The Night Tiger(132)

Ipoh, the largest city in Perak, was once known as the cleanest, neatest town in Malaysia. The center of commerce and prosperity that resulted from the tin boom, it’s famous for good food and many historic buildings. As this book is set in a fictionalized Ipoh, I’ve taken liberties with certain landmarks, like the Celestial Hotel, whose construction began in 1931 but opened later. Likewise, although Ipoh had several dance halls, the May Flower is a figment of my imagination, inspired by Bruce Lockhart’s account of a Chinese dance hall in Singapore in his memoir.1

BATU GAJAH DISTRICT HOSPITAL

Founded in 1884 on fifty-five hectares of land, the hospital is built in colonial style and laid out in a low gardenlike setting. The buildings have modernized since then, but a few of the original structures can still be seen. I took liberties with the layout of the hospital to add steps down the hill, a pathology storeroom, a cafeteria, etc., as well as the entirely fictitious hospital staff, imagining what it might have been like in 1931 based on old photographs of similar colonial hospitals and wards.

CHINESE NUMBER SUPERSTITIONS

Chinese have a great love of puns and homonyms. This fondness for wordplay, coupled with feng shui, has led to many superstitions around lucky numbers, lucky directions, and the orientation of buildings. There is the sense that by naming something, you imbue it with both positive and negative powers, and this is particularly true of numbers.

During the Hungry Ghost Festival, you’ll see quantities of paper goods fashioned for the dead, which are meant to be burned as offerings. Every detail is considered in these replicas, including the appropriate license plates and house numbers. A model of a car, for example, made of paper stretched over bamboo or reeds and intended to be burned, will likely have a license plate with a lot of fours in it to signify that it’s for the dead.

For the living, numbers that sound like lucky words are in great demand. Some people are willing to go to great lengths to secure lucky house numbers, license plates, and cell-phone numbers. The reverse is true, and sometimes a certain house number, like twenty-four or forty-two (which sounds like “you die” in both Chinese and Japanese), is worth avoiding in Asia simply because you may have a hard time reselling the property!

Interestingly, the number five is both lucky and unlucky, as it is a homophone for “negative/not.” So a lucky number eight, which sounds like “fortune” becomes less desirable in combination with five as fifty-eight sounds like “no fortune.” Similarly, an unlucky number can be flipped, so fifty-four sounds like “won’t die.”

ROMANIZATION OF NAMES

In keeping with the colonial era, I’ve used older variants of place names, for example, “Korinchi” and “Tientsin” rather than modern-day Kerinci and Tianjin. Chinese personal names at the time were phonetically spelled, often at the discretion of whoever the registry clerk was, and also varied by dialect. Cantonese was and still is the dominant Chinese dialect in the Ipoh area, though Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, Hainanese, etc., are also spoken. Since Malaysia is a multicultural society, most people can speak a few languages, including Malay, English, and Tamil or a Chinese dialect. I have kept to a Straits Chinese spelling of personal names, such as Ji Lin and Shin, which would be Zhilian and Xin in modern-day pinyin. Traditionally, Chinese family names are given first, as in Chan Yew Cheung and Lee Shin.