Category Archives: Novel

June 16, 2012 · 11:52

Lost Cells 1: the Cultural Challenge of being Overseas Chinese

I was born on a starless night in Singapore, one among fifty seven million people of Chinese descent to have been born outside of mainland China.

According to my Mandarin teacher, some overseas Chinese were at one time referred to as ‘same cells’ by our fellow-Chinese on the mainland. This sobriquet applied to those in Hong Kong and Macao, the idea being that they were all part of one body, one organism. As for the rest of us, we presumably floated too far away to qualify for ‘sameness’. Like lost cells, we’ve become disentangled from the mother organism and are now drifting aimlessly through space.

I rather like this idea. The term ‘lost cells’ conjures up amoeba-like objects from biology lessons. I imagine blobs with malleable membranes, expanding and contracting as they skim across a vast ocean.

It has sometimes been lonely being a lost cell. China always loomed, but I couldn’t have told you what it signified. When I eventually spoke to other overseas Chinese, I discovered I was far from alone. No matter where our homes were – be they in Jamaica or Australia – we all grappled with what being overseas Chinese meant.

How did this vast ancestral land of ours, with its millennia of culture, fit into our lives?

—————

Of course, we Chinese are a practical people. Nothing as nebulous as existential angst could ever stop us in the day-to-day business of simply getting on. To quote the legendary investor Jim Rogers: “By one count, the overseas Chinese together make up the third largest economy in the world.”

I found this statistic truly staggering. Imagine placing all fifty seven million of us – you if you’re an overseas Chinese, me, my family, friends and acquaintances – onto the same land. Our collective effort, according to Jim Rogers – from the businesses we owned, the work we did, the things we made – would create a powerhouse third only to America and Japan (the top two at the time) in terms of output.

(If you haven’t heard of Jim Rogers, he once worked with George Soros, retired early and then rode around the globe on his motorcycle. The above quote is taken from his book Hot Commodities, a terrific read for anyone interested in investing in commodities.)

Rogers’ statistic surprised me, but it also made me strangely proud. It spoke to me about core Chinese values: hard work, family, education. Because he was talking about far-flung Chinese, it said other things too. I thought of the way many of our ancestors had arrived in unknown places from an impoverished China, with nothing other than the clothes on their backs and the few dollars in their pockets. That they had built new lives out of so very little told me they must have had courage, a gift for adapting, and gritty determination.

Against such odds, overseas Chinese have been conspicuously successful. This is especially true in South-East Asia where most of us live.  

Alas, our success has not made for an easy relationship with the other peoples of the region. It certainly didn’t make my quest for identity any easier.

—————

The search for identity permeates my novel. Its main character is a Nyonya woman who claims a meaningful role for herself within her own culture. With the arrival of the British in Malaya, great change comes, and my heroine struggles as her culture is eroded by new Chinese immigrants and relentless Westernisation. She eventually understands there are things she cannot change; what she can change requires courage, and the confronting of bruising reality.

—————

When I was growing up, I never felt especially Chinese. Thrust into the three cultures of Malaysia – Chinese, Malay and Indian – all heavily spiced by Western influence, I became accustomed to what is now called a ‘multicultural’ society early on.

Unlike friends who can remember astonishing details, I have few childhood memories. The big events I recall were the colourful weddings, of which there were many, all involving copious amounts of food and drink; also Chinese New Year celebrations, which I looked forward to because children received red packets (ang bao) with money inside. I was always excited by a red packet. Before peeling the envelope open, I would caress its sleeves to feel what coins it contained. Envelopes with no coins were the best, because those contained bank notes.

None of what we celebrated made me feel any allegiance to China though. I didn’t even like fireworks, that staple of Chinese New Year celebrations. Whenever my family gathered to light long thin sticks or bunches of red crackers which popped like machine-guns, I cowered inside the house.

“You know we Chinese invented fireworks,” my father once told me, as if this indicated a genetic predisposition to enjoying thunderous explosions.

As I became older, it was clear there were other ways in which I wasn’t typically Chinese; in my bluntness for example, and my tendency to call a spade a spade, which even straight-talking Dutch friends find difficult. Also, while I don’t deliberately seek conflict, I don’t go out of my way to avoid them. If things need to be said, I will say them, regardless of the consequences and even at the risk of conflict. This is quite un-Chinese. It’s un-Asian too; where I come from, talking without mentioning indelicate truths has been elevated to an art form.

Such etiquette works, but only if everyone is equally attuned to fine nuances. My mother once thought she had told me something when in reality she had not – her reference to a gay relative was so oblique, I had no clue what she meant.

Such restraint has passed me by. Who knows why? Perhaps it’s my Nyonya heritage coming alive, or simply the result of decadent Western influence. I can’t help thinking though, what a pity so much is left unsaid by us all. So much holding back of words, thoughts, feeling…while every passing moment masks our and life’s fragility.

—————

In the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, I felt truly Chinese for the first time.

It was the virulent criticism of China beforehand which spurred this ‘quasi-patriotism’ in me. Not a day passed in the spring of 2008 when we in the UK didn’t hear about the air quality in Beijing (poor), Chinese policies in Tibet (oppressive), and other tit-bits such as scenes of the Chinese countryside (full of tanned peasants with crooked teeth, decaying houses and filth). In other words, the usual Western media fare when reporting on a developing country.

When British troublemakers unfurled the Tibetan flag at one of Beijing’s iconic towers, I became indignant. Not because I support Communism or think China blameless or disagree with the right to protest, but because the manner of this protest smacked of Western neo-colonialism. It showed no sensitivity to ‘face’, an important part of life in Asia. It took no account of how far China has come in the last thirty years, or how it became what it is today. China had to work damned hard for its moment of glory and no Westerner has any right to take it away. I felt personally affronted, as if I had been slapped on both cheeks.

Fortunately, we were avenged. Watching the opening ceremony live on television with colleagues, I remember very clearly my burning pride at the jaw-dropping spectacle. The grandeur, feats of coordination, and the unfurling of blocks of our history, made my heart full. It made me think of visiting the land my ancestors had come from.

—————

My first trip to China took place in 2011. It was actually instigated by my Russian partner, who had already been three times. I on the other hand, remained nervous. It seemed such a large undertaking, so fraught with meaning.

At the time, my Mandarin teacher, an overseas Chinese woman from Singapore, had just lost her job in London and was reluctantly considering two employment offers from China. “I don’t want to go,” she said. Her statement made my ears prick up. “Why?” I asked. “I don’t understand the mainlanders,” she confided. “And the toilets are terrible. Make sure you have loo roll with you.”

As if that weren’t enough, she added, “Oh, be careful when you go shopping. They’ll fleece you.”

