Becoming Ah Lan Toh

Chapter 1

When her falsetto went up to a certain pitch, something under their flies suddenly kicked up. For the older men with not so perfect hearing, it felt like a tube of balloon rising up in their trousers.
     The year was the 60s. The fashion statement was long hair, for both men and women alike. The clothes were crazy, in what they called groovy colours - and there were these wide bell bottoms. But tonight the audience here didn't see any of these on the stage, in this night club in the hustle and bustle of Chow Kit Road, right in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur in the recently renamed South East Asian country of Malaysia.
     The backing musicians behind her, on wooden stools, donned nondescript - either brown, grey or black - Chinese pajamas, their white cuffs peeping from under the shirt sleeves. Their inert tanned and leathery faces belied the nimble and professional manner they fingered, plucked, blew, and thrummed these quaint instruments - erhu, gushing,dizi, laba, pipa and a big drum. Their handlers managed to make themselves discreet and practically invisible to the audience; as they should be. Though there was sufficient light for them to read the music sheets, it was never as overwhelming as the sodium lamps above them.
     These lights were deliberately trained on the singer. That one single round very bright white light - like a beacon from a lighthouse - spotlighted her on the stage like some alluring banshee singing across rough seas to lure sailors; in this case, soldiers. Tonight, in her snug and shimmering cheongsam, and heavily powdered and rouged, Ah Lan was looking more like a Shanghai songstress transported directly from China.
     The only thing detracting from this picture was her chest. You couldn't really call those inchoate mounds breasts. Her chest was practically flat if not for the tight corset squeezing her already tiny waist even smaller still. The thing pushed her breasts higher. And this illusion was further enhanced by a wired bra a size or two bigger.
     Whatever the shortcomings some would say about her breasts, one could not concerning her voice. It was pristine and unlike her chest, not at all flat. Any musical director from any West End theatre at the time - if they intended to make a Mandarin version of Funny Girl - would kill to have such a pitch perfect sound projected onto their much bigger halls. But Ah Lan didn't have the luck or happenstance to be exposed to people from that western entertainment industry. At best, the closest she was getting in terms of a western audience was singing in front of these groups of American GIs, in a shoddy cramped hall, in a seedy low class club, within a much seedier part of the city.
     At this moment in time some war was still being fought north and outside of the country, in far away Vietnam. But no matter the gore, the horror and depravity happening there, the soldiers, the ones on the side of democracy, these Americans, they still had time to plan their R and R to Ah Lan's country. It was not so much to drink the excellent and well known Tiger beer but to attend one of these little musical soirée they got to hear about from other GIs who returned fully satisfied, if one could justify that word for an experience beyond their wildest expectations.
     By this token, Ah Lan could draw the toughest and the bravest American GI soldiers on R and R all the way from Vietnam to this place. A couple of them were now sitting watching and listening attentively. They were gripping their Tiger beers in their big hands. They were not caring that they couldn't understand a word of what was coming out of Ah Lan's mouth. Beneath their khaki flies, some of them were straining over the biggest and hardest boners they had ever gotten in the presence of any female.
     At the ending notes of the song, Ah Lan bent her neck and lowered her head to face the dirty floor of the stage. She remained in this submissive attitude for some moments, hiding her kohled eyes behind her shiny straight fringe of hair. Her mimicking coyness seemed to always go down well with foreign audience. She was very pleased - no, happy - with the loud applause before her. But the clapping could have risen louder still if some of the male clientele were not so preoccupied with trying to shield or press down their bulging crotches. All throughout her rendition of the piece of Shanghai musical, some of them had also been entertaining images in their heads, of themselves and her in some manner of entanglement.
     The lighting was dim at the tables, almost dark if not for the low red glow. Only after the applause subsided did Ah Lan lift up her head. She managed to catch a glimpse of Sammi sitting among the heaving crowd. He was at a table close to the front of the stage, and there was a big white man sitting opposite him. The man was clapping but not as enthusiastically as the others around him. Unlike them, he wasn't whooping, or punching his fists up in the air, as if hitting at some Vietcong above them. She could see Sammi watching his sedate neighbour. He had a shadow of a smile on his lips. She wondered if the big man was some new friend.