Teresa Lim - The Interpreters Daughter: A remarkable true story of feminist defiance in 19th Century Singapore

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First published by Michael Joseph 2022

Copyright Teresa Lim 2022

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design by Anna Morrison
Author photo Lorenzo Ali

Research supported by the National Heritage Board of Singapore. The views expressed here are solely those of the author in her private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the National Heritage Board and/or any government agencies.

Picture credits: Map and family tree: Ian Moores. Integrated images: photograph with kind permission of Lianhe Zaobao. All other images authors own.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book.

ISBN: 978-0-241-54442-6

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For Nick and Violet

This family tree is simplified to include only the names of those family members mentioned in the book.

Peter Tsangs three older sons before Susan are Kenneth, Alan, and Jeffrey; Florence Chang had a third child, her youngest son Soon Teck.

Chinese spellings: Nearly all place names are Romanized according to the WadeGiles system in use during my great-grandfathers time. Exceptions are when there are more familiar forms, e.g. Canton province instead of Kwangtung province or Dalian instead of Ta-lien, or when places are mentioned in a current context. Dynasty names seem less confusing if left in Pinyin. The names of my ancestors in the family genealogy were translated into Pinyin, and I have left them as they are.

Chinese surnames: A reminder that Chinese names traditionally start with the surname first, followed by the given names, usually two. I have hyphenated the given names, e.g. Law Quan-Yee.

Names and terms which were commonly used in the past have been left unchanged for authenticity. I have adopted the same approach when quoting from books written before some of their terminology became offensive to many.

Buy two mud crabs live and quarter.

Pound to a paste a thumb-piece of ginger, two fistfuls of shallot, four cloves of garlic, a pair of red, red chillies.

Heat lard in a wok, add mixture, stir till spicy smells erupt.

Turn up the heat and fry the crabs quickly. Throw in a bowlful of water, a spoonful of sugar, a splash of soy sauce, fiery chilli oil and enough ketchup to make the colours come alive as red and angry as the cooked crab, as fierce as longing or regret.

Thicken with beaten egg. Serve.

One cold morning in 1992, on the very last day of February, I arrived to live in Britain for the first time with my husband, who is English, and our three-year-old son. London was as grey and damp as everyone said it would be.

We had left a country full of smiling people, where the air was warm and where our Malaysian housekeeper had knitted a farewell jumper for our son in a colour as bright and optimistic as the sky above our heads: a pure cerulean. It was out of place in London where navy ruled the playground and where, if you were lucky, the early spring sky was dull white with cloud.

We moved into a north-facing house in south London that had recently been burgled of most of its furniture and where the boiler had stopped working. I was in my late thirties, no longer culturally nimble. Everything was surprising or seemed difficult.

I thought that I spoke and understood English my education in Singapore had been entirely in English but it wasnt English in its rich diversity of regional accents and colloquialisms. I couldnt understand the Mancunian telephonist at British Gas or the plumbers who came to fix the boiler. It took a while to recognize Aw-rite? as a greeting.

The nursery-school friend and his mother who came to lunch (We love Chinese food) found my fried rice, with its lashings of treacly oyster sauce, impossible to eat. When I dropped off our son at his classmates birthday party, the children whispered audibly to each other: Thats Victors mother. Shes Chinese.

This was our home now and I wanted to belong. Determined at least to appear more western culturally, I forced every protesting sinew in my body to do as it was bid the first time that I found myself in a swimming-pool changing room with our son. Not looking at anyone, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible, I stripped off completely in front of the other mothers and children while I swapped a wet swimsuit for knickers and bra, T-shirt and jeans. I had heard that this was what European women did. Oops, wrong European country. The entire changing room fell silent.

You dont get to understand a country straight away even when youre fluent in the language.

At the parties that we went to in London they could have been speaking Swahili for all I knew: recently arrived, my mind drew a huge blank around Westminster gossip, the latest English comedians, the latest English bands, the latest English television. There was very little interest in Southeast Asia. As if the region could be any less pertinent, at a dinner in Dulwich a young English solicitor one along on the table placement was surprised to discover that Singapore was once a British colony. Really? she asked.

The chill and anxiety of those early years were warmed and eased by emails from cousins who had also married men from strange, cool climates. There was Freida in Australia, Linda in Germany and Delice in Sweden, their names, like mine, the vestige of a European empire.

They sent recipes like curls of sultry air straight into my cold study, carrying the memory of colour and heat, replicating the smells and tastes that we longed for, of laksas and gorengs bright orange with warmth and promise.

I decided that this could be a great format for a cookbook. We could call it Four Cousins and it would show how we ate our way out of missing home by adapting our Singaporean dishes to what we could buy from the