Night Moves and Manoevres

Night Moves and Manoeuvres
NIGHT MOVES AND MANOEUVRES Introduction It might be a surprise to most, particularly in the West, if I were to say, that I grew up mainly as a nocturnal creature. It is the truth. As children, we were not trundled to bed, if we did not want to. As a family we basically stayed awaked together, adults and children. There was no concept of the adults having their little bit of time space for privacy. It might be that during school terms, Aunty, the cook and servant, might prod the children to retire early to bed, so that they might be fresh for school the next day. Even then, you did not to go to bed till you have done your homework! But, as I indicated earlier, you were not compelled to go to bed at a fixed time. My father had a very busy panel beating and welding workshop. Most working days, the workshop was opened till very late, till just about mid-night, so there was no possibility of anyone getting proper sleep; unless you were dead tired or you were deaf to the workshop din, from the panel beating. In any case there was an obvious enticement for staying up. There was the obligatory supper for the workers. That meant going out to the local night hawkers or restaurants. To be truthful, even when there was no overtime at the workshop, as on Sunday nights and public holidays, we still went out for supper. So it was a nightly gastronomic ritual. There was no scheduled time for supper as such. It could be at any time between 10pm at night or 3am in the morning. Hot meals were available at the umpteen number of food outlets opened 24/7. My father was a man of fixed simple tastes. He might occasionally try some other food, if prompted or dictated by my mother, who quite liked nasi lemak or satay, but his main staple for supper was Hokkien Mee, (probably because this was my mothers favourite food, and one of mine, if I may add), or Cantonese Crispy Noodles. In fact, Cantonese Crispy Noodles was his downfall, metaphorically speaking, because many years later, he suffered his 1st heart attack at his favourite Cantonese Crispy Noodles stall at Tai Shi Tau at Foch Avenue. Privately, he would often have liked to sneak out for Hakka Ngau Yoke Yuen Fun or Hakka Beef Ball Noodles at Soong Kee at Cross Street in the town centre, but mother being Hokkien did not eat beef. Sometimes my father might decide to have Bak Kut Teh for supper, but that would mean a doubling-up, for we usually woke up early at dawn for Bak Kut Teh as well; as that was his breakfast staple. He enjoyed, and so did I, when I acquired the same breakfast habit or addiction, the social aspects and morning rituals of Bak Kut Teh and the partaking of Ti Kwan Yin tea [refer to my memoir in the Good Old Colonial Days]. As a result of my addiction to both Hokkien Mee and Bak Kut Teh, you might say that I am an expert of these 2 staples of mine, so much so that I cringe when I come across recipes that are not quite original to be regarded as shiok, Hokkien slang for absolutely delicious. As if the market were not already saturated with food outlets situated in situ, you could not escape the claws of the ravenous itinerant night hawkers. So while you were waiting for supper, or might missed out on possible supper, you could still be tempted by the signature calls of these night hawkers that plied their trade door to door, at the access dirt roads through the squatter settlement, at the back of my house. There were quite a few. The three main ones that I remember, as a frequent customer, were the tok-tok, (the sound of his clacking on 2 pieces of bamboo), man selling tung fun [transparent bean vermicelli] soup noodles with pork balls with toong choy [preserved Tientsin vegetables], the tan cha [egg tea] man selling hard boiled eggs in oolong tea and the lok tong [steamboat] man selling skewers of assorted food that you cook in the steamboat provided and then dip in a choice of various sauces.
Night Moves and Manoeuvres /VC/03/07/11
Page 1 of 41 Vince Cheok
I have alluded to the Chinese fixation with or addiction to food in a section on Chinese food culture in my memoir in Batu Road School II, so you might just have to bear this gourmand characteristic at the back of your mind when you pass judgement on the social essence of Chinese nocturnal life in my childhood days. Just simply accept that all Chinese nocturnal activities were or are predicated on or facilitated by or orchestrated around food! Food is or was the engine oil that smoothened and lubricated social and sexual and whatever transactions that took place at night. If the food was not delectable, appetizing, scrumptious amenable and pleasing, it would be most unlikely that that venue would be suitable for social, sexual or business discourse. So the Chinese community in my childhood worked all day and played all night; or should I say worked and ate all day and played and ate all night; although some, depending on their occupations or trades or whether they were working overtime, probably worked and ate all night as well. When you grow up as a child, with your nights almost as long as your days, your attention and your mind, are quite naturally drawn to things, nocturnal. What then can be more nocturnal than ghosts and spirits? Ghosts and Spirits Ancestor worship was the original basis of so-called Chinese religion. It is a natural extension of the practice of filial piety and of maintaining a relationship with ones dead loved ones; who have gone to the spirit world. It was a simple conjunctive concept of the dead and the living. Just as there are or were good and bad people, equally there are or would be good and bad spirits. Just like your family and clan would normally side with you; equally so, your ancestral spirits would side and protect you from the bad or opposing spirits. Through speculation and superstitions the plethora of spirits extended to animals, trees, mountains and rivers; and thus Animism crept in. Later Taoism injected metaphysical aspects to this original foundation; with the notion of immortality. Confucianism provided a moral and ethical code of behaviour. And, even later still Buddhism introduced a wider extrapolation of realms of existence and spiritual alchemy; in particular the concept of karmic causes and effects. The 6 realms of existence in Buddhism are deva [god], asura [demi-god], human, animal, petra [hungry ghost] and naraka [hell]. The Chinese were not a race to discard things. Nothing is useless; everything has its utility, time and place. They absorb new concepts but they would still retain the old in the cupboard for just in case new ideas did not work out. Buddhist concepts merely fine-tuned those comprised in Ancestral Worship, Taoism, and Confucianism. In this sense, the amalgam of Ancestral Worship, Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism became a syncretism and eclectic mix that still had its basic foundation in spirits and demons. The plebeian Chinese must be regarded as having a spirit practice rather than a spiritual practice. Try telling a Chinese that there are no spirits or ghosts; and he will tell you he does not agree because our Chinese ancestors have seen and heard spirits and ghosts. Go to the next level and ask whether he is afraid of spirits or ghosts; and his reply would be that he is only afraid of bad spirits and ghosts just as he is afraid of bad men. Confucius is believed to have said that we should respect ghosts and gods, (he probably meant the good spirits), but to keep away from them all. For Chinese therefore, ghosts and spirits might be irrelevant for some but we should all not be irreverent to them. One saving aspect of Buddhist dharma is that all phenomenon is an illusion. It is only real in an experiential sense of the realm of being. Thus a ghost or a spirit is just an illusion. If you believe in them they exist; if you do not believe in them they do not exist. If you encounter a
ghost or spirit, it is part of your karmic destiny; there must have been a causal affinity for the encounter. Thus the saying mang ho keen sun; mang hak keen kuai or if your karmic residue is good, (soul is bright), you only see good spirits; if your karmic residue is bad, (soul is dark), the bad spirits seek you. From very young I was told yut tau mm hoe kong yun; yeh mun mm hoe kong kuai or during the day, speak evil of no man; during the night, speak no evil of spirits. You start off in life with things that scared you in early childhood, like loud cankerous thunder and lightning bolts in ominous night storms, wailing creepy howls of neighbourhood dogs, whirlwinds of debris, the inexplicable banging of shutters, doors and windows during monsoonal storms and moonless tropical cloudy nights; but you were gradually sensitised or desensitised, as you started to really understand about spirits and ghosts. You soon found out or were told that even though spirits and ghost normally come out during the night, that these phenomena that scare you are not the spirits and ghosts themselves. You are and were told that ghosts and spirits have their normal habitats or real estate or territorial jurisdiction. If you were to offend them, you might have also offended them during the day. The bad spirits or ghosts that are out to get you in pursuit, i.e. no matter whether you have offended them or not, are those out to seek revenge for bad things you have done to them in past lives. That sort of retributive encounter or justice, you cannot avoid, unless you resort to a Taoist shaman medium exorcist. What you can avoid however, is inadvertently or accidentally offending a local spirit in his patch of real estate, in your neighbourhood wanderings. Refer to my memoir in Batu Road School II wherein I described the various shrines to local deities in a typical Chinese house and compound. Everywhere you go in Malaysia, now as in yesteryears, you will find these ubiquitous roadside shrines to the local deity or Datuk Kong [Datuk is Malay for local chief and Kong is Chinese for god or deity], usually auspiciously located under a tree. The banyan tree is a favourite, with its aerial hanging roots. The shrine might also be located adjacent to a large boulder that has that fung-shui character about it. The site is usually chosen by fung-shui geomancers for its spiritual essence or presence or because of some spiritual occurrence there or because someone had a dream or premonition and was directed by the local deity to build a shrine for it at the nominated site. The shrine is like a little wooden cubby house, usually on a concrete slab, painted in auspicious red colour, with a joss-stick or incense receptacle, fruit bowls, (for fruit, cakes, betel nuts, cigarettes and paper money), and an idol of the Datuk Kong. The typical Datuk Kong idol is of a figurine, which wears songkok and Malay attire, because this is after all Malay land; and so, the local deity must be a Malay spirit. You can hardly say that the Chinese have no respect for other races! The cross-fertilisation of cultures has been such that even Malays, quite contrary to Muslim beliefs, have the equivalent of Datuk Kongs, which they call Datuk Keramats, and the Indians have their equivalent in puja shrines to Indian bhuta or preta local spirits, as well. So it is all a very genial kaleidoscope kind of cultural spirit mix. Whatever the genre of these local deities and whether you are devout or not, as a precautionary measure, it is advisable, whether it be day or night, but particularly at night, that you kowtow, put your palms together and bow slightly in reverence ,as you pass by one of these shrines, whether it be a Chinese, Malay or Indian shrine. I found it a handy practice to keep sweets or lollies in the pockets; so that every time you pass by one of these shrines, you pay your salutary greetings and kowtow and then drop a couple of sweets in the fruit bowl, as a toll fee. Even when there is no Datuk Kong shrine, exercise a bit of spiritual common sense. When you are out in the woods, or should I say in the jungle, and you need to piddle on a tree; just kowtow to the tree and ask
for permission from the local spirit before piddling. Local spirits have feelings. How do I know? Once, I was trekking with my wife Josephine around the jungle shack that my 2 nd Brother had in the Pahang, (one of the 14 States in Malaysia), jungle, about 15 miles from Bentong town. We had nothing to do really, and rather than follow my 2nd Brothers direction about taking the meandering rivulet upstream to get to the waterfall there, I decided to slash my way directly through the thick jungle undergrowth with a parang [a local machete]. I hated using the rivulet because of the blood sucking leeches in the stream. Then the inexplicable happened. Suddenly I just lost control of my parang. Something controlled my arm and hand and drove the machete in such a way that I got spiked in the lower leg just below the knee. To understand this weird impossibility, you must know what a parang looks like. A parang, like a machete, is a 1cm thick heavy 1 foot long knife, broader at its strike end and with a hook spike at the strike end, at the top spine of the blade. Now when you slash with a parang you are slashing with the sharpened base of the blade; but the hook spike is at the other side of the blade. I did not get slashed. I got spiked! A mad 4 hour drive in panic back to Sentul in Kuala Lumpur for anti tetanus injection and stiches ensured that both Josephine and I will never forget this jungle spirit episode. Needless to say I promptly made a return trip back to that jungle spot with offerings to make amends to the local (jungle) spirit. To this day that wound has not completely healed. In any case, it is a good personal reminder, every time I see it, to be reverential to all spirits no matter how irrelevant they might be. The fear of local spirits or deities is particularly strong and entrenched in the construction and building industry; for when you chop down trees and start excavating the ground, you are really interfering with the local spirits property and breaking his peace. No menial construction workers, whether Chinese, Indian or Malay will start work until the developer calls in the bomoh or shaman or tangki [medium exorcist] to install a shrine to the local spirit of the land being developed. The shaman would make invocations and propitiations and sacrifices and offerings to appease the local spirit. The inauguration of a local shrine is a festive religious feast. As mutton is the only mutually acceptable meat among the 3 races, a goat or two would be sacrificed. There will be lots of accompanying vegetarian curries and other dishes. The food is first offered to the local deity. 2 coins are thrown in the air. If it comes out head and tail, rather than heads or tails then the local spirit has finished dining. The food is then available for consumption by the construction workers in a breaking the ground ceremonial feast. My foster father [Victors father] was a contractor, so I know this construction industry appeasing the local spirit practice very well, but much more so for the sumptuous feasting! When Tan & Tan, (Tan Chi Nam of triple Melbourne Cup fame), built the Mid-Valley Shopping Complex, next to Brickfields, they found out that they could not demolish the Indian Temple existing on the site, no matter what they did, with heavy machinery or otherwise. There was an inexplicable spiritual force or power, which no human could overcome. So to this day, that Hindu temple is still stuck, incongruently entrenched, within the huge complex, at its Klang River frontage. There was and is usually not much human activity at night at these local roadside Datuk Kong shrines to the local deities; as most devotees would make their oblations during the day, (when they did their supplications at dawn), or just before dusk. However the insidious Chinese obsession with gambling had, and I believe still has, for this ritual still persists, the strange occultist effect of gamblers resort to seeking divine guidance from Datuk Kongs. The gamblers sought what Sah Dee or the 3-Digit numbers to buy in the then illegal numbers racket that was run and controlled by the local triads in the squatter settlement. These days all forms of
unlicensed gambling are illegal. There is now a legal 3-D TOTO, as well as 4-D, 5-D and even 6D I believe. Aside from just blindly guessing or stabbing in the dark as to which number to choose, from 001 to 999, to buy in the numbers racket, you could rely on a dream, or a premonition or a spirit medium. In the case of a dream, you can then refer to a red book called a moong lick [dream reckoner], and from the different images of different subjects of the dreams, establish what number represents your dream. In the case of a premonition, like seeing a car accident, you identify with the car number, or in the case of a house fire, you identify with the house number. If you believe in the occult, you could pay a spirit medium to be your interlocutor to seek the lucky number. This is done through a sance session in the middle of the night at a particular auspicious Datuk Kong. As a passer-by and as a young boy, wandering about at night in my childhood, one was naturally and inexplicably intrigued by this mysterious nocturnal carryingon. You were lured by the burning candles and incense and joss-money and the incantations. The ritual took on a spooky bewitching glow, with the lambent flames of candles, flickering ominously in the night breeze. If you were an adult, the participants in this roadside Datuk Kong sance may ask you to keep a certain distance, so that you did not get to hear the numbers outcome. It was quite natural of them to be selfish and to want to keep the secret number to themselves. I have been told, by my foster-brothers Ah Siew and Ah Tuck, as I have never been a witness to one, that a similar type of sance, communicating with spirits to obtain fortuitous or auspicious 3D toto numbers, often took place in cemeteries, at the grave site of a dead relative or a dead gambler. Brrrrrr! Just the thought of such a nocturnal graveyard encounter sends a chill through my spine! Not that I am afraid of cemeteries. I am not; at least, not during the day. The Chinese pay an annual visit, (during the day), to their ancestral graves or tombs during Ching Ming (meaning Clear Bright the term for the 1st day of the 5th Solar Term) or Ancestors Remembrance Day or Tomb Sweeping Day. In the lunar calendar, it is the 105th day after the Winter Solstice or it is the 15th day from the Spring Equinox. The Ching Ming festival actually extends 10 days before and after Ching Ming, for it would be silly to think that you can do everything that is sometimes required to be done in terms of filial obligations for Ching Ming in one day. The Ching Ming festival provides the opportunity for celebrants to remember and honour their ancestors; in main by repairing and maintaining the ancestral tombs. There is lawn to be cut, cracks in the tomb edifice to be filled in, names and inscriptions in English and Chinese calligraphic writing to be touched up or repainted, and pot and cover plants and flowering shrubs to be pruned or replanted. After the repairs and maintenance are completed, it is followed by a ritualistic ceremony of obeisance and reverence. Incensed joss-sticks and joss paper gold and silver money are burnt; and even papier mache effigies of household items or even cars and houses are burnt to refurbish the requisite supplies of a spirit life. When paying respects by kowtowing and libations of the finest Ti Kwan Yin tea, seniority reigns, i.e. the eldest in rank goes first and so forth. You kowtow 3 times unless you have been unfilial during the year, in which case you might have to kowtow 9 times. You light and offer 3 joss-sticks in oblation when you kowtow. The picnic basket of the days feast, comprising the deceased parents or grandparents favourite dishes and the ubiquitous roast pork, salt baked chicken, fried vermicelli, hard boiled eggs and sweet dumplings etc. are first offered to the ancestors. The Hokkiens throw a couple of coins to determine whether the ancestors have eaten; a head and a tail would indicate that they have. The Ching Ming festival picnic feast then commenced, at the grave. It is a comforting and philosophical tradition to have, particularly at that part of the day when proceedings come to an end, and you intuitively realise that you have been quietly contemplating the good times you
have had with your parents or grandparents; which you would not normally have done, as your life is or was so busy, day after day. For more substantial nocturnal spirit medium sance sessions; that is for other matters more personal or exigent, rather than 3-D toto numbers, you would have to attend one or any of the various Chinese temples in the neighbourhood or adjacent. While most Chinese temples are dedicated to a particular deity or god, they are usually pantheistic, in that they also provide for other deities or other beliefs, given the eclectic, syncretic mix of Ancestral Worship, Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, which epitomise so-called Chinese religion. In my childhood, the main Chinese temples were to Kwan Yin [Goddess of Mercy], Matzu or Tin Hau [Heavenly Queen], Kau Ong Yah [9 Emperor Gods], Sum Poh Kong [The 3 Treasures Lord (Admiral Zheng He)] or Shih Mm Hoong Kung [Monkey God]. The Chinese temples, (some of which no longer exist), that I had attended with my parents or relatives in my childhood were (a) the one behind the Hwee Hin Association along Jalan Raja Laut [Broadrick Road], (b) the one in the Right Flank, just behind the Shell Station that was built over the site of the dead dog, the subject of my memoir in the Dead Dogs Ghost Spirit, (c) the one at Pahang Road, next to the, (now nonexistent), Socialist Front headquarters, (d) the one at the junction of Ipoh Road and Circular Road, (e) the one at the junction of Ipoh Road and Segambut Road, (f) the one in Brickfields (g) the one along Old Klang Road (h) the one at Petaling Jaya Old Town (i) the one at Ampang Road near the Race Course in the middle of town and (j) the 2 temples located in close proximity to each other in Ampang New Village. You may say that there was a proliferation of Chinese temples. Where you have Chinese settlements, you have Chinese temples. You do not go to Chinese temples only when you wish to engage the services of a tangki or spirit medium. Some temples, including the Buddhist Kwan Yin temples, do not have a tangki as these tangki sance sessions are Taoist and Animist in nature or because there are no tangki available. I do not know how people become a medium, clairvoyant, seer or soothsayer. My mother told me that tangkis are born with this gift. A person just knows that he is a tangki when he can see things. Usually tangkis are people whose lives have been saved by deities. My mother believed that my life was saved by Kwan Yin, yet I have had no premonition that I may be a tangki or was or is someone with a special spiritual insight. Most devotees just attend temples for pray devotions and to make supplications or to get free medical advice from the resident Chinese sinsehs [Chinese traditional doctors], who then dispense out Chinese herbal medicine. On scheduled days however, when the tangki is in session, any devotee may, by donation, seek spiritual advice through the tangki entering a sance and becoming the ad personam of the resident spirit, when in a trance. At a Tuck Kau Wooi [Moral Uplifting Society or Red Swastika Society] temple the sance may not involved a trance or a tangki at all but just a temple elder. You queue up and when your turn comes, you explain what your request or your problem is to the temple elder and his 2 assistants. All is done under public gaze. The temple elder than spontaneously start to shake his upper body, he starts rolling his eyes and appears drunk and is mumbling to himself; all in a gentle amenable sort of way. The resident spirit is the Chuei Sun [The Taoist Drunken Immortal]. He then lowers his divine wooden writing stick into a tray pan containing sand and scribbles out Chinese characters in calligraphy on the sand. One of the assistants then copies the secret writing onto a slip of yellow paper. The writing always comes out in a double couplet 4 lines of poetry, with 4 characters per line. You then take this arcane slip of spiritual advice to an interpreter (another temple elder), for interpretation for a small donation.
