Persimmon

Pauline P Lee (Singapore)

1

Your name: Puah Chew Teh. The Chinese characters are 潘朝潮—the first and third characters have the same three drops of water in them, because you were born by the sea. You also travelled across the sea, and died along a different coast you called home for more than seven decades. The second and third characters have the same word in them that mean “morning”, and together those characters named you “the morning tide”. The last half of your family name in the first character is the word that they used to describe your entire generation: 过番客, the sojourners, migrants that sailed down the South China Sea to make a home in Nanyang.

You were home to me, but I wonder now if you ever knew it. You loved the house and the compound all around it, even though you never felt like you were meant to be there, because it was your daughter’s home and not your son’s. You had no sons. In Mandarin, you were my 外公 wai gong, but I never understood why my maternal grandfather so dear to my heart should be called my “outside grandfather”, the other grandfather. I called you Ah Gong.

2

The fruit trees all around our house were planted by you: papaya and banana in front of the house; jackfruit in the clearing at the back, just in front of the rubber plantation; custard apple close to the back fence; mango that never bore any fruit. When there were any papaya or jackfruit ripening, you’d lean a ladder against the tree, climb up to the fruit and wrap it with some newspaper and raffia string, so that the birds wouldn’t get to it before you did. You made a special contraption for harvesting fruit, using a long pole and an empty milk tin—holes on the side of the milk tin, some pieces of wire, a long bamboo pole, the kind we used to hang our laundry out to sun on. This tin would be raised on the pole high up to the tree, and with a twist, the almost-ripe papaya (or at times our neighbour’s coconut) would drop into the tin. You were so matter-of-fact about it, your brows furrowed in concentration as the sweat drops trickled down your face. In my memory now, that would have been a moment to clap my hands and jump for joy, when you brought a fruit down. But I was not that sort of a child. So I just watched you quietly.

I only learnt many years later that the papaya plant is dioecious—since each tree has either only male or female flowers, it takes some wind, a passing bee or hawk moth to pollinate the flowers so they will fruit. So much chance involved, and all I saw was fruit after fruit coming down perfectly ripe in your milk tin pole.

Jackfruit harvests were more of an event. The ripened fruit was huge, like a very well-fed baby. You had to climb the tree with a small parang to cut the fruit down, and it only occurs to me now that I have no memory of watching you do that. It sounds so dangerous to me now, but I don’t remember feeling scared for you then. That must have been before I took over from you the duty of worrying, of caring for. The image in my mind is of you squatting in the front yard, old newspaper spread like a mat before you, the fragrant jackfruit already split in two on the paper. You have a flask of salt water with you and many small plastic bags. You cut each one of the sweet, crisp yellow fruits out of the white strands of sticky sap in the rind, then rinse them in the salt water before putting them in the bags. “These can sell for RM2 at the market outside,” you say. There is too much fruit for a family to eat, because one cannot eat too much jackfruit without feeling sick from the “heatiness”. The sap made your hands itch, so you never let me touch it. I only got the clean fruit to eat. That squeaky sound it made on my fingers, the salty-sweetness of your labour.

3

Before you were grandfather and fruit tree climber, you were a kelong builder in Singapore. You had to dive into the seawater with no gear at all, planting stilts on which these wooden huts on water could stand. You were a natural swimmer, so you never understood why it took so long for me to learn to swim. When I told you I was going for swimming classes, I was already nine years old. You were surprised anyone needed classes to swim—“Just jump into the water and move your arms and legs!” Swimming was just like walking to you; it came easily, a matter of course. But those years of diving into the seawater all day left their mark on your body. The you I knew was so very tanned, and your eyes always had a cloudy film over them. Your vision was poor, and only now am I suddenly wondering: What did I look like to you? What could you see?

You also told me about how, after being out at sea all day in the sun, you would come back to shore and have a cold soda. “It is the best thing, but it is so bad for your stomach. You shouldn’t drink so much soda.” I never saw you have a soda. Every time I asked if you wanted one, you’d tell me the story of how much you had drunk when you were a kelong builder. Sometimes I offered you a soda just to hear the story again.

