Writers' Block

A Contribution From our AWA Writers' Group Members

by Mandakini Arora

Of Custard Pie and the Malayan Jungle

An excerpt from her forthcoming creative nonfiction book; a version of this was read on Anne Morgan’s podcast, “Our Community with Anne Morgan: OC32: Celebrating the Joy of a Writers’ Group”

On August 19, 1932, Bring ’Em Back Alive gave its premier screening to a packed Mayfair Theater in New York City’s Times Square. The entertainment started before the show with life-sized papier-mache elephants flapping their trunks and tigers snapping their jaws at the entrance of the theatre. The movie was a great success. Audiences from the United States to Britain and Singapore were thrilled as screens lit up with such exciting scenes as a fight to the death between a python and a crocodile in the jungles of British Malaya.

Frank Buck, a Texan businessman, had built a fortune in the early twentieth century trapping and purveying exotic animals from Asia and Africa to Western markets. Colonial Singapore, an important node in international wildlife transactions, was where Buck set up shop for a period. The movie was based on his book of the same name that documented his animal trapping excursions into the jungles of Southeast Asia. The movie opens with Buck’s sailing into Singapore harbour and includes scenes of the city in the early 1930s. Much of the wild-animal action, purportedly deep within the Malayan jungle, was in fact staged in Singapore.

Oblivious of its runaway success, an English girl in Corbridge-on-Tyne, Northumberland, would nonetheless be affected by the movie. Seven-year-old Ann Elizabeth Wilcox had never been to a movie theater. The only voices she knew that did not emanate from real-life humans came from the family radio. She must have been excited when her father decreed that Bring ’Em Back Alive was an appropriately educational film for her. Ann’s mother took her to the movie theater in the neighboring town of Hexham.

Her father was dismayed when Ann came home hooting with laughter after the movie. Looking back eighty years later, Ann said, “Unfortunately, there was a trailer of another movie first—a slapstick comedy in which somebody put a custard pie in the face of somebody else. And that was the only thing I remembered. I came home screaming with laughter, having totally missed the point of the movie which was supposed to educate me. Father was so upset!”

Her father need not have worried that the educational element of the experience had passed Ann by. The movie is said to have brought Singapore and Malaya international publicity—some US theaters displayed maps outside; a Singapore newspaper wrote that finally people understood that Singapore was not in Africa or China or anywhere other than where it was. Buck’s movie also put Singapore on Ann’s mental map. In 1944, Ann joined the London School of Economics (LSE) as an undergraduate. With the start of World War II in 1939, the university had temporarily relocated to Cambridge. Compared to Ann’s schools in Northumberland, the LSE with its diversity of British and international students presented a new world—“chalk and cheese,” she later said.

One evening Ann attended a dance organized by CUSIA, the Cambridge University Society for International Affairs. A short, dapper Chinese man approached her for a dance. Harry Wee was pursuing a law degree in Cambridge. He would later joke to Ann that, after having scoured the dance hall, he had identified her as The One—the one woman short enough to dance with him. But all that would come later. When he told her he was from Singapore, a movie screen flickered to life in Ann’s mind. Bring ’Em Back Alive. Custard pie.

The AWA Writers’ Group meets the second and fourth Thursday of each month. For more information, send an email to writers@awasingapore.org