing them, like the rest of Singapore’s young people, to slide
into western decadence. But it is not too late to effect corrective measures.

Bonzo, a highly spirited dog, is unable to
respond to its new
Hanyu Pinyin
name of Xiu, undergoes an identity
crisis, and shows increasingly bizarre behaviour.

“If that stupid dog of yours does not stop
it, I shall send him to the vet to be put to sleep!” roars Mr Sai Koh Phan who,
for the third time, shakes his leg free from the warm stream of Xiu’s piss.
Xiu’s disorientation is very real indeed; he takes to barking at the cageful of
canaries whose names of Goldie, Chirpie, Louie and Randy have been changed to
Jin, Xuan, Lie and Ran respectively.

But domestic crises of this sort are quite
inconsequential to Mr Sai Koh Phan, and he continues to be a very fulfilled and
happy man. Alas for him! The fulfilment and happiness are less real and
enduring than he thinks. In the 20th year of the total service of himself to
the campaigns, the Malady strikes Mr Sai Koh Phan. It is no ordinary malady. It
strikes with a vengeance, so that not a single organ in Mr Sai Koh Phan’s body
is free from its vicious power.

Mr Sai Koh Phan suffers stabs of pain in his
legs that travel rapidly up his spine and cause him to contort his facial
features grotesquely; wild ragings in his stomach tie up all his intestines
into impossibly tight knots of pain that cause him to double up and gasp for
help; fiery streams course up and down his throat, threatening to burst through
its walls.

Now even such sufferings would have been
tolerable to Mr Sai Koh Phan if they served his ambition, an increasingly
urgent one, of winning the Ideal Civil Servant of the Year award. But instead
they frustrate this ambition, for they render him totally incapable of
attending meetings, hosting the friendly meet-your-Member-of-Parliament
sessions, supervising the school’s Community Consciousness activities, etc.,
all of which would certainly conduce to the winning of that award. Mr Sai Koh
Phan is most distressed, and so is his Member of Parliament who is anxious for
him to have that high honour. No doctor is able to help Mr Sai Koh Phan, and
then in despair, upon the recommendation of a friend, he goes to see Dr Sindoo,
who is known as the best doctor in Singapore, and also the most eccentric.

“The cure for the malady is simple,” says
the doctor, and Mr Sai Koh Phan’s eyes light up with hope.

“Spit,” advises the doctor, “Preferably
three times a day.”

“What?” says Mr Sai Koh Phan.

“Be discourteous to your mother-in-law,”
says the doctor. “Also three times a day, and in dialect.”

“What?” cries Mr Sai Koh Phan and now he is
thinking that all those rumours about Dr Sindoo being a little mad must be
true.

“Litter – once a day will be sufficient, I
think,” says Dr Sindoo, “And when you next watch TV and the National Anthem is
sung, scratch your leg. And your armpits if you like.”

“What?” shouts Mr Sai Koh Phan, now
convinced that the doctor is mad. He falls back on his chair, thoroughly
distressed. “How can I do that,” he wails, “I’m a civil servant!”

“And getting less civil and more servant,”
mutters the doctor. “You have to do all these, I’m afraid, if you want to be
cured of this malady.”

“You ask me to spit, to litter, to swear, to
go against the very campaigns that I’ve been so faithful to for the last 20
years?” gasps Mr Sai Koh Phan. “Spit? Litter? How can I desecrate the very soil
that I worship, both on my own and ray ancestors’ behalf? How can I scandalise
my fellow Singaporeans? Doctor, you are asking me to do the impossible!”

“You don’t have to do it publicly,” says Dr
Sindoo. “I never asked you to. You can do it privately, in your own home or
garden at night. Nobody need see. But it is important that you do it. Unknown
to you, your body has not reacted very kindly to all those years of subjugation
to the campaigns, and has been building up a mechanism of protest that is only
now beginning to manifest itself in these angry knots and twists of pain. They
could get worse, I warn you. The only way to break up this mechanism is to do
precisely the opposite of what the campaigns have been making you do. In this
way, slowly but surely, you will placate your body and calm it into a state
when it will have no need of this mechanism of defiance, and thus dispense with
it. I am afraid that this is your only hope.”

“Oh, how can I? How can I?” wails Mr Sai Koh
Phan. “How can I defile my beloved country by doing all these dastardly things
on her soil? I am a son of the soil!”

The doctor gets a little impatient, mutters,
“Night soil, more like,” and then says aloud, “Don’t be silly. I never told you
to do all these things publicly. You can do them privately, very privately, in
your bathroom, for instance. The most important thing is to pluck up enough
guts to do the exact opposite of what you have been trained to do for the last
20 years.”

“I can’t! I can’t!” weeps Mr Sai Koh Phan.
“I’m a true son!”

“That’s the best unfinished sentence I’ve
ever heard,” mutters Dr Sindoo who gets more irreverent as he gets more
impatient. He says, “It’s up to you, Mr Sai Koh Phan. There is no other cure
for this malady.”