I’ve been trying to find out more about kelong builders in Singapore in the 1950s-60s. I haven’t found much. It was not the typical job for migrants from Swatow, China where you’d come from. Most other Teochews were labourers and lived by the Singapore River. I don’t know where you lived on work weeks, but you’d set up home in Pontian, Johor, and traverse the Johor-Singapore Causeway every time you went back to your family. You were the first of three generations crossing the Causeway regularly. Apparently, being a kelong builder was a rarer job, and that meant you earned a little more than the labourers did. So you got to take a taxi across the Causeway when you went home, and you would so proudly tell me, decades later, “The taxi driver thought I was a Singaporean towkay. Maybe it is because I was wearing my Montagut shirt.” Your Montagut shirt. That was all you wore, when you were not bare-chested or wearing a 555 white singlet. The Montagut polo t-shirts with dress pants were your going-out clothes, and you had them in variations of pastel colours, some with stripes across the chest, some with a faint embossed print. I have no idea how you came upon them; they were expensive, a luxury in your time, and you looked so very good in them.

I only recently googled Montagut and found out that they are a French family business that was established in 1880, starting with silk apparel and then going into knitwear. I don’t know how they came to Southeast Asia, but they’re still here, in the departmental stores that young people these days don’t go to anymore. For your ninetieth birthday, I bought you a Montagut shirt from Singapore. It was light blue, with bold blue stripes across the chest. It was tricky to get the size right, because you had lost some weight by then. You wore it for your birthday banquet that Mama organised for you, and I have a photograph of you in it, sitting with Ah Ma in front of two big cakes in the shape of 9 and 0, nine tall candles lit. You were in the middle of a clap and you were smiling the biggest smile that you’ve ever had captured on camera. That was the Montagut you asked to be buried in, and that is what is still in the ground, whatever is left of you and the shirt, in that shared plot with Ah Ma next to the pine tree in Johor Bahru. I wonder how a Montagut shirt returns to the soil.

4

A friend of mine is tracing her family history, and it made me want to find out more about the Singapore you came to and knew. But the only geographical marker in your stories was the mention of chup boi kor, the eighteenth mile. That would be eighteen miles from the then General Post Office, and there was likely a milestone with a beautiful 18 carved on it that helped you recognise that spot. I texted my youngest aunt to ask her where that might be in Singapore today, since she is my closest living tie to you. “That would be Jurong in Singapore today,” she replied, “Are you missing Ah Gong today?”

The milestone may no longer be in Jurong anymore, but somewhere around the eighteenth mile is now an apartment block called Lakeville. That is where I had bought my very first apartment, without knowing that was where you had worked. I suppose, whether we know it or not, we find ways to mark key moments in our  memory, and somehow these lead us into our futures.

At Lakeville, my apartment was on the eleventh floor, and I had a potted calamansi lime plant on my balcony. I thought about how you had liked your tea so black and so sweet, and I thought I would add some calamansi into my tea to round it out. One day, as I was watering the plants, I saw a tiny worm on a leaf. You would have known exactly what it was, but it took me a Facebook post and a few helpful comments to realise that it was a lime caterpillar, likely a third instar. I probably hadn’t seen a butterfly up close since I moved out of our family home, so I thought to sacrifice my lime plant for it. It ate. It had eaten up the shell of the egg it was in, and instar after instar, it moulted and ate its skin up even as it also chomped little big mouthfuls of leaf off my lime plant.

That week, watching the caterpillar grow was the most exciting thing on my schedule. The earlier instars so resembled the branches that it was hard to spot the caterpillars—turned out there was way more than one of them—and even after it made its fairly drastic transition into the fifth instar, it was so well camouflaged by the leaves that I had to remind myself to look out for a fat, rounded green creature the size of my pinky. It was so amazingly efficient, the caterpillar. It eats up its old self and has almost everything it needs to grow into its next stage, leaving no trace whatsoever of what it used to be. What could go wrong for them?

Of course, once that thought occurred to me, I ought to have expected that the caterpillars would be gone the next day, which in fact they were. Back I went to my Facebook advisors, and this time I was in a group for caterpillar aficionados. “Birds,” some said matter-of-factly. “Pesticide on store-bought plants,” chimed in others. “That’s life. Better luck next time.”

You wouldn’t have liked this apartment, even with its view of the lake. A shoebox in the sky, you used to lament. Who can live in those? In my five years of living there, I’d seen so many caterpillars, bought new lime plants, washed the pesticide off the leaves, brought caterpillars into my apartment and plucked leaves off for them, waited for them to pupate, their chrysalises hanging on two fragile threads, then woke up to gloriously fragile butterflies flapping in the container I’d left caterpillars in. That was probably the highlight of my years there, all those butterflies flying off into the distance. And now I’ve even sold the apartment; it was getting too expensive for me.

5

The park across from where I live now has a jackfruit tree along the trail I take. The fruits grow regularly, but too low on the tree and too small before they are eaten or drop off from their own weight. I think of those days of fruit harvesting you used to do, and wonder what you would say about this tree. When I moved out of our family home to study and live in Singapore, it was my turn then to traverse the Causeway every weekend to go home to you. You were still so well in those years, but your eyesight was worsening, and you were cautioned again and again not to climb the trees and not to walk the tricky path through the drains to our little orchard behind the house. It was probably around then that I realised your favourite fruit was none of what you’d planted, but one that came from your first home in China—the persimmon.

