A GRANDMOTHER  who beat and tortured the mui tsai and granddaughters with equal savagery, and sat at mealtimes with a cane in her hand; a mum who not only added to grandma’s horrors but attacked papa with insane violence. At first sight, Lucy Lum’s  “The Thorn of Lion City” begins suspiciously like a made-up story of horrors but when we come to the photographs we realise that this is a true and terrifiying account of the dark, unhappy and violent childhood of a girl living perpetually in a climate of fear, in which like a hunted animal she devises ways and means of avoiding a new beating. E.g. finding a way of going out without being found out.

Lucy Lum’s story of how her father and his widowed mother emigrated to Singapore, after the death of the grandfather killed by a falling tree, of  how, typically of immigrants, Grandma concentrated on the education of her son so that he would not suffer the fate of a farmer. Father passed his exams and became an interpreter

Grandma shoots dead a moneky. She dies from a fall, the revenge of the Monkey God. The family are turned out of the house by the bone setter who, after marrying grandma, has had the property transferred to him The father and his young wife and baby son seek shelter with  Popo, mother’s mother. A life of insults and demands begins for the father.  When he gets a job he is made to handover his earnings to Popo.

Lucy’s repeated beatings by Grandma and Mama, on some excuse or other, forms a list of horrors that grows even more horrifying when burning is included. Tt is a wonder she survived it all.

Lucy was the third child in a family of 5 children. With Father’s increased  income Popo acquires three mui tsai although it is forbidden by law. The use of slave girls is now a recent memory with the Poh Leong Keok at Barrack Road, Penang,  silent witness to the sufferings of the girls who sought refuge there. Lucy’s describes the life of the mui tsai well.  They “lived in fear and drudgery. They could be sexually assaulted, beaten, given away to other families or sold by their owners as wives or prostitutes. They were paid nothing and wore their mistress’s old clothes.” A guest tried to rape one of the mui tsai who got all the blame for enticement and Popo sold here to a brothel. 

So fierce and impossible is Popo that even her husband walked out of their  lives and disappeared.
 

When I put the book down  I thought it would be a good guide to understanding why an English school teacher taped a girl's lips for "making noise" and why we treat the immigrant Indonesian maids so savagely.#

Lim Kean Chye