The Scar — a true tale of old Malaya
Yussof Condred
My late father had a 2-inch diameter scar, near the elbow of his left upper arm, that tells a quaint story.
He came to the Malayan Peninsular in 1936, braving a treacherous sea journey in a rusty tin can of a steamer, to escape extreme poverty in China. He was determined to work for the survival of the loved ones he had left behind.
It was tough, leaving his newly-wedded wife and aged parents in their impoverished farming village he had lived for 20 years. When he disembarked from the steamer on Penang island, he had only the clothes clinging to his thin body and a Confusion ideology steeped in his mind.
In the early days, he was perpetually homesick. When he first experienced the might of a tropical monsoon rain storm, his immediate thought was of his aged father. He imagined that the very same rain storm was simultaneously pounding on the back of his poor father, stooping to work the land with a hoe on their farm. And tears would stream down his cheeks.
After a few years, when he was financially better off, he sent for his wife. And that was how I, his son, was born in the land my father had chosen to emigrate.
One day, when I was 9 years old, my father took me aside and proceeded to tell me how he had carried out a most extraordinary and ancient Chinese practice.
Hardly six months into his stay in Malaya, one evening, he went into the kitchen to look for a knife. He found one and, sitting by a stove, he sterilized the blade over a burning charcoal flame. When the blade had cooled down, he gritted his teeth and began to slice off a 2-inch diameter piece of flesh from his left upper arm.
Having dressed up his wound, he placed a clean roof tile over the burning stove. On the hot tile he put the piece of flesh sprinkled with a dash of common salt, a natural preservative. Then he carefully wrapped the cooked flesh in a tinfoil trying to ensure it was hermetically sealed. That done, he sat himself down at a writing table and began to write a letter to his wife.
In the letter he had implored his wife, on receipt of the content of the tinfoil, to make haste and prepare a soup with it. He further instructed her to immediately serve the hot soup to his critically sick father. She was to mention to the patient that the soup contains his son’s flesh.
All types of medicines had been exhausted in the search for his father’s cure. This was the medication of last resort … a product of pious devotion and painful self-sacrifice. This was the ultimate proof of my father’s filial piety.
The early impression I received, as a 9-year-old child, from my father’s morbid tale was that he loved his father immensely. Showing me his scar was his way of instilling Confucius teachings in me. I remember the countless number of evenings when he would tell me ancient stories from the 24 exemplars of filial piety.
In later years as an adult and after my father’s death, I did a little research into this ancient Chinese custom. In Chinese it is called gegu (literally “the slicing of a limb”). It is known to have been practiced as early as the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589 AD). There are several instances recorded of children cutting off pieces of their flesh for their deathly ill parents to ingest in the form of a soup. The practice rose to the height of popularity in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD) and the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912 AD) when many believed in the medicinal properties of human flesh.
“The 24 Paragons Of Filial Piety” is a classical text of Confusion filial piety listing out different ways of being filial to one’s parents. An example (it would be deemed ludicrous today) of these models reads as follows:
“Wu Meng was already known for his filial piety when he was still a child. His family was poor and could not afford mosquito nets. During summer nights, Wu stripped and sat near his parents’ bed to allow mosquitoes to suck his blood, in the hope that they would not bother his parents.”
However, the practice of gegu is not listed in any of the 24 paragons. Certainly, it is more radical than some of the 24 paragons. Western historical researchers aptly described gegu as “filial cannibalism”.
I marvel at the fact that my father performed gegu in 1936. That was some 24 years after the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1912 when gegu was at the peak of its popularity. I wonder how long after 1936 the custom survived.
To my father’s great joy, grandfather did recover. While there is no scientific evidence to confirm the efficacy of this archaic treatment, I am reluctant to discount the fact that psychologically the soup might have helped. Knowing that he had a most filial son had driven my grandfather to fight and win.
My father had another scar, just above his left eye-brow, that tells another story.
Perhaps, another time.
