KUSU ISLAND
Shaping Singaporean history through the Tales of Kusu Island
By Peh Yang Yu and Aishah Alhadad
Ah Yam is defenseless against the strong winds and waves but he continues to pull up his fishing net from the sea. He loses his grip momentarily and finds himself swept up from his boat, landing in the cold waters. He flails and gasps, screaming for attention. “Who will look after my wife and children?” He looks around frantically and notices how far his boat has floated away.
Just as he loses all hope, a large turtle appears before Ah Yam and gestures to him with a fin to climb onto his back. “I will take you to shore.” Ah Yam is taken aback by the speaking turtle but does as he was told. When they reach a nearby island, Ah Yam thanks the turtle and watches his saviour swim away without a word.
Ah Yam could no longer see his home island, Singapura so he resigned himself the remaining days of his life on the new island. He built a hut and gathered many food sources from the island and sea to keep him alive. He lived alone on the island until one day, he heard a voice crying for help. Ah Yam ran to the shore and sees the same turtle who rescued him carrying a man on its back. He helped the man off the turtle and was surprised to learn it is his friend, Syed Abdul Rahman. Pleased to see each other, the men shared their stories of being caught in sea storms. Before they could thank the turtle, it swam away, leaving the two friends alone on the island.
As the two friends live on the island, Ah Yam built a Chinese temple and Syed Abdul Rahman, a Malay shrine in gratitude to the turtle (Comber 2011).
The story of the two stranded fishermen illustrates how Kusu Island earned its name.[1] In Hokkien, kusu means ‘turtle island’. The island goes by many other names, such as Peak Island, and in Malay, Pulau Tembakul after the tembakul fish that swim nearby.[2] The Chinese man “Ah Yam” and Arab man “Syed Abdul Rahman” are known figures in the Kusu Island stories and legends about the Chinese temple and Malay shrines found on the island. The earliest mention of the island refers to Kusu Reef by a Spanish Governor, Dome Jose De Silva, who claimed the island as the “Governor’s Island” in the seventeenth century. When the British took interest in Singapore and its nearby waters and islands, the island carried different names, first the “Governor’s Straits”, and then “Goa Island” in 1806 by a British hydrographer (Chia 2009, 78). After Stamford Raffles arrived in Singapore in 1819, the island was appointed as a reference point for the British empire’s new port. During the late nineteenth to twentieth centuries, Kusu Island served as the burial site for immigrants quarantined for cholera on the nearby St John’s and Lazarus Islands. Beyond these colonial histories, additional tales encircle this small island, located 5.6 kilometers due south-west from the main island of Singapore. Considered as folktales, these stories were passed down by oral tradition from generation to generation, which provide serious clues about how the people of Singapore across a collective of islands and time periods, bearing multiple ethnicities, cultures, and religions, pass along knowledge of the places they call home.
Map 1. Teo, Cavin. Map of Kusu Island. 2016. Blogspot. Accessed Jan 20, 2017. http://cavinteo.blogspot.sg/2016/10/kusu-island-2016-annual-pilgrimage.html.
The stories of Kusu Island form part of the body of origin stories about Singapore and provides an alternative perspective into Singapore’s history. Persistent references to the legend of Sang Nila Utama, a thirteenth century Srivijayan prince points to the cultural importance of storytelling in the Malay Archipelago since the pre-colonial era and well after the British colonisation of Singapore in 1819. To understand the region means one must reckon with the significant role that the verbal narration of news, stories, and legends relation played among populations across the region when textual sources were limited for public’s access. These orally transmitted stories remind us that Singapore’s history is far richer and more extensive than what textbooks convey. The tales of Kusu Island offer one critical piece of a vast history submerged by other histories that have privileged texts.
Attention to the turtle island shows how rivalling details reveal the power and limits of the oral tradition. Though certain versions of the story of Kusu Island mention that Syed Abdul Rahman built the keramat, it also seems implausible, for the shrines are believed to be his burial site, along with those of his alleged mother and sister.[3] According to the legend, Yam and Syed Abdul Rahman were two holy men and close friends from Singapura who travelled to the island in search of peace and quiet in order to meditate and fast. The two men frequented the island to practice their rituals, and the temple and shrines are said to commemorate them (Monteiro and Watson 1979). Other versions of Kusu Island’s origin do not mention the names of the Chinese and Malay men. While some tales characterised the two men as religious, others have identified them as sailors who were rescued from a shipwreck. In some of these stories, the turtle did not only save the men, it turned itself into an Island––Kusu Island––to provide refuge for them (Bosco 2016). If one looks at the island from a bird’s eye view, it somewhat closely resembles a turtle: you can find the Chinese temple at the head, and the keramats at the tail.
