Old Town Chinese Medical Hall


On the adjacent side of High Road,a stone’s throw away from my house, was a Chinese Medical Hall where I used to spend many of my ‘happy hours’ during my primary school years, especially during the year-end long vacation stretching over a period of five to seven weeks.

The medical hall was a shop-house at the corner of the t-junction of High Road and Lorong Pintu Sepuloh. It had a five-foot way in front and along side of the the shop. The five-foot way offered us a good avenue to play various games including hide-and-seek ,high jump with a rope as a ‘high jump pole’. We also played indoor games like Chinese chess and ping-pong in the house.

I always hung around the shop for the whole day except when it was time for lunch or dinner. On those days parents were too busy with their chores to care about the whereabouts of their children as long as they came back during mealtimes.

On Sundays we always woke up early to tune in to the physical exercise programme that Beijing Central People‘s Broadcating Station(CHINA NATIONAL RADIO) [北京中央人民广播电台] broadcast at 6.30 am, local time.

We performed the exercise on the road and along the five-foot way. If time permitted, we would jog to Pai Teik Primary School or cycle to Changkat Hill.

In the early sixties, it was a luxury for a household in town to subscribe to a newspaper as most of the town folks could hardly afford it. But for the medical hall, it was a different story. Every morning the medical hall had a copy of Chinese daily, Sin Chew Jit Poh [星洲日报], delivered to its doorstep. On Sunday mornings, children would wait anxiously for the delivery of the newspaper. They would rush and scramble for it, for one particular page with the section called ‘The Students’ Corner’[ 学生园地]。It featured short essays written by primary school pupils in the country.Being the children of the medical hall,they held the ‘trump card’ and had the ‘upper hand’ over me. They took turns to read the column. I had to wait till each and everyone of them had finished quenching their thirst of reading the column before it was handed to me. At times the youngest brother of the family would purposely ‘glue on to the paper indefinitely’ or ‘sleep on it with eyes wide-open’ just to test my patience. That was an initial social lesson that I had to learn to cope with.

The proprietor of this medical hall was a first generation Hakka immigrant from China with the surname of Chong. To respect him as one of the few Chinese physicians in the town,we addressed him as “Xin Sang” [先生]. Mr. Chong was a quiet, polite and soft-spoken man. He was not much of a talker but he was a good listener, synonymous with a doctor listening to his patient while diagnosing. He earned the respect of all those people who came into contact with him.

He was a very thrifty and disciplined man. He never ate out. The breakfast prepared was a bowl of oatmeal mixed with one or two teaspoons of cream milk for every one in the family. He lived a life of a puritan although he was an atheist . Whenever my late father ran short of cash to pay the rent or to purchase goods during those difficult years he would look up for Mr Chong.

Mr.Chong’s business was considered good as he did all his business transactions in cash terms only. Rarely did I see any patient entering the shop asking for a discount for the medicine Mr.Chong dispensed.

Although Mr.Chong was financially sound, he was very meticulous with the money he spent. To get better discounts and good offers, he would buy goods and essential items in bulk and paying cash.

To save money he cut his children's hair himself. The success story of Mr.Chong as a self-made barber spurred my late father to emulate. He bought a set of barber’s kit and used us as guinea-pigs. We became the instant laughing stock in the neighbourhood as our haircut became the forerunner of the Beatles.

The other children would ridicule us as “Coconut-head” [椰壳头].

Since then my late father stopped emulating Mr Chong. Later on we would use the abandoned barber’s kit as our plaything.

Mr.Chong had five sons and a daughter. I was quite close to the second youngest son, Ah Ming, who was a year older than me. We played together and seldom quarreled. Once in a while we would go out together to the riverbank of River Krian beside the bridge to build sand castles or the‘Great Wall of China’; or to a clear stream on the other side of River Krian to catch fish which Ah Ming’s father allowed him to keep in an improvised aquarium. Every evening I would go to his house to watch him change the water in the aquarium. Sometimes he allowed me to partake in the process. On every alternate day I would follow him to a muddy drain at Kalidonia Road to scoop with a wire loop, tiny earthworms to feed the fish he reared.

Ah Chau was Mr.Chong's second son. He was six years older than me. At the age of thirteen, he had to help his father to look after the shop in the morning while his father was busily preparing lunch for the family. In the afternoon he attended school at the Methodist Private Secondary School. I remembered when I was at Standard Three, I was lagging behind in my English lessons in school as I did not know how to read the textbook. I approached Ah Chau for help. He took pains to check the pronunciation of each word from a bilingual English-Chinese dictionary and I would try to translate the pronunciation of the English words with Chinese characters. It took us quite some time with a few sessions to complete a short chapter. By the time I had done with the first chapter, my English teacher would have already covered a few chapters ahead. I could never keep up with my teacher in school so I finally gave up learning the subject.

In a way, the memory of the Chinese Medical Hall and the family members involved are deep-rooted in my heart and whenever I reminisce of my childhood years, they come into my mind. In another perspective, I consider myself to be lucky not to be born in this new era whence the only ‘entertainment’ a poor child has after school is just a succession of tuition classes of all sorts.