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.
senior clerk at a shipping agency
her husband, in his family's rice firm
her father, a cloth merchant
her mother, who runs the firm's institutional accounts
On 12 February the Housing and Development Board launches the Home Ownership for the People Scheme. The PAP contests the Malaysian federal election of 25 April and wins one seat, Bangsar, angering the Alliance in Kuala Lumpur.
On 21 July, during a procession for the Prophet Muhammad's birthday that set out from the Padang, violence between Malays and Chinese breaks out near Victoria Street and spreads to Bugis, Geylang and elsewhere. An islandwide curfew is imposed that night and not fully lifted until 2 August; 23 people die and 454 are injured. On 2 September the murder of a Malay trishaw rider in Geylang Serai sets off a second riot; 13 die, and a curfew runs from 4 to 11 September.
Confrontation with Indonesia continues: Indonesian trade stays cut, there are bomb blasts, and from 13 August a sea curfew bans night fishing.
Mei Lin is 24, married since November 1961 to Teo Kah Leong (30), in his father's rice business at Boat Quay; since May 1962 she has kept the books of a shipping agent. Tan Cheng Huat is 56 and Lim Swee Neo is 49. Median household income for the peer group is about $240 a month.
Sources
- Wikipedia: 1964 in Singapore; 1964 race riots in Singapore.
- BiblioAsia (NLB), 'Konfrontasi: Singapore's Experience of an Undeclared War'.
Behind the dice How likely was each thing that happened? (Spoilers)
Nothing in Life Story is chosen by a writer. Each person's year is a set of rolls, weighted by their stats and their times; the story is written afterwards to fit what the dice decided.
| Who | What the dice decided | Result | Chance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tan Mei Lin | After she untangles a Dutch line's freight account, her employer makes her senior clerk. | yes | 59% |
| Teo Kah Leong | The upriver dealer's shop shuttered and padlocked: gone to Johor, owing more than Kah Leong's year. | money trouble | 8% |
| Teo Kah Leong | Kah Leong, eyes on the tablecloth, asks Mei Lin for a loan from her own money. | yes | 45% |
| Tan Mei Lin | In the kitchen she tells Kah Leong she is expecting; he grips the table edge. | expecting | 13% |
| Tan Mei Lin | The July riot and curfew: the radio orders everyone indoors; in the curfew breaks, women queue at the market as prices climb. | prices | 8% |
| Tan Mei Lin | Mei Lin, senior clerk, shows the new junior clerk the ledgers. | picked | 97% |
| Tan Mei Lin | A furious Dutch shipping agent climbs the stairs; an hour later he leaves with his account right. | recognition | 12% |
| Tan Mei Lin | Cheng Huat writes her a cheque at the round table, on terms that are not terms at all. | kin loan | 15% |
| Tan Cheng Huat | After four flat years the godown is busy again: orders back, bales going out. | yes | 40% |
| Teo Kah Leong | In front of the elder brother, Kah Leong's father gives him the upriver dealers. | yes | 19% |
| Tan Mei Lin | Neighbours squint at an official notice in the stairwell about the street's future. | housing notice | 5% |
| Tan Mei Lin | Curfew days: Kah Leong teaches her a Hokkien card game and cheats; she lets him. | close | 55% |
| Tan Cheng Huat | During the curfews Cheng Huat pays the clerks and coolies from his own savings. | cushion | 9% |
| Lim Swee Neo | Swee Neo wins a seventh account: a government department's canteen. | yes | 41% |
| Lim Swee Neo | The Orchard Road doctor listens to Swee Neo's chest for a long time. | good doctor | 16% |
| Tan Cheng Huat | Riau traders' boats still carry the firm's cloth across the strait. | no | 86% |
| Tan Cheng Huat | The godown shut for the curfews, and little lost. | no | 67% |
| Tan Cheng Huat | Cheng Huat and Swee Neo together over the account books at the round table, as in the firm's first years. | closeness | 10% |
| Lim Swee Neo | Swee Neo in Mei Lin's old room, missing her. | misses daughter | 8% |
| Tan Mei Lin | Mei Lin well all year, at her desk through both curfews' working days. | no | over 99% |
| Tan Mei Lin | The flat's accounts: tight after the loan, but nothing owing. | no | 91% |
| Tan Mei Lin | No hard conversation goes unsaid between them this year. | no | 81% |
| Tan Mei Lin | Mei Lin alive at the year's end. | no | over 99% |
| Tan Cheng Huat | Cheng Huat well all year. | no | 97% |
| Tan Cheng Huat | Cheng Huat alive at the year's end. | no | over 99% |
| Lim Swee Neo | Swee Neo coughing but not seriously ill. | no | 96% |
| Lim Swee Neo | Swee Neo alive at the year's end. | no | over 99% |
| Teo Kah Leong | Kah Leong well all year. | no | 95% |
| Teo Kah Leong | Kah Leong alive at the year's end. | no | over 99% |
| Teo Kah Leong | Money and standing make no particular difference to Kah Leong this year. | none | 22% |
| Tan Cheng Huat | Every customer pays. | no | 87% |
Show as a table
| Year | Household a month | Peer median | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1941 | $504 | $42 | 12.0× |
| 1942 | $82 | $42 | 2.0× |
| 1943 | $148 | $42 | 3.5× |
| 1944 | $204 | $42 | 4.9× |
| 1945 | $815 | $120 | 6.8× |
| 1946 | $1,114 | $150 | 7.4× |
| 1947 | $1,094 | $155 | 7.1× |
| 1948 | $1,072 | $160 | 6.7× |
| 1949 | $1,051 | $165 | 6.4× |
| 1950 | $1,691 | $170 | 9.9× |
| 1951 | $1,753 | $175 | 10.0× |
| 1952 | $1,901 | $180 | 10.6× |
| 1953 | $1,841 | $185 | 10.0× |
| 1954 | $1,791 | $190 | 9.4× |
| 1955 | $1,838 | $195 | 9.4× |
| 1956 | $2,083 | $200 | 10.4× |
| 1957 | $2,298 | $205 | 11.2× |
| 1958 | $2,390 | $210 | 11.4× |
| 1959 | $2,841 | $215 | 13.2× |
| 1960 | $3,164 | $220 | 14.4× |
| 1961 | $2,000 | $225 | 8.9× |
| 1962 | $2,401 | $230 | 10.4× |
| 1963 | $2,453 | $235 | 10.4× |
| 1964 | $2,418 | $240 | 10.1× |
Nominal dollars; the engine's model estimate, the same figure as each issue's money line.
