The importance of keeping in touch
My Mum was born in Hong Kong. Her mother was the daughter of a court interpreter, an educated man. My Por-por went to school, carried on the back of a servant girl, it seems.
When she’d grown up, she met and fell for the sweet-talk of my Kong-kong who was then a merchant seaman. She married him and had a daughter, my Mum.
They sailed to Malaya in 1929, when my Mum was 3. Por-por had been sold the idea that Kong-kong was a man of some means I think and so when she arrived along with chests full of classic Chinese literature, she was shocked to find the reality quite different from the sales pitch.
Still, she set about to run the home and take care of the ever expanding family as best she could. Por-por became ashamed of her lot in life, my Mum told me, and didn’t write back home much and eventually lost touch with her family. The war disrupted communications too and though they received a letter from the old village from someone claiming to be a relative, asking for money to rebuild, they didn’t get a reply to their request for more information and that was that.
Mum met Dad and they were married in 1950 and over the next 15 years had the 7 of us. Most of us went overseas to complete our studies. Just how my parents managed, I don’t know. Dad didn’t earn a lot, and neither did Mum. In a way, us being roughly 2 years apart (except for me and the brother before me - I was the accident child born 5 years after him) worked for us as the strain of getting us all educated on 2 government servants’ salaries was thus spaced out.
Margaret went off to do her nursing in London in 1969 and Joe went to Sydney 2 years later. As Margaret finished, finances loosened up a little and Tony could then study in London. And so it went on down the line.
I left for Australia in 1986 to take up permanent residence there. By this time most of my siblings were done with their education and were working, and I was fortunate to be able to work for a year and be supported by my eldest brother, Joe, who put me up in his house for that first year. I worked and saved enough to put myself through college for the following two years.
I remember a few things from when I left Malaysia in March 1986. One was my Mum telling me a number of times to write. Keep in touch, she said, and she mentioned how she wished Por-por had kept in touch with the relatives in China. By not doing so, they’d cast off and sailed away in more ways than one. As Mum grew up, their little nucleus was all their universe. The offspring of Augustin Wong and Leong Mei Yoke were their own little family, bereft of cousins and aunts and uncles. It would have been so different had they corresponded with those in China.
Dad was a man of fewer words than his schoolteacher wife, but he too told me to write. He also told me to be thrifty and save on the luxuries but never to stint on food. ‘Make sure you’re never hungry. Take care of your health. And if you need anything, you have your brother there and you have us here. Write, let us know how you’re doing and if you need anything.’
And that was their farewell.
And I wrote. I was lonely, of course, but even so, we’d grown up appreciating the value of correspondence. Even when young, I had written to Margaret and Joe and Tony (whom I was closest to, for some reason) and we all eagerly awaited their letters and read them more than once.
So as I settled in to life down under, I wrote to friends and relatives. Aerogrammes were cheap but their front-and-back structure was simply inadequate for my loquacity and so I wrote sheets and sheets on Onion Skin instead, to 2 or 3 people a week. And though as I settled more and my correspondence tapered off a little, I never stopped.
Writing to keep in touch is still very important to me. I have kept many of the letters I received. I have letters from my mother telling me about what was going on in her newly-retired life, or the dog at home, or her worries about my brothers and sisters.
Late in 1986, I even received a letter from my father, neatly typewritten, detailing a reply to my request for him to help me check prices for a flash for my camera (they were cheaper in KL and a cousin would bring it over). He reminded me to make sure I was eating enough…
Mr brothers and sisters wrote too, each in their own style, all appreciated greatly to this day.
I think though, one card I received from a friend sums it all up quite nicely. I had arrived in Sydney early one morning and was met at the airport by Joe. He drove us back to his house - and my new home for the next year - in Drummoyne and I looked out at all the unfamiliar streets, signs, cars, buildings whizzing by... We finally arrived and he parked on the street in front of a single-storey red-brick house with a little gate you could almost just step over at the front. I walked in after him then paused at the door and asked in the most Malaysian of ways ‘Err, Joe, where do I put my shoes?’
‘In your room’ he replied, a little surprised I had asked. And then added ‘Oh, yeah we walk in with our shoes. And oh, you have a letter’ and picked up a beige envelope lying on the sideboard and passed it to me.
‘Who on earth?…’ I thought as I put my things down and opened the envelope. Inside was a card filled with words from a very dear friend, Yuen Mei, whom I had kept in touch with regularly. She had just graduated and would be leaving Melbourne for home in Malaysia in a couple of weeks. She wrote to me to say she hoped I was settling in better than she did in her first few months. And she remembered how lost she felt and then thought that it would be so nice if I, on my first day in a new and bewildering environment, would have something familiar to greet me - a letter from a friend.
It remains one of the sweetest things anyone has ever done for me and I still have that card. I’m so glad she kept in touch.
Now with our instant communication, it saddens me that so many of us forget how precious a few words of greetings can be. In an age when it takes such little effort to ask after someone, or to send a note telling a loved one how your day went, it seems we now find it harder to correspond than 30 years ago when I wrote in long hand, on Onion Skin paper, put it all in an envelope and addressed it, affixed a few stamps and walked down the road to stick it in a letter box. Those words, carrying all my thoughts and feelings would take days to get to their destination and a reply would take a similar time to arrive.
But when it did, I’d devour it, then savour it a second time. They weren’t just words. They were a person’s most intimate thoughts, ideas, feelings. They were a connection, and a way of expressing ‘I care for you, my son/brother/cousin/friend…’
And though now WhatsApp and emails have replaced Onion Skin and video calls are so easy to make, I still regularly make the effort. I keep in touch. Like Mum and Dad always told me to.