It was always a treat, persimmons. Your eldest daughter who worked in a factory in Singapore would buy them for you on her way back to Johor Bahru, stopping at the wet market in Woodlands just before the immigration checkpoint. Fruit there was fresher, bigger, better. The best imported fruit in Malaysia went direct to Kuala Lumpur and not to a small city like Johor Bahru. But Singapore—so much good produce got imported, and then transported in individual bags across the Causeway. Those persimmons were deep orange in colour, and the darker the colour, the sweeter they promised to be. They were so round that their roundness spilled over into an oval, perfectly smooth and squat. You always waited for me to be home before eating any of those precious persimmons from your daughter. “Go get one,” you’d say from the stringed lounge chair in your room, “and cut it in half. We’ll share it.”

The Chinese persimmon, diospyros kaki, has a long history in China. I am thinking about the parallel naming of this fruit: “diospyros” was Greek for “divine grain”, and incidentally, the Chinese see the persimmon as a symbol of good fortune and longevity. (Then again, anything that is such a vibrant colour and round in shape would likely be associated with good fortune in Chinese culture.) The word “kaki” apparently came from the Japanese word for this fruit, the kanji character of which is 柿, shi in Mandarin, and in Teochew, sai. If I’d said “kaki” to you in Teochew, you’d have thought I was telling you something about myself—kaki: self. And that familiar adage that unites Teochew people all over the world today: Teochew nang, kaki nang. Teochew people, our very own people.

The variety of persimmon you liked is the astringent one, that can only be eaten after it has ripened into a deep colour and is soft to the touch. Then it would be sweet and rich, and so very juicy. The task to get a persimmon and slice it into two was sometimes complicated by the need to pick the perfectly ripe fruit from a box so that none would go to waste from being prematurely sliced, and none became overripe and lost its sweetness in the process. But once I would slice the fruit into two, I’d see immediately if I’d chosen right: the juices seeped onto the cutting board, and the flesh was deep amber, with some strands of fibrous black. The seeds popped out easily enough—I always removed them for you—and the flesh was not too mushy to hold. Some of my favourite memories are to do with us sharing persimmons in your room. You in your lounge chair and I on your bed or on a stool next to you, each of us with half a persimmon, holding it in one hand and cupping our other hand underneath to catch the dribbling juices.

In your final month with us, when you were mostly in bed and could hardly sit up anymore, and when you were not even eating or wearing your dentures anymore, you’d asked one day: “Are there any persimmons?” I’d bought them this time—your eldest daughter had been killed in a hit-and-run accident a few years before—and had been waiting for you to ask. This time, instead of halving the fruit, I sliced them up into wedges and removed the seeds as always, then took them on a plate to your room. You took one wedge and brought it to your mouth, bearing down on it with your gums and sucking the juice from it. “Good,” you’d said softly, then returned the half-eaten piece of fruit to me as I sat next to your bed with a plate of wedges and nobody to share them with.

My aunt, the one who used to buy you persimmons, had often joked about how clear it was that I was your favourite grandchild. She called me your xing gua bak nuhng nuhng—the most tender part of the flesh of your heart. I imagine that to be as soft as the inside of a perfectly ripe persimmon.

6

Your name is Puah Chew Teh, 潘朝潮. You never learnt to write it, and you would regret never learning to read or write. There are no documents of you, and hardly any photographs. But you are there in the morning tide, and you are there in every jackfruit tree I see, and in the papaya trees, and the banana shrubs. You are there at the eighteenth mile, but also here in the seventh mile along a different route where I now live. The former General Post Office is now a hotel, and most of the persimmons I find in Singapore now are called Sharon fruits from Israel, and they’ve removed the astringency so that people can eat the fruit whenever they want, without having to wait. I don’t eat them anymore. But some days I still go to the beach in the morning and sit by the reclaimed coast, looking out at the cargo ships in the distance and thinking about the vessel that brought you down the South China Sea, so many years ago.

The water leaves no trace, but there you are, every time the wave comes in.

Pauline P Lee is a writer and educator living in Singapore. She was born in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, and grew up listening to stories set in other coastal villages in her family history. She is interested in the interactions between the natural and the human, and the unseen/ overlooked connections that tie flora, fauna, fungi and homosapiens. She enjoys spotting flowering weeds and is trying to learn as many plant names as she can.