Memories of Mum

April 25, 2017 FLAI40 Leave a comment

Born on Thursday 1st March 1917, Oi Kuan Lee (李爱群）was the eldest child of Kum Tong Lee （李锦堂）and Sheet Ying Pang （彭雪英）.

Kum Tong was working as a chef in London for six years when he received a letter from home in November 1915 asking him to return to his homeland Singapore because of his parents’ ill heath. As a filial sixth son of the family, he obediently returned in March 1916 only to find that his parents were as healthy as ever. The only reason for wanting Tong back was that they had arranged for him to marry Ying, an elegant young lady as their astronomic and zodiac almanac matched, according to the local fortune teller.

Sheet Ying was the elder of two children (she had a much younger brother) of a scholarly family and had been spoilt by her parents. Tong was tall, much taller than Ying and at the time of their marriage, Tong had secured employment in the Singapore Harbour Lines as a recruitment and training manager as he could read and write the English Language and could at the same time communicate with the local Chinese community.

Oi Kuan was the eldest child of eleven and, due to the frequent sickness of her mother, she had been trained to look after her ten younger brothers and sisters from the tender age of six or seven. As a result, she had no formal education other than spending three years at a private home-school, reading the classics （三字经). She was therefore educated in many of the Chinese cultures and customs but sadly, she had no proof of her education and because of this, she had suffered when her husband and her father were taken from her by the Japanese military police under ‘Sook Ching’ during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore in 1942.

Of the ten siblings, only five survived to adulthood. Two survived to their teens and the remaining three died at a very young age, probably due to malnutrition. Oi Kuan bore the fury of her mother’s silent anger from a young age.

Survival Brother # 1, Mun Hong Lee was given to her third uncle to be raised as her uncle’s only child. Mum Hong’s wife and only son migrated to Melbourne.

Survival Brother # 2, Mun Wah Lee died of tuberculosis in Singapore at a young age of 27 soon after the Japanese Occupation in 1946.

Survival Brother # 3, Mun Yow Lee died some years back in Melbourne where his family members had emigrated to.

Survival Brother # 4, Mun Lum Lee died recently (2017) in Singapore. Read about him at

https://www.u-write-read.com/2017/03/04/in-loving-memory-of-my-uncle-lee-mun-lum-明爱的记忆-我的四舅父-李文淋-i-roto-i-te-here-ra-pumahara-o-to/

Survival Sister # 5, Oi Kee Lee is still living in Singapore to this day. (She was born in 1936).

Oi Kuan had no wish to be married as she knew how difficult it was to raise up children. But she was an obedient child and when she was twenty, she agreed with her parents to an arranged marriage to Poon Him Lai. Marriage life was difficult as Poon Him, a worker at the Singapore Harbour Lines often gambled his salaries away every payday of the month. two children of her own.

Oi Kuan had two children of her own - a daughter and a son.

When her husband was taken away from her by the Japanese Kempei-Tai under ‘Sook Ching’, she was devastated. Under the advice of her mother and friends, she gave her children away so that she could be free to marry again. But this was against her nature as she had no intention of ever to marry.

Her daughter, the elder of the two, was gone from her forever.

Her son was given to two sisters as their brother to continue their Wong surname. But fate intervened. The Lai’s only other family member - Poon Him’s elder sister, her husband, and some of the other distant relatives and friends from the same Lai village in China Pangyu (Poon Yue) took her son back from the Wongs. A ‘battle’ between the families of the Lais and the Lees then broke out and for the next two years, her son was raised by a distant relative, Fok Si Ah Ma. She felt the need to have her son back into custody and when she steadied herself to become a domestic help for others, she negotiated to have her son back with her in the care of her mother.

She saw her son once every month and, because of her own experience in not having a certificate to proof her educational level, she insisted that her son was to have a proper education in an English Government school.

Oi Kuan was through financially difficult times caring for her only son but she refused to remarry in spite of her mother’s advice to do so.

Her son later completed his secondary education, becoming a primary school teacher at the age of eighteen.

Fate however intervened. Just as her son was able to support her financially, her son obtained a Government scholarship to study property valuation and quantity surveying in England. Her son was then married and once again Oi Kuan had to rough it out to work as a domestic help again.

Imagine her joy when her son qualified as a Chartered Surveyor in 1966 and returned to her in Singapore, working for the Singapore’s Housing and Development Board.

And, finally, in her later years, her son brought her to immigrate to New Zealand where she enjoyed her happy final days with her son, her daughter-in-law and her four grandchildren, living in Pakuranga, Auckland.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyCRbUTFWLM

On this auspicious ANZAC day of 2017, it is good to remember an event that has changed my life.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-mums-words-francis-lai

More of my family stories will come from this website. Stay in touch. Thanks for following.

