From: Rosa - 16
Date: 7/24/00
Time: 10:26:16 AM
With the characteristic Chang sense of togetherness and out of a deep affection and respect for Mamma, many many of us were gathering in Kuala Lumpur in April 2000 to mark her Ninety-First Birthday with a Chinese banquet that was to be elegant and formal in presentation yet with the lightness, warmth and gaiety of a family gathering. The sense of family was what Mamma had wanted when she conceded to our wish to celebrate her special birhday, a not insignificant giving in, as she had not celebrated her birthday since Papa died seven years ago. She had tempered her very personal avowed manner of remembering and mourning Papa by her recognition of our desire to express our love for her and also her acceptance that it would have been Papa’s earnest wish to have her birthday celebrated.
Papa
was born in Kuala Lumpur in 1914 and so Ah Koong and Ah Mah must have come when
the last century was about ten years old. Mamma celebrated her special birthday
in the first year of the new century. In the span of about a hundred years tThe
Changs as a clan have come
journeyed
a long way from our grandparents’ arrival at Nanyang as hopeful,
searching immigrants through the Kampong Pandan years of cheek-by-jowl living to
our descending upon the Shangri-La, one of the most luxurious hotels in Kuala
Lumpur. In a physical sense most of us had travelled a long way too. Mamma’s
children with their husbands and wives and children, her nephews with their
wives and children, all of us joining those in Kuala Lumpur, her brother and
sisters, brother-in-law, sister-in-law with their children and grandchildren.
From Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore, London, Thurlstone, Banbury,
Toronto we had all converged in Kuala Lumpur, bearing with us the love and good
wishes of the few family members who for good reasons could not be present.
Conspicious by their absence too were Daai-Ga-Je and Meimei #4 whose
incapacitating illnesses have confined them to homes where they could be looked
after. We decided with a reluctant prudence that their presence could have
untoward effects on them and on the party and so they were not with us except in
thought. With so many of us coming from so many places around the world and with
the family now joined by a number of non-Chinese, Mamma proudly declared that
she is ‘the head of a United Nations’. Her pride grew with the latest
foreign addition to her family in the person of American Blaine Lee, newly
married to her grand-daughter Geraldine, both now living in Spokane and were
among those unable to attend. Didi #2, with his usual affectionately rude sense
of humour, gave Paul, the eldest son of Didi #4 and his Australian wife Colleen,
the sobriquet of Chang Mongrel #1, which name Paul proudly and gamely wore.
Mamma’s wish that her birthday celebration should be a
family gathering was more than fulfilled. Through Didi #2’s generosity and
good offices, most of us who had travelled to Kuala Lumpur were staying at the
Shangri-La. Our stay there of about ten days rolled into one prolonged, noisy,
talk-filled, jokes-punctuated, laughter-ringing party. The staff at the hotel
decided that the best way to cater to us was to have a long table reserved for
us at breakfast. As we dribbled in and dawdled over the immense range of items
making up the international breakfast that was one of the hotel’s attractions,
we began the day with tips on the best buys in town, where the good eating
places were, sketching our plans for the day, always with snatches of jokes and
laughter. The few among the younger Changs, whose love of the great breakfast
was greater than their desire to lie in, with bleary eyes and through yawns
filled us in with their exploits of the evening before.We drifted off in groups,
to go on errands for the coming birthday banquet, to shop, to sun and swim at
the hotel’s pool, to go on eating sprees, to talk in our rooms. Chatting as we
went on our errands, in and out of shops in between admiring the wares and
bargaining for good prices, during pauses for lunch, no time was lost in
catching up on our lives in different parts of the world and in recalling
stories and incidents from our growing up years in Kuala Lumpur and then Ipoh.
In the evening, heeding an unspoken call, we dribbled in again to the suite of
Didi #1 or Didi #2 and, gathered with the three venerables, Mamma, Sei-Yee and
Paul Suk, we exchanged accounts of our doings of the day. The younger ones
joined in for a while, suffered, shared in, and led the leg-pulling, the jocular
insults, the stomach-aching laughter, and then disappeared for another of their
own evenings of pubs and street
markets. Over ten days so much coming and going, so much being together. Always
leading the pack was Didi #12
with his bellowing voice, his incorrigible mischief, his generous offers of
drinks, his careful overseeing that all was well.
Meimei #7 in the first part of her story, Crowded Years, Endangered Spaces, made her observation of the other journey that had brought us together to Kuala Lumpur that April, the journey that we each had made as members of the Chang family and as individuals. We largely shared a childhood, bonded as the children of two brothers married to two sisters, and took part in many family events that having the same two sets of grandparents had made common to us. Childhood over, we each began our personal journey into life. Our story with largely one setting became many stories in as many settings, each a different landscape with its own summits of achievements and joy, plateaus when life appeared to have come to a frightening standstill, and valleys of problems and pain. Whenever we can, as in those ten days in Kuala Lumpur, we are eager to listen to one another’s stories, to rejoice in one another’s life successes and sympathise in one another’s difficulties. But there are some stories that we are not in the habit of telling, the stories of our inner voyages of searching. There is nothing secretive about this; it is just something that the gregarious Changs do not do.
