"Our amah or cleaning and laundering girl was named Mas, which means gold. She was very small, less than five feet, and of mixed origin - Sumatran, Siamese, a touch of China. She spoke a little English - "Yusof a bit cracked, tuan," she would say, rightly - but was fluent in all the tongues of the peninsula. Her father called himself Mr. Raja and was reputed to have committed incest with her - sumbang, a terrible crime - but was immune from any criminal charge because the Sultan owed him money. He looked wholly Tamil. Mas had been married at the age of twelve. This was unusually young, but the occupying Japanese had had the delicacy not to send married women to their brothels. Mas's one son, born when she was thirteen, was a burly policeman who looked ten years older than his mother."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anthony_Burgess%2C_biographies
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Anthony Burgess, biographies
73 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Anthony Burgess, biographies →
Related Quotes
"I was not really anything [at university in the late 1930s] but a renegade Catholic liberal humanist with tendencies …"
"Poor as I was [at one stage of university], however, I still insisted on the Friday night booze-up, with Gaunt and Ma…"
"The few Thailand women I met in northern Malaya called the sexual act kedunkading, with a resonant stress on the last…"
"Dylan Thomas was the one big name [in the literary circles Burgess frequented in wartime London], but George Orwell, …"
"The view of Liverpudlians that they are a race apart is well-founded. There is the unanalysable genetic mixture of a …"
"They [Burgess’s students in foreign languages] just could not understand why one word had to be masculine and another…"
"We landed at London docks [finally returning from service with Army education in Gibraltar], and the first thing we s…"
"There was a writer already working on a novel which should present the ultimate austerity, whose properties he took f…"
"In 1943 there had been the Battle of Bamber Bridge, well remembered, though it never got into the official chronicles…"
"Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now."