Book Review: Kebaya Tales: Of Matriarchs, maidens, mistresses & matchmakers
The publisher's description of the book, and the author's short bio at this page.
I honestly wrestled on whether to post this review, but since reader reviews of this book have been rare that I could find, I thought I'd put mine out there. Two things I must confess: My mum's side of the family is Peranakan. Not filthy rich ones though, nor even rich. Fortunes tend to rise and fall when one (my maternal grandfather) relied on the sea for a living. My grandmother once had a very nice bungalow in Changi; understandably she was bitter at the PAP when that had to be given up for matchbox-in-the-sky public housing. The bungalow (and entire kampung, or village) had the bad fortune of being too close to Changi Airport, a planned industrial park, and two country clubs.
Second confession: I'm the mum of a child who was born with a 1-in-500-chance birth defect (though thanks to modern science, correctable). If Lee Su Kim ever reads this, consider yourself prepped for how your third-last story in the book was hugely offensive, though not just for the lone reason that it cut close. (To be utterly honest, I thought it was the last story in the book because I quite literally threw the book down after that, thankful and thinking I was done with it. While writing this review, I picked it up and realised I had two more to go.)
There are thirteen stories in this book, interspersed with traditional rhymes, songs, and colour photographs of the author, her family, kebayas, sarongs, slippers, jewelry, and close-up of their decorative motifs. The toddler, even at 20 months old, found the book irresistibly pretty. She "borrowed" it often; she liked hugging it, putting her nose to the flowers and kissing the butterfly on the cover. The layout and design of this book is a triumph. The writing is a mixed bag.
The Peranakan culture comes through the photos, the languages the characters speak (Malay, dialects, English, all mixed together), and the descriptions of food and jewelry. It may differ from reader to reader what else comes through as Peranakan: Financial well-being? Class-consciousness? Cultural-savvy? A foreign education? A smattering of languages in one's speech? Privileged attitudes? In Singapore, I'll just say those things aren't limited to the Peranakans alone. In this way, I'd say many, though not all, of the plots of the stories seemed quite universal--greed/pride before a downfall, family secrets that are devastating when revealed (and can be guessed from the first page), ugly ducklings that triumph. The stories that read as more local/Peranakan in essence were the supernatural tales, the WWII-set stories, and the match-making ones.
The writing on the whole, is concise, readable and clean except in a handful of places, where it either got too cute, or, as if the editor fell asleep, purple prose (albeit just lavender hues) yanked me out the stories and had me quoting the lines to Jason for hilarity. Some stories could end abruptly--twice it happened in stories where someone was being taught a lesson, the narration stopping right after the call into remedial class, so to speak. (Hence my first impression of the "humour" hitting me as a bit mean-spirited.) I also much preferred the stories written in third-person, and that used conversation sparingly; many characters' spoken lines, to my ear, just sounded unnatural or over-the-top.
One story really could have handled cross-racial conversation better (in this case, between a Japanese soldier and a Peranakan Baba in Malaya). First, understandably, a variety of languages comes through both characters' speeches; Japanese, Malay, Chinese dialect (Hokkien) and English. I just don't understand why all the languages are transcribed perfectly... except when the Japanese officer speaks English. Because only then (and even then, inconsistently) the author records the Japanese accent/mispronunciations even when it's clear what is said. This is one of those rants that deservedly appear in fanficrants often because it gets into the territory of insulting a particular character's--or reader's--intelligence:
"Er, those are photos of my parents. My father and mother. They're both dead. Killed by the... er...I mean...killed in the war," Chua [the Malayan Peranakan] said.
"My Fah-duh Mah-duh osoh dead," the [Japanese] Officer intoned dully.
It's even stranger if you're familiar with how Malays, Malaysians and Singaporeans speak when they have a strong local accent. They'll pronounce "father", "mother" and "also" just as the Japanese officer does in the story. Why the Japanese mangling is picked up here (and only for certain words which are easy enough to make out) is hard to justify.