In contrast tangki sance and trance sessions are more theatrical and operatic. There is a sense of gradually developing drama and heightened tension. At the beginning the tangki is quiet and smiling and may even jest about. After a short period of concentrated focused meditation, he droops his head and then suddenly burps and retch, when the resident spirit involved, be it the Monkey God or some other deity, enters his body, and he then takes on the persona of that resident spirit. The mannerism, gestures and movements of the tangki under trance, and the way and the type of ancient Chinese language that he regurgitates, would demonstrate the nature and character of that resident spirit. The Monkey God spirit would be prancing and performing monkey-style wushu; and always scratching his head and body and arms. In the usual normal sance and trance session, you have the typical gyration of the body, bopping of the head, mouth stuttering and slurping, rolling of the eyes and high pitch unworldly voice. However, in extreme cases, involving exorcism, the theatrics might become distastefully violent. The tangki may indulge in self-mortifying acts like piercing his body with metal skewers, slashing him-self with a Chinese halberd or a spiked metal ball. There might even be walking on red hot coals. At the end of a typical tangki session, i.e. when your turn comes and your supplication has been attended to by the resident spirit you will get a hu or woo (paper talisman). A woo is a propitious inscription written in ancient Chinese calligraphic characters, either in black ink on green coloured rice paper; or in red ink on yellow coloured rice paper. You will be directed whether to burn this talisman and drink the ashes to cure a sickness or malady or to put it in an amulet and wear it as a protective good luck charm for an exam or trip or even simply to slip it under the pillow case, to get rid of nightmares or to hang it at the front door of the house, to avert a recent spate of house accidents. There is a week and a half of the year, during the 7th to the 15th of the 7th month in the Chinese lunar calendar; when the nights become diligently busy and boisterous like the day. It is the time of the Hungry Ghosts Festival. It is that time of the year, during which hungry ghosts and our ancestral spirits in Hades get to come back to the human world to visit. The most ominous day and night is the 7th day and night of the 7th month, the night of the hungry ghosts. On that particular night, most parents would shut doors and windows, if there are babies at home; for some reason, babies are particularly vulnerable. There will be makeshift impromptu altars of roadside fires everywhere; in the back-alleys and waysides, at road junctions, consisting in some cases, just a hand-pile of sand or even a small used tin can filled with rice, to use as a joss-stick receptacle. Oranges and apples and rice-cakes are just left in paper bags. Sometimes, the burning joss-sticks are just spiked into the oranges and apples. Some, more indulgent or diligent than others, might even leave a couple of cigarettes and a bottle of beer and burn joss money and paper effigies of household goods. I think this 7th night offerings of condolences and food, (for the fact that the hungry ghosts are hungry and suffering), are to appease the hungry ghosts so that they do not trouble the supplicant and his household. As an aside, speaking of hungry ghosts, the women of my mothers generation had this habit of plastering their faces at night, just before bedtime, with rice paste, like a face mask, which had the (unintended) effect of them looking like ghosts. Recently, I found out that the Swiss scientists have discovered a chemical that occurs naturally in rice that has the effect of keeping the skin young and this chemical is now found in some very expensive emollient face crme. Imagine as a child waking up in the middle of the night for a wee and seeing all these ghosts about! The Hokkien community would also organise, and still do, a substantial elaborate living and dead get together by way of a koh-tai concert, during the entire period of the Hungry Ghosts Festival. This koh-tai concert is financed by contributions from all members of the Hokkien
community; with the rich and business people contributing the lions share. Every year a temporary bamboo/wood/thatch opera stage/theatre is set up, with outdoor seating and adjacent buildings containing shrines, food stores/stalls and a joss store selling Chinese religious artefacts and funereal goods. As the squatter settlement was so large there would be a few set up at the same time. There was usually one at the back of the temple behind the Hwee Hin Association at Jalan Raja Laut; another next to the Queen Cinema, across Batu Road from the Tan Chee Khoon Clinic; or alternatively, it would be held at the Right Flank behind the Shell Station. The Hungry Ghosts Festival has a fun fair like atmosphere, with the day/night theatrical shows highly amplified in volume and there is constant burning of candles and incense to attract and entertain the wandering and visiting ghosts. When I was very young the shows were in main, traditional Chinese tai hei opera and dramas. A Chinese tai hei opera is like a Japanese kabuki theatre except that instead of wearing painted head masks as in Japanese kabuki, in a Chinese tai hei opera, the actors have their faces heavily painted, in all sorts of colours and caricatures, to represent the various traditional Chinese opera characters. As years went by the shows got more modern, to include burlesque, cabaret and comedy, and often sassy nightclubish acts; performed by the local nightclub girls or the ladies of the night. Was this to please the younger set, or was it to please the ghosts? Somehow, it is assumed or presumed that ghosts have human like desires or pleasures! The 2 front rows of seats were and are left vacant and reserved for the ghosts, out of due respect for them. There was and is nothing ghoulish about the Hungry Ghosts Festival. It was and is all a festive merry-making and feasting get-together. I can attest that with accumulated experience or attendance, one becomes imbued to the notion that ghosts are merely our alter-beings. Ghosts, at least the beneficent ones, are not to be feared. As always, there were or are the ever-present mah-jong tables with gamblers playing mah-jong all night till early morning. It seems the Chinese troika of food, gambling and superstitions holds true even when interacting with hungry ghosts. At least, these gamblers kept the hungry ghosts good company even when the entertainers and food stalls had or have long gone for the night. On the 14th day/night, the community brings or brought in their contributions to the farewell food or banquet table for the visitors. The 15th day/night is the celebratory farewell day/night. The partying lasts or lasted like forever. Everyone partook in the communal food with the visitors. The final event was when papier mache effigies and objects like houses, cars and other desirable goods and giant joss-sticks and joss paper gold and silver money were burned to benefit or provision the ghosts. The Taoist and Buddhist priests in attendance then proceeded to bless the visitors, (it was more like to propitiate them and to alleviate their sufferings through merit transference by donations and provisions to the priests), and at the end of the festival, lanterns are lit to guide the visitors safely home. For some reason, there was or is an intense childhood fear or dread for water ghosts or water demons during the Hungry Ghosts Festival. Maybe it is a dread that is or was personal to my family, or should I say, my maternal grandmothers family. Or, maybe it is a Hokkien thing; for although my father was Hakka, my mother was Hokkien; we lived in a mainly Hokkien squatter settlement and we mixed mainly with the Hokkien community and we did mainly Hokkien things. Ancestrally, most Hokkiens have a fishermen background. Thus the Hokkien deities are Tin Hau, the Nine Emperor Gods and Sum Poh Kong; all having a connection with water or seafaring.
The genesis of the fear (within the family) may have an origin in what the spirit medium or tangki told my maternal grandmother when she took my cousin Boon Hooi to be cured when he was sick as a child. Boon Hooi was adopted by my 2nd maternal uncle; who himself was adopted. Somehow Boon Hooi was my maternal grandmothers favourite grandson. The tangki told my maternal grandmother that Boon Hooi was to avoid water in his life. So growing up with Boon Hooi, who was a year older than my twin and I, we were constantly reminded not to go swimming, not to go near rivers and ponds and monsoon drains. Not that we ever listened, for of course we did all those not permitted things. We all had our little accidents, a Boon Hooi expression we have used euphemistically to mean big accidents; ever since he rolled Victors car off the edge of the narrow hill road in the Sungai Buloh jungle, during one scouting expedition. Luckily the cars descent was eventually stalled or blocked by a huge tropical jungle tree. Otherwise Boon Hooi might not be still alive today! Typically Chinese or Hokkien, when the tangki was consulted about this little accident he attributed the little accident to a siew yun or bad spirit and the salvation to a kwai yun or guardian spirit. One might have said that it was all destined to be, Just as Victor, the rich boy, was destined to have another car of his written off, this time by me. I am definitely blaming this little accident of mine on a siew yun or bad spirit. My sister Jenny, my ex-wife, (1st wife), and I were driving home very late one night or very early one morning as it was past 1am, from town in Victors car. From memory, we went to a cabaret show of the Platters, (of Great Pretender fame), at the Hilton Hotel. Instead of using the most direct route through Pahang Road to Gombak, I decided to use the longer route through Ipoh Road and past Batu Caves to Gombak. Near Batu Caves, (an Indian area,) it was pitch black, even though I had high beams on, so I decided to turn back. As I made a U-turn, a car driven by a drunk Indian man, with other drunk Indians in the car, (you will read later about the Indians inherent addiction to alcohol), came seemingly out of no where, at bullet like speed, out of the pitch black darkness, and ploughed explosively straight into my car; and sent it skidding, screeching and scuttling, with sparks flying and metal grating like an ice hockey flat disc skidding on ice. It was a miracle no one was killed by the collision; let alone the subsequent encounter with 5 drunken Indians; and me with 2 young women! Those were the days, when one still had the triad spirit and the courage bred by the thought that death was not to be feared; rather it was whether you died nobly in the karmic sense. I was not brave. I was under a filial duty that I was obliged to fulfil to protect Jenny and my ex-wife. Luckily, before the confrontation could get nasty, other cars came by and also local sticky beaks as the noise of the accident must have travelled piercingly far in the stillness and quiet of the night. There were the usual opportunists, the gamblers out to secure the requisite propitious numbers for the 3-D toto. I have, like in a musing reverie of childhood, drifted away from the supposed water spirit nemesis to be feared by Boon Hooi. Years later, Boon Hooi used to work as a cashier in an insurance company. There was an armed hold-up robbery of the armoured van collecting money one cash takings day. Boon Hooi was implicated as an accomplice having provided inside information to the triad members involved in the armed hold-up. Without going into further details, Boon Hooi was incarcerated for a few years. In triad slang or patois, suei or water means money. So the tangki was correct after all; Boon Hooi should never have taken up employment as a cashier; he was going near water. It is difficult to explain how one feels about ghosts and spirits. You fear them, yet you do not fear them. It is more like you dread having any encounters with bad spirits, yet you would not mind an encounter with a good spirit. I suppose you dread any encounter with a bad man but you would not mind an encounter with a good man. At least as a Chinese you can rely on your ancestral
spirits to be beneficent to you or to protect you. Take careful note, if you do not have your ancestral altar at home how are they, your ancestral spirits, around to protect and keep an eye on your family and you? When you watch Chinese movies, they are mainly about kung-fu and triads and about ghosts and spirits. These themes are perpetual draw cards and best sellers; they prick the Chinese psyche or inner spiritual consciousness. So do you watch these Chinese movies because you have a sadistic streak or because somehow somewhere in your deep spiritual consciousness or conscience something is calling out for recognition or identification; i.e. the Chinese deep in you? So, with some slight trepidation, but nevertheless without any latent fear, the cousins or fosterbrothers would quite freely exchange notes about encounters with the other world. Victor, Thean Cheong and Albert swore that they saw a Pontianak [Malay for a female vampire] one very late night driving back from Petaling Jaya on the Federal Highway. They had been or were being cheeky. They saw a car in front with what appeared to be a beautiful maiden with long hair. Victor therefore speeded up to overtake and to tease or perve. As they got alongside and were about to yodel out sweet nothings they saw the Pontianak! My (2nd) wife Josephine and I had a similar experience. We were driving on an isolated slip road, taking a short cut, from Port Dickson to Seremban. It was dusk when we started from Port Dickson. A few miles along the slip road there was an old off-white VW beetle car, with a young lady driver. She was in female Malay costume; i.e. she was wearing a tudung or head scarf. As we were in a hurry, I overtook this off-white VW beetle car. Few miles down the road there was this same car. As I overtook it, without much notice, Josephine said to me Isnt that the same car that you overtook before? I glanced at the rear vision mirror; and it looked from that distance, like the same Malay woman. I sped up real fast, my intuition and reflex telling me that we could possibly be having an encounter of the spooky kind. Neither Josephine nor I said a word; we both just knew instinctively that no words should be spoken. Yet a few miles further up, the same off-white VW beetle car appeared in front of us again. This time I could feel my pulse rising through the roof. My heart was beating so fast and loud I could hear and feel it in my ears! I revved my Mercedes 250E for as much horsepower that it could provide, to overtake the VW. It was sure providence that I saw a sign indicating the turn-off to get to the main trunk highway to Seremban. I turned into the turn-off and when we got to the highway I was still speeding. We were so relieved, we were in fact glad, when a police car waved me down for speeding. I had to (but gladly) pay up the usual bribe so as not to be fined. Ah Tak my foster cousin brother once told me of a story he heard from a night hawker who was out selling cut fruit during the Hungry Ghosts Festival near the Kwantung Cemetery near the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka at Loke Yew Road near Victoria Institution. Apparently a lady customer, upon receiving the cut fruit that she purchased, lifted up her head with one hand and then just dropped the cut fruit she bought down the pipe of her neck! Creepy! When one has to deal with sibling or brotherly spirits however, one naturally feels a sense of brotherly love and longing for their welfare. This was what I experienced when I was involved with the ghost marriages of my deceased younger brothers Aw Ling and Ang Kow. They both died when they were babies. Refer to my memoir on Life and Deaths in the Family. When my twin brother was working in Singapore for the Monetary Authority of Singapore, he went through a bad trot in his life. Apparently Albert had what he thought were some bad dreams or premonitions, that caused him to be depressed. My (adopted) 1st Sister took Albert to consult a tangki or medium spirit. Apparently our deceased baby brothers were now grown up and that they had fallen in love and wished to marry the girls they met on the other side. Yes! This
