The Harmony Silk Factory

His talent for finding an appropriate partnership appears to have passed on to his son T.K., who proved to be even more astute. While managing to cling to his father’s scholarly heritage, T.K. also managed to learn the ways of the new Chinese — the ways of commerce and industry. He did so through his wife, Patti, who was the daughter of no less a person than the Kapitan of Melaka’s right-hand man. T.K. and Patti were a formidable pairing indeed.

T.K. had always shown exceptional promise, even as a young boy. He passed his examinations in law at the University of Malaya with the highest honours and for a brief spell studied at Harvard before impatience, boredom, and cold weather brought him home. For a while, he considered pursuing a career in banking in Singapore, but opted instead to return to the Valley, where there were none of the distractions that abounded in Singapore — nightlife, foreign money, women. He was a notable calligrapher and painter, and his home was decorated with many scrolls of Tang poems, written in his own flowing hand. Many of them have been rehung in that old house, the same house which was Snow’s home and, briefly, Johnny’s too. The house is now inhabited by Patti’s relatives — my cousins, I suppose, though I do not know them.

Like me, T.K. was the only son of a wealthy family in an area where wealthy families were uncommon. People would have known and talked about him simply because of who he was, even before he had done anything of note. It is a difficult thing to live with. When you know that everyone talks about you behind your back, while looking at you with silent eyes, it can sometimes have an effect on you. Not everything they say is good, for although people may admire your standing in life, they may also boil with jealousy and hatred. It makes you think differently from other people, and maybe it even twists your character, making you a different person from the one you would have been if you lived alone in an igloo at the North Pole. That was the case with T.K. A young man like him wearing smart Western clothing and spending his time painting would have aroused much comment. In the end, it was the burden of what other people said that made T.K. settle down and build a life and a family for himself, just as his father had before him.

Firstly, he changed his appearance. He swapped his Western suits for the traditional Chinese clothes his father once wore, the attire of a Manchu civil servant — long shirts made of the richest brocade, trousers of plain, good silk. This kind of dress was no less conspicuous in rural Malaya, and many people thought it was merely a phase which he would soon leave behind. But he persisted with it to the end of his days; it is how he is dressed in the stiffly posed photographs which survive. He continued reading classical Chinese texts; he wrote and he painted. But his demeanour changed. Whereas before he had been flamboyant and easily excitable, now he was serious and calmly spoken. At last, sighed his parents, he took an interest in business. He benefitted from family connections and became involved in large-scale enterprises such as commercial loan-making and the import and export of tin and rubber to Europe. He got married too.

Patti was said to have been a woman of notable beauty, although to my eyes hers must have been a beauty of that particular age. Certainly, the worn sepia-tinted portraits do not do any of their subjects justice, but even so, she appears sullen and withdrawn. If you look closely, you can see where Snow inherited the cold streak that she was said to have possessed. Patti’s mouth is drawn tight and thin, her eyes hard and dark. Her looks are not dissimilar to her daughter’s but her beauty (if it is beauty) is of a harsher variety.

Though I close my eyes and search my memory I cannot recall ever having seen T.K. and Patti Soong, my grandparents. They exist only as ghosts, shapeless, shadowy imprints on my consciousness. Sometimes I wonder if there is any chance that I might have liked them, loved them. Even ghosts and shadows are capable of being loved, after all. But always, the answer is “No.” I would not have loved them even if I had known them, because when the debits and the credits have been weighed, T.K. and Patti fall on the wrong side of the line between good and evil. It was their desire for Snow, my mother, to marry a rich man that pushed her into the arms of Johnny. Nothing can ever atone for that.