The Moonlight Palace (10 page)

I must have done especially well by the milliner, for a few weeks later I found on my desk at the
Singapore Gate
a hatbox emblazoned with gold letters, and inside, a small green cloche covered with blue pansies. I wore that hat everywhere, and wrote afterward with even more deliberation and care, but the miracle was never repeated.

The managing editor of the
Singapore Gate
was a Mr. Williams, who always signed himself
Mr. Wms
, as if he could not be bothered to write out his own name. He was Mr. Singh’s opposite—large, bulky, blond, and brusque. His hands were neatly manicured, and he smelled chokingly of men’s cologne. Every word he spoke he issued at full volume; he seemed to be in a perpetual state of rage. His tantrums were legendary. I stayed as far away from him as possible—but complete avoidance was not to be had.

One day, he collared me in the hall and thrust into my face half a recipe for chicken salad, then told me to finish it and have it ready by the next afternoon. The recipe broke off midway. I scanned it anxiously.

“Where is the other half?” I asked.

“Lost!” he barked. His eyebrows were like two enormous, angry yellow caterpillars. “Can you do this or not?” It was not a question but an accusation. I never felt he approved of my being allowed in the office at all. I was, to that point, the sole woman writing at the
Singapore Gate
, morning
or
evening edition. I must forge my own destiny, I told myself, unconsciously echoing things that Geoffrey had told me. I nodded.

“Tomorrow, then. It’s too late for tonight’s paper.”

“I’m not familiar with chicken salad,” I said.

“Ask your mother,” he growled.

If I admitted that I was a motherless girl who could not cook, I could have lost the job entirely.

So I brought the scrap of the recipe home sheepishly to Nei-Nei Down. She scowled at it and made her disparaging
Tschuck!
sound at the list of ingredients. “Celery!” she scoffed. “Reasonable people do not like their meat dishes to crunch like bones.”

“But we must follow the recipe,” I begged. “Chicken Salad for an Elegant Luncheon.”

She rolled her eyes. “Elegant. A salad made of bird and mayonnaise.” But she took pity on me, as usual. “We will add a few things and salvage the dish,” she said. “We will do this Singapore-style.”

That is what I renamed the dish: Chicken Salad for an Elegant Luncheon, Singapore-style.

The recipe proved surprisingly popular. It provoked an unsolicited letter to the editor praising the long-overdue acknowledgement of Singapore cuisine, a letter Mr. Singh was only too glad to publish. Heretofore, the
Singapore Gate
, like all other popular Singapore newspapers and magazines of the 1920s, had limited itself to British recipes and British dishes. The letter writer had signed off,
A Champion of Singaporean Cuisine and Culture
.

Mr. Singh was pleased enough to ask me to contribute another recipe, Singapore-style. Nei-Nei Down obliged with Flattened Fried Chicken, Singapore-style. This drew three letters to the editor—two from housewives arguing politely with the frying method, and another glowing encomium from our Champion of Singaporean Cuisine and Culture.

Not since the Singapore Mutiny of 1915 had the
Singapore Gate
received three letters on a single subject. Mr. Singh took this as a public referendum, and from then on Singapore Style became my regular column. The recipes were all Nei-Nei Down’s, and she seldom earned fewer than two or three responses from our readers. Her recipe for Chicken Rice, Singapore-style, drew eight replies, half of them offering alternative recipes. When it came to food and Singaporeans, it seemed we had struck a nerve. Our Champion remained our most loyal correspondent, but the public’s interest was stirred.

Geoffrey was also impressed by my new success as a social columnist. He had a great respect—almost too great—for public opinion. “You are as the world sees you,” he declared more than once.

Mr. Singh raised my salary from $7.75 Straits dollars to $8.00. I shared my rise in pay with the true author of Singapore Style. At first, Nei-Nei Down tried to refuse all payment. I explained that I would never have achieved the magnificent sum of $8.00 per week without her culinary aid. She was unmoved until I threatened to resign from the newspaper and close down the food column altogether.

