The image of the mad woman, with her long tangled hair tumbling over her face like a black veil, parting the veil with both hands to peer out at the world, seeing someone who suddenly stirs the dark tortured depths of memory, erupting into a screaming rage and sinking sharp teeth into his flesh, before she is overcome and led away: I confess that this portrait of poor mad Bertha has gripped my imagination ever since I read Charlotte Bronte’s amazing novel ‘Jane Eyre’ more than fifty years ago.

In my mind, the image of Bertha and that of Ah Han, somebody I remember from childhood, have merged to form the quintessential mad woman in my novels and short stories in one of which, as a ghost condemned to roam the earth for a hundred years, she maintains the same tangled hair covering her eyes, the same angry look each time she parts it to look upon the outside world.

Ah Han became mad because of racial prejudice or what, to modern minds, must be the most virulent form of it, because it is prejudice within prejudice—discrimination against not just another race, but against another dialectal group within the same race. Ah Han’s Hokkien parents objected to her marrying a Teochew. It seemed that the young man had only seen her once, on one of those rare outings to the temple or market, that her conservative parents allowed her. He persuaded his parents to apply to hers for her hand in marriage, and was, as they half expected, turned down without ceremony. Ah Han’s father was the among the wealthiest in the town, owning a number of buses that provided the only means of transportation between a cluster of towns. There was no question of his permitting a marriage in the family that would violate tradition, demean his status, bring personal shame to himself and displeasure to his ancestors .

He began to look for a suitable husband for Ah Han as soon as she showed signs of disturbing behaviour, refusing to eat, take a bath, change her clothes, comb her long hair. The matchmakers were aware that the top requisite for the prospective groom was his dialectal status: he had to be from the Hokkien community. None was found. In any case it was too late. For Ah Han’s madness came with a vengeance, and within two years she was dead. In death, the truth about poor Ah Han’s tragedy was kept hidden by her parents with the same obsessive secrecy as it had been in life.

I remember the whispers in the neighbourhood during those two years, and the sly attempts to get the truth out of the many children living in that large household comprising three houses linked together in a row to accommodate three generations. There was one of Ah Han’s nieces, a talkative little girl of seven who sometimes forgot the rule of secrecy enjoined upon everyone in the household, and who told gripping stories of Ah Han’s madness. Ever the voyeur I listened, spellbound, to her reports about how Ah Han refused to allow the maidservant to clean her room, which stank of dried urine and spittle, how her mother threatened to burn her hair if she didn’t wash it or allow it to be cut, how once, when a small nephew asked for some coffee, she asked him to stretch out his hand and poured the hot boiling liquid from her mug on to it.

One day to my great joy, I was asked by my mother to go to the Great House (our name for the three linked houses )on some errand. This was my chance to see the mad Ah Han with my own eyes! To my disappointment, she didn’t act mad at all, but actually gave me the stuff that my mother had sent me to get (I think it was some dried red chillis), wrapping it neatly in a piece of paper for me. But in the few minutes before she left to go upstairs back to her room, I took in all the details that one day, many years later, I would use in my short stories—the long tangled hair which kept falling over her face, the long menacing fingernails, the dirty unmatched samfoo of blue printed blouse and orange striped trousers, the desperate aura of a derelicted life.

When Ah Han died, there was something that her father was no longer able to keep secret—his bitter grief which must have been remorse at the same time, for he knocked his head repeatedly on her coffin, weeping and calling out her name. But tradition, ever unforgiving, made the same demand of fidelity when it came to the turn of the remaining daughters to get married. It was only in the time of the grand-daughters that marriage outside the dialect was allowed. Now a great-great grand-daughter who went to London for her studies, speaks with a Western accent, and is living with a Caucasian. She probably does not believe—or does not want to believe—the story that her parents must have whispered to her about her poor great grand-aunt Han.

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About Vignettes...

A continuing flow of little, readable pieces that will constitute what I feel is an important 'legacy of values' to leave behind. Read more about Vignettes...