From her description, I expected the worst, and was pleasantly surprised when I loved Shanghai. I was struck by how clean the city was; the floors of every metro station gleamed. Though my Mandarin teacher was right about taking loo roll, toilets were generally fine where we went, better than their Malaysian equivalent (see my blog-post Truly Malaysia: The Wetness of Toilets).

More importantly, I blended in. No one towered over me. I looked like everyone else, which made me feel strangely at home. According to my partner, twenty four hours was all it took for my ‘veneer’ of British politeness to rub off. By the second day, I behaved like a local and happily jumped queues. 

Despite this, I was also aware of being different. For a start, I hardly speak Mandarin. Yet even if I did, I don’t think it would have changed anything. The mainlanders eyed me cautiously and I did the same, as if we knew we shared a heritage but our experiences had diverged too long ago for collective memory to matter. China may be my ancestral land, but it is definitely not my homeland. Like a lost cell which had thrived elsewhere, I knew then that China wouldn’t be my destiny.

To be continued

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June 4, 2012 · 12:53

Smart Girls don’t find Husbands?!

The first day I went to school, a Methodist kindergarten, I cried. My mother stood outside watching for a few hours, but I knew she would leave at some point and I dreaded the moment. Nonetheless, when the teacher asked whether any of us knew the song ‘Ten Little Indian Boys,’ I put up my hand. Drying tears, I opened my mouth to sing.

“One little two little three little Indians, four little five little six…”

I became so carried away that when I finished, I repeated the song in reverse, but the teacher told me I had done enough.

That was how my educational adventure began – with a humble rendition of a children’s song. I was not to know that this karaoke debut, full of fear and trembling, would one day lead me to the spires of Oxford University.

—————

While growing up, I was fortunate to have an enlightened mother who emphasised the value of education. The girls in my novel aren’t so lucky. They live in an era when education for girls is deemed unimportant or ignored altogether. Even my feisty Nyonya matriarch struggles with sending her daughters to school. She fears that education would make them too clever to be appreciated by men.  Below is an excerpt:

COPYRIGHT SIAK CHIN YOKE 2012 (from Spirit of Kueh, my unpublished novel)

“I wanted to send them to school but at the same time, was concerned not to damage their ability to find husbands, instinctively knowing that men didn’t like wives who were cleverer than they. Even my beloved Peng Choon, wonderful husband that he was, liked to think of himself as being the smarter of us two, which for the sake of peace, I of course allowed. He would make comments, “Ai-yahh! That is rubbish-lah! You talk just like a woman!” in a particular tone, as if talking like a woman were such a terrible affliction.”

COPYRIGHT SIAK CHIN YOKE 2012

Attitudes may not have changed as much as we like to think. Even while I was at school, one or two of the older girls warned me that it would be hard to find a man prepared to ‘put up’ with my brains. Therefore, they suggested I play down my intelligence, just a little. How many girls have been told the same thing, I wonder? To dumb ourselves down for the sake of boys?

—————

The matriarch in my novel eventually sends her daughters to the Anglo Chinese Girls’ School in Ipoh, where they thrive. The school, now called the Methodist Girls’ School (see photograph), happens to be my alma mater. It is also the school which my mother and her mother before her attended.

I have fond memories of the place. I remember our old wooden desks, always badly scratched, with doodles all over, sometimes with the marks of penknives etched into them. We had a desk each, and a wooden chair on which we sat for five hours and forty minutes every day, facing a succession of teachers who would come in to teach us different subjects.

Presumably to ensure that we girls would become good homemakers, we were forced to take Domestic Science. It was a subject I loathed. We learnt sewing, the different types of stitches, cooking and I can’t remember what else. Because Domestic Science didn’t have to count towards my end-of-term mark, I would do as little as I could get away with. Once, I actually failed the subject. That proved too shameful; the next term, I made sure I scraped through. Still, I learnt nothing, not even how to sew a button. (If I need a button sewn now, I take the garment to a tailor.)

My best memory is the canteen. It served food which, living in England today, I would kill for. Fried noodles, rice dishes, steaming laksa, juicy tropical fruit. During a twenty-minute break, we would devour our food while sitting on benches in a large open-air area, under the cool of ceiling fans (see photograph).   

Our facilities would have struck many in the West as ‘basic’ for a leading school. Yet, we had everything we needed: laboratories, a library, a single set of courts for netball or badminton, an open-air performance hall, and a playing field where we had to do timed runs of six hundred metres in the heat once a term.

Whatever we may have lacked, we more than made up for in attitude and spirit. All of us wanted to do well. Amongst my classmates, it was assumed we would go to university and graduate with a degree.

When I arrived at a private school in England, the opposite was true: facilities were better, but ambition and desire to learn were in scarce evidence. To be honest, I was stunned. My new classmates thought they did well if they passed O-levels in five or six subjects, whereas the norm in Malaysia at the time was nine or ten subjects. And it didn’t occur to my English peers that A-grades were there for a reason: to be attained.

It was only after reaching British shores that I appreciated what Malaysian education had given me. I discovered I had a solid base from which to build, so solid that the transition to England proved seamless, the lessons easy.

I cannot thank my Malaysian teachers enough for all that they taught me. When I say that, I’m not referring to what they explained from our textbooks. Rather, I mean the values they carried within, which seeped into the air to mould us into the people we eventually became. I’m grateful also to my former classmates, for the unique spirit they helped us engender. Unconstrained by expectations of who we would one day be, we accepted each other as we were then: pimply adolescents still unsure of ourselves, burning with hope for the future. We competed hard, but we also played hard. That easy mix of friendly competition, can-do and fun warms my heart whenever I remember those times.

We had a good life. And we probably appreciate it even more now.

—————

The story of my Malaysian school started, ironically, in the country in which I now live, with an English vicar.

In July 1895, the Reverend William Horley was already in Singapore. From there, he was sent by the Methodist Mission to the-then frontier mining town of Ipoh, his remit being to open a school. Reverend Horley was, by all accounts, an energetic man. Five days after reaching Ipoh, he began teaching a class of boys in a small rented Malay house with a thatched (attap) roof. When girls started arriving, he taught them as well. This was how my alma mater started.

The thirst for learning among the local population was great, and classes of both boys and girls grew quickly. Reverend Horley literally had jungle cleared before arranging for buildings to be constructed. The buildings were financed not by the colonial government but mainly by wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs. Hence their names Anglo Chinese School Ipoh, or more affectionately, ACS Ipoh, and Anglo Chinese Girls’ School. ACS Ipoh went on to become one of Malaysia’s top boys’ schools. You can read the story here.

As for the girls, their school was located within the grounds of ACS until a separate piece of land was bought and a school constructed for them. (The schools remain twinned; at seventeen years of age, the young women move to the boys’ school to continue in the sixth form.)

Whenever I hear this story, I am filled with awe. I imagine the men and the elephants they would have driven. I smell their sweat as they haul trees in thick jungle, clearing the land so that our schools could be built. I think too, of the progressive Chinese entrepreneurs who gave Reverend Horley the funds. Without them, our schools might never have risen from the ground.

