Fragments of Gong Gong from old newspaper clippings

In childhood, everything makes sense.

There was nothing off-key about my grandfather’s absence from the big Sunday lunch. The adults agreed he was a threat to my grandmother’s appetite. Therefore: exile. Therefore: he took his soup at a private table in the same flat.

The way I saw it, my mother’s father was not many things, but a few bad ones. Tan Swee Teck was a former cop and philanderer who turned deserter in 1965, when he, too, declared independence, begging off from his family for seven years.

If his charge sheet held intrigue, I was, in the tweenage tradition, immune to it.

In an abuse of free will, I had, aged nine or 10, suddenly decided my body was unseemly and the new girth to my thighs – not yet observed under the pinafores of my peers – obliged me to scrutinise all bodies religiously.

In the old man, I saw the worst of it: a weeping mouth, liable to drool, and hands, lousy with veins. His eyes were the chilliest of all.

Wet and inexplicably blue, they expressed nothing, made no petition for love or pity, and even in his final act, when he got dementia and had to be spoon-fed by his children, asked no questions.

He died of pneumonia in 2012, aged 85 – a commonplace that could not provoke my interest.

Then, this Chinese New Year, my mother let slip that in her father’s drawer of last effects were two clippings of The Straits Times.

They were lost now, after 13 years, but had something to do with the Hock Lee bus riots, she said, recalling an interview – accents implying heroics.

Probably, I had heard of them before and promptly forgot. Improbably, I was now working for The Straits Times, with a new and intimate stake in its archive.

Family legend is peculiar that way. The young take it as fact, too conclusive to be exciting, unmoved even by tales of secret stature or fortunes lost in mysterious and implausible ways. The not-so-young abruptly see that the facts must be proven, on pain of living with myth.

Exhibit A: Singaporean men of a certain vintage have been known to spontaneously produce coffee-table books of family histories.

So, with a feeling of ambush by the dead, I began a quest for the public record of my grandfather.

The past was instantly unruly. I preferred to meet it the old-fashioned way, with gloves, in the dusty office library, among stacks of yellowed paper. At the very least, have a go at the microfiche, threading film through the quaint machine.

But the librarian, her quarters spotless, said she would handle it. PDF scans of all Straits Times articles with my grandfather’s name arrived in my inbox by the end of the business day.

Its heft was unnerving – eight stories in all. I had heard of only two, and by some cosmic prank, one of the rumoured clippings that had set things off was missing from the compilation.

All but one report sketched ignominy.

In 1961, Detective Tan had been among 14 police officers interdicted from the force for the suspicious death of a thug in lock-up.

The autopsy of the secret society member confirmed strangulation, nine fractured ribs, massive internal bleeding and 24 abrasions, bruises and contusions all over.

He died alone in a cell in the Criminal Investigation Department, after interrogations by my grandfather and company.

None would own up to the deathblows, and the police commissioner threatened to sack the lot, on grounds of a “conspiracy of silence”.

It was all there in black and white – evidence of a crime more serious than infidelity – and as I read the headlines adjudicating my grandfather’s guilt, I had the curious sense of being stiffed by history.

Legally, my secret hope of a redemption story was still tenable, if not obtuse.

The detective was not guilty, in fact, no one was, said the clippings.

Though three inspectors in the group had been identified as the chief assailants, the coroner’s inquest returned an open verdict. The prosecution issued charges, then dropped them. An internal investigation concluded with almost the whole crew reprieved and only the leader dismissed.

But the facts had my grandfather bang to rights: at best, an accessory, and at worst, a lucky participant.

Blood quickened, I made off for the old Sunday lunch, declaring in a giddy text some “news” for the family – puffed up suddenly by the moral seriousness of journalism which, in fact, could reach through time to tell us what we have neglected to remember.

My relatives were lounging in the post-lunch way in my uncle’s new condo, mumbling about cold soup.

The words tumbled out of me artlessly (“Gong Gong might have killed someone in jail”). They received it impassively. Only my younger sister seemed to react.

For a beat, I thought perhaps his children already knew but had chosen to omit it, preferring to guard their fair share of information. My aunt and uncle would already have been born, a timeline I confirmed with some urgency.