“If that happens, all of Singapore will mourn,” said Uncle Chachi, who now interested himself intensely in everything relating to the
Singapore Gate
evening edition. He reported, for instance, that at both his Singapore Gentleman’s Club and the Lion’s Head Business Club, the Singapore Style column often went missing, a sure sign of its success. He suspected that an influential member of the Lion’s Head might be our secret Champion of Singaporean Cuisine and Culture. “You have friends in high places,” Uncle Chachi said. “You must not resign.”

“It would be a great loss,” I agreed.

Only then did Nei-Nei Down accept the four dollars I bore home for her each week. It was the first money she had ever earned after marriage, she informed me. She treated the Straits dollars as she would have treated fine linen. She hand-ironed each bill individually and kept them in a cedar-lined box. Never would she have spent a King George V half-cent coin if I had not coaxed and begged and teased and tormented her. When I accused her of being tightfisted, she broke down and bought a few things for the household—never for herself. Mostly, of course, she used it for British Grandfather, though his failing health seemed far beyond her meager reach. Still, she spent it on herbs and medicinals, on remedies, and even on occasional visits from a local Hindu healer. This man was very famous among the Hindi in Singapore. His skin was as brown as a piece of old leather, and he had only one good eye, a bright-green one, with which he peered at me as suspiciously as I did at him.

On his first visit to British Grandfather, I happened to be passing through the kitchen when I came upon what looked like a handful of grass bubbling away in an old copper pot. It had turned the water a brownish green, the color of an alligator, and it smelled like lemons. I thought it was one of Nei-Nei Down’s crazy concoctions, and I made the mistake of joking about it. That’s when I saw the healer standing in a corner of the room, watching me, watching the medicine boil.

He shook both hands at me, chasing me away from the stove. “Don’t breathe on it, foolish girl!” he said.

I apologized, as I had been taught to do whenever I offended an elder, but I must have looked amused.

“You think it is a joke, this?” he said. “To heal, one must first have a healer’s nature. A healer must first of all be interested in seeing truly, hearing truly, understanding truly, and acting truly.”

I bit my lips. I was not sure what to say in response that would not make him even angrier. I didn’t want him to harm my grandfather. That much I believed.

“You see why this will never be a popular vocation? Most men would rather have power than to see and hear correctly. Remember my words.”

I nodded and scurried away. The next time I saw him, he gestured for me to come nearer. My uncle Chachi was watching us both with interest. I knew better than to argue with Nei-Nei Down when it came to matters of health. “Look up!” the healer demanded. I looked at the ceiling. As usual, I saw more cracks, more plaster peeling. And was that a new leak? “Put out your hands,” he said. I held them out in front of me like a sleepwalker. “Palms up!” he snapped. I turned them over, warily. But the healer did not strike me. He never even came close to touching me. “You are out of balance,” he said. “Remember my words.”

One afternoon in late January, Geoffrey surprised me at the gates of the Raffles School. It had been nearly a week since we had been able to contrive any way to meet, and that meeting had been brief, for I was on my way to the newspaper office. I had not realized until this moment that Geoffrey even knew where I went to school—I hadn’t remembered telling him.

There were numerous educational opportunities for high-school girls in Singapore. The island was very forward-looking in that regard. I might have attended the Nanyang High School had it not been located so inconveniently far, in the Bukit Timah area. Many of Uncle Chachi’s acquaintances sent their children and grandchildren to the Chinese High School, though it was looked upon as a school for outsiders—visiting Chinese, not true Singaporeans. Nei-Nei Down called it “the school of revolving principals,” and indeed they had trouble finding and keeping a head of the school. But Nei-Nei was really being snobbish about the Chinese High School, a fine educational establishment, simply because it had had its beginnings as a lowly shophouse at No. 7 Dhoby Ghaut.

