Ecerpt # 70: Reliving My Childhood Years

Excerpt # 70: Reliving My Childhood Years

M. Bakri Musa (www.bakrimusa.com)

            I spent my time that week in Seremban visiting the old places of my childhood. I asked my parents if they were interested in visiting the old villages where they had taught. My mother was eager but my father was not. As she did not want to go without him, I ended going alone. I drove to Labu, a village a few miles to the north. Only the railway tracks remained familiar; the surrounding scene had all changed. The school where my parents taught and the teachers’ duplex where we lived were gone, as were the padi fields between the school and the railroad track. My auntie Mak Biah who took care of us then used to take us every morning to the tracks to wave to the passengers on the “mail train” bound for Singapore. She always warned me to look on either side before getting close to the tracks lest I would be hit by an oncoming train. I thought that was a superfluous advice as the roar of the locomotives and the vibrations on the tracks would scare anyone way ahead.

            I also visited Lenggeng, up on the Main Range on the way to KL. My parents taught there too, at the height of the terrible communist insurgency. There too nothing was familiar. I thought the old small Chinese cemetery at the end of town would surely remain. That cemetery had a special place in my heart as a youngster. I used to visit it to collect the oranges and other goodies left behind by the families of the deceased. The tributes were especially bountiful during the certain festive seasons. It seemed that the more I collect, more would come! I was sure that to those families, I was their divine intermediary for their long-gone relatives!

When my parents taught there in the early 1950s, it was a very “black” area, with strict curfew from 6PM to 6AM. The two unisex Malay schools were also gone. The padi fields where I used to make and play serunai (reeds made from the padi stalks) with my friends were now gone, as was the water rice mill and the rubber drying kilns. The weeds had taken over the once fertile rice fields.

            I visited my old village of Kampung Tengah. There by contrast, the difference could not be more stark. A decade and half later the scene remained all too familiar to me. It was eerie. It was as if everything had remained at a standstill after I left. The royal town of Sri Menanti where I had attended religious classes in the afternoon that seemed so far away during my youth was now but a few minutes away by car. Likewise, the reservoir behind the dam near my house which I struggled to swim across then was now but only a few strokes in length. I could even swim underwater across its whole breath. Those listless schoolchildren taking refuge from the blistering Malaysian sun underneath the shade of the roadside tree waiting for the still erratic village bus could have been me. I wondered where they would be or what story they would tell twenty years hence.

            Contrary to Thomas Wolfe’s assertion, you can go home again, to the old familiar scene and people. To me that was the unnerving part. I wondered whether what I had been through for the past decade and a half, going to Canada, becoming a surgeon, marrying Karen, vacationing in Hawaii, visiting San Francisco, living briefly in Montreal were all but a dream. Now I was back to the listless existence and purposeless life in the kampung. Should I dare pinch myself?

            Then I imagined if fate would have me back to the kampung after all those years away. Could I survive without my credit card, bank account, and a steady job? What would I do if all I had was the knowledge and skills that I had acquired?

            That was an intriguing thought as I enjoyed the coolness underneath the shade of the roadside ipoh tree, picking my teeth with the fresh grass stalks. That distraction was momentary, for upon my return to Seremban I still had to apprise my parents of my decision to leave the country. I still had to have their permission and blessing. I promised my mother earlier that I would never leave otherwise. That still remained my solid commitment to her.

            At dinner that evening, my father inquired about the happenings back in the village. He and my mother had not been back for quite some time. Their roots were now deep in their new suburban community; they had little reason to go back except for weddings and funerals.

            I replied that I was saddened that nothing much had changed in all those years. I saw so many kids who reminded me of my youth, waiting for the still erratic village bus and listless in the heat. At least during my youth I knew that if I were to study hard, the world would be open to me. By contrast, even if those kids were to study hard, with their Malay-only education and language skills, their horizons were limited. My parents agreed.

            I thanked my parents for their wisdom in keeping us (my siblings and me) in the English stream despite the tremendous social and professional pressures upon them, being that they were Malay schoolteachers. If they did not show support for Malay schools by enrolling their children there, who would? I told my parents that I met some of my old friends whose parents had taken them out of English schools on the exhortations of our Malay leaders. How my friends envied me now! Their only comment on seeing me was that my father was wiser than theirs!

            To this day I still do not fully comprehend how my parents, my father in particular, managed to remain steadfast in their decision to defy the popular opinion of the day. For my part, even though I, like my brothers and sisters, was forever grateful for the decisions my parents made on our behalf, nonetheless I do not remember ever fully and formally thanking them for their wise and brave actions.

            I was about to make good on that particular glaring deficit when my father interrupted me. He said that both he and my mother had accepted my decision to leave. His casual and almost off-handed remark caught me unprepared. I should be jumping with joy–my mission accomplished–but I did not. Instead I had no reaction. I was flat. What I thought would be a tough and very emotional challenge to convince my parents of my decision to leave turned out to be anything but. They had accepted it at their own pace. My mother was not crying.

            I do not remember whether I even thanked my parents for their supporting my decision. I was more numb and sad rather than relieved and happy. Numb because I was not prepared, and sad because I had to make that decision to leave. While I considered myself lucky at having a path out, and a very well paved one at that, not so those village kids I met in my old village. They had no such opportunities.

            My parents knew that I was not happy in Malaysia. They were just pleased that Allah had been generous to provide me with better opportunities elsewhere. They had wished that elsewhere would be somewhere nearby in the region, not thousands of miles away across the vast Pacific.

Excerpt # 71:  On To Practical Matters

From the author’s second memoir, The Son Has Not Returned.  A Surgeon In His Native Malaysia, 2018.