Of course, Reverend Horley and his fellow-missionaries didn’t do the physical work themselves: they hired local help. Nonetheless, they would have had to put up with the vagaries of the tropics: the mosquitoes and insects, the inhospitable climate, the uncertainty of how their efforts would be received. It is true that they arrived to ‘convert the natives’. Yet, this didn’t stop them from teaching children of all races and religions.

Many generations of Malaysians have passed through both the Anglo Chinese School and its sister Methodist Girls’ School (formerly called the Anglo Chinese Girls’ School) in Ipoh. We owe a debt to Reverend Horley and the men and women like him, who braved unknown climes to teach us.

I have acknowledged this by including missionary characters in my novel and depicting the vital role they played in education. Because the timeframe fits, I even imagine meetings between my Nyonya matriarch and the Reverend William Horley himself. This is an intriguing possibility: on the one hand, a fierce Nyonya who is sceptical of British rule, on the other, a genial, larger than life English missionary. I hope you will read my novel to find out what happens.

Meanwhile, on 1 August this year, it will have been a hundred years since the foundation stone for the grand buildings by which ACS Ipoh is known, was laid. Undeterred by the fears Nyonya matriarchs would once have had, I’ve donated a small sum to encourage the girls onwards. It is to be awarded as a prize to the best sixth-form pupil in Physics, if she is a young woman, or to the top sixth-form pupil, also if she is a young woman. Even better if there are two winners (in which case, the prize will be doubled)!

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May 6, 2012 · 17:54

The Miracle of Writing

“Do you write when the inspiration takes you?” you ask. No, I say, I write every day, whether inspired or not. Otherwise, I’d never finish my novel. You look surprised. It’s obviously not what you expected to hear.

I am perhaps fortunate, I add. Some people say they find it hard to begin writing. I have no such problem. I simply sit in front of my machine, and write. Just like with this blog-post.

The act of searching for words, of putting them together to form sentences, does something to my whole being. When I write, it’s not just my brain which is engaged – it’s also my heart. I see what my characters see, feel what they feel. Writing awakens my soul.

With each word comes a new idea. Or a memory long cast aside. Often, the thoughts and ideas and memories appear in random order, yet there are nebulous connections between them, strange pathways I can use or store as I wish. Sometimes, it’s not a thought I tap into, but the reservoir of emotion I know is there. The act of striking little black keys on a silver board unleashes a side of my psyche that has been kept in check for many years and can’t wait to be let out.  

It isn’t always so. In everyday life, I often can’t find the words. But when I write, I inevitably find the words. Even if it takes half a year.

 

The words sometimes come in dreams. I have only ever remembered a handful of dreams, yet I’m conscious of writing parts of my novel when I sleep. Or of adding to and subtracting from it, as I’m doing now. I will wake up with the exact phrase I had been searching for, which happened to come while I was still asleep. It’s uncanny.

 

I’ve known for a long time that I have some sort of talent for creative fiction. When I was nine, I was runner-up in a national essay competition in Malaysia (in the English language). There were only two submissions from my school: mine and a classmate’s. We both wrote about tragedy; my essay was about a girl who survives a plane crash, his about two children who are involved in a boat accident with their father. Mine was pure fiction, inspired by the tale of the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes. My classmate’s story, on the other hand, was based on his first-hand experience of surviving a terrible boat accident in which he watched his father drown while trying to save him and his sister. I still remember the title of his essay – Labyrinth of Fear. I handed my story in and thought no more about it. To my amazement, I was named runner-up nationally while my classmate was left without a prize. I felt embarrassed at the result. How could a made-up story trump real-life experience?

I thought of giving my classmate the trophy I won, but something held me back. 

 

As I grew up, I put story-writing away. There were too many other things in life. I continued to write, but only articles full of facts and figures. In the early years, they had titles like ‘The Quasiparticle Lifetime at the Mobility Edge’; later on, they described companies and the different elements of capital that could fund them. My pieces were lengthy tomes which required grammatically correct sentences, proper syntax and punctuation, but which had neither soul nor heart. In them, the equations and facts were more important than the writing. Yet, it was my words which stood out. Colleagues would comment on how well I wrote. I acknowledged their praise before promptly moving on. There were still too many other things I wanted to do.

 

Somewhere inside though, I must have stored all the words I have ever heard in my life. Because when the moment came, I was able to retrieve them.      

  

It started on a low day. Months after my final chemo session, I felt desperate. My hair had come back, but my energy hadn’t. What is life, I asked myself, without energy? When you lack the energy to move, life passes by in slow grinding motion. I slept, woke, read, went back to sleep, woke again, listened to the birds in the study, returned to sleep. Always, sleep overcame me, as if I had never slept before chemo and would never sleep enough again afterwards.

I couldn’t understand why it was so hard to regain my footing. My body had survived the ravages of illness and of drugs, and I was supposed to be well. Yet, I felt far from any state of equilibrium. “Why don’t you write?” my counsellor at MacMillan Cancer Support suggested.   

Reluctantly, I began. I felt all of the inertia which writers speak about, the resistance to sitting down with a blank page. It was a beautifully sunny autumn afternoon. I made endless cups of tea before carrying my laptop into the dining room where I wouldn’t be disturbed by the chirping of birds. I had only a vague idea what I would write about. Just start, my editor friend had said. So I did. I embarked on a short story involving four students who shared a house in a university town.

And then an extraordinary thing happened: I became immersed in the world of my characters. When I next went to the gym, I found myself imagining the scene to come, tweaking words in my head. I couldn’t wait to get back to my story.

In the fifth decade of my life, I finally experienced that cliché known as the creative spark. With every word I wrote, I felt my body becoming stronger. I commenced on a novel that had long lain dormant, and by the time I had written three chapters, was a rejuvenated person. Writing became as natural as breathing. No longer could I sit back in this life and not write. I now have to write to live, and to suffer all the consequences of this art in their full-blown form.

 

Ichtyandr is a young boy who needs a life-saving operation to survive. His father, a surgeon, implants a set of gills onto his lungs. Thereafter, Ichtyandr is able to live in both water and on land, but he must keep this a secret from his friends in Argentina where he has his home. He moves surreptitiously between two worlds: one full of beaches and open fields, the other a silent world in which the only sound is the gurgling of his breath.

Invented by Alexandr Belyayev, Russia’s equivalent of Jules Verne, Ichtyandr appeared in the novel Amphibian Man in 1928. I often feel like Ichtyandr as I scurry between the folds of my imagination and the vast terrace of day-to-day existence. My real life is quiet, while the world my characters inhabit is full of noise, and bustle, and people…always so many people everywhere. It is also full of food – that central plank of Malaysian identity – and I’m constantly hungry when I write. I smell the garlic and lemongrass being pounded in a grey granite pestle-and-mortar, see the juicy roasted ducks hanging on spits. Unwittingly, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, I will taste the saliva in my mouth. “What to do lah?” as one of my characters would say. “Of course must eat!”

 

Sometimes, being in two worlds or even three makes me schizophrenic. I can understand why writers become cranky. It forces me to look at Malaysia and at myself in a new light. I often imagine the characters in my novel as they would have moved around Ipoh, the tin mining town in which my story is set, a hundred years ago.

They were all alive then, going about their lives in rickshaws. If they could see Ipoh today, they would be astonished by the changes. There are many things I think they would love, and also much that would make them sad, as I am sad.

But sadness is not what I wish to dwell on here. Rather, I want to describe the sheer exhilaration of being able to tell the story I’ve kept inside my head all these years. I make up characters and sometimes I kill them; I find the words, thread them into sentences, move paragraphs around.

All this I do, so that I can guide my reader into a world that once was, down the very street she or he may still live on.

“You write and you erase. And you call this a profession?” says Nicole Kraus in her novel Great House.

No, I don’t call it a profession. I call it a miracle. And I’m thankful I have the vitality to share in this miracle, however imperfect my participation may be.

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April 21, 2012 · 23:09

What’s in a Chinese Name?

清玉

The above is my Chinese name. They were the first, and for a long time, the only, Chinese characters I knew how to write. The character on the left means ‘Pure’, while the one on the right means ‘Jade’. Together, they make Pure Jade, the meaning of my Chinese name.

Jade is a type of precious stone. I’m sure you’ve seen it on rings, or in Asia, carved into images of deities, dragons and other mythical creatures. I loved the idea of Pure Jade. When I was a child, the sight of pieces of emerald-coloured stone on fingers always evoked a special feeling in my heart.

Until last year, I thought jade only came in green. Then, when we were in Shanghai, we saw Pi Xiu, a mythical creature with the head of a dragon, the paws of a lion and an apparently voracious appetite for silver and gold.

Pi Xiu only eats treasure; he never releases any, since he lacks an anus (such a wonderful creation, so characteristically Chinese…). Our Pi Xiu is in solid jade, brown from head to his non-existent bottom, and extremely heavy. He gives new meaning to the word ‘lug’. Finally, I knew what it felt like to lift Pure Jade in my hands.

Now for the trickier bit: how to say Pure Jade in Chinese. How you say my name depends on whether you’re speaking Mandarin or one of the many Chinese dialects. The same written character can be said many different ways. Because my father is Cantonese, my name was officially transliterated using the Cantonese form. In Cantonese, Pure Jade is more or less said as ‘Chin Yoke’, which is how my name appears on my birth certificate. But because transliteration is only approximate, my name could also have been written ‘Ching Yoke’, ‘Cheng Yoke’, or even ‘Chin Yook’.

You can just imagine the fun our British rulers had with our names before Malaysia’s independence. Some people ended up with official names which were nothing like what they should have been. Fortunately, this didn’t happen to me, as I was born after independence and my Chinese name was properly spelt.

The point to note though is that there are two parts to my Chinese name. My name is Chin Yoke, not Chin on its own, or Yoke on its own. If you called me just Chin, it would be like having Yin without the Yang – one half would be missing. That is true for all traditional Chinese names. (Though there seems to be a recent fad among the mainland Chinese of giving their children just one name, so that their surnames have to be tagged on. For example, the tennis player Li Na. Li is her surname, Na is her name. But having just one ‘particle’ is bizarre for a Chinese name, which I assume is why she’s known as Li Na. Otherwise the yin-yang principle would break down).

The example of Li Na illustrates perfectly where our surnames should be placed: before our names. This may seem strange, but once I explain the principle, you’ll understand why we do it this way. As a rule, we Chinese try to ‘home’ in on details gradually, starting with the bigger picture. The result is a logic all of our own and which generally confounds everyone else.

Take for example, the writing of an address on an envelope. If you were to hand the envelope to a courier for delivery, the first thing the person would want to know is: to which country? Therefore in a Chinese address, the country is written first. After the country, the courier will ask about the province, then the town, followed by the street, and finally the house or building number and if relevant, the apartment number. (Actually, if you look at it this way, conventional Western practice appears quite odd.)

The same principle of ‘homing’ in applies also to our surnames and names: your surname is far more important – it identifies the clan to which you belong; therefore, your surname comes first. Your name only identifies you. Let’s face it, we’re not that significant in the large scheme of the world. This is why our names follow our surnames.

In my case, my surname is the character for ‘Stone’ (see below), pronounced ‘Sek’ in Cantonese and transliterated into English either as ‘Sek’ or ‘Siak’.

石

My surname happens to appear on my birth certificate as Siak, therefore my full Chinese name is Siak Chin Yoke.

I’ve never been called by my Chinese name, which is a pity, since I like the sound of Chin Yoke. The trouble with using it where I live in Europe is that people wouldn’t have a clue what to do if I told them my name was Siak Chin Yoke. The first question they’d ask is, er, which one is your surname? And then, they’d start calling me Chin.

It always makes me wonder whenever anyone does that. I know there are many Western names for which such abbreviation is possible, but shortening is by no means a universal rule. For example, if someone told you her name was Pauline – which has two syllables – you wouldn’t immediately ask whether you could call her Paul, would you? Why do it just because my name happens to sound Oriental?

The path of least resistance being easier, for the moment I stick to the Western name I was also given at birth, Selina, for daily use. Because it’s a Western name, it’s written in the order Westerners are used to, with the name before the surname. Therefore, if we combine my English and Chinese names together, you get the full name on my birth certificate – Selina Siak Chin Yoke.

This giving of English names to Chinese children is a relatively recent fashion. The characters in my Malayan novel – set between 1878 and 1941 – certainly wouldn’t have had English names. And I haven’t given them artificially simple names to make reading supposedly ‘easier’ for a Western audience. I think Chinese names are already straight-forward, since they tend to be short. Chin Yoke, for example. Hardly difficult, is it?

Where it gets trickier is that the Chinese liked being able to identify the generation to which a person belonged. Therefore in Chinese families, the children have names which may sound very similar, but aren’t. For example, if I had a sister, a possible name for her could have been Chin Fah. The first parts of our names would then be Chin, so that everyone would know we were related and of the same generation.

That’s all very well if there are just the two of you. But in the old days, people had large families. We’re talking ten or more children. That’s what we have in my novel. Which explains why, when my partner read the first draft, she wondered aloud whether I was deliberately trying to confuse my readers. “Why do you have names that all sound alike?” she asked. Then, in despair, she added, “Your names are so hard to remember!”

I looked at her in astonishment. To put this in context, my partner is Russian. Let me repeat: she’s Russian. Question: have you ever tried to pronounce an entire Russian name from start to finish including the part in the middle they call the patronymic? And our names are hard to remember?? Please. I reminded her of what I’d had to do while ploughing through War & Peace, how I was forced to flip backwards constantly to see who was who. Even that didn’t always work, since Russians often use pet names. This means that a man can appear as Alexandr somewhere, mutate paragraphs later into Sacha and you’re supposed to know that it’s the same person. (No offence to the Russians and Russian speakers reading this blog. Except that you’re not allowed to complain about our names being hard to remember. At least ours are short and don’t mysteriously mutate.)

Back to my novel. I promise I’m not deliberately trying to confuse anyone. And I do try to help my readers to the extent possible. But there’s no avoiding Chinese and Malay names, and for this I make no apology.

The increasing attempts at ‘Westernising’ Chinese names has also had unintended consequences. When I was growing up, everyone used the traditional format for writing their names, placing surname first, and then their name. So we could tell at once what someone’s surname was. Now, many people of Chinese descent have adopted the Western convention when writing their Chinese names. This has sometimes been through necessity (as for Twitter handles) and sometimes through choice – to make it easier for everyone else. The trouble is that it makes it harder now, even for us Chinese, to tell which the surname is and which the name is. For instance, the name Lai Weng Yip could be parsed in one of two ways, with either Lai being the surname, or Yip being the surname. Which is it, my partner asks? I shrug. Could be either, I tell her, since Lai is a Chinese surname, as is Yip. Indeed, Weng Yip could be a name, and so could Lai Weng. With globalisation, it looks like we’ve all become confused. Aren’t Chinese names fun?

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March 4, 2012 · 16:57

Snapshots – 3. Day with a Special Chef

I held my breath. On turning the bright pink mould upside down and giving it a gentle tap, I could barely believe that what I had just fashioned with my fingers would fall out. Yet fall out it did, plopping into my open palm without fuss, its shape intact. You can see the look of utter surprise on my face.

I had finally made my first angkoo.

If you’re not from south-east Asia, you may well ask what angkoo is and why on earth I would want to make it.

In the photograph on the right, angkoos are the orange-red mounds resting on the tray at the bottom. Each angkoo comprises a glutinous rice skin, coloured orange-red and filled with steamed mung beans. Not your cup of tea? You may change your mind once you’ve tasted one: angkoos are sweet and delightfully aromatic, with lots of thick coconut milk and sugar.

Why this interest in angkoo? Well, angkoo is a well-known type of ‘cake’ or kueh made by the Nyonyas. It also has symbolic significance, because angkoos were traditionally given by a Nyonya couple to their family and friends when a new baby reached its first month. Angkoo features at key moments in my novel because of this symbolism. It has additional import for my main character, because it is while making angkoo one day that she finally realises what being a Nyonya actually means for her.

Because of the role angkoo plays in my novel, I’ve had to follow its recipe in detail, trying to imagine what it would have been like making angkoo in a sweaty olden kitchen. This week, I decided it was time to consult an expert.

Who better than my aunt Lorna, who comes from multiple lines of Nyonyas? My aunt’s grandmother was my Great Grandmother, a fierce Nyonya woman, and my aunt’s mother was also a Nyonya descendant of many generations. Aunt Lorna runs Sri Nyonya, one of the best-known restaurants in Petaling Jaya specialising in Nyonya cuisine. (Petaling Jaya, PJ to locals, is close to Malaysia’s capital of Kuala Lumpur).

I was nervous before we started, uncertain how the day would go. Everyone had told me beforehand what hard work Nyonya cooking was, especially the ‘cakes’ or kueh I wished to learn.

For the first few minutes, I stood watching my aunt in awe. By the time the photograph with my stunned face was taken, I had relaxed, because most of the arduous work had been done. I call it arduous, yet it was easier than in the days when my main character was making her angkoos. She would have had to grind her own glutinous rice flour by hand; we bought ours in ready-made packets. She would also have had to chop firewood for the stove and use bellows to control the strength of the fire.

Despite our modern conveniences, I can’t say the work was easy. There was much mixing and kneading and steaming. Even though aunt Lorna had steamed and crushed the mung beans the day before, it still took us a couple of hours to make thirty two angkoos. Each angkoo has to be made individually, which means that the amounts for every skin and ball of filling have to be separately weighed. Only thereafter could the fun begin: the shaping of each angkoo into its mould and the ‘knocking out’ of the angkoo.

From the photographs, it’s obvious I had to concentrate hard. Aunt Lorna showed me how to flatten the orange-red angkoo skin on my palm, making sure the skin became thin but at the same time, was thick enough to hold its filling. When the skin was properly prepared, I placed a ball of the mung bean filling onto it and slowly pulled at the sides of the skin to close the wrapped ball up. Then, I pushed the ball into an intricately designed mould. The traditional moulds were wooden, but we used a bright pink plastic mould with the characteristic tortoise pattern inscribed. I was told that if I coated the mould properly with glutinous rice flour, the angkoo should simply drop out when the mould was turned over and given a soft tap. Although I understood the theory, it still felt like a small miracle whenever an angkoo fell out with no problem. I always breathed a sigh of relief.

My angkoos tended to have wobbly sides, not the clean lines of my aunt’s expert hands, but that didn’t matter, because they all tasted wonderful once they had been steamed. They were a perfect shade of orange-red too – thanks entirely to my aunt, who had mixed in the colouring in judicious proportions.

It was only afterwards, in the quiet of the night, that I became aware of the emotions I must have carried during the day. I remembered the joy I felt as we, my aunt and her helper Theresa and I, chatted happily while knocking angkoos out. I imagined my main character doing the same a hundred years ago in her old-fashioned kitchen. She would also have been standing with other women, surrounded by the sound of chattering and familiar aromas, of garlic frying and pandanus leaf steaming. It was in the midst of such activity that she learnt to appreciate her heritage.

For me, what began as a research adventure turned into an intense, highly personal event. Making angkoo with aunt Lorna was a privilege, an experience I will never forget.

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February 15, 2012 · 09:41

When Resemblance to Real People May Not be Coincidental

A year ago, I began writing my novel. I completed the first draft three days ago – twenty three chapters in all. I thought I would be relieved; instead, I’m numb. When I look back, I see a cycle of dreaming, writing, research…inventing, followed by more writing…followed by more research. Even now, I’m carrying out research in Malaysia, hoping to weave small details into my story. What I’m looking for are the simple everyday things we forget about, because they become as natural as breathing. To find these hidden gems, I’ve had to deploy methods that were at times unorthodox (though perfectly legal). This blog-post is about how I gathered such pearls.

Aunt Lorna at Sri Nyonya

The first victims in my quest for authenticity were my family. This seemed natural, because all I had a year ago were a rough story-line and the raw passion to tell a story linked to Great Grandmother. I conducted interviews with every single family member willing to talk: uncles and aunts, grand-aunts, my mother. They would see me coming with a little black case; it contained an Olympus digital voice recorder, a present from my partner, an apparatus no larger than a small Nokia handset – but extraordinarily powerful. Once, I put it in the middle of a large dining table at Sri Nyonya, the Nyonya restaurant in Petaling Jaya run by my aunt Lorna (see picture) and uncle James, and was pleasantly surprised. Amidst the clanking of bowls and howls of laughter, I could decipher every word that was said.  

While speaking of Sri Nyonya, I can’t avoid mentioning food. Nyonya cuisine plays a pivotal role in my story, and learning about its intricacies formed an important part of my research. Needless to say, eating was equally important. I could hardly have found a better place; the recipes at Sri Nyonya have been passed down for generations – and it’s run by family! 

Through good old-fashioned talking, I learnt about Great Grandmother and the Malaya of times past. The best anecdotes came unexpectedly, spurred by the jerk of recollection, the sort we tend to have once our memories are stirred. In the middle of one conversation, an aunt blurted out, “Very naughty boy-lah! Make my mother so sad…,” about her own father, which of course caused my ears to prick up. I then heard what the naughty boy got up to, and carefully stored the story to see what I could do with it. For a while, that was my modus operandi: listening, transferring what I’d heard onto my laptop, jotting down notes. It might have been different with a less loquacious family, but fortunately mine loves to talk.

My relations were able to make their childhood years come alive in a way no history book ever could. For example, my cousins reminded me of the ingenious pulley system that was used in old Chinese shops (there’s a modern version in the internal courtyard at Sri Nyonya – see photo). A basket suspended on a piece of strong rope which was looped around itself allowed residents on the top floors of the two-storey shop-houses to buy goods without having to descend staircases. If their favourite street vendor passed, residents would shout out of their windows for what they wanted. These could be dry dishes, such as bundles of aromatic rice wrapped in fragrant banana leaves, or wet food, bowls of noodles say. After calling out orders, the people upstairs would lower their basket with a plate or bowl and the necessary coins, and a few minutes later, haul up their basket, noodles and all, with change for their money.

Of course, I didn’t just rely on memories; I also went to the National Archives in Kuala Lumpur, where I spent hours scanning old newspapers to get an idea of what people were reading at the time. Though thin, the papers contained so much gossip that it took discipline not to digress. This is where I acquired fascinating insight into the topics which vexed our colonial rulers. In 1892, the government of Penang (see map) was exceedingly alarmed about an outbreak of cholera – thousands of miles away in Europe.

Map of Malaysia

I learnt things about my country which had been omitted from our history classes.For example, that the British colonial government in Malaya sold opium indirectly to generate revenue, and very openly (while simultaneously banning its import into Britain). It was even accepted practice for the government of the time to place advertisements for opium concessions in leading Malayan newspapers! The 1892 editions of the Penang Gazette advertised one such concession in the state of Perak (where most of my story unfolds). According to the advertisement, the concession gave its holder “the exclusive right to the importing, the manufacturing, sale and licensing others to sell, of chandu (opium), opium dross, and spirituous liquors, free of duty.” I was horrified.

Yet this practice fitted very much with the tenor of that era. The colonial atmosphere is detailed in the book When Tin was King, which charts the rise of Ipoh (more or less in the centre of Perak on the map) as a mining town. During the tin rush which began in the late 1800s, all sorts of adventurers were drawn by the lure of tin. The situation in Ipoh was reminiscent of the gold rush, and it’s no exaggeration to call Ipoh the San Francisco of the East. At the time my story takes place, the area in which Ipoh is located was the world’s largest producer of tin. The metal transformed Ipoh from a sleepy fishing village into a metropolis, and When Tin was King outlines how this happened in entertaining fashion. I was fortunate to have been introduced to its author Dr. Ho Tak Ming, a family physician with a vast knowledge of local history, who has kindly answered many questions.

I must confess to not being the first writer in my family, nor the first to pen Great Grandmother’s story. That honour belongs to my late grand-uncle Chin Kee Onn, whose novel Twilight of the Nyonyas, published in Malaysia in 1984, shares a similar story-line with my own. Thereafter, the similarities end. My story begins in 1878, his in 1915. I’ve told the story from a woman’s perspective, he from a man’s point of view. It’s no surprise we explore different themes; my novel is about a woman’s struggle for survival and her battle for identity. I also explore the consequences she has to face when she spoils her sons. Despite our differences, I owe a debt to my grand-uncle for his book, which at the time of publication, was the first novel ever written about a Nyonya family. I’m grateful to him for leading the way.

My research sometimes went down amusing paths. Because the main character ate everything with her hands, including the Nyonya curries she was so fond of, it occurred to me one day that I should try to do the same. With much enthusiasm, I rolled a ball of rice dipped into gravy in one hand – it looked so easy when I watched an Indian friend do this. Yet, as soon as I tried putting the ball into my mouth, gravy dripped all over my elbows. I gave up after a second attempt, deciding that this wasn’t for the uninitiated.

Then there were the children, of which my central character had plenty. Given the themes I wanted to explore – a woman’s survival and struggle for identity – it seemed appropriate to describe a birth scene. The only problem was my own lack of children. Much as I like children, having a child for the sake of a book seemed excessive. Attending a live birth was out of the question, since I faint at the sight of blood. So I did the next best thing: I interviewed as many friends and family I could find, especially those with three and more children. I also spoke to a nurse in Malaysia who told me in vivid detail the practices of old. In the process I heard amazing stories; I only hope I’ve done justice to them all.

A large family with no illness would be unrealistic, which is why it doesn’t happen in my story. When I needed medical information, I turned to neighbours in London. Veritable doctors, they happily described every conceivable consequence of the illnesses I was asking about. They then plied me with photographic evidence to show how horrible things could become. I ended up borrowing their medical text and staring at grotesque images for several weeks.

That was just before re-visiting Malaysia, where I’ve now completed the first draft of my novel. When I survey the result, I’m a little nervous. Because I know I’ve applied a writer’s prerogative, which is to say that I’ve exaggerated, added embellishments and generally used poetic licence with what I’ve heard and read (except in relation to historical facts and real figures who are named in the story). My creation is a fictional account, but one in which resemblance to real people isn’t entirely coincidental!

It was my partner who spurred my worries. She shot up after reading the latest chapter, telling me how amazing it was to recognise family members she knows from among my characters. Hmmm. It made me wonder how my own family would react. I’ve always told them I was writing fiction, which is true – up to a point. But it doesn’t stop me from worrying that they may not like the characters their relations have become, or their own prototypes have become, or the secrets I reveal, some true, others invented. I only hope they will see my novel for what it is: fiction with a large dose of reality, in which we Malaysians can see ourselves reflected. That after all, is what my research has been for.

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January 28, 2012 · 08:22

The Story of Nu Kua – Excerpt from my Novel

This blog-post is rather special since it’s the first I’m writing from within Malaysia itself – the land in which my story unfolds. To mark the occasion, I thought I’d provide a short excerpt from the novel itself.

My novel tells the story of a Nyonya (mixed heritage) woman as she struggles for some of the fundamental things in life: survival – her own as well as her family’s – and a meaningful identity. For my main character, whose name is Chye Hoon, the struggle for survival and the struggle for identity are linked; to find out how, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for the book!

Set in the multi-cultural Malaya of roughly 1880 to 1940, the narrative is rich in descriptions of food and places in Malaya, with historical events being alluded to as they happen. In addition, I have woven Chinese and South East Asian mythology into the narrative where possible, usually in the form of stories passed from mothers to children.   

The following passages are one such example. They appear relatively early on, when the main character Chye Hoon, also the narrator, has just borne her second child. She’s up early one morning to feed him when she recalls a story her own mother once told her.

© Copyright Siak Chin Yoke 2012

As I dragged myself up to feed the latest child, cradling the little one to my breast, watching him suckle greedily with the stillness of morning all around us, I finally understood the heroic efforts Mother had made, and the toll which raising us must have taken on her life.

I felt so close to her then – because I knew that I too, was doing exactly what she had done.

I had also begun to tell my children stories, just as Mother used to. It’s probably because I was thinking so much about her while feeding Weng Koon one night that I suddenly recalled a tale she had told. For no obvious reason at all, it jumped into my mind and refused to go away. It was a fable so long forgotten that at first, I struggled to recollect even its bare outline.

It was the name which came back first. Nu Kua. I couldn’t recall who she was, one of the goddesses perhaps. Or maybe she was more than a goddess? I tried to cast my memory back to the day when Mother had first told us her story. Slowly, the haze of years lifted, and details started to come, bit by bit; once more, I could hear Mother’s lilting voice as she told us the fable, carefully enunciating every word. I remember watching the movement of her lips that day, when all of us children were sitting on the floor, looking up at her, rapt with attention.

Mother had called Nu Kua the divine mother of all humans. She said Nu Kua had come down to repair the sky a long time ago, after a great battle in which the monster Kung Kung had wreaked havoc. During this terrible battle, the earth started falling into itself, mountains were flattened, the oceans overran many lands and everywhere, there were fires which burnt night and day, raging out of control. The chaos caused the earth’s points to be misaligned, and a large hole was ripped right across the sky. On seeing the destruction, Nu Kua became very sad. She knew she would have to repair the damage, for the sake of the earth’s children. Holding five coloured stones in her hand, she calmed the waters, put out the fires, and repaired the sky. Then she said, ‘The sky will now be blue, as an eternal symbol of hope for the children.’

I smiled as I recalled this story, because I had immediately shouted out, “But where is the hole Mother?” in a loud voice.

“It’s not there anymore, Nu Kua repaired the sky.”

“But where was it before she repaired the sky? Can you show me?” I asked insistently. “Maybe we can see where the sky was torn,” I had added in a voice full of hope. For many weeks, I remained fascinated by the idea of a hole in the heavens; with a hand shielding my eyes from the glare, I would survey the Malayan skies, constantly disappointed that all I could see were the fluffy white clouds that floated freely above.

© Copyright Siak Chin Yoke 2012

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January 16, 2012 · 16:56

My Ipoh

Usually, when people say they come from somewhere, they have a particular town in mind – somewhere they think of as home, whose very name evokes nostalgia. For me, this special place is Ipoh. Whenever I hear Ipoh (i:pou) mentioned, I feel a familiar tug in my heart. Ipoh is my family’s hometown. It’s the place I spend most time in when I visit Malaysia. It also happens to feature heavily in my novel – most of my story unfolds in this often overlooked town.

Ipoh is famous for many things. In this blog-post, I want to share personal reminiscences of the three Ipoh things that are dearest to my heart: its wondrous limestone hills, the Chinese temples that have been built into caves, and last but not least, one of Ipoh’s best-known dishes.

I don’t know how old I was when I saw the limestone hills for the first time. Like the main character in my novel, I have loved these hills from the very first. They surround the town, many covered in trees, thickly, so that they look like furry animals you want to hug. As you get closer, you can see exposed rock faces that glint pink and white in the sun. Some of the trees have grown in strange formations along rock crevices; I remember from childhood a hill which looked like the face of a man, two curves of green drooping like eyebrows and another one beneath that resembled a moustache. The lovely photograph above was taken by Boon Low, an Ipoh boy now living in Edinburgh, whose work I discovered while researching for this post.

Not only are Ipoh’s hills beautiful to look at, but you can actually go right inside, into their belly! There are stretches of limestone rock into which Chinese temples have been built, visible from the main road. I was taken to one when still a small child – to the world-renowned SamPoh Tong Temple which penetrates deep inside a cave.

The visit to Sam Poh Tong was my first cave trip, so you can imagine how exciting it seemed. I remember the darkness. The air was cool and damp and musty. My mother had to hold my hand because we climbed many steps that were wet with water. We went higher and higher, up towards what looked like the ceiling of a monstrous room. There were monks dressed in saffron-coloured robes walking about, wearing simple sandals on their feet and with their heads completely shaven. The smell of incense just added to the mysteriousness of the place. I know I was wide-eyed, especially when a clearing suddenly opened up and I saw turtles frolicking in a pond. My parents bought a handful of kangkong (water convolvulus) which the creatures gobbled happily. In the distance I heard an unusual chorus of voices – monks chanting, I was told. When the main character in my novel has occasion to visit a temple inside Ipoh’s limestone caves, I re-visited these caves many times. But I also called upon childhood memories and my imagination – a must, seeing that the fictional visit took place around 1914. 

Another thing Ipoh is famous for is tin. In fact, this metal is what  put Ipoh on the map, for until tin began to be mined on a large scale, Ipoh was just a small fishing village. With the discovery of rich tin deposits in the Kinta Valley where Ipoh is situated, the village came to life. People flooded in to seek their fortunes, and it was exactly then, in 1900, that the main character in my novel arrives with her husband.

In retrospect we know that Ipoh grew voraciously and many of the Chinese coolies who arrived to do the back-breaking, dangerous work in the mines became millionaires. But in 1900, the future of the town was far from clear. As a result, the story of the Wong family in my novel is very much intertwined with Ipoh’s own story as a town (although I hasten to add that what I’ve written is fiction, not history). Many local landmarks have been woven into my story, which I hope will make it of interest to the people of Ipoh (known locally as Ipohites). For example, the main character’s sons eventually attend the Anglo Chinese School, and this school, together with its founder and then Principal Reverend Horley, play important roles in the family’s lives.

So far, I haven’t mentioned food, and I couldn’t possibly write a whole blog-post about Ipoh without talking about food. Whenever I’m there, the whole town seems obsessed with eating (or perhaps it’s just my family, who will fight traffic from one end of Ipoh to the other for ‘tastier’ Chinese steamed buns or ‘more fragrant’ durians). With Chinese New Year coming up, this really could set me off, so I’d better be careful. I’ll just tell you what I most like to eat when I’m in Ipoh: ‘bean-sprouts chicken’. This dish really is as simple as it sounds, so you’ll think I’m crazy unless you’ve tried it. It comprises a plate of steamed chicken, chopped into bite-sized pieces and lightly seasoned with sesame oil and soya sauce, together with a separate plate of bean-sprouts, also seasoned and similarly garnished with sliced chillies. What, you may ask, could possibly be so exciting about steamed chicken and boiled bean-sprouts?

Well, with Chinese food, it’s often the mix of texture and taste that we look for. And with bean-sprouts chicken, it’s important that neither chicken nor bean-sprouts is over-cooked. When done just right, the chicken simply slips along your tongue, releasing delicious flavours as it does so; if accompanied by a chopstick-full of crunchy bean-sprouts, the effect is hard to beat. Both chicken and bean-sprouts can be eaten on their own or gulped down with Ipoh’s very own rice noodles (‘hor fun’ or ‘kuay-teow’).  

Now, during my seventeen years away, I had completely forgotten about bean-sprouts chicken. My re-initiation into this spectacular dish was somewhat hard. I arrived late on a Friday evening after a week at a fancy hotel in Thailand, and my aunt and uncle took me to Ipoh’s most famous coffee-shop for bean-sprouts chicken. This shop – Lou Wong – has become an institution: it serves nothing but bean-sprouts chicken, and has done so for years. It’s also full every night; you have to queue unless you get there early. Now, what’s important to understand is that traditionally, the Chinese focus in restaurants has been on food and nothing else – not décor, certainly not service, least of all hygiene. There was a rule of thumb that the dirtier a restaurant, the better, because it showed it was popular.

The result was that by the time we arrived at the Lou Wong Coffee Shop, a good fraction of town must already have stepped in. As had other creatures; in one corner, I was sure I spotted a cockroach on the wall. The table tops were so marked that I didn’t dare rest my elbows on them. Yet the cooking smelt heavenly, and I could see the chefs in front of me, chopping their chicken with cleavers and dunking handfuls of sprouts into boiling vats of water. Not being able to resist the food, I opted to put on my sunglasses. Sometimes, see no evil works a treat.

Interestingly, there appears to be a connection between Ipoh’s limestone and its delicious bean-sprouts. I’m firmly of the opinion that Ipoh’s bean-sprouts are plumper and crunchier than those I’ve had anywhere else. And from the number of Malaysian blogs on this topic, I know I’m not alone! Now here’s the connection with limestone: the bean-sprouts are grown in a part of town where the underground water is rich in limestone. Once harvested, the bean-sprout seeds are apparently watered every five hours for five days until they’re judged ready (a fact I’ve gleaned from my Russian partner who’s mad about Ipoh food).

Which brings us once again to limestone and Ipoh’s magnificent hills. I still gaze at them for hours whenever I’m there, the way I used to as a child. I watch the hills in their varied moods – in bright sunshine, after rain, also when partially covered by mist. I see how they change in the middle of raging thunderstorms, when they turn blue with the darkening skies. I know no other Malaysian town with this topology or range of temperament, where the same view looks different every day. I can hardly wait to see those hills again.

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December 3, 2011 · 20:34

She Arrived on an Elephant – Why I’m Writing my Novel

My novel is based on my Great Grandmother, whom I first heard about when still quite small. I remember being shown a black and white photograph in which a rather plump woman stood, wearing a patterned blouse that was fastened by an enormous brooch. “That’s grandma,” my mother told me simply. It turned out that was the only photo ever taken of my Great Grandmother and it was brown with age even then; it revealed a forbidding-looking woman, someone a child would be frightened of, despite the semblance of a smile on her round face. This impression was reinforced whenever Great Grandmother came up in conversation; with bated breath, the adults around me would exclaim – “Wahh! Very fierce ah!”

I was told Great Grandmother came from Siam (now Thailand) and was a Nyonya, words I hadn’t heard before and which seemed too complicated for my little brain to deal with. For years I didn’t dig any further, content to simply associate the word Nyonya with spicy dishes and with the kueh I enjoyed (see my previous blog post). Those who know me may find this hard to believe, but the fact that there was something I liked eating was actually a big deal – because I hated eating as a child. Every meal was a tortured ritual in which my mother was forced to slowly hand-feed me. I took so long to eat that by the time I finished, it would almost be time for the next meal. The net result was that for me, all meals blended into a single nightmare, so it must have seemed like a gift from heaven to my poor mother when she discovered that I would happily devour Nyonya kueh.

Over the years as I grew up, I remember being told that I was just like my Great Grandmother – stubborn and fierce. The comments weren’t necessarily intended as compliments, and initially they didn’t please me. But they were repeated so often that I became curious about the woman who had inspired them. Eventually I felt I had no choice except to find out more. It was then that I heard how she raised nine children on her own, unaided, with nothing to fall back on except her wits and business acumen. She couldn’t even read and write, but that didn’t stop her from establishing her own business. For a woman in Malaya in 1910, that must have taken guts, something Great Grandmother appeared to have plenty of.

Hers was a story I had long intended to write, but creative writing didn’t fit in with the fast world of finance. I was seldom at home and worked such insane hours, often in far-flung corners of the world, that there was barely time for sleep. Everything else fell by the wayside; in those days writing seemed a hazy dream to be pursued later, a bit like golf.

Then, two years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Because it was cancer, it meant I had to have not only surgery but also radio- and chemotherapy. For someone with needle-phobia who doesn’t take any drugs and faints at the sight of blood, the entire process proved very stressful – although I didn’t feel it at the time. It was only after my treatment had finished that I realised life had changed. For months afterwards, I felt adrift. No matter how much I slept, I couldn’t seem to regain my previous energy. My confidence waned, and there were days when I wondered if I could ever be the person I once was. I knew then that I had to alter the way I lived.

As a result, I began to do things I never did before. I stopped rushing around. I scaled down my business. And I discovered writing. I had heard about cancer survivors who had found a lifeline through creative self-expression, activities like pottery or singing, as well as writing. At a low-ebb one day, I simply sat down with a blank Word page and just started typing. Magically, as the sentences flowed, I could literally feel myself getting better.

Within two months, when I asked myself whether there was anything I would regret not having done if my life were to end tomorrow, I knew at once what the answer was. It was clear then what my next project had to be. Great Grandmother had already waited far too long.

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