sounds a bit incredible. However, this shows that it is not important what is in your mind. It is what is in your heart that counts, well, my fathers heart anyway. He gave the go ahead to my 1st Sister to proceed to organise the ghost marriages with the tangki and the deceased girls parents; the latter having been located through some surreptitious methods that I have no inkling of. My father and I, (and I think Jenny, my sister, came too), drove to Singapore. It would normally take a long full days trip those days, if you just drove straight through to Singapore from Kuala Lumpur. However we took 2 days as my father wanted to stop here and there to visit towns that he had visited as a youth or had friends in. The ghost marriage ceremony was like most tangki ceremonies except this time it was more solemn, subdued and quietly celebratory. It was also civilly held in the late afternoon, going to the early hours of the evening, rather than very late at night. Papier Mache effigies representing the brides and grooms and of the goods comprised in their wedding dowries were burnt and the attending family members from all 3 families partook in the somewhat meagre, (because it looked more like an ordinary home cooked meal), wedding feast. Apparently my father paid the entire costs of the weddings, as the other 2 families were poor. The important thing was that my father was contented, relieved and happy, Albert got better and my father also got closer to 1st Sister, who had absconded from home when I was young. 1st Sister abdicated her title as No1 daughter or it was taken away from her, when she ran away from home and was disowned. My 1st Sister and my father and the rest of the family only reconciled after my mothers death. Wedding Dinner Banquets Let us move from ghost weddings to real weddings. When it comes to food in a Chinese sense, the pinnacle is a Chinese wedding dinner banquet. In a day to day or night to night sense, coming from a Batu Road Tiong Nam Squatter Settlement background, eating was best described as gourmand (glutton) rather than gourmet (connoisseur). We were uncouth and had none of the finery of Western table manners, like chewing slowly with your mouth closed and no slurping or making noises. When you are poor and hungry you usually devour than consume; you gobble rather than chew and masticate. When you eat with chopsticks and shuffle portions from the rice bowl straight into your mouth; you cannot help but to slurp and to make munching, crunching and gulping noises. When the neighbourhood at large is your lounge room and the tropical nights are balmy and sweaty, and the people you are out with are all family, you do not feel inclined to be dressed up in sartorial elegance for public show. You felt quite at home in your Chinese sumfoo pyjamas, native sarong or just tropical Hawaiian casuals and thongs or Malay capals [leather thongs], whatever the time of day or night. Wedding dinner banquets were however different. You got to meet strangers. You got to meet members of the other family. You, or should I say my parents would be part of the extended family to the wedding. Our extended family would lose face and honour if we did not keep up the appropriate image. What was this appropriate image to be projected and portrayed hypocritically, falsely or inscrutably for the wedding banquet night, for the benefit of the other extended family? Very simple; you must appear to be good people, salubrious and prosperous and lucky. So, it was not just whether you needed to look neat and tidy, or whether you needed to look pretty. No, that would be too simple. That did not require any ability to act or to role play. For, it was not about you being your normal self; unless you are that one in a million, such that you are a saint or in Buddhist terms, a Bodhisattva. In general everyone was expected to be their expected self, to be on their best behaviour, to demonstrate the best decorum; which meant that
you had to portray your clan in a good light. This meant you have to be a bit of a thespian; a bit of a salesman. You had to be obsequious when the circumstances and situation so required. You had to act and appear humble, and yet you want the person judging you to come to the impression, mistaken or otherwise, that you are actually very rich or very educated, but somewhat pretending not to be. It is all about inscrutable manner and form! Arrogance, pomposity and ostentatiousness have no place in Chinese social etiquette. There are specific individuals who were assigned special roles; sometimes these were professional people. Various persons are assigned to be emcees; to be the drinkers to represent the bride and/or the groom in the yum seng toast, (which was a drinking marathon on its own, if you have a wedding dinner banquet of a 100 tables @ 10 heads per table!), and even speech makers and singers and bands. Certain family members are delegated the roles of liaison officers to attend to the special requests from the other side, usually with the corresponding liaison officers from the other family. Nothing was to be left to chance. It was all about harmony and clockwork, (all according to plan) on this important, special auspicious occasion. If any contingency should arise there is already a person or committee of persons dedicated to resolve any unforseen problem behind the scenes. Publicly, there should be no hitches. The Chinese treat wedding banquet dinners like a business transaction. All because it involves face and honour, and what can be more important than these in a Chinese society? Accordingly, given the complexities of the overall equation, it was not strictly speaking, to be a night belonging solely, by prerogative, to the nuptials. In its wider scope, it was to be a celebration by and of 2 families. It signifies a certain alliance that if properly cultured and nurtured, may inculcate an allegiance that might bring about a strategic business alliance. A strategic alliance will guarantee security in the wider sense of an extended family, a wider social and business networking. I should also mention, as background information, in this regard, that all the weddings I had attended during my childhood were arranged marriages, either through matchmaking between strangers through a professional matchmaker or the nuptials were introduced by friends. This ensured that there was ample opportunity and means for the parents or the clan to check out the credentials of the other family. In my childhood days, whole families attended, and so, weddings were family affairs i.e. the close relatives came with their children. There were of course separate tables for the children. So I had good times at family wedding dinner banquets with my dozens of siblings and cousins. It was true that we were kept some distance away from the adults and the main events or functions. For instance, they would chase us away from the separate area where the adults were playing mahjong. Yes, mahjong gambling took and takes place at wedding dinner banquets as well. Our children tables were excluded rather than exempted from the customary yum seng (bottoms up) ritual. Nor did our children tables have the obligatory bottle of the best French cognac for the yum seng ritual. At a certain point in the night the bride and groom and their entourage of parents and the drinking representatives, would go from table to table to yum seng toast and be toasted in return or double or triple toasted, as it might be, depending on what dignitaries or close relatives are at the respective esteemed table. Yum Seng means Bottoms Up. If the cognac ran out another bottle was quickly requisitioned. If anyone got drunk, it would be the drinking representatives. Very civilised, the Chinese, for, in terms of face and honour, the bride and groom and the immediate senior members of the 2 families should never get drunk. On the odd occasions that a guest got drunk, he would be quietly taken out of the picture; so as to not cause a ruckus or spoil the night for everyone else.
However, the main indulgence for the evening, rather than being the requisite rituals, including the yum seng, the gambling, or even the burlesque and cabaret, was the 10-15 courses of meals. Yes, none of this 3-course a la carte menu that you will find in a Western wedding dinner but 1015 generous full sized courses! Strangely enough, relatives that you know who were normally gluttons and ate like pigs are not into wanton degustation at these wedding dinner banquets. They become rather prim and proper and delicately reserved in their table manners! Its a great thing, this Chinese concept of face and shame! The dishes come, one at a time, and are placed in the middle of the round table. Each table normally sits a complete number of 10. Everyone is overly polite, falling over each other, helping to serve one another, and giving the best pieces to one another. It is rather impolite to polish off a dish, so some pieces are always left on the dish, giving the impression that you were not there to bloat yourself but rather to just taste or savour the dishes like a connoisseur. The ladies in particular had to act rather demure, timid and feminine. The Chinese culture is a lot into symbolism. There are different dishes to represent or symbolise, fertility, harmony, longevity, fidelity, good fortune, abundance and assiduousness. As for me, I was rather selective and calculative, being a tooth person from young. I focused on the ice-cream, abalone, shark fins soup and suckling pig. By the way, the left-overs are often packaged up and ended up as take-away to immediate family members, at the end of the night. Speeches were not a big thing like in Western weddings, as the toasting was done in the yum seng ritual. Any speeches were mainly short thank you speeches by the parents or their representatives. The bride and groom just sat together like sedated mannequin dolls for public view and they essentially played no active part in the nights proceedings. There was also no Western throwing of flowers by the bride. In fact the newly-weds made an exit well before the evening drew to a close. The parents and immediate family were left to thank the guests at the end of the night. There was a bright note to a Chinese wedding dinner banquet cost-wise. Guests did not give presents. In the Chinese tradition, money, hard cash, speaks louder than presents. Guests gave ang-pows, money in red packets; and the total would inevitably result in a profit for the newlyweds, enough in some cases to pay a deposit on a house. Chinese New Year When it comes to feasting or being festive in a Chinese sense; nothing beats the Chinese New Year or Spring Festival, it being the 1st day of Spring. It is the most essential and vital part of Chinese culture being the celebration of new life. The air of festivity and the magnitude of the Chinese New Year celebrations in my childhood cannot be easily described or explained to Westerners. It is complex in more ways than one, having regard to all the intricate Chinese customs and traditions. It is, to sum up, a time of festive celebration, decadent feasting, generous largess, full of ambient grandeur, and very apparent pleasure, enjoyment and merriment. The celebration begins with the family reunion dinner on Leen Sah Ah Mun [New Years Eve] and concludes on Chap Goh Mei [15th night of the New Year]. Traditionally, there is an exodus back to ones home village, and you do not return to work until the 16th day. This exodus still takes place in modern day China, except they may not have the advantage of having 15 days off. The preparations were well underway at least a month or two before the New Year. Preparations for the New Year involved firstly, shopping. Chinese New Year shopping was and is a bit like Christmas shopping in Western societies. The Chinese shopped mainly for food and New Year delicacies, both for home consumption, for the reunion feast, also as gifts to relatives and friends, and provisions for the Buddhist and Chinese temples. Dried or canned food provisions like hoe
see [oysters], futt choy [black maiden hair type fungus], tungku [shitake mushroom], kum chum [water lotus shoots], tauki and fuchok [dried tofu], bak kuah [chilli-honey pork jerkies], lup nghap [waxed duck]. lotus seeds, hoong choe [Chinese dates], fah sung [menglembu peanuts], pow ee [abalone], cho koo [straw mushroom], kua chee [red water melon seeds], assorted Chinese candies and sweet cakes, including the must buy leen koe [Chinese New Year cake - a sweet caramelised glutinous rice cake], all for good luck, are requisitioned first. Closer to New Years Eve, you would buy the fresh provisions, including fresh fruit - (boxes and boxes of!) mandarins, lychees and longans, (all the way from China), oranges, ornamental pineapple, pomelo [giant grapefruit], star fruit, lime leaves and meat pork, duck, chicken, roast pork, (note: no beef or lamb), fish, prawns, crabs and vegetables a wide assortment of greens and others. The shopping list is or was virtually endless. The Chinese are a superstitious lot. So the cuisine for the reunion dinner would comprise of dishes or ingredients that have names that phonetically sound like longevity, fortune, abundance or wealth or have colours that signify the same or have a Buddhist vegetarian spiritual feel to it. Hoe see sounds like good outcome; futt choy sounds like good luck; ong lai [pineapple] sounds like prosperity comes; kum [mandarins] means gold; and eating fish every reunion means leen leen yow yue, which sounds like every year you will good tidings. New clothing was and is purchased for the family members as well, as everyone was and is expected to wear new clothing on the 1st day, (the most auspicious day), of the New Year. The auspicious colours of red and yellow are expected to be worn, particularly by the ladies and the children, for good luck, unless there had been a recent bereavement. Some might even buy Chinese traditional costumes to wear on the 1st day of the New Year. The girls looked good in their cheongsums but the boys would end up looking like kungfu fighters. My mother would usually buy the new clothes and shoes for the children herself. Those days the new clothes had to be tailor-made; for those were the days before buying clothes off the rack. I am not sure how she did it because we never went along to shop with her to Bata, the shoe shop or the drapers, fabric shops or tailors. In the event, we would all end up looking the same, the boys and girls separately of course. We were like the children in the The Sound of Music. Either she must have been frugal or overestimated our respective sizes, for the clothes and shoes were always over-sized! Years later, I found out that this was because we would grow into our clothes and shoes. Luckily most of us children were not that fashion conscious (except for my sisters of course!). I am still not fashion conscious at all. My wife buys my clothes. Like my father, I will never throw away my old clothes. I just wear them until they are torn and tattered, or until they somehow (suspiciously) disappear. Western style shopping would be done at the Globe Silk Store at the southern end of Batu Road towards the Padang and Robinsons on Mountbatten Road, both in the town centre. Chinese style shopping would be done in the local Batu Road/Chow Kit precinct, at shops like Mun Loong. Every New Year my mother would add to her collection of jade stones for good luck and acquire more silk dress cloth rolls from the fabric shops for her silk collection. Secondly, you had preparations by way of spring cleaning, repairs and maintenance and cleaning of the house. During the New Year, certain things are taboo, at least for the 1 st day, (some might extend it to the first 3 days), like sweeping the floor or washing ones hair. Some would have the house decorated with lanterns and pasted with propitious red paper scrolls with gold Chinese inscriptions or characters signifying prosperity and wealth. This is for good fung shui. This was particularly the practice with most houses in the squatter settlement. My parents were not particularly keen on this practice, any such pastings were done by Aunty, the cook and servant, to her part of the house. One reason might be because my mother considered her home for this purpose to be her parents house which was about 15 minutes walk away, up Batu Road. She ruled the roost, and being Hokkien, she had little time for my fathers Hakka ancestry. My
mother did not like my Hakka paternal grandmother. The Hakka ancestral altar in our house was therefore minimalist in content and configuration. Her ancestral altar was at her parents house. Professional Chinese calligraphers, those with beautiful brush writing skills would have set up stalls for this brisk business of selling propitious red paper scrolls, (this time of the year), at the local market, temples or the shops selling joss-stick & other paraphernalia. Thirdly, you had to attend to the paying of debts; particularly spiritual vows that you had made during the year to various deities. Personally, I presume that paying debts must mean debts to friends and associates; for if anything my parents went into debt or further debt with strangers. I know this because I would accompany my parents to the Indian chettiar, who collected rent for us, from the village that my parents owned at 3 mile Ipoh Road, to collect an advance (at exorbitant interest). In a benevolent sense and as a show of largess, my parents would pay off their debt to their workers, the employees at my fathers panel-beating and welding workshop and also Aunty the cook and servant, on New Years Eve. Some years they might get up to a 3-month bonus or fah hoong [red flower], in an ang pow [red packet] of money. The employees whose home villages are far from town and those not required to finish off urgent jobs would get to leave early. Aunty, an old spinster, usually stayed on. She had a sister in another town; but all her other relatives were back in Hong Kong or China. Similarly, as a customary business practice, my mother would also send out lai see [gifts] to regular clientele and suppliers and contractors. Some entail a personal delivery and a face to face expression of thanks and kung hei fatt choi [Wishing You A Happy and Prosperous New Year] and others through red ornate Chinese New Year cards expressing gratitude and well wishes for the new year. As to spiritual vows, these were renewed by a trip to the temple. My mother went to the Kwan Yin temple for oblations. She was sort of a Buddhist/Catholic. My father in contrast was a strange mix of all the Chinese faiths in conjunction with Christianity, sort of like a Chinese Bahai equivalent. This trip to the temple would also involve for some, a resort to fortune telling. The Chinese has a zodiac calendar based on the 12 animals that paid homage to Buddha. Depending on your particular zodiac year, (and there are 4 elements wood, fire, earth and metal, for example, I was born in the Year of the Metal Tiger), and the time of birth, the putt chee, i.e. lunar day, month and year; the Chinese astrologer can make a prediction as to how you would fare in the new year. It is very important that before the New Years Eve family reunion dinner that you make the right invocations to the Kitchen God. This was so that he does not dob on you. In fact you sort of bribed him, (so to speak), by offering him candies, honey sweet cakes to sweeten him up. You also complete all the ceremonial propitiations to the other deities and gods that you have shrines or altars for in the house. The most important is the reverential oath of filial piety, lighting josssticks and traditional kowtowing, to ancestors at the Ancestral Altar. Hours before the reunion dinner, you could smell the rich fragrant aroma of garlic and pork lard and Chinese 5-spices wafting through the air from Auntys kitchen into the workshop area. You would start drooling and salivating from the thought of the scrumptious meal to come. After all, we are talking of a lavish feast! We are talking of decadent gluttony. Being just family, there would be no need for saving grace. Once the family is all gathered at the table, except for the childrens polite customary grace of inviting their elders to eat first, it was all hands on or chopsticks in to pick up choice portions from the dishes laid out in the centre of the huge round table. There was the usual banter and jest and giggle in good spirits and good terms about the youngest having to do an almost never ending speed-recital of invitation to his elders Father
