The driving instructor (Singapore)

The three of us younger children started to notice that a regular visitor would turn up in the afternoon at our house.  He and our mother would sit in the living room, chatting and laughing.  Our mother laughing!!??  We became suspicious of this man.

His name, it turned out, was Eric.  We disliked him even more for that. 

During my childhood days, Chinese people with self-given Western names were often treated with suspicion, if not contempt.  It’s a betrayal of their Chinese roots, especially if they didn’t even speak English, so couldn’t even lay claim to being “Westernised”.  (The Malays and Indians didn’t seem to be so treacherous to their roots.)  It’s different if it’s a Christian name, because that’s for religious reasons.

What’s more, this man who called himself Eric and made our mother laugh a lot had curly hair!  (See blog Chinese men with curly hair.)  That was it: final nail in his coffin.

The three of us (aged around 11 [me], 12 [my 3rd sister] and 14 [my brother] — the terrible tweenagers!) hung around the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, glowering at this objectionable man who was entertaining our mother.  This cramped his style so much that she sent us away to get a cup of coffee for him.

In the kitchen, we decided to doctor the coffee.  Yes, we did the restaurant kitchen staff trick for difficult customers: we spat into the coffee, each one in turn, then stirred it in properly.

For good measure, we threw in a bonus touch.

In traditional Chinese thinking, the groin is yīn (of yīn 阴 and yáng 阳), being the nether regions.  People hang their wet laundry on bamboo poles to dry.  The poles would go up onto overhead racks:  in the garden, out of the windows in a block of flats, beneath the ceiling of the ground-floor verandah in a terraced house.  As children, we were specifically instructed not to walk under them, because the laundry would include underwear — therefore the same as the actual nether regions themselves for the yīn qì (negative vital energy), so our growth would be stunted.  (It doesn’t make any difference that the underwear has been washed.)

Similarly, if young children were playing on the ground, some (usually male) older teenagers or young adults would often playfully walk over them, straddling their heads.  They’d get told off for doing this, as passing their nether regions over a child’s head would harm the child’s development.

We even have a term for it in my dialect (潮州 / Teochew, or Cháozhōu in Mandarin): “yum hee”.  Don’t know the Chinese characters for the term; we just picked it up as children.

Although Eric was a grown man, we decided to try this trick all the same on his coffee.  Anything to stunt his growing interest in our mother.  We put the cup of coffee on the floor, then each one, in turn, shuffled over the cup of coffee, legs apart to let it have the full blast of our nether regions and the negative yīn energy emanating from there.  Three doses of yīn qì.  No less.

For some reason, Eric never came back again…. 

(Singapore, 1960s)