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some, now relegated to the hall, when one’s host had the hollow
cheeks of an addict, now reformed. Not to think for an instant that one
would ever master or understand ‘face’. And never to question when
told ‘in China we do it this way’.
I lived, in fact, in rather a Chinese household run by Val and the amah
in Cantonese. She had his private ear. Kneeling by his chair as he had
his early tea on the verandah, she could bend him to her will in a way
no one else ever could. After six months in a residential hotel, we had
been allocated a house and Val let the Labour Department know that
we were looking for an amah, a ‘black and white’ amah, so called from
her attire in the Cantonese style. She was rather unusual he was told.
A Catholic from a convent in Hong Kong, she had come to Malaya as a
catechist, but times were hard during the war and she had become an
amah. She did not at once realise that Val was a hung
moh gwei
(‘red
haired devil’) as he had spoken no English. With a meekness that was
misleading, she extended a tiny hand to me: ‘How do you do mem’.
She was to rule my life for decades. A-mah, little mother, she was in
every sense.
Life with Ue Ching was a daily pantomime. We communicated in
Pidgin. At our first dinner party it was disconcerting, to say the least,
when two strange amahs appeared as we sat down to dinner. Ue
Ching had enlisted them without a word to me, considering herself too
inexperienced. Every day she packed Master’s rattan case with his
squash clothes and repeatedly his original old shorts, patched and
darned, would reappear. His shoes too were patched. Never mind
that they gave him blisters, economy was served. He did not seem able
to control this situation. I did not even try. The only time she left us to
fend for ourselves was at Chinese New Year. One New Year’s Eve fell
on a Friday. ‘What a pity’, I said, ‘you cannot have big feast’. ‘Pope
say never mind’ was the answer.
Finding a second amah was near impossible. If she was not good
enough, she was out, if too good, out even faster. Eventually, a docile
Malay was the answer. She did not mind being bullied and viewed Ue
Ching with mild amusement. Possessiveness and jealousy, however,
became acute and, in the far future, she resorted to saying awful things
