The Water Margin is a historical fiction novel whereas the Brotherhood of the Marsh is based on historical stories of the brothers from Urghhling Marsh. That the Liangshan stories lack heroines is not surprising since it was written in the 14th century at a time when a declining dynasty saw the unravelling of meritocratic civic administration and the corruption of the courts and legal systems through flattery and bribes, which fomented the rise of rebellions from societal breakdowns. Women in the novel were usually chattels of unsavoury men and unsurprisingly were the subject of enslavement due to poverty and Confucian teachings that diminished a woman’s role in society to be dutiful only to her husband and family. Some of them were to perish in a gory manner, brutally disembowelled and mutilated, such was the adherence to the much revered teachings of Confucius that valued virtue above all else.

It is all over! I have not seen one who values virtue as he loves beauty.

Confucius, The Analects

One female character who was constantly bullied and lived in pitiful circumstances prompted me to write about the marsh girl in this chapter. Cuilian was the daughter of Old Jin, a poor man, aged about sixty, whose wife had just died from a long illness. The girl, aged about nineteen, was forced to submit herself as a mistress of the local butcher, in order to pay for their lodgings at the local inn. The butcher, a wealthy man with the nickname ‘The Bully of the Western Pass’, enjoyed her services but did not pay her the negotiated price of three thousand strings of cash (in those days, coins with holes in the centre were stringed together). Instead, he employed her as a songstress in the inn and taxed two-thirds of her income for the arrangement. The butcher’s wife kicked out Cuilian and demanded her to return the three thousand strings of cash she had not received. Cuilian was sobbing loudly in the inn in her desperation one day, disturbing the peace and quiet of the diners. She caught the attention of Major Lu Da who upon learning of their plight, decided to exact swift justice. It was easy for him to locate ‘The Bully of the Western Pass’ and with just a single lightning-fast blow, the butcher’s eyeball dislodged from its socket and landed on the street outside his store. Major Lu Da, who had no intention to kill him, suddenly found himself as a criminal and quickly fled the town.

Our marsh girl’s story resonated with me too. Also from a similarly poor background, she was deprived of her mother even earlier. She was no more than five years old at the time. She was also bullied by her peers and with neither parent to care for her, she was looked after by an aunty instead. Like Cuilian, our marsh girl wasn’t a stunning beauty, yet there was something attractive about her that men found difficult to resist. Unlike Cuilian, our marsh girl luckily was not forced into prostitution although that could have easily been her fate too.

“I should have been born into a rich family,” Cecelia Kok, our marsh girl, said. Cecelia has a very kind face, one that reveals her honesty and kindness, traits that her husband, Chan Jer Ping, will attest to.

“She’s nice to me from the very start. She has become my mentor, my life teacher. I can go to her for advice; she’s a very independent and strong woman, a woman that I truly admire and love,” he said.

“I am a better man because of her,” he added without any prompting.

Cecelia has a pair of healthy eyebrows and pretty eyes. She is unlike most Chinese in being blessed with a high thin bridge nose that broadens to a pair of nostrils that are much narrower-than-average. Bubbly and vivacious, she possesses a soft fair complexion that complements her slender shoulders and shapely figure.

According to her late aunt, Kok Kwai Mooi, both her parents were from rich families. Her great-grandfather was a rich businessman who arrived in Malaya from China, got married and had two sons. However, he decided to return to China with his wife and the younger son for unknown reasons. The  younger son later died from a sexually transmitted disease in China. No one knew what happened to his wealth and even if they did, they kept it a secret.

“There’s a saying the wealth will not pass to the fourth generation,” Cecelia said, shrugging her slender shoulders.

“My late aunt suspected someone “swallowed” it,” she added.

“Why was the older son left behind when the rest returned to China?” I asked.

“I have no idea why Ah Yeh was left behind to fend for himself,” she replied.

“Ah Yeh married my grandmother and they had nine children,” she continued with her story.

Ah Yeh was an undertaker who struggled to make ends meet to support his huge family. So, all the children had to find odd-jobs at a very young age to contribute to the family budget. Cecelia’s dad, Kok Weng Fai, being the youngest and one of the smartest, was lucky to have the opportunity to study and became a teacher at age sixteen. He was considered the breadwinner of the family. Weng Fai’s mother and a young sister died in WW2 from cholera, a disease even the Japanese occupiers feared. 

Cecelia’s maternal grandfather, Ah Kong, was a goldsmith but he died young. After Ah Kong died, her maternal grandmother went to live with her uncle in the basement of his house. Cecelia’s mother who was in her early teens then had four siblings – two brothers and two sisters. She was the third child. The younger of her two brothers worked to support them.