When it was clear they were equally caught out, I resorted to the leading question: “Aren’t you shocked?”

The retorts were swift. My uncle said: “What’s there to be shocked about? That time all police beat to get a confession.”

You don’t know if he was just scared of his boss, my aunt chimed in. In a few strokes, they saw what I had to exert myself to understand, that the dead operate in the ethical framework of their time.

The proof was in the paper.

Two years after the gangster’s death, in 1963, the body of the fired inspector was found belly up in the sea, trussed up with steel wire, in what the front-page news report framed as a suspected secret society revenge killing. The rough justice of the epoch demanded it.

Another curveball: my mother had found a picture of the news clipping missing from the folder sent by the librarian.

Buried deep in her camera roll, the photographed text quoted “Tan Swee Peck’s” court testimony of his work in the 1955 Hock Lee bus riots.

Its disappearance from the search results had come down to a banal typo, a “p” in his name where there should have been a “t”.

The curt report told of how the detective had infiltrated a mob of some 3,000 striking bus drivers and angry students who turned violent when police opened water jets at them. The fray lasted a day, injuring 31 people and killing four – one student, two cops and a journalist. My grandfather was in court to give evidence against rioters he had caught in the act.

It was somewhere between this reveal and the next, that my Gong Gong had come home for good in what my uncle remembered as a drama of fire and brimstone on the night of the 1972 Robinsons fire, that the satisfactions of the official narratives broke down.

In the hunt for the past, the margin of error is slimmer than a letter. The paper was broad, blunt and not without error. The family account was partial, qualified by what had been kept from them but heightened by the odds and ends that stick in personal memory.

If I wanted to meet the man, I would have to look harder, squint for the blazing fragments not on the record.

Helpfully, the late detective had left taped interviews with the National Archives’ Oral History Centre copied into cassettes now stashed in mottled envelopes under my uncle’s TV.

Recorded in 2000, they frizzed into life with some reluctance, disclosing, not the grunts and groans of my grandfather’s wasted throat, but the low voice of the man at 73.

I had never heard him speak. He talked in a loud drawl, with a fugitive trace of Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s cadence – a slow start, rising in the middle – that struck me for the first time as a quirk of that generation of English speakers, born in the 1920s.

In a different accent, his young interlocutor pressed for details of the vanished Chinatown of his past.

Over four hours, the old man dictated the narrative of the place and so, his life: A childhood in Craig Road watching clans go to war in the streets, opium dens, rickshaw pullers who made their own shoes and had special lamps for escorts, the war and liberation, the night soil truck coming to take buckets of poo from each house before the advent of the sewerage system, cabarets.

Sometimes, he was unwittingly charming, nerdy about place names and the minutiae of who owned what. He could rattle off the full names and titles of every neighbour, the number of floors in each building, and at one point offered to draw the floor plan of the old CID building.

Always, he was factual, verging on cold, delivering details of British coronation day and mass screenings during the Japanese Occupation with the same steady dispassion. That he went to be registered with two brothers and one never came back, didn’t seem to shake him.

Working as a labourer for the Japanese was “hot and dirty”, so he joined the police, where he could get better rations and rice “not too broken” for cooking. Naturally, he never left.

This made for some comedy. Did he not face resentment from his countrymen for working for the Japanese, asked the interviewer. He had no understanding of the sentiment.

The rumour was that the Chinese would be sent away if they did not, “that is all”, he said – a catchphrase he liked to end his every disclosure with.

I had to laugh. Here was a man with a Nietzschean love for his fate, who had lived under three administrations and knew the bounds of all authority, had seen the British go from overlords to night soil men as prisoners of war then restored once again.

Suddenly the silence, or submission, of his eyes as I had known them made sense.

My mother later let on that she had never seen proof of adultery. Perhaps his seven-year departure from the family was a midlife attempt to cut against that instinct, though, and this is the rub, I am only imagining this.

In the final analysis, I cannot say if he was redeemed or condemned by my labours, nor even if he was many things or just a few.

My flirtation with the past had thrown up only the incompleteness of evidence, memory, and the facts we call history, which even when undisputed – like the death of a man in custody – can admit different meanings.

Eventually, that is all.