The chapter in prose
1964: The Curfew
In 1964 race riots break out in Singapore in July and again in September, and the island is put under curfew. Mei Lin, 24, is made senior clerk at the shipping agency, with a junior clerk under her at last. Kah Leong's father gives him more of the rice business, and with it a dealer's debt that goes bad; Kah Leong asks Mei Lin for a loan from her own money, and her father quietly lends the rest. A notice on the block puts their street's future in question. By the end of the year she is expecting their first child, due in 1965. At the Tan house the firm grows for the first time in five years, the curfews cost it little, and Lim Swee Neo wins a seventh account and sees a private doctor about her cough. Nobody is seriously ill.
Senior Clerk
In April a Dutch line's agent came up the stairs in a temper about a freight account that had been wrong for a year, and went down again an hour later with the account right and a different temper. Her employer had listened from his own room. The next week he told her he had found the money after all: there would be a junior clerk, and she would be senior clerk over him, at a wage that was now more than the bank had ever paid her.
The junior was a boy of eighteen from a Chinese school, quick with an abacus and frightened of the telephone. She taught him the ledgers the way the bank had taught her, and the telephone the way nobody had.
The Upriver Debt
In the spring Kah Leong's father gave him the upriver dealers to manage, with a share of their trade, and said it in front of the elder brother, which was the part Kah Leong repeated to her twice.
In June one of those dealers, the same man whose payments had come late the year before, shut his shop and went to Johor owing the Teo firm more than Kah Leong's share of a year's profit. His father held him to the loss. For a week he came home late and ate without speaking, and then one evening he sat down across from her and asked, looking at the tablecloth, whether she would lend him something from the shophouse money her father had settled on her.
She said yes before he had finished asking. It was not enough, and she did not tell him that she went to her father on the Sunday. Cheng Huat asked only how much, and wrote the cheque at the round table, on terms that were not terms at all. Kah Leong found out in October and said nothing about it, and the next Sunday he went with her to her parents' house for the first time in months.
The Curfew
On the evening of the twenty-first of July the trouble broke out along the route of the procession that had set out from the Padang, and by nightfall the radio was telling everyone to stay indoors. They stayed in the flat for most of the next twelve days, as everyone did, going out only in the hours the curfew was lifted, to queue at the market with the rest of the block. The prices there were higher every time, and the women in the queue talked about nothing else, because it was the one thing that could safely be talked about. In September it happened again, and the shutters came down again for a week.
In the curfew days they played cards, and Kah Leong taught her a Hokkien game she had never learned, and cheated, and she let him.
In the same month a notice went up in the stairwell from the authorities about the future of the street, which might be widened, or cleared, or neither. Nobody in the block could make out which, and the landlord said it would come to nothing.
In October she knew that she was expecting. She told Kah Leong in the kitchen, and he held on to the edge of the table, and then went out, at nine at night, and came back with a tin of Ovaltine and a bag of oranges, as if she were ill, and they sat on the stairs and ate the oranges.
A Good Year at Last
After four flat years the Tan firm grew. The orders that had held back since merger came in, no debt went bad, and the Riau traders went on carrying the firm's cloth across the strait through a second year of Confrontation. The curfews shut the godown for the better part of three weeks in all. Cheng Huat paid the clerks and the coolies for every day of it from what he had put by, and lost very little trade.
Swee Neo won a seventh account, the canteen of a government department. In the autumn her cough came back, and this time she went on her own to the Orchard Road doctor she had sent her husband to, who listened to her chest for a long time and gave her a bottle of something brown and told her to stop going down to the godown in the rain.
The house was quieter than ever with Mei Lin gone, and she missed her daughter more than she said. In the evenings she and Cheng Huat sat together over the account books at the round table, as they had in the first years of the firm.
On the last night of the year she told her parents, at the round table, and her father put down his chopsticks and said nothing at all for a long moment, and then asked whether the flat had room for a cot, and her mother said that of course it did, and began, at once, to cry.