“My mum, Chew Kit Ching, met dad while she was a trainee nurse in Penang,” Cecelia continued.

Her mother was very attractive and had many suitors. Fate had it that Weng Fai was the chosen one to be Cecelia’s father. For reasons unknown, Kit Ching was not allowed to get married. Perhaps she was a trainee nurse that they forbade her to marry.

“Therefore, I was born out of wedlock,” Cecelia revealed.

3 June 1958 marked the day her vagitus was heard. It was a vociferous protesting cry. After growing in her mother’s womb for ten months, she was perhaps too comfortable and wished to hibernate inside her mother for longer. In mid-century Malaysia, a child born outside the sanctity of marriage was frowned upon and often stigmatised.

“My prolonged stay in my mother’s womb meant she had to start work immediately after giving birth,” Cecelia said.

“She was lost as to what to do with me.”

A mature Cecelia was later to understand her mother had three options after her conversation with aunty Mooi, her dad’s sister who was ranked sixth oldest amongst the nine siblings. If her mother had given her to a convent, she would have become a nun. It was not uncommon for a woman to leave her newborn with the convent out of desperation or to avoid embarrassment in a prudish society. The other viable option available to Kit Ching at the time was to sell her baby to a neighbour, a mamasan, who had been eyeing the progress of her pregnancy.

“I will take your baby if it’s a girl,” the mamasan said, without naming her price.

Luckily for Cecelia, calmer heads prevailed and Kit Ching gave her baby to her boyfriend’s older sister instead.

“Aunty Mooi took care of me like a real mother,” Cecelia said, oblivious of the probable inaccuracy of her comparison. I think her late aunty was probably a better mother than many other mothers during the postwar era.

Aunty Mooi passed on at age eighty-five in 2013. She worked very hard to bring food to the table as a single parent and ensured Cecelia did not lack any necessities.

“I was her “baby” and even when I landed in hospital for a surgery in 2000, she insisted on staying by my bedside. Knowing her, I agreed to take a single room and put in an extra bed so she could be with me. I am who I am and that is all because of her love. She taught me my manners and was always there for me as my mother. She supported me to take up a secretarial course by bringing home my course fees every month,” Cecelia said, as she finished the last bit of her scones and smacked her red lips. With a regal demeanour, she sipped tea from a porcelain cup and uncrossed her legs.

“She was the most understanding person and allowed me to go “dating” when I was fifteen. We used to talk about my beaus. When she left there was a void. I miss her so…..,” Cecelia said softly, letting her voice disappear into the void. She turned away from me to hide her face, crossed her legs, smoothed her floral skirts and regained her composure.

When aunty Mooi took Cecelia home to see Ah Yeh, she told him she had adopted her from an orphanage as the rest of the family did not want him to know the truth that his son, Weng Fai, had fathered an illegitimate child. Ah Yeh scolded her and took an instant dislike for Cecelia. When Cecelia was four, Ah Yeh fell ill and it was generally felt that he “had not long to go.” So, the family members thought he should not die not knowing who Cecelia was. When they told him she was his granddaughter, he was overjoyed and recovered!

When Cecelia turned five, her mother went to fight for her rights to have her daughter back.

“They quarrelled loudly long into the night. Aunty Mooi, realising Kit Ching was not going to agree to any terms, caused a ruse and snuck out of the house through the back door.

“I still remember aunty Mooi and I running away barefooted,” Cecelia said, and explained she was very particular about her footwear and never went barefooted outside the house as a child.

That episode was the final attempt by Kit Ching to reunite with her daughter as her husband, A Mr Khoo, did not want “someone else’s baby.” Cecelia was someone else’s baby yet felt like she was nobody’s child in her early years. But, once Ah Yeh was told the truth about Cecelia, she felt the love of everyone in their big family. She finally felt she belonged. But, disaster struck the family when Ah Yeh was fatally knocked over by a super-bike along Penang Road. He was around seventy years old.

Cecelia attended kindergarten in Fettes Park, after which she went to Convent Pulau Tikus Primary School and from there to Convent Pulau Tikus Secondary School for her MCE. In 1976, she did her Form 6 in St Xavier’s Institution, qualifying her as a true-blue member of the Urghhling Marsh Brotherhood.

As a child, she was very timid. Being an only child, she was over-protected. Aunty Mooi accompanied her to school from kindergarten till Standard 3 as she would cry if she didn’t see her aunty in school. As a kid who was often picked on by bullies in her school, she had every reason to be scared. A scare that seared into her memory was when she discovered she was locked up in the toilet by a school bully, a classmate in Standard 5. It seemed her frantic pounding on the toilet door could not be heard by anyone in the school. She stood inside the small cubicle and sobbed uncontrollably, her eyes stinging from free-flowing tears and from the stench of ammonia in the air.