please eat, Mother please eat, 1st brother please eat, 2nd brother please eat and so forth. It went without saying that my parents and Aunty would have ensured that the younger children got their treat regardless of the mad scrambling for food. From the start of the reunion dinner and for the entire New Year period of 15 days, bad language and unpleasant topics are discouraged if not forbidden. This was to ensure good luck or good karma. I will not go into details of the 8-10 dishes of culinary delights, it will suffice to say that you ate and ate until you could eat no more; till you were bloated to almost gastronomic agony; to the point where you would say in despair, so much more to eat and yet you had no room to tuck them in. All these cooked chicken, pork, duck, fish, prawns, (no lobsters those days), crabs, abalone, shitake mushroom and vegetarian delights and more! It is rather strange but a rather true perspective; you start off in life as a child craving for all the supposedly choicer or choicier food like seafood but later in life as an adult you somehow settle for the more mundane peasant Hakka dishes like khaw yoke [belly pork with yam], sheen chue sau [sweet-vinegared pork trotters] and loh hon chai [Buddhist vegetarian dish with futt choy, tofu and straw mushroom]. There was a good reason for cooking aplenty. No cooking is done over the first 3 days in the New Year, except to cook steamed rice or to warm up leftover food. On the 1st day of the New Year you would just have leftover vegetarian food or canned salted greens or congees with pickled vegetables. Eating vegetarian on the 1st day of the New Year is good karma from the Buddhist point of view; and who wants anything but good karma? Most of the cooked meat would last till the 2nd or 3rd day. After that all leftovers are put into a ghah po sheen, a sort of hunters clay pot; a hot and sour crock-pot dish, and further, ham trotters, salted fish and vegetables, sour picked mustard greens, Hakka dried tofu, salted plums, rice wine & vinegar are then added. This hot and sour crock-pot would be the everyday meal for until Aunty decided to start cooking when fresh provisions are or were available again. In my early childhood, most Chinese businesses would close for 15 days, but the Chinese groceries and food stores might open on or about the 7th day. After the reunion dinner, family members would just sit around to get over the repast, by just chatting and chatting, listening to Rediffusion, the wired radio broadcasting service, and even attempting to sing Sun Koh [traditional Hakka Mountain Songs]; for those were the days before television and karaoke. At about midnight, to usher in the New Year the children would be out firing illegal traditional red Chinese firecrackers and other types of fireworks. Firecrackers were officially banned but as is typical in Asia, the authorities knew or still know when to turn a blind eye, when the ban cannot be enforceable in kind or in spirit against the Chinese public at large. I must say, the same also applied or still apply to illegal prostitution and gambling. They were and still are just sources of revenue for corrupt cops, to turn a blind eye to the transgression. It was also time to wish everyone you met kung hei fatt choy. The children would then go to midnight shows at the local cinemas; which would be screening the latest Western and Chinese movies. I shall write about night movies later; as that was to be a weekly night time pursuit for my siblings, cousins, foster-brothers and I, later in life. The adults would then commence their gambling - poker and other card games or mahjong sessions. I never acquired a fancy for mahjong, but I did enjoy card gambling sah tiew [3 cards]. The banker plays against the rest. You take the last digit when you total up the 3 cards as the score that you then compared with the other players scores, including the banker. Also, I played chup sah tiew [13 cards]. 4 players play against each other - sort of like gin rummy. You dish out 3 hands. The 1st hand comprised of 3 cards and the other 2 hands comprised of 5 cards. You then match the hands with each other, based on pairs, threes, fours, straight, flush or full
house. Ideally, everyone tried to stay awake till dawn, out of Taoist belief, to ensure ones parents longevity. Neither of my parents gambled for some reason. My mother rolled and smoked red tobacco and cracked red water melon seeds and my father smoked on his self-made guava wood long-stemmed Chinese pipe; to stay awake. Needless to say, the gamblers would still be eating away, this time snacking on fah sung, bak kuah and leen koe and drinking tea or beer. Close to dawn you would still hear firecrackers and the click-clacking of mahjong tiles. In time, when you think of long nights, you would inevitably think of Chinese New Years Eve. Children, even if they should go to sleep early that Chinese New Years Eve night would wake up at the crack of dawn in earnest. Why? This is or was so that they could hurriedly pay filial obeisance and reverence to their parents and to wish them kung hei fatt choy; and the parents then reciprocated by giving the children ang pows of money. Chinese are taught early to appreciate cash or money rather than presents of toys or books. Essential mercantile training you might say. Maybe we can say the same thing about gambling; it might instil in the children the art of taking financial risk? Ang pows are given to the young and unmarried for good luck. There is a Chinese saying to get you must first give and another saying that is similar in life you must give and take; and yet another saying there is coming and going. There must be something much deep or philosophically profound in these sayings. I asked my father once and he said simply Get used to giving because eventually you have to give everything away; you take nothing with you when you die. Obviously, not a question I would have asked during Chinese New Year! I must say my old man was very wise in his own way, for someone who was illiterate, anyway. Ang pows are given in auspicious denominations; they have to either denote pairs or 8 or a 0 at the end, and definitely no 4, so no two $2 notes. Apparently 38 is an exception to the 8 rule, for 38 sounds phonetically like the Chinese expression sum patt for a whore. Thus you can have two $1, $1.10, $2.20, one$1, one $2 and a $5 [total $8], two $5 [total 10], one $10, and other combinations that will total up to $18, $20, $28, $88, $880, $888 and $1,000. As children we would spend most of the next few days at my mothers ancestral home at Soon Company nearby, only occasionally returning home, not only because over there we were able to collect more ang pows of money from uncles and aunties, but also we got to mix and play with our cousins and foster brothers from the other big family the Yuen Company Family. We would gamble, go walkabout in the neighbourhood playing fire crackers and going to movie shows, all the time indulging in festival food in between gambling sessions and extra-curricular activities. From the 4th day onwards till the 15th day, there would also be frequent Lion Dance activity at various houses of rich people, business houses that are starting to open and at local temples. Just chasing the lion around the neighbourhood was an all day activity and often continued right through the night, in relation to night businesses or establishments. The lion in a Chinese Lion Dance looks more like a gigantic stylized Pekinese pug dog than a lion. Its head is made out of rattan, papier mache and silk cloth and the tail is like a flowing stream of silk cloth. Both head and tail can come in a variety of colours and designs. In the Lion Dance itself, there are 2 kungfu trained performers, the one in the front manipulating the head and the other at the rear controlling the tail. They did so in synchronised movements in tandem, and thus role play the lion, their feet being the 4 legs of the lion. The Lion Dance is a traditional choreographed Chinese kungfu dance routine. It is physical very taxing, as the lions head is quite heavy. It also requires martial arts techniques, to reflect the distinctive Chinese kungfu characteristics of the dance. It was sort of like the lion doing kungfu.
Further, the front man needed adept skills to operate or move or flutter the ears, eye-lids and mouth of the lion so as to convey the different expressions of shock, amazement, query or joy. Then you have the constant vigorous war-thumping of the accompanying huge kungfu drums and the clanging of the brass gong to add to the heightened excitement and thrill. You have a posse of kungfu warriors trailing behind. Every so often, another pair of performers slips in to take over from the pair already tired from their exertions. Together with the din of the fire crackers the atmosphere was highly charged. It never failed to attract attention and crowds. Like the Pied Piper, a Lion Dance attracted children in particular, and they were totally mesmerised by the spectacle; and some might be distraught at the same time, should the lion approach them. Everywhere that the lion had been, there is a telltale trail of red fire cracker debris strewn like a path. Once in a while 2 separate lions would meet and then there would be an impromptu orchestrated battle. Particularly, when they fought to see who would be the first to reach the dangled carrot and cabbage green parcel, placed up high out at the shop or house front as a donation, to be captured by the lion. For the community as a whole, the lion, the noise of the crackers meant that evil spirits were being cast away. In my early childhood there was nothing really significant about the 7 th day of the New Year, other than the fact that it was the common mans birthday. By custom, those who did not know their birth date would regard this day as their birthday, and thus became a year older. This would apply to orphans, abandoned children, adopted children etc. This method was commonly called ho yee sung yet [easy birthday reckoner] [underlining for emphasis]. The expression yee sung phonetically sounds like raw fish. When I was in my early teens, there started a practice or custom of having raw fish for lunch on the 7th day or dinner on the 7th night. It was not just simply having raw fish but it had to be done by way of a social ritual which involved the entire group of diners or partakers mutually tossing yee sung sashimi raw fish slices in a huge salad bowl with condiments like chilli, sesame oil, rice vinegar, peanut grits, jelly fish strips, diced carrots & cucumber. Loh Sung Ee - the ritual of tossing raw fish in salad dressing, phonetically sounded like delving or embroiled in business. What the mercantile Chinese wish for is that their life would be full of business or business opportunities. During this ritual there are shouts of Loh Hei! Loh Hei! [Lets deal! Lets deal!], followed by Huat! Huat! [Prosperity! Prosperity!]. This is followed by the consumption of the yee sung sashimi, (together with other fine dishes of course, as it is also meant to be another feast) and constant toasts of yum seng of beer and spirits. At lunch on the New Years 7th day Or at dinner on New Years 7th night Something strange is happening, let us say For youll come across a most amazing sight Grown men tossing rawfish slices in bowl about Adding oil, carrots, chilli and who knows what! Loh Hei! Loh Hei! Some would loudly shout Others then respond in turn - Huat! Huat! Huat! All gathered together in New Year merry cheer Wishing for great fortune, prosperity and wealth Every Chinese business mans dream, its clear Followed by sake & beer, toasting to a good health Religiously the 8th night of the Chinese New Year is very important for my family, for we were and are effectively a Hokkien family despite my father being a Hakka. So what other Chinese
did or will do on the New Years Eve night, in terms of praying to Thi Kong [Heavenly Father], the Hokkiens by tradition will do it on the 8th night. We posted or stood pairs of kum chia kee [yellow or gold sugar cane (the whole plant)], appropriately tied with red cloth or garlands, alongside the front door. We would then set up an outdoor altar with auspicious food, like chicken, roast pork, fruit like mandarins, oranges, pomelo, pineapples, starfruit and bananas, and sweets and cakes, in particular angku kuih [red tortoise cake], huat kuih [white and pink fluffy rice cupcakes, like the steamed white BBQ pork buns at Chinese dim sum restaurants, but without any filling], leen koe and Chinese candies and peanuts and dates. We then burned joss-sticks and joss paper and other papier mache articles and effigies; and illegally set off firecrackers. As the food markets have by now opened for business since at least the 7 th day, Aunty would have had the opportunity to get fresh provisions and thus cooked us another scrumptious meal. On completion of the offerings to Thi Kong, another festive feast then ensued; not as grand as the New Years Eve dinner, but just as enjoyable. I am not quite sure as to the exact historical background or details to the Hokkien shifting of their 1st day of the New Year to the 9th day. Apparently, the Hokkiens and their king were under siege in one particular year, long, long time ago. Some claimed the invaders to be Cantonese and others say that they might be the Mongols. The invaders were not driven away until the 9th day; when the Hokkien king came out of hiding in the sugar cane fields. In ancient times, the king led the prayer invocations to Thi Kong. Personally, I suspect the invaders were the Cantonese king and his army; for to this day we have our related cousins, the Chiuchow, who speak almost the same dialect as the Hokkiens, being part of Kwantung Province rather than Fujian Province. I further suspect that most Hakkas were or could on the side of the Cantonese, for 80% the Hakka mountain homelands are now also part of Kwantung Province, the remaining 20% in Fujian Province. This divide persisted in Colonial Malaya. When civil war broke out between the Hai San and the Ghee Hin Triads in the Larut Wars in Perak State in the late1800s, there were Hakkas and Cantonese on one side [Ghee Hin] and Hakkas and Hokkiens [Hai San] on the other. Both sides supported rival Malay chieftains as claimants to the Perak throne. As a result of the Pangkor Treaty negotiated by the British, who recognised Raja Abdullah instead of Raja Ismail as the Ruler of Perak, the civil war also came to an end; and the Hakkas/Hokkiens were given Larut, renamed Taiping [Great Peace] and the Hakkas/Cantonese given Kamunting. Until very recently, my ancestral Hakka mountain village in China, near Dapu (the nearest city), could only be reached from Fujian. Does that make me a Hai San member by proxy? The next night of festivity during the New Year Festive Season is Chap Goh Mei, the 15th night. This is again, in main, a Hokkien festival, not only to celebrate the end of the Chinese New Year festive season but also it is Valentines Night for the young unmarried women. Some Hokkiens make a small outdoor altar to ask for blessings from the Moon Goddess or since it is the 15th of the lunar month, light joss sticks to Kwan Yin at the temple, and ask for her blessings and prosperity for the family. Most just kept the house brightly lit for the night and would hang coloured lanterns outside the house; to give it a fiesta ambience. It is a full moon night and therefore ideal for moonlight serenades and a night that the young ladies, (albeit chaperoned by a close male relative), are allowed to moonlight to check out eligible suitors. It is also a night for the farewell dinner to loved ones going back to work in urban areas, and for others to the pure indulgences of carefree gambling and taking life easy during the Chinese New Year festive season. There would be more firing of fire crackers to chase away evil spirits; or to spend all unused fire crackers, for the cops would not be so lenient or lax in their attitude after the festive season. Luckily, there will always be another Chinese New Year.
