1948: The Teacher Notices

In 1948 eight-year-old Mei Lin is laid up for a spell with coughs and sores, and her teacher notices how quickly she catches up. Her father's trade stalls under the weight of competition, but the street around them fills with new paint and new shops, and he and Lim Swee Neo grow closer. Swee Neo is woken by the old fear at night. Mei Lin does not work outside school, and nobody in the family is seriously ill.

The Teacher Notices

She was out of school for three weeks in the wet season. It was nothing the doctor would put a name to: a cough that sat in her chest and would not shift, and a crop of small sores on her shins that the servant dressed each morning with a bitter yellow paste. She lay on the mat in the back room and listened to the rain on the zinc, and made up stories about the people in the street whose voices she could hear.

When she went back the teacher looked at her over the top of the register, said nothing about the empty weeks, and gave her the book. She was behind by three weeks of sums. By the end of the second morning she was not behind, and the teacher, handing back the slates, stopped at her bench and turned hers over, and turned it back.

It was not praise. It was a look, held a little too long, and a question the next day about whether she had been taught at home. She said her mother had taught her the characters. The teacher nodded and said, "And the figures?" and Mei Lin said she had learned those by herself, from her father's book, and the teacher wrote something down.

She had no work that year but school and the chores of the house. On the afternoons that were not hot she sat at the front step with her slate, and the street went by.

New Paint

The street changed that year in a way you could smell. Shop after shop put up its shutters on a new coat of paint, red or green or a pale cream, and the eating-house on the corner got a second oven and a hired man to stand at the door. Cheng Huat noticed the paint before he noticed the customers. The customers were what he had not got.

His table did the same trade as the year before, a little less. A cloth-seller two streets away had a godown and a bank behind him and was undercutting everyone, and Cheng Huat, who knew his figures better than any man in the row, could not match him and did not try. He went once more to the men with credit and was told, politely, to come back when the Emergency had settled. He did not know when that would be. The radio talked about it every night. He turned it down.

What he did get that year, without having looked for it, was his wife. They had been tired together for so long that it took him a while to see what had changed. She sat with him at the table in the evenings while he did the accounts. She read the figures back to him as he wrote them. She did not offer comfort, and he did not ask for it, but there was a lamp on the table and two of them in its light, and that was more than they had had in some time.

The Lamp in the Passage

The fear came back to Swee Neo at night. It had been waiting, she supposed, until the days were safe enough to leave room for it. It did not come as a memory. It came as a sound in the house after midnight, a footstep or a latch, and she would be sitting up in the dark with her heart going before she knew she had woken.

Nothing was ever there. Cheng Huat slept through it, or let her think he did. In the morning she was brisk with the servant and gentle with the child, and nobody would have said anything was the matter.

She did very little sewing. She told herself it was the wrist. Some afternoons she sat with the basket on her knees and looked at the window and did not take up the needle, and some afternoons she did.

She did not tell anyone about the nights. She lit the lamp in the passage on the last of them, and left it, and in the morning she found that someone had trimmed the wick.

On the last night of the year Swee Neo lit the lamp and left it burning in the passage, a thing she had stopped doing in 1946, and went to bed without explaining why.

Household income about $1,072 a month, against a peer median of $160: 6.7 times the median (nominal dollars; a model estimate).

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