That incident changed Cecelia. When the toilet door opened, she felt like a bird being released from captivity. She was going to find her true spirit.

Hope is your survival
A captive path I lead

No matter where you go, I will find you
If it takes a long long time
No matter where you go, I will find you
If it takes a thousand years

Clannad, I Will Find You

In Standard 6, Cecelia was already a different girl who was finding her way to negotiate safely out of the bullies’ reach.

“I remember who I fought with but I can’t remember why we fought,” she said.

That afternoon, she uncharacteristically yanked at the bully’s hair and pulled her school blouse towards her. Plat, plat, plat, plat, plat. Cecelia ripped the buttons off the poor girl’s uniform. From that moment on, Cecelia was no longer the target of any bully.

From Form 1 on, she was in Science 1 class but she considered herself as the ‘black sheep’ of the class as the others were much brainier. Most of them were glued to their books while she was dating boys.

“I had my fair share of beaus. I was always invited to house parties and discos. Even just before the MCE exams, I went on a date. Those days, going to the movies was the usual thing to do on a date,” she said while placing both palms together and fingers pointing to the high ceiling.

“Did you do alright?” I asked, for no reason.

“Two A’s,” she replied.
“Not bad I guess,” I said.

Studies were okay but on the home front, it was becoming dire for Cecelia. Her dad had fallen into bad company and was in debt even with the Ah Longs or loan sharks. They would turn up at the house in the middle of the night shouting out her father’s name.

“We never owned a house and lived like hunted nomads moving from one place to another, alert to any sudden attacks by loan sharks, our hunters. Always on a tight budget we never had a nice house to stay in. I told myself things will change when I grow up,” she said.

Aunty Mooi, the wonderful mother that she was to Cecelia, always made sure “her baby” had money to spend on movies. In her late teens, Cecelia was attracting a lot of attention from the guys from nearby schools, so they would take her out to movies and places and being taught that chivalry and kindness were important qualities, they often paid everything for her. Aunty Mooi, having understood why Cecelia wasn’t spending much of her pocket money, began asking who she was dating.

“I even dated a band boy whose hair was longer than mine,” Cecelia said and noted that her aunty wasn’t the least flustered.

After leaving school, her first job was working as a cashier in a hair salon. It only lasted one month as she could not stand the customers eyeing her like a vulture waiting for its meal. One of the customers offered her a job also as a cashier in his restaurant. That lasted only one and a half months after a jealous colleague planted a story that she stole money from the cash register. Cecelia’s dad found out about this sabotage and stormed into the restaurant to tell her boss that she would never need to steal RM20.

“Dad told me to resign,” Cecelia said.

Jobs were harder to find then so Cecelia moved on to a hotel job in Garden Inn as a waitress. That lasted a year. There, she learnt a lot. Being overprotected at home, she never had to do any housework but the waitressing job gave her the opportunity to do just that – sweeping and mopping the floor, serving customers, setting up the tables, and observing dining etiquette. 

Having completed her secretarial course, she was soon finding office jobs were easy to come by. Her first office job at a legal firm, Cheong Wai Meng & Van Buerle gave her one of the key foundations in her life. Possessing loads of initiative and being always proactive and a quick learner, the bosses soon noticed her and took the enterprising clerk under their wings. In the following twenty four months, she was learning about litigation and conveyancing matters. Those two intensive years gave her the insight of how businesses operate from a legal angle.

“That’s why I can read commercial contracts!” she exclaimed. 

Her next job was the longest, for five and a half years as the secretary in Pantrade, a company trading in imported tiles. Jimmy Lim was a fantastic boss, in fact the best employer she ever had. She enjoyed working with him and only left when his sister-in-law got jealous and hindered her progress. The computer era had just started but his sister-in-law refused to allow Cecelia near the computer. 

Realising that computers would be the next disrupter to business, Cecelia moved to Integrated Data Systems, a company selling high-end dot matrix computer printers. She was the Administrator for the Penang branch office with three staff and had her own computer from which she got to learn how to use many different software.

“My first boyfriend, Cliff, was a seaman so he bought me many presents whenever he returned from faraway places. He even took me onboard a cargo ship,” she told me matter-of-factly.

Cecelia was devastated when Cliff got married to a married woman with kids! She couldn’t get over their relationship. It took the jilted girl over a year and many troubled nights to recover from the misplaced trust.

“Rod Stewart’s song, The First Cut Is the Deepest, rang true for me,” she said.

So, she learned that although chemistry between two lovers was important, it was better to marry someone who loved you more than you loved him. The marriage would last, she was told.

