This example was given by my third sister, who’s only 14 months older than I. In her younger days, she was the one in the family of five children to be the most timid.
She told me this story herself when she was aged 21.
In the 60s and 70s, Singapore bus fares were paid according to the length of the journey, collected by the conductor going up and down the bus. At peak hours, the poor man (there were no female bus conductors in those days) had to squeeze past all these tightly-packed passengers, so he was bound to miss some.
On one of these journeys, when the bus was less crowded and the conductor went past my sister, she held out her money. He remembered her face, and started to shout at her, “Why have you waited all this time? I’ve walked past you many times, yet you’ve waited until now! Were you trying to evade payment?” My sister said although she’d been wrongly accused, she was only 20 at the time — and single. The significance of this will become clear further down.
My sister went on with her story.
On the same bus route, same circumstances (jam-packed with passengers, conductor missing my sister more than once, then seeing her when there were fewer people on the bus), but when he started to shout at her again, she answered back, “I’ve been holding my money all this time, ready to pay. I did try to attract your attention but you just didn’t look at me. It’s not my fault that you didn’t ask me. YOU are the one who’s not been doing your job properly.”
My sister finished her story with, “I don’t know where I got the courage from, answering back in front of all those people. It must be because I’m now a married woman.”
She was only a year older than when she was shouted at by the conductor the last time, but her role had changed: she’d gone from being a maiden to being a married woman.
(Singapore, early 1970s)
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