1961: The Registry

In 1961, the year of the Women's Charter, Mei Lin marries Teo Kah Leong, the rice merchant's second son from Boat Quay, to whom she has been engaged since 1960. Over the year she finds that she likes him. The Teos are comfortable but less well off than the Tans, and the young couple take a home of their own instead of moving in with his parents. Before the wedding she leaves the bank, where the manager had just praised her work in front of the room. The Tan firm has a second flat year. Lim Swee Neo wins a fifth account, but borrows from her brother again to help pay for the wedding, and her old cough comes back. Tan Cheng Huat takes on his Malacca cousin's boy at the firm. With their daughter gone, he and Swee Neo are closer than they have been in years. Nobody is seriously ill.

The Last Months at the Bank

In the spring a shipping agent's account that had defeated two clerks before her came to her desk, and she found the difference that nobody else had found, a sum entered twice in two currencies in 1959. The manager said so aloud, in front of the room, which he did not often do.

She gave in her notice all the same, a month before the wedding. When the girls at the next desks asked her why, she said that she would be busy, which was true.

The Registry

It was a year in which she got to know the man she was going to marry, and found, a little to her surprise, that she liked him. Teo Kah Leong was heavy and slow to speak, and in front of her father he talked about rice. Alone, on the walks their mothers allowed them along the Esplanade, he talked about Hong Kong, where he had been at school, and asked her what she was reading, and listened to the answer.

At home that spring the worry over the firm filled the house. Her father was pleased about one thing only: in April Ong Eng Guan, whom the PAP had thrown out, won back Hong Lim from them, and Cheng Huat, who had not voted for him, said at dinner that the Chinatown people were not fools.

The wedding was in November. Under the new Charter it began at the Registry of Marriages, with the two families on hard chairs and a clerk who mispronounced her name, and went on at the Teos' house and the Tans' with the tea ceremony, the bowing and a banquet that her father paid for half of. The Teos, she learned that year, were comfortable but not as well off as her own family. Her father noticed it and her mother pretended not to. A married son usually lived under his parents' roof, but the couple took a flat of their own, and she moved her books into it in the week after the wedding.

Within a month of the wedding, poorer cousins of both families began to come to the new flat, one at a time, with small requests, as they came to the well-off. She gave more than she had meant to from what she had saved at the bank.

The Cousin's Boy

The firm had a second flat year. No debt went bad and none of the year's many strikes touched its goods, but it did not grow either. Swee Neo won a fifth institutional account, and in the summer a share in a property that Cheng Huat had kept through everything began to pay a steady sum.

In March he took on his Malacca cousin's boy, as his brother had asked, and put him under the old clerk.

The wedding cost more than the firm could spare in a flat year, and Swee Neo went to her elder brother again and borrowed, on the same easy terms as before. That autumn her old tiredness came back, and with it a cough that would not go, as it had after the war.

With the girl gone from the house, she and Cheng Huat were closer that winter than they had been for years. They ate alone together at the round table and did not mind the quiet.

On the first night in the flat she unpacked her books before her clothes, and Kah Leong, watching from the door, asked whether she had read all of them, and when she said yes, he said, slowly, as if it had just been decided, that they would need another shelf.

Household income about $2,000 a month, against a peer median of $225: 8.9 times the median (nominal dollars; a model estimate).

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