Cecelia married Lawrence at age twenty-nine because Lawrence had literally chased her for seven years. Lawrence was a nice guy; he was chivalrous, honest and hard-working, all great attributes for a would-be-husband to show. But, it was a mistake as their marriage lasted only four years. Their relationship unravelled when Lawrence started making lots of money in his Sunway job. His work required him to network with housing contractors who took him to nightclubs and bars where he would meet someone who looked like Cecelia. It was just a fling to him but Cecelia got terribly upset and felt cheated by his affair with the girl. Cecelia had kept her marriage vows despite being pursued by other men. So, she decided her husband’s betrayal was too much to bear so soon after the seaman’s duplicity from a few years earlier. The couple divorced and with no children from their union, Cecelia did not want to look back despite Lawrence’s many attempts to win her back. Instead of hanging around in the same town, she decided to expand her horizons and moved to Kuala Lumpur (KL) in May 1991.

Cecelia wanted to believe KL was going to be her gold mine. Approaching the age of thirty-two, she felt she was already late to taste a new life in a new vibrant place all on her own. She was resolute to find her ingots there and poured all her energy and focus in search of golden opportunities. If truth be told, she was going to be happy with even gold dust, she said. Her first employer, The First Edition Pacific, an advertising company, offered her a monthly salary of RM1,400 which included an extra RM500 to cover for lodgings and food. Her post was as the private secretary for one of the directors. Ng Lai Yee was her first lady boss there but she failed in her fight to break the glass ceiling for other female staff in the firm. Although generous, the directors were petty and unforgiving. They made life difficult for Wan Lee, a female colleague of Cecelia’s, and when Wan Lee quit in tears, Cecelia followed her in solidarity. Widuri Pine Club situated in Taman Tun Dr Ismail was her next employer. The Chairman of the club fancied Cecelia and just like ‘The Bully of the Western Pass’ was with Cuilian, he offered her not a string of gold coins but ‘ingots of gold’. But, unlike Cuilian, Cecelia quit her job, rejecting her earlier ambition of accepting even gold dust.

After a few brief stints with other companies, Cecelia resorted to temping work. The one month with Vision Plus Entertainment gave her a full-time job at Vision Merchandising followed by other fulfilling jobs at their other subsidiaries. She used them as stepping stones in her career whilst absorbing knowledge at a fast pace. She was soon promoted to Office Manager and later on, as Personal Assistant to the CEO. She also worked with the Young Presidents Organisation and with the Young Entrepreneurs Organisation. She left the corporate world to care for her dad who had suffered a stroke. He and aunty Mooi had joined Cecelia in KL a few years earlier after he retired at age fifty-five. Being a carer was tough as she had to make-do on a much reduced income, juggling her time as a general insurance agent and unit trusts advisor.

“No regrets,” she said, as she got up to make herself another cup of tea, after I had politely declined her offer.

Cecelia’s dad, not only a former Xaverian but also a former SXI teacher, passed away in 2016, leaving her all alone till she met a licensed tour guide Chan Jer Ping two years later. It was a chance meeting from a swap meet called Beli Nothing project, where members of the Facebook group could exchange or give away possessions they no longer wanted.

In 2019, the couple married. Duchess was the one who gave her consent for them to wed. She was the glue that bonded their friendship. Born in 2006, Duchess was a gift from a friend of Cecelia’s. She thought her dad would be less lonely with Duchess at home. But, when he was finally moved into a nursing home, Duchess and aunty Mooi went to live with Cecelia in her condo and when aunty Mooi died, the shih tzu gained all the love and attention that the grieving Cecelia needed to pour out. Duchess survived two heart attacks but Cecelia’s fifteen-year-old companion was by then almost blind and deaf and with her right hind limb amputated due to cancer, she had lost all quality of life. Cecelia, in an act of mercy and love, softly asked Duchess to let go and not suffer anymore. The next morning, Cecelia managed to give her one and only four-legged darling a long gentle hug as a final goodbye before Duchess took her last breath.

Cecelia did not expect to marry again when she was already in her sixties, but her resolute belief that life should be lived with no regrets meant she disregarded or ignored all negative opinions and silly stigma imposed by society’s ignorance and followed her heart’s command to marry the man sixteen years her junior. The couple spend a lot of quality time together but they also understand the importance of “me time”, a time reserved for oneself for whatever reason, to rest, destress or restore.

There is therefore no doubt that the Urghhling Marsh has found the heroine in their midst. Cecelia is as confident, independent and honest as they come. Her strength, tenacity and energy are attributes that were the last missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle, those of the girl in the Brotherhood of the Marsh.

“Be regal, we have found our marsh girl,” I said.