Sarawak 2011

Kuching riverfrontIn February, Mike and I returned to Sarawak, my father's homeland, this time to research my next novel. It was a most fruitful journey, including visiting Sri Aman, the Mulu Caves in eastern Sarawak, and Iban and Bidayuh Dayak longhouses. Most importantly, we revisited Buso, my father's bazaar where he spent his childhood, and Bau, the town and district that will figure much in my novel. We went to the Sarawak jungle border with Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), near Bau. And we combed the streets of old town Kuching, the state capital, searching the past, reconnecting with a time when Sarawak was under the rule of the White Rajahs in the nineteenth century.

Sarawak River at Tundong Bazaar

Perhaps what touched me most on this trip, however, was my meeting with my Malay uncle, Hon San, my father's half brother. I first learned of his existence in 2006, when I visited Sarawak with Michael the first time. At my grandfather's grave in Buso, on the tombstone were engraved the names of his sons. There were four names, Hon San being the last one. I had always known my father to have only two brothers. Who was Hon San? My cousin explained that he was a son born to my grandfather and his Malay mistress. It was a big surprise, for I had never known about that phase of my paternal grandfather's life. I could imagine him driving his little black Morris Minor over dirt roads and crossing the river on a car ferry to meet his lover, while my grandmother stoically held up the fort at Buso, the matriach of the clan, managing a household that included my father's older brother and his family of ten girls and two boys. And when young Hon San and his mother knocked on their door, my grandmother, I was told, asked one of her daughters to shoo them away.

The years passed. Hon San grew up. At my grandfather's funeral, my cousin saw him on his motor bike outside the family home, looking in, an unwelcomed outsider. Now, at 78, he is a widower with seven grown children, and thirty-plus grandchildren. His only link to his father's family was Benjamin, son of my father's late brother. Through Benjamin, I was finally able to meet Uncle Hon San on this visit.  

Hon San is holding his own, living with one of his sons in a very decent house in a Malay kampong just outside Kuching. The day we paid him a visit, he called his three sons to take time off and receive us at his house. We sat in his living room. He had his sons serve us tea, banana fritters and local fruits. He asked about my father. He knew my father to be in Canada, and had returned three times, he said. How else would he know unless they had met? Perhaps my father had visited him years later, on his visits home. Hon San admitted things had not been pleasant in the past, but all that was behind him. He seemed confident and relaxed, master of his own house, and grand patriach of his own children and grandchildren.

The irony is of all my grandfather's children, including my father, no one resembled him more than my Malay uncle, Hon San.  

Comments

[porety]

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[sohbet]

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