The Child Bride

My paternal grandfather died forty days after my parents married.  My grandmother glared bitterly at my trembling, waifish, 24-year-old mother and accused her of bringing bad luck upon the family.

Even in her old age, my grandmother, or ‘Por Por’, as I call her in Mandarin, can invoke trembling from her daughters-in-law.  Por Por’s reign as a formidable matriarch began when she was 16 and married off to a man twice her age because her parents were worried about the libidos of Japanese soldiers in Malaysia during the war.  A village kid ventured into the grease-spattered kitchen where my grandfather worked to announce that he would be getting married that day and my grandfather shrugged off his apron and climbed into a rickshaw to pick up the teenage bride he had never met. 

She cried for weeks.  But her homesickness was soon engulfed by the busyness of raising five boys and one girl in a dusty shack beside a graveyard.  They played and tumbled and argued and stole guavas from neighbours’ gardens while her husband worked 15-hour days at a ‘kopee tiam’ (literally ‘coffee shop’).  The children slept side by side on thin, foam mattresses on the floor, like skinny matchsticks packed in a box.  She saw them with their elbows jabbing each other’s chests, sweaty tendrils of hair plastered to their foreheads and mouths ajar, and her heart ran over with love and worry for their futures. 

Por Por was the family mediator, accountant, entrepreneur and medicine woman.  When one of the children complained of a stomach ache, Por Por balanced a wad of toilet paper on their belly, set it on fire and placed a cup over it until the flame died.  The satisfying pop when she pulled the cup away, and the palpable relief at finding a midriff free from burns, worked a medical marvel every time. 

The boys worked with their father when they were old enough to balance trays on their skinny arms.  They scraped burnt rice off black pots in the sink and licked the charred scraps off their fingers.  To help pay for school fees, Por Por did laundry for wealthy families.  She soaked sheets in hot water and scrubbed the heavy, sagging loads against a washboard until white flesh peeled off her fingers.

Her years of toiling and squireling away cash in a rusty Milo tin meant that Por Por’s children never needed to wash other peoples’ linen for a living.  Her children and grandchildren accumulated liberties unknown to her, like driving, sitting university exams, swallowing multivitamins, consulting therapists, joining gyms, backpacking, signing credit cards, owning pets and attending symphony orchestra performances.  Nobody could have predicted that such a significant and profound legacy would blossom from the 16-year-old girl weeping in a rickshaw.