1959: The Photograph

In 1959 Singapore elects its own government, and the Tan household goes on much as before. Nineteen-year-old Mei Lin works well at school, sits the School Certificate in November, and will not know her result until the new year. Before the examination the manager of her mother's bank offers her a post in the bank, if she passes. The rice merchant's family from Boat Quay comes back with its proposal. This time her parents meet them, and a studio photograph of Mei Lin is taken to send. Nothing is agreed. The firm grows for a fourth year. Lim Swee Neo wins another account, and the clan association lends them money to take a second godown. She and Tan Cheng Huat quarrel over that loan. A specialist sees him about his heart and finds nothing to worry about. Nobody in the family is seriously ill.

The Examination

She worked that year as she had worked at nothing since the books. The mistresses, who had taken her on the bursar's word, began by spring to speak of her as one of the two or three in the class who would do well, and the headmistress, meeting Swee Neo at the prize-giving, said that she had not been wrong about the girl. Mei Lin was still the oldest by three years and still did not quite have a friend among them. It did not trouble her as much as she had expected.

She sat the School Certificate in the last weeks of November, in the school hall, with the fans turning and the invigilator walking between the desks: English, mathematics, history, geography, the Bible, and a paper of commercial arithmetic that she finished with forty minutes to spare. The results would come out from Cambridge in the new year. Until then there was nothing to do but wait.

In October, before the examination, the manager of her mother's bank, who had watched her grow up across his desk, told Swee Neo that the bank was taking on local girls as clerks now and that if her daughter passed, there would be a place for her. Swee Neo told Mei Lin, and Mei Lin told no one, and kept the firm's books in the evenings as she always had.

Outside, the island elected its own government in May, and her parents queued at the polling station because the law now said they must. The new men came in, and the household was overlooked by the worst of what her father had feared. At home it was a quiet year.

The Photograph

In July the go-between came back. The rice merchant's family in Boat Quay had not found anyone they liked better for their second son, who was twenty-five now and had gone into his father's business, and they asked whether, the girl's studies being nearly over, the Tans would think of it again.

This time her parents did. There was a dinner at a restaurant in Chinatown, the two families at a round table, the young man across from her, polite and heavy and talking mostly to her father about the price of rice in Rangoon. Mei Lin said very little. Afterwards, as was the custom, a photograph was wanted, and she was taken to a studio in Hill Street and made to sit for an hour under the lamps. Her mother made a treat of it, with tea at the Cathay afterwards and a film.

Nothing was agreed. Her parents said that they would wait for the examination, and the rice merchant's family said that they would wait too, and the photograph went to Boat Quay in an envelope.

The Second Godown

The election that frightened half the merchants on the island did not touch the firm. No customer held back, none failed to pay, and the firm grew for the fourth year running. Swee Neo won a fourth institutional account, for a government school's uniforms.

There was more cloth than the godown would hold, and Swee Neo went to the clan association, where her husband sat on the committee, and arranged a loan on easy terms to take a second godown in the next street. She did it properly this time and told him first. They quarrelled anyway, for most of a week, about the loan and about her brother's loan the year before and about who ran the firm, and it ended as their quarrels did now, with nothing said and the second godown taken.

In the spring Cheng Huat had a fluttering in his chest that frightened him, and he went, for the first time in his life, to a specialist, an Englishman with rooms in Orchard Road who listened to his heart for a long time and told him that it was nothing, that he should walk more and smoke less. He walked more. And in the autumn there was a small piece of good news: his younger brother in Malacca wrote to say that his son had won a scholarship to the university in Kuala Lumpur.

The photograph came back from the studio in Hill Street in a card frame, and Mei Lin, who had sat for it in her mother's jade earrings and a cheongsam she disliked, thought that the girl in it looked like someone who had already decided, and wondered what.

Household income about $2,841 a month, against a peer median of $215: 13.2 times the median (nominal dollars; a model estimate).

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