The Raffles Girls’ School, on the other hand, was dignity itself. I had gone there for elementary school, and now, in high school, the boys and the girls studied together, if not side by side. Our school had just moved that year to Queen Street from Beach Road—also known locally as College Street, or “mouth of the old jail,” or even “beside the seaside English big school.” For years, the Nanyang girls had worn a badge of pale blue. That year, upon our move to Queen Street, we Raffles girls began sporting our own badge of green and white and black. Our motto was “Daughters of a Better Age.”

We daughters of that better age spilled out from the white-columned school wing like a swarm, crowding around the tall trees for shade, since the hottest part of the day coincided with our school dismissal.

Geoffrey, a handsome, pale specter, looked out of place among these Singaporean high-school girls. It was as if a man from inside a moving picture had stepped down among us, bringing with him all of the background noise and music, the white light of Hollywood, California. His gold hair, set against our black, looked like the crown of a royal prince.

He lounged against the metal gates with his usual grace, though his smile looked less certain as I approached.

My classmates glanced from Geoffrey to me and back again with undisguised amazement and, in more than a few cases, something near to disbelief. In fact, partly due to my height, most of the boys and girls overlooked me completely, gazing quite literally over my head. For me to have captured this god must have seemed like a minor miracle.

“Is everyone at home all right?” I asked. My first thought was of British Grandfather back at the palace. But then why would Geoffrey be smiling and leaning?

Geoffrey steered me away from the gaping crowd. “Do they always stand around with their mouths open?” he asked.

I decided the best approach was to lie. No use feeding his vanity. “Yes,” I said.

We walked together along Queen Street in silence for about a block. He was clearly agitated about something.

“Your grandparents don’t approve of me,” he burst out at last. “They detest me.”

This was not the first time we had discussed the matter. Nei-Nei Down made her opposition clear each time Geoffrey came near the palace.

“Not Grandfather,” I said. I could not argue about Nei-Nei Down, but then my grandmother was stubborn and unreasonable, irrational about a hundred things. Geoffrey was a nearly perfect human being. He was kind, thoughtful, and, whatever his background may have been, a thorough gentleman. Look at how my classmates had reacted at the sight of him. Geoffrey Brown had a magnetic effect on perfect strangers.

“I’m not from Singapore,” he said.

“But my own grandfather is British,” I pointed out.

“We’re not from the same Britain,” Geoffrey said. “I don’t come from your grandfather’s Great Britain. I come from a rat-infested, coal-filled hole in England called Newcastle. My people were all miners, domestics, and dung shovelers.”

“You’re saying my grandfather is a snob,” I said. “I don’t believe it. He married my nei-nei, and she is ordinary Chinese.”

“Which makes it all the more unfair,” he said, “that they would try to keep us apart. But it often turns out that way, from one generation to the next. Your grandmother has practically barred the doors against me.”

I could not deny it. “She’s beside herself with worry. And Grandfather is really ill—he is in no condition to receive guests, Geoffrey. It’s not personal. ”

Geoffrey was immediately all tender concern. Despite his harsh words, I knew he felt deeply attached to my grandfather. His face turned almost gray with worry. “I was afraid of this,” he said. “My God, that’s bad news. I’m so sorry,” he added, pressing my hand. “I shouldn’t be pressuring you at a time like this. —It’s just that I have to see him one more time. I need—I need his blessing.”

This was so old-fashioned and unexpected that I was left speechless for a moment, and I admit, I felt a little afraid. Did Geoffrey really intend to ask my grandfather for my hand in marriage? We had only known each other a few months. Everything seemed to be happening so fast, both the good and the terrible things hand in hand. I was only seventeen. I was not yet done with school. I was not yet fully formed.

But perhaps he wanted my grandfather’s blessing in a more general way—a word or two of encouragement and approval. Geoffrey never spoke of his own father. I wasn’t sure if Mr. Brown was dead or simply absent from Geoffrey’s life. Because British Grandfather had protected Geoffrey’s brother, Geoffrey seemed to regard him as almost a second father. Perhaps he had in mind a very long engagement. These were not uncommon in Singapore. Couples remained engaged for three or four years sometimes. I felt the knot in my stomach begin to loosen.