On the whole, the treatment of the Japanese (which you have to expect in this collection since many people's most memorable family stories are set during WWII) didn't sit well with me--the Japanese characters featured were fairly simplistic, and almost felt like they were written to be clearly culturally inferior to the Peranakans. You know which side I'm on, yet I was annoyed by the one-upmanship.
(Though, to be fair, two-dimensional characters and stereotypes were common in the collection.)
The Supernatural in Southeast Asia
This is a bit of a tangent to explain the literary phenomenon you'll find in Southest Asian books: that ghost stories (real or made up) rarely fall under the "speculative" genre.
In SE Asia, no one asks if you believe in ghosts. The ones who outright say they don't (and don't suffer for it) are just understood to be of a class the ghosts don't touch. It is also understood that there are many different types of supernatural beings of different alignments (to borrow a D&D term) and power. The landscape is soaked with them--tree spirits, souls of those who die in unfortunate circumstances (the war dead, the Japanese soldiers who committed suicide en masse, the murdered, etc), protective spirits, captive spirits, malignant things (some more powerful than others), and heck, just the sampling of ghosts in this Thai commercial will clue you in that there's a ton of lore to discover about them. In this part of the world, there's no one who doesn't have a story to share, either out of their own experience or a family member they really trust.
Anyway, just as there are people whom the ghosts don't touch, there are those who are born with "the veil". They have the ability to see spirits, or sometimes it's "gifted" upon them during an odd event, and is no laughing matter. I've known no one trustworthy who profits or shows off when they have it--in fact, this is info rarely shared outside a trusted group. In a part of the world that is accepted as very haunted (if only because of WWII, jungle spirits, freak accidents and so on), the veil is more a curse than not. You do not even want the ghosts to know, because they tend to take that individual on as a target or challenge.
Christians in this region (or that I knew) were once more blase about ghosts (owing to the fact they couldn't believe in these wandering malignant ghosts without cognitive dissonance to their God, I think); Now, as I said, no one ever asks if you believe.
I love reading and hearing these stories, even though many can be badly told or too easily dismissed.
There are two supernatural tales in this collection. They are told in first-person narrative. To me, that usually makes a ghost story stronger. Usually.
In "My Old Baby", the story is told by the mother of a young boy born with the veil. I suspect the goal was to write a story that had a horror/suspense structure about it, but in a Peranakan collection, you just had to wonder how the presumably Peranakan mum (or her husband, or her pal Geraldine) couldn't know about the veil, or how she could remain in denial about it for so long. There was a definite textbook buildup (three supernatural encounters, each one given more detail than the last), by the end of which the mum possibly/partly accepts her son having the ability. The narrator is hard to understand or sympathise with; You're left wanting the most sympathetic character--her son--to have a mother who will just accept him rather than constantly wonder "who" he is, an obsession wrapped up in both the story's title and its lame parting question. (On the story-crafting side of things, I think if a writer has to force their character into uncharacteristic ignorance/stupidity, the set-up of the story needs another look.)
The other supernatural tale, "The Island", has a sixteen-year-old telling the story of her family's encounter with an island protected by spirits. The spirits will brook no pork or animal cruelty on their island off Malacca. How do you spoil a perfectly OK story? By inserting a ten-megaton lesson, stressing the superiority of the book-, history- and nature-loving narrator to her eleven-year-old twin brothers, who hate nature and books, and love air-conditioning, sugar, computer games, TV, and electronic gadgets. They're eleven, media-addicted and sadly typical for their age; but the criticism of their preferences is so smug and heavy-handed as to make the story's voice insufferable. The supernatural trouble that rears its head, was brought about by the stooopeedity of the twins, of course. Didn't see that coming. (As I mentioned above, the third-person stories in the book are a bit better.)
Subtlety was hard for me to find, overall. By the fourth story, you'd learned that fat ("flabby", "tubby") characters were unlikable people with no saving grace, and who were going to be absolutely humiliated by story's end. Funny, right? (Who edited this book?) Sad thing is, I feel the fourth story ("The Bachelor from Balik Pulau") is the strongest one in the collection, weakened by unnecessary (and, by then, old) fat-hate.
Conspicuous Wealth
There's a lot of it in the book, more so than poverty or even just middle-class comfort (which, while there, is not given as much description or mention, which I really wouldn't have minded seeing). Car brand names and makes are dropped whenever possible, as are expensive travel destinations, western college educations, top-level company positions, high-flying connections, glittering Nonya jewelry, mentions of spacious landed homes with multiple domestic helpers, etc. It does kinda jump out, especially in the moral stories; cementing (whether intended or not) the association of Peranakans with fabulous conspicuous wealth. After all, being Peranakan is all about those beautiful kebayas, kerosangs, slippers and finery, champagne living and caviar dreams, right?
Science versus Superstition
And finally... I come to the story about pregnancy superstitions, a subject that (surprise!) got my ire while I was pregnant, and got it again--worse than ever--while reading the story "The Promise". Because in this story, everything they say in those superstitions comes out (and this is NOT a magical or supernatural story, nor a first-person narrative) 100 PERCENT TRUE.
"Oooww, yes-oohh, I think Bebe kena chiung. My cousin sister in Taiping also got spooked. Gave birth to a boy hairy as a monkey. She was seven months pregnant, plucking rambutans in the backyard when a monkey pounced on her," Bebe's mother-in-law contributed her version in between spasms of sobbing.
(This is all happening in Bebe's bedroom, in which she's just delivered her fifth kid; home births being fairly common in the past or in more remote parts of Malaysia.)
Right before that, Bebe's own mother (grandmother to the family's LATEST SHAME), found it fit to tell her daughter a story of how her sister had given birth to a baby with a cleft lip because, in the sister's eight month of pregnancy, she'd tried to put a picture on the wall and hammered a nail into her finger.
Meanwhile, with all this helpful, comforting storytelling going on, the doctor and nurses in the room have no science to interject with (nevermind cleft lips/palates develop around the 6th week of gestation) and in fact concede, when invited, OMG WE HAS NO EXPLANASHUNS FOR TEH FREAKS. UR PERANAKAN SUPERSTISHUNS HAVE WON.
You see, Bebe's latest child, a girl, is born 2 weeks early, "very dark in complexion, the colour of lush ebony" because Bebe, her mum, earlier the same day, was scared into fainting and early delivery by an Indian chettiar (moneylender in essence) with a "gleaming black complexion". And no, Bebe hadn't been cheating on her hubby with the chettiar. The baby was unequivocally called "black". Black, not merely dark, darker-skinned, nor suffering a "wine stain". EBONY-BLACK. To parents you could assume had no black ancestry in the last millenium. The baby was ebony-black because the mum got spooked by a ebony-black man during the pregnancy, got it? (Again, I stress, this was NOT a genre story.)
If I was supposed to feel wonder at the unexpected magical result in the story, NO. The only wonder I felt was how this vile steaming shit could have been sprung on me in what I thought was the last story in a book that had had no magic (one ghost story excepted) in all the pages before. If pregnancy and social stigmas surrounding birth defects or any health issues/appearances out of the norm, AND pre/post-natal depression are not difficult enough for real women, HERE'S A TWUE STORY OF HOW MOTHERS CAN DELIVER FREAKS OF GENETICS WHEN THEY DON'T LISTEN TO OLD WIVES' TALES.
So yes, per the publisher's book description, Kebaya Tales does have "occasional gentle satire". Because when it's not occasional, you can count on what clumsily passes for it hammering on you with all the subtlety of a pile-driver.
I was very much tempted to end this review on a much worse note. I'll rein in my worst instincts, and say it's OK writing, with predictable story plots just tolerable for those who have outgrown their school texts for Moral Education.
