Tash Aw’s Malaysia, in The Harmony Silk Factory, smells of the earth and metal of the country’s tin mines, and shiny black cars grind dirt into dust as they drive by, carrying a pink Westerner or a fat Chinaman. In My Life as a Fake, Peter Carey tells of a monsoonal Kuala Lumpur and the grubby concrete of a shophouse’s ground-floor bicycle repair shop. The story of the Malaysia I know unfurls, mostly, in my grandmother’s house in Petaling Jaya, and in the houses of my aunts and uncles and cousins. People tell me of KL nightlife, of the clubs and restaurants of Bangsar, but what I know is the smooth marble floor in my grandmother’s house, and the rosewood living-room set; I know the round table with fewer chairs than family members so we have to take turns eating, and I know the large photo frame at the top of the stairs with fading pictures of me and my sister and our cousins and our round, childish faces. In my Malaysia, my cousin Seng Hui, the first male child of the generation, is only ever referred to as Ah Boy. My mother’s youngest brother is called Anak, Child – and I realise as I am writing this that I do not know (have never known) his actual name. My mother herself is known to the family as Ah Nooi, Girl.

Distance and family tradition meant that I was removed from my mother’s clan when I was a child. We visited irregularly, I seem to think – in any case my memories of the house and my maternal grandparents are blurry. I remember that my grandfather urged us to learn Mandarin, and would speak to us in this language I couldn’t wrap my mind around. I stuttered and stumbled through conversation with these people I rarely saw – barely knew. So many years later we choose to return, my sister and I, to the house and its black sliding gate in the front. We have been coming every year now for, I don’t know, enough time that I would like to believe it has become an established occasion. And somehow, after the years of sitting and fidgeting while a mixed-up procession of uncles and aunts filed by, I find, now, that all this time I remembered the smell of the house and the sound of footsteps on the wooden staircase. All this time I retained that feeling of coming in from the outside, putting hot feet onto cool marble. It is curious, the things memory chooses to keep safe, for I see clearly, in my mind’s eye, the plastic breadbin (no longer in use) and the square slices of white bread.



We took the bus to KL on the first day of the lunar new year, me and Mowmy and CC and the kid, up the North-South Highway bordered left and right by oil palm plantations. At the Pagoh rest stop they announced a toilet break, and we shuffled out into the sun, shaking the stiffness from our legs. By the side of the road, a brown-skinned man sold bunches of longans from a makeshift wooden frame on his motorcycle.

We arrived at the old railway station in downtown KL, late for lunch. The heat rose off the street, off the pavements, reflected off the building’s white façade. We tried to escape into the shade, our fringes and futility plastered on our foreheads, while we snacked on nangka chips and waited for my uncle to pick us up.



New Year at Yin Ma’s is what we call lao jua – bustling, festive and convival all in one. We had barely said hello to all the other visiting relatives when we were summoned to the big table for noodle soups in silver-rimmed bowls. My grandmother’s green bean ang ku kueh made an appearance shortly after, comfortably sharing space on the plate with diamond-shaped slices of toddy-laced huat kueh. We thought we were done, then, but there was jelly to come. This is my grandmother. One morning we pulled into the driveway and stepped into the house. “Hi, Yin Ma,” we said. “Goreng pisang,” she said in greeting and response, “kee chia.” Go eat. I threw my arms in the air and whooped. In the dining room, freshly fried banana halves sat draining, hot still, on sheets of kitchen paper.