Documentary on Singapore in the 1930’s or 40’s — Film 7552

https://youtu.be/TmXtnYf9eLo

Published on Feb 27, 2013

British documentary on Singapore made in the pre-World War Two years (probably 1930s) focusing on its status as a British port and successful colony, but with very little on the lives and culture of its inhabitants.
Camera pans round the stern of a large ship, which fills the screen, part a small multi-storeyed building with windows like portholes on a wharf, below which mill people who are probably Chinese workers at the port, bare-torsoed and wearing wide-brimmed sun hats. Masts and chimneys of large ships are visible on the other side of the wharf: as the seventh largest port in the world, this is often the entry and exit point for visitors to Singapore. A passenger/cargo boat moored at quayside, which, together with large liners, are the main form of transportation for such travellers.

Caucasian passengers emerge from a liner and walk down stairs, past the portholes and several suspension chains; they are dressed lightly, in trousers and shirts or short skirts, or what the narrator calls ‘tropical clothes’; a lady wearing large sunglasses and in a short skirts waves to people above her rather dramatically. A man pauses at the gang way to look around, squinting in the bright sunlight - Singapore lies almost at the equator - above, on the stairs near the entrance to the ship, a worker kneels on a step and scrubs it.

A street sign reading ‘BOAT QUAY’ and its Chinese translation, next to an advertisement for Horlicks, sticking out of the weathered, peeling side of a shop house by the river - part of the area up north which is supposedly the best place to see the busy life of the waterfront; below the sign is part of a corrugated iron roof; the camera pans along the side of the decrepit building: gutter pipes, a hole in the wall, panelled windows, white clothing hanging out of the window to dry on bamboo poles and finally the congested quayside: motorcars parked along the road, lorries and carts filled with gunny sacks, labourers walking around carrying various loads, makeshift shelters of wooden poles, corrugated iron sheets and canvas by the water, bumboats and smaller vessels crawling across the Singapore River, and across the water, low-rise shophouses and godowns with large colonial buildings rising behind them. A closer shot of the boats filled with ‘the native crowd’ unloading goods: they are crammed with bales, sacks, boxes and coiled rope, thin wooden planks act as bridges between the boats and shore; on land, a row of shophouses and the offices of ‘European and Asiatic merchants’; manual labourers in rolled-up trousers and sometimes hats, move around. Labourers carry large gunny sacks on their shoulders into a worn, grimy godown (storehouse); the name of the company is written in Chinese over its door and the pillars are plastered with layers of Chinese newspaper/notices; a small wooden table and stool, possibly for eating, stands just outside. This is portrayed as a typical scene in one part of Singapore life.

Not far away another kind of ‘typical’ scene is found at Raffles Place: a shot of its ‘pleasant gardens’ and ‘tall white buildings’ - three/four storey buildings with more elaborate colonial façades, shop names and flagpoles; traffic passes on the narrow street below. A group of Caucasian tourists stand and look at the statue of Sir Stamford Raffles on a pedestal outside Victoria Concert Hall - he was the founder of Singapore in 1819, setting up a free port on the island to advance British trade.

A map of the region, showing Singapore island at the tip of the Malayan peninsula, just above the equator, ‘in a position to dominate shipping routes [traced on the map] between the islands of the East Indies [Sumatra, Sarawak and Borneo also pointed out]’. Singapore’s place on a larger map of Asia and part of Africa: it is also an important link to the Suez Canal route [traced on map] to East Asia from Europe; other routes are traced on the map linking Singapore to other parts of the world. Close-up of the map of Singapore island alone. Arrows pointing to the assets of the site that Raffles chose: a wide river estuary, a protective/sheltering low ridge of hills, a natural deep harbour, all in the south of the island. A network of lines demonstrates how the port and city ‘have grown up’.

An aerial view of the historic colonial centre of Singapore, including St Joseph’s Institution, the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus on Victoria Street, the spire of St Andrew’s Cathedral, the dome of City Hall and the Supreme Court; in the background, the sea: Singapore’s development into ‘one of the great commercial centres of the East’ is raised to illustrate how its ‘history as a British colony has justified Raffles’ choice.’ Malaria threat

Category
- Entertainment
License
- Standard YouTube License

tagged with history, memory, Mum, reflection, singapore

Memories of Mum

Documentary on Singapore in the 1930’s or 40’s — Film 7552

Category

License

Share this:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply