Miss Seetoh in the World (2 page)

A poster hung on the classroom wall, done by
the same artistic student whose interest then was only in cartoon caricatures,
showing Miss Seetoh in black witch garb riding on a broomstick, carrying
someone behind her, a man recognisable by his pronounced forehead dome, beard
and ruffled Elizabethan neck collar as the revered Bard, cheering her on as she
used another broomstick to put to flight a giant octopus with a dozen waving
tentacles. Each deadly tentacle carried a sentence that carried a common
grammatical mistake, coloured bright green, to suggest a venomous snake. The
double deadliness, explained the artist, was to reflect the seriousness of the
problem, for according to Miss Seetoh, a composition with just three major
grammatical errors would instantly earn a poor grade from the examiners in the
Cambridge Examinations Syndicate.

One error which most certainly originated in
the schools, had, in the most alarming way, become ingrained in the speech of a
whole society – ‘I ever went to a circus when I was a child’ – resisting the
remedial efforts of at least two generations of English language teachers.

Another was one that Miss Seetoh had picked
up from an entry for a national essay competition of which she was one of the
judges – ‘Mr TPK our great Prime Minister with vision and high endeavour have
given prosperity to Singapore.’

Indeed, the largest number of errors she had
picked up from classroom compositions had to do with the Prime Minister. Either
the deep awe inspired by his name led students to borrow the laudatory phrases
regularly used in the local newspapers and string them together in complex,
formal sentences, only to flounder in a mess of grammatical, lexical and
stylistic contortions. Or there were simply too many students choosing to pay
tribute to the Prime Minister whenever a composition title allowed them to do
so.

‘Why don’t you write about what you know
best,’ said Miss Seetoh. ‘It’s perfectly okay to write about your funny
grandfather, you know. Or your aunt who goes to the temple to get lucky lottery
numbers. Swee Hua, you told us about your Ah Kor who went to a cemetery to get
help from your grandma’s ghost, and won two thousand dollars? Or your awful
neighbour who keeps you awake all night because she plays mah-jong non-stop.
Jun Ling, has your family solved the problem yet? But no more leaving dog shit
in the shoes outside her flat, do you hear?’ The student, during the weekly
forty-minute session called ‘Improve your English through fun story-telling’
had described the operation in the grossest of gratuitous details until stopped
by Miss Seetoh.

Her students tittered. They had no
inhibitions about sharing the comic indignities of their lowly lives in the
large, sprawling housing estates, during the creative writing sharing sessions.
To bring these, however, into the austerely formal world of the G.C.E. O Level
examinations was a different matter, and so, despite Miss Seetoh’s advice, they
chose to play safe and write about safe, adult-approved topics in the
composition paper, the safest, presumably, being responsible citizenship under
a responsible leadership. One student had written about Mrs Neo’s hero husband
by simply lifting the paragraphs from the history book. Miss Seetoh made him
cry by telling him that dishonesty was a hundred times worse than a hundred bad
grammar mistakes, and then made him rewrite each plagiarised paragraph in his
own words. On the school bulletin board were pinned up the regular newspaper
reports of official speeches extolling hard work, discipline, tolerance, the
community spirit. School mottoes and slogans on every wall screamed back their
support. There was a rule for her weekly composition writing lesson: nobody was
to use any expression taken from
The National Times
or
The Singapore
Tribune
.

In her creative writing class, Miss Seetoh
had a large waste-basket into which she dropped each pathetic echo of the
language of cheap romances and TV soaps, filling it with rosebud lips, starry
eyes, honey kisses, tender embraces.

‘ ‘A shiver ran down my spine’? Yuks!’ She
instantly consigned it to the waiting receptacle of shame. ‘Rashid, you had
written ‘I was really scared. Worse than when I saw Grandfather’s hantu’,’ she
continued, reading from a script. ‘Why on earth did you cancel it and replace
it with that atrocity?’ She had a rule in her creative writing class: everybody
was to describe his or her feelings from the heart and the guts, never from
imitation.

The clear favourite with Miss Seetoh, among
the identified twelve horrors on the poster, had elicited a deliciously wicked
chuckle. It was a spelling rather than a grammatical error, and it bore the
full force of the punitive broomstick – ‘We can be proud that our Singapore is
now an effluent society.’ The class had laughed at previous misspelling howlers
that Miss Seetoh liked to draw to their attention and challenge them to depict
cartoon-style. The classroom walls were decorated with drawings cheerfully
showing students being ‘canned’ by the discipline master if they came late to
school, the giant tin cans, into which the screaming culprits were dropped,
actually bearing familiar local sardine or luncheon pork labels; and of hunters
firing ‘shorts’ into the air, the shorts, emanating from huge gun barrels,
being the recognisably navy blue ones used for the Physical Education lessons.

The principal, on his regular rounds of the
classroom, sometimes stopped by to look at the pictures and ask Miss Seetoh
about them. Dressed in impeccable white, his hands clasped behind his back, a
puzzled frown on his grave face as his head twisted this way and that to follow
the wild cartoon swirls of the artist’s crayons or marker pens, asking the same
earnest questions as he did at educational seminars, he was himself a humorous
sight, and the subject of a student cartoon drawing that had to stay out of
sight. A member of that brave band of ageing, conservative community leaders
who tried to adapt to the changing times by occasionally wearing a bright
floral shirt and clapping to the impossibly loud music at a student party, he
was happiest when in his habitual white and doing his rounds of the school.

The students had stared blankly at the
‘effluent society’ sentence on the chalkboard, and Miss Seetoh had said, ‘Go
look in your dictionary. Make that one more word for your vocabulary list.’ She
loved the witch-and-Shakespeare poster so much she removed it from the
classroom wall after a while to take home and put up in her apartment.

The penalty money went into a round tin box
that stood on Miss Seetoh’s table, prettily decorated by a student named
Maggie. It was Maggie, a bright, bold, fun-loving girl who had had the idea to
circle the tin box with a broad band of white paper that carried the message,
in bright colours: ‘Mrs Tan is no more. Long live Miss Seetoh!’

It was shocking – a secret joy suddenly
revealed to the world with the public aplomb of a portentous royal
announcement. Miss Seetoh stared, feeling a hot flush spread on her neck and
cheeks. A picture of composure, she was now all cringing embarrassment in the
bright glare of an exposed truth that was both frightening for its guilt and
exhilarating for its promise. Between the two appellations of society’s
recognition of a woman’s status, scrolled her private story of breathless
escape. It was surely the work of a single moment of inspired genius for Maggie
who made the most deplorable grammar mistakes in speech and writing, even for
the Special Needs class of overaged students held back for two years for extra
coaching to prepare them for the O Level exams. Strictly, Maggie did not
qualify to be in the creative writing class, but had begged so hard that Miss
Seetoh made an exception for her. Her short stories, always in bad English,
swung between the mawkishly sentimental and the crudely earthy, both held up as
samples of bad writing, with the name of the author erased. ‘I don’t mind,’
said Maggie airily. ‘You can use my name. My stories, they all true, I tell
you!’

 The girl was holding up the box with both
hands and turning it round very slowly before Miss Seetoh’s eyes, so that she
could read, as a continuous statement, the words on the encircling band. They
danced before her eyes, like a flock of released butterflies. Maggie was
grinning and watching her with keen interest.

It was one thing to reclaim a maiden name
upon widowhood, and quite another to flaunt it in concrete, documented proof.
The society, taking its cue from the government, could be unforgiving towards
single women boldly disavowing the sanctity of marriage. Renegades were safe if
they kept quiet, never if they openly challenged authority. ‘Do you like it,
Miss Seetoh?’ said Maggie. ‘Yes, I do.’ It was only partly a lie. She wished
Maggie had not done anything like that. But she was impressed by its brilliant
audacity. If she had wished to celebrate her new status, she could not have
expressed it better. Out of the mouths of babes. Or rather, of worldly-wise
teenage girls like Maggie, teetering on the brink of womanhood, sensing its
perils, ready to test its intoxicating power.

The principal had, shortly after, called her
into his office. ‘I understand,’ he said in his always polite and guarded
manner, ‘that you would like to be called by your name before your marriage.
But have you made it official? Because, if not, your name will continue to be
‘Mrs Bernard Tan Boon Siong’ in the school records.’

‘Oh, that’s okay,’ said Miss Seetoh. ‘I only
meant for my students to greet me by my old name. Makes me feel more
comfortable.’

The principal had given her a quick
quizzical look, but said no more on the matter. He assiduously ignored the
rumours that sometimes came to his ears about this teacher, his favourite
because almost single-handedly she guaranteed the school’s consistently high
national ranking in the English language examination results every year. From a
humiliating position of twenty-nine out of forty before Miss Seetoh arrived, it
had leapt to number ten, then number five. The school had actually been singled
out for honourable mention in one of the Education Minister’s speeches. A good
speaker of the English language was not necessarily its best teacher. Miss
Seetoh was both, and best of all, she showed a creative flair for speech
writing, which, the principal noted with quiet satisfaction, she very
generously used to help him craft or fine-tune the many speeches he had to make
at principals’ seminars, especially those where senior representatives from the
Ministry of Education were present.

‘Then I and the rest of the staff will
continue to address you as Mrs Tan.’

Long live Miss Maria Seetoh Wei Cheng!

Never again would she abandon that
designation for the prized honorific that women were supposed to seek before
they hit thirty, spurred on by society’s grim reminders of that relentless
biological clock. Anxious mothers, her own mother being a typical example,
reminded their daughters, ambitious for university degrees, not to forget the
most important one of all – the MRS. Indeed, the whole society seemed to be in
thrall of some imperative to get its many single women married, mothered and
launched on the road of respectable womanhood.

It was a movement called ‘Family Values’
spearheaded by the Ministry of Social Development which had marshaled its
substantial resources of money and talent to set up an organisation with the
sole purpose of helping women find true fulfilment. It was remarkable that her
mother who had to endure the feckless ways of a husband for years was always
saying to her, ‘If you don’t get married, who will take care of you when I’m
gone?’ Her father had suddenly disappeared from their lives when she was a
little girl, fleeing from debtors to Thailand where purportedly he had been
living with his Thai mistress since.

The great TPK himself had appeared on TV
several times to urge women to cooperate in the national exercise. It did not
matter that the reason he gave for its purpose did not match that of the
‘Family Values’ campaign. He left it to the junior ministers to use the soft
approach to deal with a delicate subject, so as not to offend an increasingly
well-educated electorate, while he and his senior ministers went all the way of
the brutal truth, as they spoke to the people on TV, through the newspapers, in
face-to-face encounters in the walkabouts through the sprawling housing
estates.

The economy, he warned, was in serious
danger. If the birth rate continued to decline, there would be massive labour
shortages in the future. Incapable of the language of sentiment used in the
campaign posters everywhere showing happy pictures of smiling families, though
himself a happily married man with an adoring, adored wife and two bright
daughters, he concentrated on the hard statistics of the tiny island-state’s
struggle to survive in a relentlessly competitive world. ‘Make no mistake,’ he
said sternly. ‘We will be in deep trouble if we do nothing now.’

Thirty years ago, he had warned of an
opposite but no less dangerous demographic trend – Singapore women were having
too many babies, and creating a crisis of overpopulation. The Singapore General
Maternity Hospital, to the society’s shame, had one of the highest birth rates
in the world. These overproductive women were straining national resources and
therefore had to be stopped. TPK, looking his sternest on TV, his hair back
then still a deep gleaming black, the admonishing forefinger and thrusting jaw
already the trademarks of his bellicose style, had threatened a slew of
penalties for recalcitrant women who dared to have more than the permitted two
children. At the same time, he offered an incentive: the woman who could
produce a sterilisation certificate from a government hospital after two
children was entitled to enrol her children in Singapore’s choicest schools.