1963: The Bangkok Letters

In 1963 Singapore leaves British rule and joins Malaysia, and the year is loud with arrests, rallies, flags and an election. Mei Lin, 23 and in her second year at the shipping agent's office, has a steady year. Her husband Teo Kah Leong asks her to write the English letters for his father's rice firm, and she does. For a few months the money from the rice firm comes late, and their savings carry them. There is still no baby, and her mother-in-law has begun to ask. At the Tan house the firm holds steady, and Indonesia's trade cut in September costs it little. Lim Swee Neo wins a sixth institutional account and is asked onto a clan committee, and she worries over her brother's wife. Tan Cheng Huat has a giddy spell in the hot months and sees a good doctor. Nobody is seriously ill.

The Bangkok Letters

At the agency it was an ordinary year. The ledgers balanced at the month's end, the letters to Rotterdam and Kobe went out on the right boats, and her employer, who had begun the year by saying that he might need a second clerk under her, ended it without having found the money for one. She did not ask him about it.

In March Kah Leong came home with a bundle of letters from a rice house in Bangkok and put them on the table beside her plate. His father's clerk wrote Chinese well and English badly, and the Bangkok house had begun to answer in English. Would she, he asked, look at them? She looked at them that evening and wrote the replies on the Sunday, and after that the bundle came every fortnight. He carried the replies back to Boat Quay himself and did not tell his father who had written them, and she did not ask him to.

In the middle of the year the money from the rice firm came late, two months running. Kah Leong said that his father was waiting on a debt from a dealer upriver, and that it would come. They paid the amah and the rent from what they had put by since the wedding, and when the money came in August they put it back. She knew that a poorer household would have gone to a moneylender, and she did not mention it to him.

The Second Year

It was a steady year between them, of the kind that is hard to describe afterwards. He still woke first. She still read at the table.

There was still no baby, and now her mother-in-law asked. She asked at the New Year visit and at the Teo dinners after it, and once she brought a packet of herbs from a medicine shop in Chinatown and gave it to Mei Lin in front of the other daughters-in-law. Mei Lin thanked her and put it in the kitchen cupboard. Kah Leong saw it there and said nothing about it, and she was grateful.

The year's great events went past the flat without coming in. In February she read in the paper of the arrests before dawn, the names of men she had never met. In August the crowds walked down to the Padang to demand the blood debt from Japan, and on that Sunday she watched them pass the end of their road. In September there were flags on every shophouse in Boat Quay and an election five days after Malaysia Day, and she and Kah Leong voted, and this time neither of them asked the other what they had put.

The Sixth Account

The Tan firm held steady for a fourth year. No customer failed it, and when Indonesia cut off its trade with Singapore in September, the firm lost little: the cloth that had gone to Indonesian buyers had mostly gone through traders in the Riau islands, and they went on trading. Cheng Huat read the newspapers about the ruined entrepot trade and checked his order book, and found that it was not his.

In the spring Swee Neo won a sixth institutional account, a mission hospital that wanted bed linen. In the autumn the women's section of their clan association asked her onto its committee. She went to the first meeting in her best kebaya and came home and told Cheng Huat, at length, what was wrong with how they kept their accounts.

In the hot months he had a giddy spell in the godown and sat down on a bale until it passed. Swee Neo would not let him go back to the old Chinatown physician, and sent him instead to a doctor in Orchard Road with a waiting room full of Europeans. The doctor found nothing that he could name and told him to rest in the afternoons. He did, for a month.

In October her elder brother wrote that his wife had been taken into hospital, and did not say with what. Swee Neo went to see her twice before the year ended. She came back each time quieter than she had gone.

On the night of the sixteenth of September they stood at the window of the flat and looked at the lights strung along the river, and Kah Leong said that they lived in a different country now, and she said that it was the same flat, and he said that was what he meant.

Household income about $2,453 a month, against a peer median of $235: 10.4 times the median (nominal dollars; a model estimate).

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