1943: Small Goods

In 1943, the third year of the war for the Tan family and the second under Japanese rule in Syonan-to, Tan Cheng Huat finds a way to earn again without a firm. He buys and sells small goods, and takes a careful share in a scarce-goods trade he would once have refused. Lim Swee Neo sews and sells at home, and gets worrying news of a relative. Fever and hunger-sickness run through the neighbourhood and the household is spared. Their three-year-old daughter, Mei Lin, has a quiet year.

The Fever Street

The fever came to the street in the dry months, house by house. It started two doors down, with a child nobody had worried about, and by the end of the week there were four houses with their shutters closed at midday. Someone said it was the water. Someone else said it was what people were eating, or not eating. A man who had been a clerk at a shipping office before the surrender died of it in his own back room, and the neighbours put what they could together for the funeral.

Lim Swee Neo boiled the water twice and kept Mei Lin indoors. The house did not take the fever. She did not know why, and she did not feel lucky; she felt like someone who has been let off a debt and does not trust the paper.

Mei Lin did not understand why she could not go to the neighbours' door. She was three. She sat on the floor of the front room with the old tin lid and a wooden spoon and a row of rice cakes made of nothing, and announced that she was selling them, two for a cent, and her mother paid for the whole row with imaginary coins and was handed the spoon as change.

It was, for the child, a quiet year. She was never ill enough that anyone sent for the doctor.

Small Goods

Tan Cheng Huat had spent his life selling cloth by the bolt to people who had known what they wanted. The year taught him to sell things by the handful to people who would take whatever there was.

He did it the way he did everything, with a ledger. He had no godown now and no clerk. He kept a narrow book in his inside pocket, in which he wrote down what he had bought and from whom, what he had sold and for how much, and on the next line what it would cost him to replace it, which was never what he had sold it for. The figures were bigger every month, and meant less. He wrote them anyway.

Mid-year a man he knew a little, from before the war, offered him a place in a trade that moved scarce goods without the military administration's knowledge. It was not a large place, and the man did not pretend it was safe. Cheng Huat said he would think about it. He thought about it for two evenings, at the table, in front of his wife, and then took it, on terms he made as small as the man would allow. He did not describe it to her afterwards, and she did not ask him to.

He was home before the curfew on every night but two. On those nights she sat up with the lamp turned down, her hands in her lap, and did not mend anything.

Needle and Pot

Swee Neo began to sew for other people. It was not announced. A neighbour with a torn sleeve left it at the door and returned for it with a few cents, and a week later brought her sister's. By the middle of the year she had a basket by the window and a regular set of women who knew her name and did not ask whose daughter she was.

She also cooked more than the household needed. The surplus went out the back door in a covered pot, to someone who could pay for it and had said they would, and sometimes did. It was money that came in small pieces, and she saw it that way: not as a salary, but as a way of keeping the days from being nothing.

Word came that autumn of a relative's trouble. It reached her by way of a woman at the market, and arrived without any detail she could do anything about. She told Cheng Huat the part she could say out loud. She kept the rest, and went on with the mending, and when Mei Lin came to lean on her knee she stopped and let her.

At night he counted the day's takings onto the table, a few notes and some coins, and she put the notes in the tin before either of them could change their mind about what they were worth.

Household income about $148 a month, against a peer median of $42: 3.5 times the median (nominal dollars; a model estimate).

The comic of this issue is still at the drawing board.