Mid-Autumn Festival The Mid-Autumn Festival or Lantern Festival or Mooncake Festival as it is otherwise known is another ancient Chinese Festival in the sense of a family reunion, like Chinese New Year and Ancestors Remembrance Day [or Ancestral Tomb Sweeping Day]. It is the Autumn Equinox and represents the day of the end of the autumn harvest. It is the 15th day of the 8th Lunar Month; and therefore it is a full moon night. The Chinese believe that the moon has something to do with crops; so this day or night started off in antiquity to pray to the Moon Goddess to give thanks for the annual harvest. There are also other Chinese fairy tales or folklore associated with this festival, like the love affair between a goddess and a shepherd, another about the elixir of youth and a rabbit still scouting for that bottle of elixir that fell down to Earth, but as these were not aspects that was integral to my sense of its celebration in my childhood, I will not discuss these. I remember in main that it was another occasion for a family reunion dinner, i.e. another feast and another festive occasion. As with Chinese New Year, there were the usual preparations ahead of time for the festival by my mother and Aunty. Aunty attended to the fresh provisions (meat, vegetables and fruit) from the market for the reunion dinner and for making tong yuen, the traditional dessert for this festival; and also spiritual requirements from the joss shop i.e. joss sticks, joss paper and other paraphernalia. My mother attended to the more business aspect of procuring yuet paeng or moon cakes, the main delicacy of this festival, for home consumption, and more importantly, for business gifts to good clientele and associated businesses and personal gifts to relatives and friends; and also the lanterns for her children. The tong yuen is a sugary caramelised soup with round glutinous pink and white rice balls in them; thus tong for soup and yuen for round. The expression yuen also sounds phonetically like complete and sound and so in the Buddhist sense implies completeness in lifes cycle, (as in the cycle of the seasons of life), or ones life. Eating tong yuen would imply you will have a sweet complete life. As I have said on many occasions and shall reiterate, the Chinese are a very superstitious people! Yuet [Moon] Paeng [Biscuit] or moon cakes started of as soft shortbread-like biscuits. As adults preferred something more filling, the adult version developed into substantive cakes with fillings of sweet paste of red beans, water melon, lotus seeds, sesame and even diced dried fruit, like a Western sweet-minced tart. The children version remained cookie-size without fillings called appropriately kung chai paeng or doll biscuits. The kung chai paeng would come in shapes of the 12 animals of the Chinese Buddhist Zodiac. One in particular stood out from the rest, for its cuteness, little piggy, for it came in a chee loong, a little miniscule cylindrical rattan cage. I think these days, with rattan being so scarce, the cage is made of plastic. In China, live pigs are transported in individual chee loong made of bamboo or rattan. This would seem to be the obvious reason, until someone with an enquiring mind or is presumably perspicacious like your humble self, remain querulous as to why the other Zodiac animals should not be similarly caged. Many years later, my 7th Maternal Aunty, or was it my 8th Maternal Aunty, told me that in ancient times when couples were caught for adultery, the offenders would be imprisoned in a chee loong and tossed out into the sea or lake or river! Then it clicked in my mind, this story about the illicit love affair between the goddess and the shepherd! So much for subtle messages often implanted in ones infant mind, the
fullness of the message not being revealed until when becomes an adult. Wow! All these secret esoteric teachings of morality! Now, it is time for me to reveal the conspiratorial aspect of the adult yuet paeng. The Chinese were at one stage ruled by the Mongols, (of Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan fame or notoriety), of the Yuan Dynasty. The Mongol rulers were overthrown in a rebellion that began one MidAutumn Festival long ago. The rebels sent out secret messages, calling for the uprising to take place on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month (Mid-Autumn Festival), by inserting them in the yuet paeng, under the pretext of the yuet paeng being customary gifts. The peasant rebel leader who became emperor appropriately called his new dynasty the Ming dynasty. Ming means bright. Ming, I presume, was also meant to refer to the Full moon and the Mid-Autumn Festival. Since that time the adult yuet paeng starting containing a complete solid egg yolk. In later years this became two egg yolks, either out of indulgence or out of memory to the 2 illicit moon lovers. The yuet paeng has since assumed ascendancy to the extent that the Mid-Autumn Festival is now known as the Mooncake Festival to the common people. For us children however, it is not the Mid-Autumn Festival or the Mooncake Festival, but the Lantern Festival. The lanterns would come in the plain standard cylindrical or octagonal tube form or you have a choice of any of the different 12 animals of the Chinese Buddhist Zodiac. The framework would be made of bamboo or wire, the covering either of ornately painted rice translucent paper or transparent red-coloured or yellow-coloured, (the colour of the moon), transparent paper. There is candle holding loop at the base to slot in the little red candle. My preferred choice was the tiger, being a Year of the Tiger boy. After worshipping to the Moon Goddess and the ensuing feast, the children would be out parading like little tin soldiers, brandishing their brightly lit lanterns for all in the neighbourhood to see. Unfortunately the paper lanterns were susceptible to fire mishaps; and unless offered a replacement lantern, some children would end up disappointed, despondent and in tears. I need to mention the water caltrop (a type of water chestnut resembling black buffalo horns), which is also synonymous with the Lantern Festival, for we used to have pretend buffalo fights, before cracking and eating these strangely shaped chestnuts. The prayer ritual and the offerings to the Moon Goddess were not as grand in magnitude when compared with the Pai Thi Kong ceremony during the 8th night of the Hokkien Chinese New Year. In any case after the Americans landed on the moon, my father abandoned the worship of the Moon Goddess altogether. Thaipusam Thaipusam is an Indian Hindu religious festival. The Batu Road/Tiong Nam/Chow Kit precinct that I grew up in is not an Indian suburb. The 2 main nationalities are Chinese on the eastern side of Batu Road and Malays in Kampung Baru on the western side of Batu Road. However this Thaipusam Festival holds a special place in my childhood memories because of the annual night pageant like procession that proceeded, (and still proceeds), through Batu Road, from the Sri Maha Mariamman Temple near Petaling Street, (Chinatown), in the centre of town to the Batu Caves Temple, 15km and 8hours, (by slow procession), away. As the Thaipusam procession traversed through Batu Road, through my neighbourhood, the local community, of all nationalities, would be out en masse to see this uniquely Indian procession. All children love a procession or parade, particularly a night procession full of light, colour, music, gaiety and grandeur.
As I understood from my Tamil classmates at school, I think Thaipusam means Festival in the month of Thai, when the star poosam aligns with the full moon, i.e. the star is at its highest point. On that point, I have a feeling that this might be a Tamil Indian Hindu festival. The festival is dedicated to a Hindu God called Lord Murugan. If you ever get to visit the Batu Caves Temple, which is a Hindu temple set inside limestone caves, perched high up in high limestone gorges, there will be two outstanding physical structural features. The first is an imposing gilded statue of Lord Murugan about 3-4 storeys high! The second is the stairway with 272 steps that you have to climb to gain access to the temple proper inside the limestone caves! I remember from a trip to Batu Caves in my childhood that I saw a 5legged cow there! Cows are sacred animals to the Hindus. In a couple of trips to Batu Caves as an adult during Thaipusam there was even a Tamil Tigers tent, where they showed atrocities done to Tamils in Sri Lanka and also sought donations to their cause. During Thaipusam, Batu Caves is full of temporary tents and stalls, serving respectively various sorts of functions and purposes. The place would be extremely crowded and the atmosphere is stifling and hot. Unless you were Tamil and a Hindu, you felt it was intrusive and tiring to investigate every single tent. I would just wander around the alleyways between the tents and would just poke my eyes into what were transpiring inside each tent, just to gauge or get an overview. However, and typically, I always made the obligatory trip to the food tent for free vegetarian curry meal served on banana leaf. I am told that the festival is about the cleansing or abrogation of sins by Lord Murugan. Some devotees apparently have had their supplications answered and they now take the opportunity during the Thaipusam Festival to fulfil the vows that they have made to Lord Murugan. I shall describe such devotees as devout devotees. Other devotees just take the occasion to be blessed. As a child, well before the scheduled time for the procession, I would normally stake out a position at the post-box outside the Cycle & Carriage shopfront [refer to my memoir in the The Hainanese Chicken Rice Hawker], as I could climb up the post-box for a vantage view. As an older child in my early teens I would look out through the upstairs window of my maternal grandfathers 2-storey shop-house fronting Batu Road. As the Thaipusam procession drew near you can hear the sounds of cacophonous Hindi Indian drums and trumpets. Then you would sight the police escort, and behind them the main body of the procession. The procession entourage was led by bare-chested Indians in their white wraparound sarong like attire, most walking bare-footed or just wearing capals, i.e. flat Indian leather thongs. Most of them had their foreheads painted white with limestone wash and they had little Bindi dots of red or black or vermillion in the centre of the forehead. Next came, the devout devotees. The males were bare-chested and attired like the men preceding them. There were some women and most of them were in brightly coloured saris. Some women who were in simple white saris were carrying a pot, jug or pitcher, (containing milk, I think), above their heads. Some of the male devout devotees have shaven heads, some have metal skewers spiked through their cheeks or tongues. Some were self-flagellating themselves with chains. Quite a few were carrying kavadis, a chair-like wooden altar or shrine, decorated with peacock flowers and images of the Hindu gods. The kavadis appeared to be spiked into to their shoulders and upper chest. Some were dancing away like in deep trance. The strange thing was that none of those spiked or flagellated appeared to be bleeding! I was told that these devout devotees suffered no injury because they were protected by Lord Murugan and because they had prepared themselves beforehand through fasting and prayer meditation for weeks or months. Probably, I suspect, also a no meat diet and also no sex?
After the devout devotees came other devotees, some of who were smashing old coconuts everywhere, like some sort of cleansing ritual. They were followed by the temple attendants and the centre piece of attraction - the brightly lit bullock driven silver carriage/chariot of Lord Murugan. The two bullocks were huge with huge horns. The carriage is like a mobile Hindu temple, with all the ornate sculptures, figurines or statuettes that you would normally see or find on the facade of a Hindu temple. It was or is the size of a mini-bus. You could see and smell fragrant incense burning in the inner alcove or sanctum, where the Gods idol is seated, and you could hear somebody or more chanting inside. Then, behind, followed, the dignitaries, some walking and some in a motorcade. Another Thaipusam procession had passed, till the next year. Many, many years later as an adult, I was having dinner with my wife Josephine at an Indian fish-head curry restaurant next the Sentul Police Station at Ipoh Road, when the Thaipusam procession came past. The procession stopped at the nearby padang [field] for an interval to give the devotees a rest. I never ever knew until then that there was a half-way stop for the Thaipusam procession. We went to the padang and to our surprise we saw a few Chinese devout devotees. I do not think these Chinese devout devotees were Hindus as such; but they probably must have adopted Lord Murugan as a deity; just as the local Chinese have adopted local Malay land spirits as Datuk Kongs. The Tamil Hindi Brahmin priest was doing the rounds blessing devotees, by dabbing their foreheads with incense ash from Lord Murugans altar inside the Silver Chariot. Josephine asked me whether it was alright to receive blessing from a Hindu God. I said, Why not? all spiritual blessings are good; and so we both got blessed as well. Movies The days of ones life are or were inevitably always reserved or scheduled for work or other unavoidable pursuits. Nights are or were fundamentally different in this regard. The nights allow you to indulge in escapism. When it comes to escapism, whether escaping from the discomfort or miseries of your lot in life or from the apathetic, boorish people and incongruent things around you, or just simply to escape to another world or sphere, (realms that you can only imagine in your wildest dreams), nothing can beat or surpass the reach and scope of the celluloid fantasies provided by the movie theatre or cinema. This has and had been the case and was more probably so in my childhood days, because cinema was then the only form of surreal electronic entertainment. These days you have an entire spectrum of escape mediums, including Internet, mobile phones, playstations and virtual reality computer games. I have always enjoyed movies, in this sense. When I got to about 11 or 12 years of age, hardly a week went by without me attending a movie, at least on a Saturday night, and usually it would be the Saturday Midnight Show, and this habit persisted until I left for Australia in 1968. Within my childhood hunting ground, defined as within walking or cycling distance, there are or were several cinemas. The one furthest north, at the junction of Circular Road, (now Jalan Tun Razak), and Maxwell Road, (now part of Jalan Mahameru), and Ipoh Road, was the Golden City Cinema, which belonged to my 2nd Maternal Auntys husband, (a wealthy landowner and timber merchant). My 2nd Maternal Aunty familys house was just directly opposite my Maternal Grandfathers house in Batu Road. So it was very convenient, to just drop by to get free tickets, (through my Maternal Grandmother), whenever we wanted to see a movie there. The Dynasty Hotel stands where the Golden City was once located. The Golden City mainly screened Chinese movies. It was appropriate that my 2nd Maternal Aunty should end up having a connection with a movie theatre, as she was the most beautiful of all my maternal aunties, and from what I have been told,
as beautiful as a movie star, when she was young. Unlike my temperamental mother, my 2 nd Maternal Aunty was a very demure, quiet and shy woman and very civil and punctilious in decorum. She was also the most spiritual and religious of all the sisters; fastidiously being vegetarian on the 1st and 15th days of the lunar month and never failing in her daily prayers and supplications to the Buddhist Bodhisattva Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. She never failed to attend the Kwan Yin Temple opposite the road from the Golden City for Kwan Yins Birthday on the 19th day of the 2nd lunar month, Kwan Yins Enlightenment Day on the 19th day of the 6th lunar month and Kwan Yins Ascension Day on the 19th day of the 9th lunar month. Of all my maternal aunties, my 2nd Maternal Aunty had the most substantial, imposing and ornate redwood traditional family altar in the house. It covered an entire wall and almost reached to the ceiling. She had pure jade or milk-white china idols of the Goddess of Mercy and joss bowls in expensive gilded trigram-motif china porcelain. I mention all these because the traditional Chinese classical and kungfu movies, like cowboy westerns, do not vary very much from one film to the next, in terms of the basic scheme or plot or the moral Taoist, Confucian and Buddhist principles that they instil or uphold. There is always a heroine figure that epitomises all the desired Chinese feminine virtues of beauty, humility, patience, fortitude and religious piety. My 2nd Maternal Aunty epitomised this albeit fictional or literary heroine. Moving south, but still north of my childhood home, you have the Federal and Capitol cinemas near the Princess Circle. These 2 Shaw Brothers cinemas are conveniently located adjacent to Chow Kit, the local business and social hub, the centre of local community life and affairs, situated around the junction of Batu Road and Chow Kit Road. In Batu Road alignment terms, Chow Kit stretched from Cycle & Carriage, where my house was located, to the Princess Circle, at the northern end of Batu Road, where it branched out to Ipoh Road, Pahang Road and Princess Road. Proceeding from Cycle & Carriage, on the left, Jalan Haji Taib is the first road to branch off, then followed by Chow Kit Road. On the right, Jalan Raja Alang is the first road to branch off, sort of obliquely opposite Jalan Haji Taib, then Jalan Raja Bot, sort of obliquely opposite Chow Kit Road. Within Chow Kit, you have the Chow Kit Pasar Wet Market, on Jalan Haji Hussein, which is parallel to Batu Road, on the Kampung Baru side of Batu Road. In my childhood, the Chow Kit Pasar was the 2nd largest wet fresh produce market, after the Central Market at Foch Avenue in the centre of town. A wet market is strictly wet only in relation to the wet section i.e. the fresh produce section of the market; and in relation to that section, it means exactly that; the floor is wet, (upon purchase the live animals and fish would be slaughtered in front of you, consequently bloodying and wetting the market floor), the vegetables are fresh and wet from the constant watering, (as if they were growing plants). Who could forget the jumping frogs? How would you properly weigh them, when they are jumping on the scales? Also, who could forget the live mud crabs; their giant feelers tied with reed strings, their eyes popping out in confused anxiety? Who could forget the live mud crab race? At $1.50 per crab during those childhood days; they were cheap entertainment, trying to race them one against the other. Those silly creatures just kept side-swaddling all over the place without a directional clue! The term wet certainly did not apply to the dried provisions section, where they sold or sell dried and salted food or herbs and medicine and curry spices; and kitchen goods and appliances and clothing. My, oh my, the strong pungent aroma of the chilli powder and paste, burning right through your noses! Nor would the term, apply to the hawker food section, of assorted hawkers selling different foods, for their floor was not really wet, (short of a spillage or similar mishap). As for these cooked food hawkers, a couple deserve special mention, for the record. The first is The Chinese Nasi Lemak stall owned by my Batu Road II classmate, Si Sans family. Unlike Malay Nasi Lemak this version had pork! The other is the Chu Yoke Chuk or Pork Porridge. Victor used to frequent this stall not so much for the fantastic Chu Yoke Chuk but because the owner had a very beautiful daughter! In a dispositional sense, a wet market is a wet
market because when you came out of it, you would inevitably be soaking sweaty wet. The absence of air conditioning and the inadequate ventilation exacerbated by the crowded tenements and narrow passages made the Chow Kit Pasar feel like a steaming sauna; except for the early hours of the morning. These days the heritage listed Central market is a cultural centre, with stores selling cultural artefacts to tourists, and therefore no longer a market or wet market. So, the Chow Kit Pasar is now the largest wet market in Kuala Lumpur. Also within Chow Kit, you had the Chow Kit (Malay) Pasar Malam [night market], at the junction of Batu Road and Jalan Raja Bot, just in front of the Post Office, and behind the Post Office was the Toddy [coconut sap arak] Shop. The Toddy Shop was more like a prison compound, where the mainly Tamil alcoholics checked in and out for their alcoholic addiction, presumably to facilitate police supervision and for the containment of the drunken orgies. Jalan Raja Bot then cuts across Jalan Haji Hussein into Kampung Baru. The Chinese Siew Yeh Kai [Glutton Street], which was only opened at night, was located along the entire stretch of Chow Kit Road. From the Siew Yeh Kai, you could get to the Federal and Capitol Cinemas, via short cuts through back lanes or alleyways. You had the ubiquitous two-storey Chinese shop-houses all along Batu Road, Chow Kit Road and Ipoh Road, of all trades and professions, selling all types of goods and services, including quite a few selling fabrics, drapes, linen and haberdashery. You also had the banks and other adjuncts, like pawnshops and betting-shop and further down the spectrum, brothels and coffin shop as well. Chow Kit was and still is a red-light district. Those days there were no or negligible Malay shops or businesses outside of Kampung Baru, the Malay Reserve precinct. In fact, in my childhood, there were only Malay hawkers or stalls, for the Malays were not then, a mercantile race. Even though it is in Kampung Baru rather than Chow Kit, there was and is the Kampung Baru (Malay) Pasar Malam, at the bottom end of Jalan Raja Alang, extending right though to its junction with Jalan Raja Abdullah, the main road though Kampung Baru. In my childhood there was a bridge over the creek or river that cut across Jalan Raja Alang, a short distance down from the Lorong Raja Bot (Raja Bot Lane). The Jalan Raja Alang Bridge was the unofficial territorial divide between the Chinese and Malay areas. So, in my childhood, while I would walk or ramble freely on my own, in Chow Kit, I would never wander alone across the Jalan Raja Alang Bridge to the Kampung Baru Pasar Malam. Unless, you required something special, cuisine wise, like Nasi Padang [Minangkabau Food] or Ikan Bakar [Grilled Fish], it would not be necessary to cross the Jalan Raja Alang Bridge, as you would be able to get traditional Malay snacks like Satay, Nasi Lemak [Coconut Rice], Goreng Pisang [Deep-fried Bananas], Goreng Kledek [Deep-fried Tapioca], Jagung [Maize], assorted Malay Kueh-Kueh [Malay Cakes], at the Chow Kit (Malay) Pasar Malam. In the 50-60s, there were only 3 major nightspots of activity in Kuala Lumpur Chinatown (Petaling Street), which was almost all Chinese, Bukit Bintang Road, because of the BB Amusement Park there, but still mainly Chinese, and Chow Kit. Chow Kit as nightspot was and is still the most cosmopolitan and colourful of them all. Here the local Chinese, the Malays from nearby Kampung Baru and the Indians from nearby Sentul, would all freely congregate in gay abandon, to co-mingle and mix and trade with each other in utmost racial harmony, and with respect and deference to each others religion and customs. To the south, away from Chow Kit, there was the open air Queen Cinema, opposite Tan Chee Khoon Clinic and the Batu Road School. This was in fact the nearest cinema to my house. The screen and wooden stage was within a wooden fence compound. The chairs were laid out in rows
in the open space within the compound. If you were inclined to have a more comfortable seat, you brought your own seat or a cushion to provide bum comfort. Occasionally this arena would be utilised for the Hungry Ghosts Festival and for the occasional travelling circus, (the real type with elephants and tigers), or Chinese opera. Only Chinese movies, in particular the Wong Fei Hung kungfu movies, were screened here. As a pre-school child, you did not have to pay to get into the Queen Cinema, which might explain my not infrequent free attendance. When I was in kindergarten at the Prince of Wales Kindergarten, which was just behind and north of the Chow Kit Wet Market, I had a classmate called Tan Hoo Ben, who also later attended Batu Road School II with me. Tan Hoo Ben had a cousin working as an usher at the Capitol Cinema. After Kindergarten classes, we would often sneak in for free into the Capitol Cinema for the airconditioning comfort rather than the free show, since we could hardly understand English then, unless they happened to be screening a Chinese movie. Further down the road, on the same side of Batu Road, next to the Lee Wong Kee Restaurant, where all the local Chinese wedding dinner banquets were held, and at the junction of Batu Road and Campbell Road, was the Odeon Cinema, (which is now a shopping arcade). This cinema screened Western, Indian and Malay movies. Dr Leela, who attended to me when I was a sick child, had her clinic near the junction of Batu Road and Campbell Road, diagonally opposite to the Odeon Cinema. As you continue along Batu Road, after the Campbell road junction, you get to the southern stretch of Batu Road that ends up at the junction with Mountbatten Road, (where the then top-notch Western departmental store Robinsons was). The southern stretch of Batu Road was also where you did Western style shopping, (mainly Punjabi Indian owned businesses), such as the Globe Silk Department Store (clothing and fabrics and luggage), Gian Singh (sports goods) and PH Henry (Jewellers). There were other smaller local fabric and shoe shops as well, also eateries. These smaller shops, extended to Malay Street, behind this southern stretch of Batu Road. The shops in Malay Street were however predominantly Indian-Moslem. In my youth, if I craved for Indian curries, I would go to Malay Street. The Coliseum Theatre, probably described as such because of its Victorian architectural style, and now heritage listed, lies in the middle of this southern stretch of Batu Road. It only screened Indian movies. While I could relate to English songs, (probably because of my mothers love for English songs), in my early childhood, I never quite connected with English movies. The simple fact was I could not culturally or physically relate to what I saw in the few Western movies that I saw. I simply cannot remember anything in great detail as regards the English movies of my childhood, except maybe for Tarzan movies (Johnny Weissmuller) and some cowboy movies (Audie Murphy). The exception was of course movies that I went to, more for the songs or singing rather than the story plots, like the Elvis and Cliff Richard movies. I was a vivid fan of Cliff Richard, and could sing most of his songs by heart. I got his autograph outside the Federal Cinema, when he came to Kuala Lumpur in 1963, but sadly, I have lost that autograph. My movie fantasies had to be an extension of my being, both racially and culturally, and related to the real world I lived in. Quite naturally or consequently, except for a few Indian and Malay movies, I watched mainly Chinese movies. Funny enough, (unless they were in Cantonese or Hokkien), I had to read the English sub-titles for I could not read or understand Hua Ee i.e. Mandarin, the Chinese National Language. I accompanied my mother to Indian movies, as she had a fetish for these. I can still remember some of the epics like Mother India, Son of India, (these two were real tear-jerkers), and Sangam, (a love triangle musical). The Indian movies had or have very good songs, or should I say very good rhythmic melodies, to the ear, as I do not
understand Hindi or Tamil either, and had to rely on the English sub-titles as well. As to Malay movies, there were not that many, there was not a universal market as such. However, when they were any and they were P. Ramlee [the Malay Dean Martin] and Ibrahim Pendek [the Malay Jerry Lewis] comedies, I would go and see them. I enjoyed Bujang Lapok [Bachelors past their Prime] and Seniman Bujang Lapok [Artiste Bachelors past their Prime], and the Malay ghost movies like Pontianak [Female Vampire] and Orang Minyak [Spirit Rapist]. I was addicted to and lost in the ephemeral world of Chinese folklore, of ghosts and spirits, of kungfu and sword fighting and triads; and by extension to the Japanese ephemeral world of karate and samurai and ninja fighting and the yakuza. Who can forget Ivy Ling Po [the Chinese Lynn or Vanessa Redgrave], (who was famous for playing male roles), in the Dream of the Red Chamber, Love Eterne, Hua Mulan, The Grand Substitution and The Mermaid; or the tragic Lin Dai [the Chinese Sophia Loren or Elizabeth Taylor], (who like James Dean, died young at her prime, she committed suicide), for her role in The Kingdom and the Beauty, Love Without End and Madam White Snake. The song Can Never Forget from Love Without End is reportedly the most sentimental, sad, Mandarin love song ever! As a child, who did not enjoy Fung Po Po [the Chinese Shirley Temple] as Hoong Nga Ee, a mystical child kungfu spirit. Then you have the various versions, of various actors, of Shee Mm Hoong or Monkey and all his adventures with Piggy, Sandy and Tripitaka in The Journey West. When it comes to Chinese sword fighting, all that magic, like jumping from roof to roof, tree-top to tree-top, mountain peak to mountain peak, asportation, levitation, floating into the sky and astral travelling, figure transformation and shrinking and expanding at will, sorcery and black magic, impossible Herculean feats and just superbly fantastic kungfu movements and sequences; who can forget Wang Yu, particularly in The One-Armed Swordsman, and Cheng Pei Pei, particularly in Come Drink With Me? If you preferred real-to-life unarmed kungfu combat, then we were kept in suspense and enthralled by the historical Chinese hero Wong Fei Hoong, played by Kwan Tak Hing. In Wong Fei Hoong, and the almost never-ending cult sequels to it, you had the other main characters, the villain or bad guy Sek Keen; and the idiot braggart Nga Chutt Sow. However my all-time favourite movie character must be and is Hak Soon Foong or The Whirlwind Rambler, played by Akira Kobayashi. Like Wong Fei Hoong, there were almost never-ending cult sequels to The Whirlwind Rambler. The title character Hak Soon Foong was a triad or yakusa member, who was a professional dice gambler, who was variously contracted out to different gangs; so in that sense he was also a rambler. He could spin or throw the 3 dices, in such a way, that they were all 6s, and would be sitting atop each other, like a totem. Although a gangster, he was a good guy, and ended up in each movie helping the victimised or oppressed. He was also a very good trumpeter and singer and was obviously very handsome. In each movie, there would be a romantic interest, or more correctly, a girl (usually Sayuri Yoshinaga) falling in love with him; but being a rambler, he moved on, but without having taken advantage of the girls infatuation. He was after all a tough but saintly guy. It would be as if Elvis, as it were, playing a mafia special underling; but who was actually a saviour rather than a mobster. My second all-time favourite movie character was and is Mun Hup or The Blind Swordsman played by Shintaro Katsu. The Blind Swordsman was unexpectedly the best samurai, (in the movie), because he was blind and therefore depended on his sharp antennae like hearing and keen sense of smell. Strategically he would choose to fight in the dark of the night or in the dimness of the woods. His opponents would try to detract him by causing a din around him or setting the surrounds ablaze, as he had a fear of fire. He was also a comedian or made out to be one, in the way he stumbled around and causing accidents or mishaps or when his sense of smell detected a female and his consequential facial expressive,(twitching of his nose and raising of his
eyebrows), connotations. As with The Whirlwind Rambler, The Blind Swordsman had his classic moves of his trade as a samurai. The Blind Swordsman could use his chopsticks to pick flies irritating him, one by one, as he ate his rice. He could triple slice a burning candle, and all 3 pieces, would remain on the flat of his samurai blade held out horizontally. He could throw a watermelon in the air, slice it into 6 pieces, as it fell, and collect all 6 pieces with his palm, before they can hit the floor. As between The Whirlwind Rambler and The Blind Swordsman, it was fairly obvious that you had more chance of emulating The Whirlwind Rambler in real life in my childhood triad controlled, gambling addicted and prostitute parading neighbourhood than The Blind Swordsman. Put it this way, if someone were to call me Hak Soon Foong, I would take it as a complement; not that I have ever been called that. Tiong Nam and Chow Kit Since we are concentrating on nocturnal activities, you probably wish to know how I whiled away the hours of the night, when not otherwise occupied by ghosts or spirits, wedding dinner banquets, religious or cultural festivals or movies. The short answer to that is of course Tiong Nam and followed later or extended later to Chow Kit. In my early childhood nocturnal wanderings, my radius of operation, in terms of walking distance was half a mile [the half-mile radius], thereby I was restricted to the Tiong Nam Settlement and across Batu Road to the Queen Cinema. In late teens this extended to a mile or two, thereby to the Odeon Cinema, to the Kampung Baru (Malay) Pasar Malam, to the Golden City Cinema, to Jalan Raja Laut and to the end of Chow Kit Road [the 2-mile radius]. Except for the lanes or alleyways close to home or close to Soon Company and Yuen Company or a couple of lanes along Chow Kit Road, even I, as a local, would still stick to the main roads at night, being Batu Road, Jalan Haji Taib, Chow Kit Road, Jalan Raja Laut (between Jalan Haji Taib and Ipoh Road), Ipoh Road, Pahang Road, Princess Road, (Batu Road end of) Jalan Raja Bot, Jalan Raja Alang and Campbell Road. Before my early teens, my nightly pursuits were with my twin or other siblings or with my parents or with my fathers employees. Except when going out with my parents or my fathers employees, the night trips would seldom venture beyond the half-mile radius. In the odd occasions when we ventured into the 2-mile radius, we went to Jalan Haji Taib, where my parents favourite Hokkien Mee stall and Bak Kut Teh stall were; or we went to the Chow Kit Siew Yeh Kai, where my fathers employee or employees nominated to buy overtime supper will get their food. Not that there were no coffee-shops or restaurants or hawker stalls in-situ or itinerant hawkers within the half-mile radius, there were. I have in my memoir of Batu Road School II referred to a good Cantonese wan ton noodle shop in the Left Flank of the Tiong Nam Settlement. There was also Tuck Theen, a Hainanese Coffee Shop/Bar/Hotel/Brothel, a few doors away from Cycle & Carriage on Batu Road, that you could get Hainanese Fried Noodles. There was also an Indian-Muslim restaurant called Hameed, directly across the road from Tuck Theen, where you could get Roti Chennai, Murtabak, Nasi Bryani and various Indian Curries. There was a coffee shop in a wooden hut in the Right Flank, just outside the Cycle & Carriage boundary fence, which could be accessed by a gate. During the daytime on work days there was a food stall in this coffee shop [which I shall call the workers canteen] which sold hot assorted Chinese meals to the Chinese workers of Cycle & Carriage and nearby workshops. Everyday, there were different cooked dishes to choose from. You pay for the combination of your choice, and hot steamed white rice and hot soup came for free with it. The area behind this workers canteen is the same location that I described as where the Hungry Ghosts Festival koh-tai concert was held in the Right Flank behind the Shell Station. Thus the workers canteen was adjacent to
the koh-tai concert site and both were behind the Shell Station fronting Batu Road. The workers canteen reverted to being a coffee-shop and a mahjong parlour at night. I should mention that n my childhood you could buy beer, but not liquor, at any coffee shop. I think that would still be the case currently. The reason for this might be because beer could be sold in crown bottles, and thus subject to bottle crown tax; and not liquor tax. The workers canteen also had a Rediffusion wired radio service. At night some of the gamblers i.e. the mahjong players were the English-educated bosses of Cycle & Carriage, who knew my mother. When the bosses were in session, the workers canteen proprietor would have the Rediffusion turned on to the English Channel. There was obviously a stage in my life when I outgrew torch lighting for geckos, rats, cockroaches and fruit bats, and shining torchlight into the eyes of dogs and cats. I became interested in pop songs. I found out that I had a bit of a singing voice; good enough for my mother to request that I sing songs to her that she loved, like April Love, Seven Lonely Days, Isle of Capri and Secret Love. I became pop songs crazy. So I would ensconce myself in the workers canteen at about 9pm most nights to listen to the top of the pops or the request hour. I was particularly absorbed and concentrated when it came to the latest Cliff Richard songs, for my ears were then glued tight to the radio, so that I could grasp the lyrics, which I was busy attempting to note or copy down. You can just imagine, how many times I would have had to listen to a new song before I could get the lyrics right. Mind you, this is me, with English as a second language! I would not incriminate myself as to revealing some of the atrocious song-copying errors I had made in my early youth. I am too embarrassed to put these gross mistakes to print. There was a surprise bonus in frequenting the workers canteen at night. The regular group of gamblers, (the English-educated bosses of Cycle & Carriage), loved to drink beer and snack as they played mah-jong. One snack they enjoyed above all else, with frequent regularity, was Chicken Neck and Giblet Rendang, a dry coconut-based sweet curry. This elite group knew that I was my mothers son, and so I was always asked to help myself to the snack, which I never declined. Speaking of freebies, we children learned early in the piece that the Sikh Temple or the Guru Nanak Gurdwara at Jalan Raja Alang, next door to the Chow Kit Wet Pasar, provided free chapatis and dhal curry served on banana leaf, just before sunset. This was always an option, when you were hungry, and when you had no pocket money! Time and years went by, and I as I grew older, I became more gregarious, and enjoyed being part of a group, clique, gang or coterie. There was much more fun, security, hilarity, activity, camaraderie, co-operation and money and status in doing terms as a gang. For one thing, as a gang you shared in the costs, there was economies of scale, and the better off had to contribute more than the not so better off. After all, the members, in the clique or gang, were either with the Soon Company Family or the Yuen Company Family. We were family! If it were not for this fact of family, I sincerely doubted whether our respective parents would have allowed us to go out loitering or just hanging about, lingering without purpose or general intent. We were just young teenagers, bored senseless by the lack of specific things to do or the lack of personal attention from or supervision by our busy parents or simply from the sheer lack of excitement. We were just seeking a little excitement to our life. Except for my twin and me, most in the gang were not really interested in studying. Come to think of it, neither were my twin and I. Somehow we had this knack or talent to be able to swot at the last minute; i.e. the week before the end of the year exams. For some reason the academic assessment was based on the year end exam. Remarkably or miraculously or providentially, we both excelled academically, year after year, much to my mothers absolute delight and astonishment. However we both did do our school homework, if there were any; although we did not do anything beyond what was dished out as homework. Thus, if we had homework to do, and we had not completed our homework, we
would not have dared go out loitering. There was usually no homework during the weekends and therefore there was no bar to our catching up with the gang. There were no fast rules. During the schooldays, there might not be any get together; or if any, it might just be till sundown, so that we could rush back to do homework. It was during the weekends that the companionship blossomed and flourished; particularly when it got to a stage where Saturday night gatherings ended only after midnight shows, and even then after the early morning supper that followed! Initially the gang was just Boon Hooi, my 2nd Maternal Uncles eldest son, a year older than my twin and I. We were from the Soon Company Family. Then we ganged up with Victor, (same age as us), and his cousin Heng Beng, (same age as Boon Hooi). They were from the Yuen Company Family. Initially we wanted to call our gang the Whirlwind Ramblers. We then shortened it to simply Ramblers. Even then no one quite took to or noticed it, because the neighbourhood mainly conversed in Hokkien. Not for them, this red devils language! And so, eventually the gang had no name. Further, there was a translation and interpretation and image problem. The Chinese name for The Whirlwind Rambler was Hak Soon Foong which actually meant Black Whirlwind. Now, in Chinese, there is nothing good about Hak or Black and Whirlwind which was regarded as the Devils Wind. After jettisoning the idea of a name for the gang; whenever we were asked by people in the neighbourhood, we would simply say in Hokkien, the lingua franca, that we were Batu Road Beh Kia or Little Soldiers from Batu Road in triad slang. On the Soon Company Family side, cousins Ah Piaw, Thean Cheong, King Chuan were added. On the Yuen Company family side, cousins Ah Tak, King Kong, Ah Siew, Ah Yang, Cowboy and Gila were added. Later Victor introduced a friend, Kee Kok. Heng Beng introduced a friend, Paul and Boon Hooi introduced a friend, See Bak Kow. Kee Kok, otherwise known as Fei Low or Fat Fellow as he was very obese, (through a genetic glandular problem), was a motor cycle mechanic; and he often came in on his Moto Guzzi. With great thrill, we often took turns riding pillion, as he raced as around the local precinct, without any safety helmet those days I should add. See Bak Kows claim to fame was that he was a very good bass guitarist; for we went through a stage when we experimented with being a rock band. He sang a very good version of the Bee Gees I gotta get a Message to Her. So that was the gang 14 family members and 3 honorary members. This was the gang at its pinnacle of glory as a gang of adolescents, if you might excuse that expression. What I meant to say was that we were just a gang of adolescent boys. Our being together was predicated on our freedom as 'boys'. Boys grow up and soon get infatuated with girls and boys then lose their adolescent freedom. Thus we stayed together, in the gang, until when, each of us, separately, as and when, we got smitten by love, had to go our own separate merry ways with our girlfriends, and thereby had to desert the gang. Anyway, until that inevitable eventuality, we congregated thus weekly. There was no specific or special arrangement. It was simply, to outsiders, a family gathering, so there were no formalities or rules. The main bulk gathering was on Saturday nights. Meeting time was normally around 9pm on a Saturday night. The meeting place, our headquarters, was the Yuen Kongsi Hokkien Mee Stall, socalled because of its location, outside and at the rear of Yuen Company. Yuen Company was a corner block. By this time of the night, tables and chairs would have been put or laid out on the verge of Jalan Raja Bot, at its corner with Batu Lane, the lane at the rear of the 2-storey shophouses on Batu Road. The Yuen Kongsi Hokkien Mee Stall was set up nightly at about 8pm and only operated at night and then only until sold out; which was usually at around midnight. Their location would be directly across the road from the Chow Kit (Malay) Pasar Malam. Across Batu Lane from them, on the other side of Jalan Raja Bot was the Toddy Shop. Diagonally across Batu
Road, opposite the Chow Kit (Malay) Pasar Malam, was Chow Kit Road and its Siew Yeh Kai. So this was where our gang spent its time - in Chow Kit, the local socio-economic hub, the local night life centre, the local red-light district, and most importantly, the local night eating & drinking centre; of which the Chow Kit (Malay) Pasar Malam, the Chow Kit Siew Yeh Kai and the nearby Kampung Baru (Malay) Pasar Malam across the Jalan Raja Alang Bridge were the three main sub-precincts within Chow Kit and surrounds, that we hung out. Night falls about 6:30pm; i.e. by 7pm it would be dark. So that often left at least a couple of hours to kill for those who were usually early. My twin and I would usually have arrived at Soon Company, (about 10 shop lots away), and met up with Boon Hooi by 7pm. If we felt a bit hungry we would walk over to Chow Kit Siew Yeh Kai and have sort of entrees or starters. This Glutton Street had all types of Malaysian Chinese hawker food that you can think of. If we were very hungry, there was a siew lup or Cantonese roast meat stall, (popular with my fathers employees), where we could get char siew or barbecued pork, siew yoke or roast pork, see yaw kai or soya chicken, pak chum kai or steamed chicken, siew kai or roast chicken, siew ngap or roast duck or, (one of my fathers favourite), kong foo chau or Cantonese Crispy Noodles. Most of the stalls sold less substantive snack like meals. As far as the gang members were concerned, (coming from a Hokkien background), we preferred food that were chilli hot or required dipping in hot chilli sauce. Thus we liked or preferred laksa, a type of curry noodles, to which we would add more sambal [chilli] paste, (to make it hotter and lime juice for the extra zing); chee ngau chup or pig and beef innards, (where the innards, including curdled pigs blood, are cooked for a long time in stock and Chinese pickled mustard greens), all eaten dipped in hot chilli sauce and chay kway tiaw or fried flat rice noodles, (again fried with extra chilli paste for maximum heat). If we were not particularly hungry or peckish, we would just have hot dessert, by way of hoong tau suey or red bean soup accompanied by yu cha kway or deep-fried dough sticks or crullers. There was just one pure snack only item that is worth special mentioning the siew yow yue or grilled dry squid or cuttlefish. This is a snack purely for the chewy texture, like chewing gum, and the very hot chilli sauce. You chose a piece of preserved dried squid, (tentacles and all), which the vendor would bash up with a mallet, then grill it over charcoal, then roll it, stage by stage, through a spaghetti-roller like machine, until you got an almost wafer thin squid, which he then lightly toasted on the grill again. Dip this squashed dry toasted squid in hot chilli sauce, then start chewing it, and voila, you have a hot chewing gum! Alternatively, we would go window shopping at the Fom Lom Store, an electrical and furniture shop owned by my batu Road School II classmate, Lim Siew Hocks father & uncle. Otherwise we would just watch sepak raga, a game played like volleyball, (except you play with your feet and the ball is a rattan ball), played by the Malay residents of Kampung Baru at the sepak raga courts, (like badminton courts in design), at Jalan Raja Alang, (next to the Shell station, directly opposite Jalan Haji Taib). Or, we could just go walkabout, (buy some take-away finger food, like goreng pisang at the Chow Kit (Malay) Pasar Malam), and just traverse the pavements alongside the Chow Kit (Malay) Pasar Malam and alongside Batu Road at its junction with Chow Kit Road; for at this time of the night, it would be full of street pedlars, who would have laid out their wares on grass mats or tarpaulin sheets. There were and are all types of pedlars selling all types of goods, some of which might be stolen goods. Talking about stolen goods, outsiders or non-locals should be careful of pickpockets. Being locals, (thereby we are known), we did not or did not have to dress
up, and so we looked poor, and in any case we would have had special pockets sewed inside our pockets. If I were with my father, (on the very few odd occasions), walking the pavements, he would always stop at the Sherpa Nepalese pedlars selling semi-precious gemstones and amulets and necklaces. My father had the strange notion that one day he would find a magic stone; one which colour would change with its wearer. For example, a pale light green stone would gradually turn dark green to show that the wearers destiny was ascending. I am not a great believer in magic stones but I used to have a fetish for genuine bone or hardwood comb, which these same pedlars also sell. I do however believe that there is an inexplicable something in the Chinese belief in the intrinsic, spiritual, rather than aesthetic, quality of jade. I have known Victors mother to buy expensive jade bracelets. Once she rolled over her new Mercedes Benz, and came out of the freak accident unscratched but for a broken jade bracelet! There were and are Indian fortune tellers with their colourful green parrots to pick out the deck of cards to predict your fortune. Then you have the Penjaja Ubat or Malay so called snake-oil pedlars, peddling all sorts of medicated oils, balms or embrocations to cure skin diseases, haemorrhoids and even jungle herbs and roots like Tongkat Ali or Malay Viagra to make you like Tarzan. Talking about Malay things, one could always visit the Kampung Baru Pasar Malam, under the pretext of having a Nasi Padang or Nasi Lemak meal, but actually to see the Saturday Night Pasar Malam Fashion Parade. The Malay single maidens took the opportunity each Saturday night to dress up in their sarong kebaya and go parading, (chaperoned of course), to sort of advertise that they are eligible for marriage. As I was saying or describing earlier, our gang headquarters, the Yuen Kongsi Hokkien Mee Stall was directly across the road from the Toddy Shop. Let me pose a question to you as a reader, why do you think the British Authorities placed a toddy shop in the middle of a Chinese area, and next to a Malay area? Why? If you had the toddy shop right in the middle of an Indian settlement, it would be like having a pub right in the middle of an Aboriginal Settlement in Australia. The Indians would not be working, they would be drinking the whole day, there would be drunken brawls and gang fights, also inter-caste altercations, beating up the wives etc. The Hindu Tamil Indians that frequented the Toddy Shop had to travel all the way from Sentul or Brickfields; and that is a long, long walk; for most of these irremediable intransigent alcoholics were poor and could not afford a cab ride, and drunks were by law not allowed on buses. The Toddy is fermented coconut flower shoot sap. It is very cheap alcohol, since coconut trees are aplenty and easy to make. The sap is collected, (like with maple syrup in Canada), by making cuts to the coconut flower shoots and allowing the sap to drip into containers and be collected. The sap that is initially collected is naturally sweet but is non-alcoholic. It ferments naturally within a few hours and becomes toddy. Toddy does not last; for unless distilled within a day, it becomes vinegar. As to alcoholic strength, it is like strong beer, except intoxication takes effect quicker, because it is drunk warm. It is an acquired taste, quite nice to drink with curry seafood but I would have it icy cold. I do not know why the Hindu Tamil Indians are addicted to alcohol. From my vantage observation, from the gang headquarters, over the years, I have come to the personal conclusion that Indians and alcohol do not mix. I have asked the same question in Australia as to why Westerners, or even the indigenous Aboriginals, have a drinking culture. And, from the constant pub brawls and senseless drunken violence, over in Australia, I have come to the personal conclusion that White men and alcohol do not mix either. Mind you, some Chinese also drink, but Chinese culture is not a drinking culture, in fact, it is dishonourable and shameful to be drunk in
public. It would amount to a loss of face. Rather the Chinese have an eating culture, a gambling culture, and perhaps a mercantile culture. At least with the Hindu Tamil Indians, a certain group, the upper caste, the Brahmins, do not drink alcohol or eat meat. So the Hindu Tamil Indians, who drink alcohol, are by caste definition, of or from the lower classes. I am not one to comment on another race or another culture, unless I feel personally comfortable with my opinion. I grew up with Indian classmates, and as an adult I lived in Sentul, an Indian suburb, and one of my best friends in childhood was the nephew of the Indian Mando [Labourers Overseer] of Batu Road School II. I am absolutely certain that the Hindu Caste System is the most backward, oppressive and degrading spiritual canon. It punishes and sentences those born in the lower castes to a sense of low-esteem, worthlessness, dispossession of status of being, property, occupation and profession and absolute disadvantage in all aspects of human life. In short, you are useless as shit. I remember vividly, one Saturday night, when I was hurrying from Soon Company to the Yuen Kongsi Hokkien Mee Stall. I was late, so as shortcut, I went by, (through the back door into), Batu Lane; as the Yuen Kongsi Hokkien Mee Stall was just at the top end of this lane, where it meets Jalan Raja Bot. It was dark in the lane; the only lighting was from the moonlight. As I drew near to the Yuen Kongsi Hokkien Mee Stall, I noticed this short, old, white-haired emaciated Tamil Indian man pulling what turned out to be an equally emaciated, diminutive and old haggish woman, on the ground, by her long trestle hair! They both stank and reeked of the foul stench of toddy. He was groaning Po-rah, po-rah, which I think is Lets go [home] in Tamil. There they were, two specimens of drunken atrophy, like Flintstone & Wife in stone-age days, living like animals, or worse. Who do you blame, them or the Hindu Caste System? The gang members who arrived first or early, (and as regulars, we would have a big round table that can sit up to 15), would get seated and order Chinese tea, which, (without further elaboration or enquiry), would always be Ti Kwan Yin or Iron Buddha Tea. Even though it was and is hot and humid at night in the tropics, the Chinese therapeutic tradition was and is to drink hot tea as a coolant. I am not sure how this cooling works, unless it had to do with the diuretic effect of the tea. In that sense you ended up flushing your system constantly. Since we drank copious cups of tea throughout the night, you would have expected frequent trips to the urinal. Somehow that seldom happened, so this diuretic effect is quite unfounded or the Chinese youth must have very strong bladders; unless it came out by way of body perspiration. When enough of the gang have arrived (i.e. on a give and take basis) a consensus would be taken to start ordering meals. There were basically 3 versions or styles of cooking of Hokkien Mee - stir-fried, braised or consomm. It was customary that we ordered 2 standard serves of each style, given the number of diners. You also have 3 types of noodles to choose from - the thick, round, spaghetti size, yellow wheat noodles, white flat rice noodles and white rice vermicelli noodles. Other than the style of cooking, the type of noodles, the meat and vegetables were however the same. Meat was always pork slices, pork kidney and liver slices and baby intestines and vegetable was always choy sum [Chinese spinach]. With the stir-fried version, the taste and aroma came from the generous dose of diced garlic, pork lard and bak yu poh or pork lard crisps [its like mini pork cracklings] and dark honey soy and the MSG-enhanced pork bones stock or Tee Taw Kut Teng in Hokkien. Strangers to this dish might find unattractive or unenticing because of the blackish colour of the thick starchy greasy sauce. But, trust me, forget the fat, cholesterol and carbohydrate, the taste is simply delectable. As to the sir-fry version, we would normally order a yellow noodle/rice vermicelli mix stir-fry and a flat rice noodle stir-fry. The braised version, which looked like thick Western pumpkin