Didi #1 gave us a glimpse of his personal voyage of search in one of his stories. This is an uncommon telling. But it must be common among all of us that our growing up saw us embarked on questing voyages of the inner person. Some of us find the faith that we were brought up in a safe haven; many of us have sailed on into sometimes tumultuous seas, rocking our own boats in an unsettling search. Religious faith may have started us on this lonely voyage but the answer is not for a replacement religion itself but much else besides. I have found the voyage lonely and isolating, the more so because I grew up in a sheltered harbour of given faith, protected from buffeting winds by a Convent education and the solid practice of a father who brooked no waywardness in this regard.
My first active protestation against what I could no longer claim as my own belief was to stay away from Mass one Sunday when I was at university. I remember it as a most miserable day. I was not overcome with repentance, I was not afraid that I was in a state of sin, I was overwhelmed with a heaviness of having deliberately done something I was not supposed to do. It was not even a feeling of regret that I should feel thus as it surely must be a mark of a lack of conviction, or more aptly, of a lack of non-conviction. It was just a most deeply unsettling feeling and the only consolation my act brought was that I recognised that I had crossed the Rubicon. The years by myself, away from the family, for the rest of my time at university and then working in Kuala Lumpur was a great relief. Looking back, I wonder if I would have invited my sisters to help me in my search if we had been together. I think not. It was a time of upheavalling change for us as Daai-Ga-Je was preparing to enter the novitiate and Meimei #3 was about to go off to England for a course in teacher training. But even if there had not been these pending changes I doubt that I would have shared my troubling search with them. Going home to Ipoh for the holidays filled me with as much dread as the gladness of being with the family again. Nobody treated me any differently but I felt alienated with a cold sense of inner loneliness. Looking back again, I wonder if I behaved outwardly normally or if I appeared a stranger sister, self-absorbed and uncommunicative, especially to the younger ones. Then there was the pretence and dishonesty of carrying out all the duties of religion together with the family. I stopped short of receiving the communion and hoped each time that my non-participation had escaped notice. I also accused myself of being a sham but acknowledged that I would never dare declare my change, not at the thought of Papa’s certain reaction.
These years on the dark ocean of a crisis of conscience were not truthfully my first experience of a spiritual dilemma. Some years earlier my interest in Chinese had brought me face to face with communism in China. My fascination with it, although without any firm knowledge of its principles, was further aroused by a girl who had joined our Chinese class in my last year there. She fanned my interest with books on the subject and her own enthusiasm. In fact she soon left with her brother for China and I still sometimes wonder in which part of vast China Yue Ping is and how she has fared. I had fanciful dreams of going to China myself but they were always arrested by the thought of how could I reconcile such a move with my Catholic religion. An irony in retrospect. But this little tentative putting out into the unkown sea of personal questing was at a time when I was still young enough to have time to postpone the inevitable voyage that I had to embark on a few years later.
So very many years on and I am still on that quest. I have charted some seas but some are still unknown and I need must sail them. So too must there be the personal inner voyages of those Changs of my generation gathered in Kuala Lumpur in April. Typically, these journeys have not been the subject of our many conversations and although it appears that one could spot where some of us have arrived, one never knows. Whatever different routes we have taken, whatever ports of call some of us have reached, there are a number of signals that have set us on our individual courses and guided us through our individual shoals and deep waters, storms and calms. These are the Chang tenets of living that we have inherited. The Chang togetherness of caring and sharing, the commitment to stand up for the underdog and to help the unfortunate, the gift of humaneness.
At Mamma’s birthday dinner Meimei #3 suggested that congratulations and laudations of Mamma should take the form of various persons going up to speak on anything that he/she wished to say of Mamma. This was eagerly taken up and as the dinner unfolded its ten courses the evening was spiced with the family, relatives and friends sharing their memories and thoughts about Mamma. Didi #7 spoke of the joy of the occasion, his delight in the expression of Chang togetherness and the glad promise of its continuation in the generation of younger Changs. For indeed the signs were promising.They had come together, some for the first time, some after many years, from different countries, leading their different pursuits, but they got together as a happy band as immediately, effortlessly, seamlessly, as their elders who had shared childhood years
This happy gathering of youngsters had the binding force of the indefinable Changness, our priceless heritage. This Changness is more than the ability to laugh and joke and do together; it is also a set of core values that transcends and at the same time underlies our individual spiritual and inner make-up. Some of us are still searching at sea; the young ones will soon begin, if some have not already begun, their individual launching into questing for the inner person. We are drifting, we may even be adrift sometimes, but we are also anchored by being Chang. Mamma had her wish, her birthday celebration was a very family time. And may she and others who take her place as the matriarch/patriarch of the clan continue to be the head of a family United Nations whose beacon of Changness shine not only among the Changs but also the Lohs, the Chyes, the Ohs, the Ngs and the Kilmartins, and, in time, among the Lees and the Foxs and those who join later.
23 July 2000