Given that neither the shrine nor keramat keep records of their histories, we contemporaries have only the stories and tales of the island to remember and know the island by. One common form, illustrated children’s books, the Kusu Island origin stories continue to circulate within Singapore in a variety of ways to this day, title authored and illustrated by Ron Chandran-Dudley and Wilkie Tan (Chandran-Dudley 2001). The example describes two hetero sexual couples that were each saved from a storm and brought to a nearby island by the turtle. The first couple was Chinese and the second Malay. They similarly proceeded to build a shrine and temple to commemorate the turtle’s kindness and help. This version of the story also parallels the idea of racial harmony and island population.
News records alongside children’s illustrated books have also ropagated Kusu Island’s origin stories. According to historian Jack Chia, wealthy businessman Chia Cheng Ho built the Tua Pek Kong temple in 1923 in honour of a Chinese deity, Grand Uncle (大伯公), also known as the Merchant God or God of Prosperity (Chia 2009). Local English newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s have shown that pilgrimages to the island began as early as 1813, the year of Syed Abdul Rahman’s death (Sit 1948). Before ferry services to the Southern Islands (mainly St. John’s, Lazarus and Kusu Islands) were relocated from Clifford Pier to Marina South Pier in 2006, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims in the 1990s would make their way to Kusu Island. Statistics from the Singapore Land Authority show that approximately 42,000 have visited the island annually during the pilgrimage seasons of 2012 to 2016. However, the annual Kusu Pilgrimage Season 2020 marks a turning point on how pilgrimages would be conducted. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted religion in various way, most notably with the implementation of Safe Management Measures (SMMs) in limiting the number of people who could visit Kusu Island to reduce the risks of the spread of virus. As part of the SMMs, visitors to Kusu Island are capped at 500 daily, with a limit capacity of 30 people within the temple and 15 people at the keramat at any point of time.[4] Visitors would also have to pre-book their planned visit in order to purchase the ferry tickets. Pilgrimage to Kusu Island takes place during the ninth lunar month, largely because it is considered sacred, and it is often believed that the miracles performed by the Grand Uncle happen during this month (Chia 2009). Most importantly, it is also Tua Pek Kong’s birthday.
Pilgrimage rituals on Kusu Island reflect Singapore’s multi-ethnic and multicultural qualities. After visiting the Tua Pek Kong Temple, the pilgrims will climb 152 steps to pay respects at the shrines of Syed Abdul Rahman and his family. Buddhists, Taoists, Confucians, and even Muslims paid respects to both ritual sites, praying for longevity, peace, wealth, health, and fertility. A visit to the keramats typically shows joss sticks and mandarin oranges by the burial sites, and prayers and wishes in different languages written across the walls. The amalgamation of different religious and ethnic practices at the keramat is especially symbolic of Singapore’s multi-ethnic society. The keramat grave as an unprejudiced space allows for many methods of worshipping it, depending on how the pilgrims approach it. Despite differences, the Chinese temple and Malay shrines serve similar tutelary functions, receiving prayers for peace, health, wealth and prosperity. Both places also offer “fertility trees” on which those wanting children hang stones and other items to make their wishes, while gamblers pray to both Chinese and Malay deities for winning lottery numbers (Lu 2012). The stories that surround the legendary Chinese and Arab/Malay characters reinforce the values of Singapore’s multiculturalism. On the back of the turtle island, it seems that a particular narrative of Singaporean history continues, as the wisdom of the turtle that saved the fishermen bears a reminder of the efforts required to keep humanity intact during times of hardship.
NOTES
[1] Kusu Island is located 5.6 km south-west of Singapore. A Chinese temple and three Malay keramat (shrines) on the island attract thousands of pilgrims annually, especially in the ninth lunar month falls between September and October (Singapore Infopedia 2016).
[2] Kusu means “tortoise/turtle island” in the Hokkien dialect because the Chinese say it resembled a huge turtle floating in the sea (Fong 1948). The island is also known in Malay as Pulau Tambakul/Tembakul, Goa Island or Peak Island, and in Mandarin, Guiyu Dao (Singapore Inforpedia 2016). Malays, however, prefer to call the island Pulau Tembakul, after a variety of fish which abound in the island’s shallow muddy shoals, and have a peculiar habit of leaping up trees on land (Fong 1948).
[3] The term ‘Keramat’ in Malay is derived from the Arabic term ‘karamah’, which refers to the wali, a close friend of God (Allah), or a pious person. It may be applied to the living saint, although it is usually applied to the dead (Cheu 1996). Hence, keramat can be broadly applied to the tombs of Islamic saints (Chia 2009).
[4] According to the Chinese caretaker, the 2020 pilgrimage saw a dismal record number of visitors due to the SMMs and poor booking system management. The fate of Kusu Island and its pilgrimages seemed to be in the hands of COVID-19.
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