Mr Sai Koh Phan leaves the doctor’s clinic
in a daze. He walks into the bright sunshine outside, and he looks at the many
campaign posters around, and the pride and gratitude once more surge into his
heart, in recollection of years of total fidelity to their admonitions:

Don’t litter

Don’t spit

Don’t stop at two

Don’t dirty public toilets

Don’t sniff glue

Don’t waste water

Be courteous

Eat more wheat

Eat frozen meat

Don’t breed mosquitoes

Don’t change lanes while driving

Say ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you’ in Mandarin

Don’t fill your plates to overflowing at
buffet lunches

Don’t be ‘
kia su
’

Plant a tree

Don’t grow long hair

Don’t grow

Don’t

But the pleasurable sensation is
short-lived. A furious knot of pain explodes in the left side of his chest and
races up his throat to emerge through his open mouth as strangulated gasps and
grunts.

Mr Sai Koh Phan, clutching his throat, is
back at Dr Sindoo’s clinic. He pleads again and again, “Help me, Doctor. I want
to be well again, I want to win the Ideal Civil Servant of the Year Award. But
I can’t do all these things that you told me to. As I told you, I am a son of
the soil and will die before I desecrate it. Please help me by finding me
another cure, Doctor, I beg you!”

And that’s when Dr Sindoo has an idea for a
cure. But it is an idea for whose implementation the assistance of the Member
of Parliament has first to be sought, and then the Singapore Government’s and
finally the Malaysian Government’s. The Member of Parliament listens very
carefully and then swings into action. In a series of highly secretive
meetings, he is able to convince the Government that the proposed measures,
elaborate though they are, are worthwhile taking for a much valued civil
servant, and when later, it is learnt that many other civil servants suffer
from the same malady and are therefore in need of the same cure, the decision
is unanimously taken, at Cabinet level, to approach the Malaysian Government at
once for their co-operation. The approach is made with the greatest tact and
caution, and the request with utmost grace and humility, for the well-being of
the civil service is at stake. Owing to the extreme urgency in Mr Sai Koh
Phan’s particular case, the Malaysian government is gracious enough to allow
for the immediate implementation of the plan, even before the necessary
formalities have been gone through. Mr Sai Koh Phan and family move to a house
situated near the Causeway, and as soon as he is on Malaysian soil, is able to
carry out the rest of the prescription, that is, he shouts, curses, swears, all
in dialect, then litters. He does all these with a degree of enthusiasm and
abandon that surprises even Dr Sindoo, and after all these ablutions, returns
to Singapore thoroughly cleansed, ready to begin the day’s work. He says he
feels very much better, and actually looks forward to each day’s preparation of
litter (put very neatly in a plastic bag by his wife) for scattering on other
people’s soil.

His Member of Parliament is happy to see
this prized civil servant on the road to recovery, and he prides himself on
being instrumental in the setting up of a most unusual scheme by which
thousands of Singaporean civil servants become cured of their malady. A special
plot of ground has been procured from the Malaysian Government, one which the
Malaysian Government had originally intended to use as a dumping site for
industrial effluents. (Some believe that the plot is being rented out for an
undisclosed sum, whereas others believe it is a gift, a token of friendly
co-operation.) Here Singaporeans come by the hundreds daily to do on other soil
what they have been forbidden to do on their own, and from which they return, quite
refreshed and ready to be ideal civil servants all over again. It is a strange
sight: usually grave-faced, bespectacled civil servants in conservative white
shirts and dark trousers wildly shouting, stomping, spitting, laughing,
littering, hurling rambutan rinds in the air, tossing peanut shells over their
shoulders, swearing in the dialect of their ancestors, quarrelling, fighting.
Sometimes a playful competition is held, to see whose spit lands furthest,
whose peanut shells, ‘kana’ seeds or melon-seed husks pile up most quickly.
There is even a very good-natured contest to see whose Hokkien or Cantonese
ditty is the coarsest. The method is unfailingly effective, for the
constrictions and knots and tightnesses disappear.

Dr Sindoo will deliver a paper at the coming
Geneva Convention and no doubt the unique malady and its equally unique cure
will create much interest in the medical world. Mr Sai Koh Phan, to his great
joy, has been nominated for the Ideal Civil Servant Award, and if he wins that
much coveted award, will give due credit to his doctor, and his Member of
Parliament; indeed, Mr Sai Koh Phan has already prepared the acceptance speech
in which the names of Dr Sindoo and his Member of Parliament come up for
grateful, honourable mention at least four times.

Now what has
come over
the Vice-Consul, quintessence of moral
uprightness, the ideal Confucian product, that he says such unseemly things in
his speeches? Not only unseemly, but downright filthy. And in front of the most
distinguished audience that could ever be found in Singapore, including, on one
occasion, the First Lady, who looks down in pained silence at the dirty joke
about the Cardinal, and on another occasion, the Ambassador of Italy who looks
up unbelievingly when
the Vice-Consul, just before he declares open the Convention, makes the equally
dirty joke about the aging Dato and Datin.

People begin to ask each other privately,
“What’s come over the Vice-Consul? He’s behaving very strangely, to say the least.”
They are puzzled because it is so obvious that the dirty joke is not intended
by the Vice-Consul to be part of his speech; he, like everyone else, seems
surprised by its intrusion, like a muddy current in an otherwise crystal clear
stream. But he seems to be in its power while it lasts, for his features, when
he tells the joke, are no longer the calm benign features of the pure of heart,
but the vitiated contortions of the hungering lecher. The transformation is
remarkable, and is as compelling as the joke itself. At the end of it, a dead
hush falls upon the whole assembly, the Vice-Consul realizes what is happening,
struggles to be his old self, and resumes his speech, usually with greater
moral fervour as if to make amends for what he apologetically calls ‘a
temporary aberration’.