1962: The Shipping Office

In 1962, Mei Lin's first year of marriage, Singapore votes for merger with Malaysia. For the first months she keeps house in the new flat. Then the shipping agent whose account she untangled at the bank offers her a post in his office, and she takes it, on a little less than the bank had paid. Her wage and the rent from a share her father settled on her at the wedding come into the young household. She and Kah Leong have a season of real closeness. Kah Leong has a piece of bad news from Hong Kong. There is no baby yet. At the Tan house the firm has a third flat year. Lim Swee Neo borrows from her brother once more, and the two of them quarrel about it. Tan Cheng Huat loses a consignment to damp and is asked onto a temple committee. Nobody is seriously ill.

The Shipping Office

For the first months of the year she kept house. There was an amah who came in the mornings, the market, and the accounts of a household so small that they took her ten minutes a week. She was good at it and it was not enough.

In May the shipping agent whose tangled account she had put right at the bank came to the flat, with her old manager's permission and a box of oranges, and asked whether she would keep his office's books. It was a post, not a favour: a desk by the window above the river, the agency's ledgers and its letters to Rotterdam and Kobe, and a wage a little below what the bank had paid. Kah Leong said that it was for her to decide, and she decided in a day.

The same spring, the share of rent from a shophouse that her father had settled on her at the wedding began to come in each quarter. Between that and her wage the flat was easier than either family had expected.

The Flat

It was a good year between them. They learned each other's habits in the small flat: that he woke early and she late, that he liked the radio and she did not, that they could sit in the same room for an evening, she with a book and he with the rice prices, and both be content. There was no baby that year, and nobody but her mother-in-law asked.

In June a letter came from Hong Kong to say that a school friend of Kah Leong's, the one he had written to every year since he left, had died there of a fever. He did not speak for most of an evening, and then told her about the school, the hill it stood on and the boy, more than he had told her about anything.

At the Mid-Autumn Festival the whole block hung lanterns along the corridors, and the children ran up and down the stairs with them until midnight. At the market, prices were up again, and she noticed it now that the money was hers to manage. His father did not give him more of the business that year, and he did not ask.

A Third Flat Year

The Tan firm had a third flat year. No customer failed it and the referendum did not frighten the orders away, but it did not grow, and Swee Neo won no new account. In the rains a consignment of printed cotton in the second godown took the damp and had to be sold off cheap.

Swee Neo went once more to her elder brother, who lent as easily as ever, and this time Cheng Huat found out from the brother before she told him. They quarrelled about it for a week, about the brother and the loans and the second godown, which had never been full.

In the autumn the committee of a temple in their district asked him to join it, and he did. Mei Lin came on Sundays, and he no longer brought her the figures.

On the morning of the referendum she and Kah Leong walked to the polling station together and voted, and walking back he asked her what she had put, and she said that it was a secret ballot, and he laughed, which he did not often do, all the way home.

Household income about $2,401 a month, against a peer median of $230: 10.4 times the median (nominal dollars; a model estimate).

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