For an unspoiled Peranakan experience, I should have just looked at the pictures.
I honestly wrestled on whether to post this review, but since reader reviews of this book have been rare that I could find, I thought I'd put mine out there. Two things I must confess: My mum's side of the family is Peranakan. Not filthy rich ones though, nor even rich. Fortunes tend to rise and fall when one (my maternal grandfather) relied on the sea for a living. My grandmother once had a very nice bungalow in Changi; understandably she was bitter at the PAP when that had to be given up for matchbox-in-the-sky public housing. The bungalow (and entire kampung, or village) had the bad fortune of being too close to Changi Airport, a planned industrial park, and two country clubs.
Second confession: I'm the mum of a child who was born with a 1-in-500-chance birth defect (though thanks to modern science, correctable). If Lee Su Kim ever reads this, consider yourself prepped for how your third-last story in the book was hugely offensive, though not just for the lone reason that it cut close. (To be utterly honest, I thought it was the last story in the book because I quite literally threw the book down after that, thankful and thinking I was done with it. While writing this review, I picked it up and realised I had two more to go.)
There are thirteen stories in this book, interspersed with traditional rhymes, songs, and colour photographs of the author, her family, kebayas, sarongs, slippers, jewelry, and close-up of their decorative motifs. The toddler, even at 20 months old, found the book irresistibly pretty. She "borrowed" it often; she liked hugging it, putting her nose to the flowers and kissing the butterfly on the cover. The layout and design of this book is a triumph. The writing is a mixed bag.
The Peranakan culture comes through the photos, the languages the characters speak (Malay, dialects, English, all mixed together), and the descriptions of food and jewelry. It may differ from reader to reader what else comes through as Peranakan: Financial well-being? Class-consciousness? Cultural-savvy? A foreign education? A smattering of languages in one's speech? Privileged attitudes? In Singapore, I'll just say those things aren't limited to the Peranakans alone. In this way, I'd say many, though not all, of the plots of the stories seemed quite universal--greed/pride before a downfall, family secrets that are devastating when revealed (and can be guessed from the first page), ugly ducklings that triumph. The stories that read as more local/Peranakan in essence were the supernatural tales, the WWII-set stories, and the match-making ones.
The writing on the whole, is concise, readable and clean except in a handful of places, where it either got too cute, or, as if the editor fell asleep, purple prose (albeit just lavender hues) yanked me out the stories and had me quoting the lines to Jason for hilarity. Some stories could end abruptly--twice it happened in stories where someone was being taught a lesson, the narration stopping right after the call into remedial class, so to speak. (Hence my first impression of the "humour" hitting me as a bit mean-spirited.) I also much preferred the stories written in third-person, and that used conversation sparingly; many characters' spoken lines, to my ear, just sounded unnatural or over-the-top.
One story really could have handled cross-racial conversation better (in this case, between a Japanese soldier and a Peranakan Baba in Malaya). First, understandably, a variety of languages comes through both characters' speeches; Japanese, Malay, Chinese dialect (Hokkien) and English. I just don't understand why all the languages are transcribed perfectly... except when the Japanese officer speaks English. Because only then (and even then, inconsistently) the author records the Japanese accent/mispronunciations even when it's clear what is said. This is one of those rants that deservedly appear in fanficrants often because it gets into the territory of insulting a particular character's--or reader's--intelligence:
"Er, those are photos of my parents. My father and mother. They're both dead. Killed by the... er...I mean...killed in the war," Chua [the Malayan Peranakan] said.
"My Fah-duh Mah-duh osoh dead," the [Japanese] Officer intoned dully.
It's even stranger if you're familiar with how Malays, Malaysians and Singaporeans speak when they have a strong local accent. They'll pronounce "father", "mother" and "also" just as the Japanese officer does in the story. Why the Japanese mangling is picked up here (and only for certain words which are easy enough to make out) is hard to justify.
On the whole, the treatment of the Japanese (which you have to expect in this collection since many people's most memorable family stories are set during WWII) didn't sit well with me--the Japanese characters featured were fairly simplistic, and almost felt like they were written to be clearly culturally inferior to the Peranakans. You know which side I'm on, yet I was annoyed by the one-upmanship.
(Though, to be fair, two-dimensional characters and stereotypes were common in the collection.)
The Supernatural in Southeast Asia
This is a bit of a tangent to explain the literary phenomenon you'll find in Southest Asian books: that ghost stories (real or made up) rarely fall under the "speculative" genre.
In SE Asia, no one asks if you believe in ghosts. The ones who outright say they don't (and don't suffer for it) are just understood to be of a class the ghosts don't touch. It is also understood that there are many different types of supernatural beings of different alignments (to borrow a D&D term) and power. The landscape is soaked with them--tree spirits, souls of those who die in unfortunate circumstances (the war dead, the Japanese soldiers who committed suicide en masse, the murdered, etc), protective spirits, captive spirits, malignant things (some more powerful than others), and heck, just the sampling of ghosts in this Thai commercial will clue you in that there's a ton of lore to discover about them. In this part of the world, there's no one who doesn't have a story to share, either out of their own experience or a family member they really trust.
Anyway, just as there are people whom the ghosts don't touch, there are those who are born with "the veil". They have the ability to see spirits, or sometimes it's "gifted" upon them during an odd event, and is no laughing matter. I've known no one trustworthy who profits or shows off when they have it--in fact, this is info rarely shared outside a trusted group. In a part of the world that is accepted as very haunted (if only because of WWII, jungle spirits, freak accidents and so on), the veil is more a curse than not. You do not even want the ghosts to know, because they tend to take that individual on as a target or challenge.
Christians in this region (or that I knew) were once more blase about ghosts (owing to the fact they couldn't believe in these wandering malignant ghosts without cognitive dissonance to their God, I think); Now, as I said, no one ever asks if you believe.
I love reading and hearing these stories, even though many can be badly told or too easily dismissed.
There are two supernatural tales in this collection. They are told in first-person narrative. To me, that usually makes a ghost story stronger. Usually.
In "My Old Baby", the story is told by the mother of a young boy born with the veil. I suspect the goal was to write a story that had a horror/suspense structure about it, but in a Peranakan collection, you just had to wonder how the presumably Peranakan mum (or her husband, or her pal Geraldine) couldn't know about the veil, or how she could remain in denial about it for so long. There was a definite textbook buildup (three supernatural encounters, each one given more detail than the last), by the end of which the mum possibly/partly accepts her son having the ability. The narrator is hard to understand or sympathise with; You're left wanting the most sympathetic character--her son--to have a mother who will just accept him rather than constantly wonder "who" he is, an obsession wrapped up in both the story's title and its lame parting question. (On the story-crafting side of things, I think if a writer has to force their character into uncharacteristic ignorance/stupidity, the set-up of the story needs another look.)
The other supernatural tale, "The Island", has a sixteen-year-old telling the story of her family's encounter with an island protected by spirits. The spirits will brook no pork or animal cruelty on their island off Malacca. How do you spoil a perfectly OK story? By inserting a ten-megaton lesson, stressing the superiority of the book-, history- and nature-loving narrator to her eleven-year-old twin brothers, who hate nature and books, and love air-conditioning, sugar, computer games, TV, and electronic gadgets. They're eleven, media-addicted and sadly typical for their age; but the criticism of their preferences is so smug and heavy-handed as to make the story's voice insufferable. The supernatural trouble that rears its head, was brought about by the stooopeedity of the twins, of course. Didn't see that coming. (As I mentioned above, the third-person stories in the book are a bit better.)
Subtlety was hard for me to find, overall. By the fourth story, you'd learned that fat ("flabby", "tubby") characters were unlikable people with no saving grace, and who were going to be absolutely humiliated by story's end. Funny, right? (Who edited this book?) Sad thing is, I feel the fourth story ("The Bachelor from Balik Pulau") is the strongest one in the collection, weakened by unnecessary (and, by then, old) fat-hate.
Conspicuous Wealth
There's a lot of it in the book, more so than poverty or even just middle-class comfort (which, while there, is not given as much description or mention, which I really wouldn't have minded seeing). Car brand names and makes are dropped whenever possible, as are expensive travel destinations, western college educations, top-level company positions, high-flying connections, glittering Nonya jewelry, mentions of spacious landed homes with multiple domestic helpers, etc. It does kinda jump out, especially in the moral stories; cementing (whether intended or not) the association of Peranakans with fabulous conspicuous wealth. After all, being Peranakan is all about those beautiful kebayas, kerosangs, slippers and finery, champagne living and caviar dreams, right?
Science versus Superstition
And finally... I come to the story about pregnancy superstitions, a subject that (surprise!) got my ire while I was pregnant, and got it again--worse than ever--while reading the story "The Promise". Because in this story, everything they say in those superstitions comes out (and this is NOT a magical or supernatural story, nor a first-person narrative) 100 PERCENT TRUE.
"Oooww, yes-oohh, I think Bebe kena chiung. My cousin sister in Taiping also got spooked. Gave birth to a boy hairy as a monkey. She was seven months pregnant, plucking rambutans in the backyard when a monkey pounced on her," Bebe's mother-in-law contributed her version in between spasms of sobbing.
(This is all happening in Bebe's bedroom, in which she's just delivered her fifth kid; home births being fairly common in the past or in more remote parts of Malaysia.)
Right before that, Bebe's own mother (grandmother to the family's LATEST SHAME), found it fit to tell her daughter a story of how her sister had given birth to a baby with a cleft lip because, in the sister's eight month of pregnancy, she'd tried to put a picture on the wall and hammered a nail into her finger.
Meanwhile, with all this helpful, comforting storytelling going on, the doctor and nurses in the room have no science to interject with (nevermind cleft lips/palates develop around the 6th week of gestation) and in fact concede, when invited, OMG WE HAS NO EXPLANASHUNS FOR TEH FREAKS. UR PERANAKAN SUPERSTISHUNS HAVE WON.
You see, Bebe's latest child, a girl, is born 2 weeks early, "very dark in complexion, the colour of lush ebony" because Bebe, her mum, earlier the same day, was scared into fainting and early delivery by an Indian chettiar (moneylender in essence) with a "gleaming black complexion". And no, Bebe hadn't been cheating on her hubby with the chettiar. The baby was unequivocally called "black". Black, not merely dark, darker-skinned, nor suffering a "wine stain". EBONY-BLACK. To parents you could assume had no black ancestry in the last millenium. The baby was ebony-black because the mum got spooked by a ebony-black man during the pregnancy, got it? (Again, I stress, this was NOT a genre story.)
If I was supposed to feel wonder at the unexpected magical result in the story, NO. The only wonder I felt was how this vile steaming shit could have been sprung on me in what I thought was the last story in a book that had had no magic (one ghost story excepted) in all the pages before. If pregnancy and social stigmas surrounding birth defects or any health issues/appearances out of the norm, AND pre/post-natal depression are not difficult enough for real women, HERE'S A TWUE STORY OF HOW MOTHERS CAN DELIVER FREAKS OF GENETICS WHEN THEY DON'T LISTEN TO OLD WIVES' TALES.
So yes, per the publisher's book description, Kebaya Tales does have "occasional gentle satire". Because when it's not occasional, you can count on what clumsily passes for it hammering on you with all the subtlety of a pile-driver.
I was very much tempted to end this review on a much worse note. I'll rein in my worst instincts, and say it's OK writing, with predictable story plots just tolerable for those who have outgrown their school texts for Moral Education.
For an unspoiled Peranakan experience, I should have just looked at the pictures.