Stepping into my mother’s shoes

Throughout my holiday, I had been thinking of my mother Caroline, how she would feel if she was with me, and how she must be feeling back in the UK, knowing I was in Malaysia. She has never returned since packing up our things in 1983 and is now unfortunately not well enough to be able to make the trip.

I had thought of her, and Skyped and Facebooked in order to share the whole experience with her as much as possible, but it wasn’t until I got to Penang that I started to feel like her. Mother was in her late 30s when we went to live in KL and it was a huge upheaval for her. The difference between East and West was far more pronounced than it is now. We couldn’t really do or buy anything the same as we were used to in England, and with two young children this must have been really difficult to manage. She helped us to cope with new, very different schools immediately, and in a few short weeks she had to decide on a house, buy equipment, hire staff and move us in. What a challenge this must have been after a typical English existence consisting of the school run, taking care of the house and the animals and keeping the family in order!

Mother also found herself with an unpaid part time job as a ‘company wife.’ She was used to a certain amount of business socialising and entertaining connected with my father’s job, but this moved to an entirely different level in Malaysia. There was a constant round of very formal engagements at High Commissions, Embassies and events, populated with business people, politicians, diplomats and even royalty from a variety of countries. As I’ve already mentioned, there were also the frequent tours around the interesting sights for visiting ‘wives’ who needed to be kept entertained while their husbands attended meetings etc. This all sounds rather anachronistic and in fact it was, at the time, a more old fashioned version of how business and social life took place in Britain. The colonial era might have been over but many of its ways lingered on.

One of the colonial traditions that still existed in the 70s was that Western men and women were called ‘Tuan’ and ‘Mem.’ These terms would be used by anyone in a position of service or in a shop for example. I was usually called ‘Missy’ and my brother was ‘Boy.’ At the time, I was young enough to accept these titles without questioning them, but now I can see that it was something that really needed to go. We didn’t need or deserve any different treatment from anyone else, just because we were European. Actually, during my time there, a very understandable backlash was just beginning and we noticed that many people seemed to consciously move away from the UK as a natural place to aspire to be educated, or to emulate in any way. There was also a very deliberate move away from the blanket use of English and towards Bahasa Malaysia, or Malay, being the first language. I am glad this has happened and I was happy to sense a much diminished aspect of ‘Britishness’ in Malaysia. The same cannot be said for Singapore, as far as I could tell in the short time I was there, which at least retains English as the predominant language.

In Penang, however, I suddenly noticed that I was being called ‘Mem.’ It sounded so familiar that for a while I didn’t realise how significant this was. Then it filtered through to my consciousness that this was me. I was the one being called ‘Mem,’ not my mother. For a while, after this realisation, I felt as if I was my mother. I recalled how much she used to love our occasional visits to Penang, when it was a much gentler and quieter place than it is now. I thought of her shopping at stalls for Batik and dealing with the requests and complaints of my brother and myself. I thought of how she – apparently effortlessly – integrated with the new society she found herself in and became busy with a portfolio of new roles. I knew that she had felt pain – different from mine but nonetheless uncomfortable – at leaving the country in a manner not of her choosing and that she had wrestled with homesickness along with many other challenges as we all tried to integrate back into the UK.

By the time I returned, I took with me my own child who is the same age as I was when I left. So, as well as understanding some of her experience in the to-ing and fro-ing I’ve just described, I also know what it is like to parent a teenager. I left Malaysia as a young girl, unformed and naïve, and returned a mother, toughened by various kinds of adversity and made wise by the twists and turns of life. Much of what I needed to know and experience took place, as I said the other day, at a deep, perhaps unconscious level. Some of it is hard to put into words. You know when they say, unable to describe something adequately, ‘you just had to be there’? Well, that phrase really applies to this experience. Being there was key.

I know that Mother will read this and hope that she knows I took her with me to Singapore and Malaysia in spirit, just as I often take her on walks and to other places she is unable to visit. She couldn’t ‘be there’ but I tried to do the being there for her. I hope that my ‘doing over’ and my healing will spill over to her, that maybe I have done some of whatever she needed on her behalf. I hope she will let us know during this month of blogging.