soup or like shark fins soup, came only in the yellow noodles, the unique taste and aroma came from rice vinegar, beaten egg drop, the same generous dose of diced garlic, pork lard and bak yu poh (pork lard crisps) but light soy is used instead of dark honey soy, but the same Tee Taw Kut Teng is used. The consomm version, which came only in rice vermicelli, is light when contrasted with the other 2 versions, is in clear soup, is lacking in strong flavour or aroma, as the taste and aroma came solely from the Tee Taw Kut Teng. All three versions were eaten with condiments diced hot chillies, diced garlic, and hot sambal paste with lime and bak yu poh (pork lard crisps). Heng Beng, who was abstemious in his eating and drinking habits, might only have a spoonful, for taste, of the stir-fried and the braised noodles, but he would have 2 or 3 or more serves of the consomm rice vermicelli. Aside from being dietary conscious, Heng Beng, was a bit on the effeminate side; he used face masks, skin emollient and exfoliating crmes. Strange isnt it, Life? Heng Beng was the 1st in the gang to die. He died of a heart attack, he didnt even make it to 45! I too had my 1st heart attack at 45; but as my fate would have it; I am still kicking and well! It is not true that men or males never chat. It is true however, (taking our gang as the gauge, in any case), that we do not gossip as such. We were not really interested in what others did or did not do; nor were we interested in clothes or window shopping or sports. Conversations were somehow never about girls or love or sex. It was the case that within the gang, even if you had sex or fell in love, you kept it a secret, to yourself. Maybe it was because we were family. There was an unwritten rule or taboo about talking about these things, regarded as personal. In a sense, the same topics were regurgitated weekly. The main topic was about good eating or good hawkers, for we were beginning to venture out into other areas of town to try good food. Those of us, who were still studying, were now at secondary schools outside our home turf. Those who were working, in their work and travels, have been trying food in other areas outside our home turf as well. So, like food gourmets, even though we were gourmands rather than gourmets, we were always comparing notes and relating our respective new food experiences. After school, Victor, Thean Cheong, Albert and I were exploring many of the hawker food centres and restaurants near Victoria Institution on Petaling Hill. In particular, we were exploring every nook and corner of Chinatown, centred around Petaling Street, and also nearby Madras Lane, Foch Avenue, Sultan Street and High Street. Soon, we were daytime regulars of the Hainanese Chicken Rice at Nam Heong on Sultan Street; Siew Cheong Fun [Roast Sausage Noodles] at Tai Shee Tau [Foch Avenue] and Leong Tau Foo [Hakka Tofu] and Curry Laksa in Madras Lane. The workers informed the rest about Bak Kut Teh at Ban Lee and at Leng Kee, both at Ipoh Road; Hokkien Mee at Ming Hoe at Ipoh Road, Sin Onn at Gombak Road and Loong Kee at Pahang Road and Hakka Leong Tau Foo at Foong Foong at Ampang New Village. We basically lived and talked food. We were Wai Sek Kwai or Hungry Ghosts! Funny enough, that was the next most common topic, i.e. about ghosts and spirits and about all types of accidents and 3-D toto numbers. Then, next in topicality, the latest news on the triads grapevine; and last but not least, discussion about the latest kungfu and samurai and Hak Soon Foong movies. Before you knew it, someone would sound the alarm that it was about 11:30pm and therefore time to make a move to attend the midnight show at Capitol Cinema, where most of the Chinese and Japanese movies were shown. We would all then, (when inside the movie realm), fantasize again, about being kungfu or samurai warriors or being a Whirlwind Rambler. After the midnight show, depending on how tired we were, some would call it a night or morning; and the rest would soldier on, at a Bak Kut Teh place like Mungo Jerry at Jalan Raja Laut or Hokkien Mee at Hup Lee, just across from the Princess Circle. By dawn, if we did get to
sunrise, this remnant group will be enervated from the long hours and the chain-smoking of cigarettes. The 3 most popular brands then were Dunhill, Benson & Hedges & Peter Stuyvesant. Those who drank Guinness Stout would be in soporific drunken stupor. The shopkeeper would gently coax us to go home and get some sleep. Kai As years went by, and girlfriends entered our lives, gang members dropped out of sight or attended infrequently, (when they were not dating). A point came when I had to leave permanently forever, because I was about to leave for studies in Australia. We all grew up in an area where kai tau or brothels were a thriving business for the Henghua triads; and kai or prostitutes on parade, (in their trishaws), was a common sight late at night. Sometimes, things you get to know by accident have to remain a secret; in the hope that the secret will never be discovered. I am revealing a few secrets now, because the people that the secrets relate to are now long dead and gone; like finding out that one of my fathers employees sister, and the wife of one of the Cycle & Carriage Accounts Clerks, were local prostitutes. I sighted them personally, being transported in kai trishaws, in Batu Lane, to brothels, that I often used as short-cuts or to use the toilets. As a farewell gift the gang chipped in and organised for me to lose my virginity before I left for overseas. Ah Siew [Victors cousin] was the organiser. The venue was the Princess Hotel owned by my Prince of Wales Kindergarten and Batu Road School II classmate, Tan Hoo Bens father. I knew the insides of the Princess Hotel well, in fact very well, having spent lots of time there as a kindergarten kid with Hoo Ben. The kai poh or prostitute chosen, (when paid), was also supposed to reciprocate by giving me an ang pow [red packet of money], for being given the opportunity to do the honours. I did not get an ang pow because I did not deserve one, although I paid the kai poh in full plus a top-up tip, because she had to waste her time telling me about her unfortunate life circumstances of abject poverty, and a father who lost everything in an addiction to gambling. Personally I could not do it because I thought she was dirty and unclean; although I did not tell her that. I gave the excuse that I was engaged to be married to my girlfriend overseas, which was of course a white lie. It is only a small world, in any case. When I returned for holidays many years later, Ah Siew jokingly sought a full refund of the pooled funds on behalf of the gang. We all had a good laugh, when he said, of all in our gang; I turned out to be the Hak Soon Foong, the one leaving the girls broken-hearted. Vince Cheok Chow Kit Road Song by Sudirman LYRICS Chow Kit Road (8x) Di tengah bandaraya orang merata-rata In the centre of town with crowds of people Dari segala bangsa tua atau muda Of various races, young and old Ada yang berkereta ada yang jalan saja Some driving and some are only walking Ada yang cuci mata
Some are just sightseeing Ha..ha..ha..ha.. Chow Kit Road (8x) Di tengah bandaraya In the centre of town Yang miskin dan yang kaya Rich and poor Bagai satu keluarga bersama gembira As one happy family Ramai orang berniaga menjual apa saja Lots of traders selling everything under the sun Semuanya murah-murah Everything is dirt cheap Ha..ha..ha..ha.. Indahnya petang di Chow Kit Road Kuala Lumpur (2x) Beautiful are the evenings in Chow Kit Road Chow Kit Road (8x) Di tengah bandaraya walau baik orangnya In the middle of town, even if you are good honest people Perlu berhati-hati di tipu pencuri You must be watchful of pickpockets and thieves Bila melintas jalan jangan sesuka hati Do not jaywalk when you cross the road Ditangkap mata-mata baru padan muka Or youll be caught by the police before you are aware Indahnya petang di chow kit road Kuala Lumpur (2x) Beautiful are the evenings in Chow Kit Road *Repeat (1) PENANG GOURMET CENTRE in ADELAIDE Raymond and Ah Fun, what can I say, Chow Kit Road you are to me now, Yet, you are only a poor surrogate, Despite all the sustenance you provide me, Despite the entire kedai kopi atmosphere you create for me, You cannot replace the nostalgia you beget in me, Of my days with Boon Hooi, Ah Tuck and Ah Seng, Eating laksa with a twist of lime, for the extra tang, With a good measure of see hum and cabai padi, Or else tidak siok lah, Yet I am addictively drawn to you, Out of need, and out of practicality, With good old Gaby for company, And thankful, you are near and not too dear, Nasi campur your chup fun can never be, But to my hunger pangs, your food is like, Manna from heavens above, Raymond and Ah Fun, what can I say, But banyak terima kaseh.
Vince Cheok GLOSSARY Ah Fun Chow Kit Road kedai kopi Boon Hooi Ah Tuck Ah Seng laksa see hum cabai padi tidak siok lah nasi campur chup fun banyak terima kaseh NIGHT MOVES Paper gliders, from secret admirers and would be valentines, Within public gaze and scrutiny and yet so clandestine, Gliding to the harmonics of pubescent puppy love, Mingling with the white kapok moths blitzkreiging above, Fluttering to the urgent yearnings of anxious adolescent heart-beats, Amorous advances denied, but guilt exposed by timorous facial deceit, Two different earthly creatures, in the same place gathered to meet, Each spurred on by primordial biological urges to mate and breed, Lofty unintended encounters and apologetic, embarrassed retreat, Emulated below by mis-targeted landings and annoyed or surprised receipt, Amidst the tropical snow and supper outing of pasar malam nights, Watching love blossom fresh or die in rejected suits was a memorable sight, For me, the seasons a plenty have come and gone, and I my spright, Yet when I watch my young dandy of a son Nicholas in Adonic flight, My memories travel back to amorous pasar malam nights. Vince Cheok GLOSSARY paper gliders kapok pasar malam "origami" paper aeroplanes cotton (Malay) night food centre (Malay) Chinese name - female name of a famous glutton food street in Kuala Lumpur coffee shop name of a my cousin - male name of Ah Seng's cousin - male name of my foster-brother (Victor) Malaysian curry noodles blood cockles little chillies (very, very hot) not scrumptious (Malay) Malaysian combination rice dish Chinese combination rice dish many, many thanks (Malay)
KL Stir-Fried Hokkien Mee This is my true original KL home-grown recipe, one for the aficionados; not one for the dietary faint-hearted, for it is greasy with lard, and black fat noodles do not have the appearance of being appetizing. It is like durian or hot curry; you either love or hate it.
The other important thing to note is that you need a gas burner with at least 2 gas rings; otherwise it would be most unlikely that you will get the wok hei, the high temperature require for quick stir-fry; the temperature must be high enough to cook so as not to allow the meat or vegetables to sweat or give out liquid. You also have to prepare the ingredients in advance; for the actual cooking time is less than 5 minutes in total! You just have enough time to toss the prepared ingredients in and then stir, stir, stir in a continuous motion; i.e. using left hand to toss ingredients in and the right hand to stir. So, you would need a stable, heavy cast iron wok as well, so that the wok itself does not move easily. Ingredients: (1) 200g of pork belly fat, (the skin and excess fat of which is removed), and sliced into 1cm pieces. This is to make pork lard/oil and the bak yu poh or pork lard crisps, which I shall describe below. (2) Lots of crushed or minced fresh garlic, at least 3 tablespoons. (3) Pork broth or stock, from the previous nights soup. Otherwise use Maggi chicken stock as a substitute. (4) A small bowl of watery cornflour paste. This is to thicken the noodles towards the end of the cooking. (5) A bottle of dark gooey honey soy sauce, with a pourer spout, for easy dispensing. This is a key ingredient. (6) A bottle of sesame oil. (7) 1 packet of fresh fat Hokkien Noodles. (8) Choy Sum [Chinese Spinach] or substitute with Pak Choy. (9) Sliced pork strips (add pork liver and kidney slices and baby intestines, if you are adventurous, but only if they are really fresh, i.e. as in less than 24 hours from the kill). Traditionally, you mix the meat slices with a bit of cornflour and sesame oil. This is to stop the meat from sweating and for the meat to seal immediately when tossed into the wok instead of spluttering. Another method to avoid spluttering, is to pour boiling water over the meat to slightly parboil it, and leave them to cool and dry, before using them. Marinade for Pork: White pepper to taste 1 TB of soy sauce tsp oyster sauce 1 tsp sesame oil 1 tsp of To make the pork lard/oil and bak yu poh: Dice your pork belly fat into 2 cm cubes or lardoons. Place the diced pork fat into a deep pot with about a cm level of peanut oil over low heat. Let the pork fat slowly ooze out, stirring frequently, raising the level of heat, once in a while, if necessary to speed things
up, until the fat is rendered into liquid oil and until all the little pork pieces are crispy and golden. Focus on this task as you do not want to burn down the house or the lard! When most of the oil has exuded and the bak yu poh is crisp, turn off the burner and remove the bak yu poh from the oil and drain on paper towels. When cooled, and drained, store the bak yu poh in an airtight container, with towelling paper at the bottom. The pork lard/oil can be stored in an open clay jar, but put in the fridge if not in use. Stir-Frying Get all the ingredients and other items ready. Heat up the wok. When it is hot, add about 2-4 tablespoons of pork oil (depending on how much noodles you are cooking), and wait till it starts smoking. Then add the garlic; and when the garlic sizzles (it will just be a few seconds before it does), add the pork slices and fry briskly; and when the pork slices are brown and cooked (it will just be about 30 seconds before they do) toss in the choy sum. Remember to keep stirring. When the leafy green (but not the white stems) of the choy sum has shrunk, add in the Hokkien noodles and stir briskly to uncomb or loosen out the noodles. Add the dark honey soy sauce and light soy sauce and mix to coat the noodles. Add more dark honey soy sauce if the colour isnt dark enough. Add a small cup of the pork or chicken stock. Adjust for taste by adding more dark honey soy sauce (for sweetness) or light soy sauce (for saltiness). Add in a couple of tablespoons of the watery cornflour paste and stir the noodles and toss the wok (if you know how) until the sauce has thickened and the noodles are coated in the dark gooey gravy. Add a small handful of bak yu poh and do a final stir-fry before serving. Eat with diced chilli in soya sauce as a condiment. Nasi Lemak - Recipe from malaysianfamousrecipes.blogspot.com Nasi Lemak is Malaysia's No 1 Delicacy. It is considered as a balance diet food as it contains protein, fat, fibre, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals. In Malaysia people never get bored eating nasi lemak even if they were to have it everyday Rice Ingredients 2 cups of rice 1cup of coconut milk 1 pandan or screwpine leave 1 inch ginger (cut into strips) a pinch of salt Sambal or Gravy Ingredients 5 big onions -sliced 4 of the onions 1 bowl grinded dried chilli. Cut the dried chillies into pieces and boil, then drain and put aside. 4 pieces of garlic 1 large tomato Condiments
2 hard boiled eggs (cut into half or quarters) 1/2 cucumber sliced 1/2 cup crispy fried anchovies 1/2 cup fried peanuts Rice Preparation Wash and drain 2 cups of rice. You will need 3 cups of water to cook 2 cups of rice. However replace 1 cup of water with coconut milk i.e. use 2 cups of water and 1 cup of coconut milk. Add ginger and salt. Tie the pandan or screwpine leaf in a knot and drop in the rice cooker. Cook the rice as you would steam-boil rice. You will detect the beautiful aroma of pandan and coconut as the rice is cooking. Sambal Preparation. Add one onion (cut into large cubes), the garlic and tomato into a blender. Add the ground chilli and blend all the ingredients together until the texture is smooth. Heat oil in a pan and add the 4 sliced onions. Sautee the onions till golden brown and add the smooth blended chilli paste and fry this until the paste becomes a reddish brown colour. Add a little more oil if the paste is too dry. Add the crispy fried anchovies, a little water, and some salt and tamarind juice. Check and if the taste is to your liking, the sambal is ready. Serving Put rice in a small bowl, press and overturn bowl onto a plate. Your rice will be moulded by the small bowl. Add sambal, sliced cucumber, fried peanuts, hard-boiled egg and crispy anchovies. Enjoy! You can have nasi lemak at any time of the day, breakfast, lunch, dinner or supper. Yee Sung An Original Recipe by Not Quite Nigella Yee Sung salad symbolises abundance, prosperity and good health and is eaten on the 7th day of the Chinese New Year. The fun is in the tossing of the salad. Just dont forget to toss deep and toss high as the higher you toss, the greater your luck and fortune! Feeds 4-6 people as part of a banquet Salad 1/2 sweet potato peeled 1 cucumber peeled and seeded 1/2 daikon white radish 1/4 pomelo or substitute with pink grapefruit 250grams sashimi salmon, sliced in bite sized pieces 1/4 bunch fresh coriander/cilantro 1 packet of jellyfish 2 tablespoons Japanese red pickled ginger strips
Iceberg lettuce Won Ton pastry sheets Deep-Fried vermicelli noodles Sauce: 250g plum sauce 2 tablespoons lime juice 2 tablespoons sesame oil 1 tablespoon sesame seeds, toasted 1 tablespoon apricot jam 2 tablespoons honey A pinch of five spice powder 1. Deep fry the vermicelli and won ton pastry sheets. Set aside. 2. Shred all vegetables and arrange in a large platter in separate but touching piles. Leave space in the centre for the jellyfish and salmon slices. 2. Mix sauce ingredients together to make a dressing. 3. Just before serving, place jellyfish and salmon in the centre and arrange won ton pastry around the edge or on top. 4.Pour sauce and have everyone toss the salad high with chopsticks.

Night Moves and Manoevres

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Night Moves and Manoeuvres

Night Moves and Manoeuvres /VC/03/07/11

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