I am in a Sydney summer, where the berries are in season and the lychees are juicy and sweet. We eat raspberries straight up from the punnet, or, late at night and over a rented DVD, blueberries and ice cream over warmed chocolate fondant. In this Sydney summer, the frangipani trees shed perfect white flowers on the sidewalk. We pick them up and tuck them behind our ears on the way to the park.

Nights, I sleep with only the bug screen pulled shut; the sliding doors are open to the night, to the sailboats bobbing in the harbour.



We arrived Thursday, CC and Maeve and me, after a midnight flight. I fell asleep on the carpet that afternoon.

I am awake now. The sky is blue. The water is blue.

Saturday morning we rose early. Maeve had been talking about taking ballet lessons for months, so this Saturday, CC roused Maeve by muttering into her ear: “Ballet class… Ballet class… Ballet class!” The girl sat up straight and slid out of bed. Her eyes were still shut, but she knew what she was going to wear: pink.

We waited outside the school hall in Leichhardt while the other parents and their small, variously pink- and sparkle-clad daughters assembled – seven, maybe eight in all. One of them had wings. The teacher was blond, with a straight back. “Maybe that’s your teacher,” we told Maeve, and she glanced behind her and then turned back to us, eyes alight. “Hey! That’s my teacher!” she said. She slid her hand into her mum’s and we filed into the room.

The teacher taped a line of blue tape to the floor and said, “OK, girls, come and sit along this line.” Maeve, who all the previous night had been crowing, “I’m going to ballet school! I’m going to ballet school!” this morning turned around and said, hesitantly, “Mum?” She wavered between us and the Blue Line before she regretfully took her place. The teacher introduced two minutes of “creative dance”, and the girls swung their arms and tiptoed, skipped, trotted their way across the shiny parquet floor. Maeve sat, suddenly shy and watching with wide eyes, at the line. When the teacher called the girls back to the starting point, Maeve uncrossed her legs, slowly, and walked across the room to where we sat, over by the side. “But don’t you want to dance, Maevey?” CC said. The teacher was modelling pliés and sautés. “I want to eat,” she said, and she reached for her banana.



In the playground before sunset, though, this is the girl who fearlessly hangs from the monkey bars. She clatters across the shaky wooden bridge. She slides down poles, she walks up slides. If there were a tree with branches hanging low enough, she would climb it – or at least try to. She is sweet and small, and, at three years and four months, she sometimes pronounces her ls as ys. “Ee-ee,” she said to me proudly the other day, and her grin was wide and ready for surprises, “this is our yucky day.”

Very hot, and very sweaty, our last few days in Singapore, but there were adventures yet to be had in the shade of the shophouses’ five-foot ways. We headed to Kampong Glam one morning, me and Mowmy and CC and the kid, before the sun reached its full burny power. I know that Glam, pronounced glahm, comes from the gelam tree that once grew in this colonial-era Malay enclave, but this does not stop me from expecting the high life and bejewelled transvestites whenever I venture into the neighbourhood.



We wandered down Kandahar Street to Bussorah Mall, where, in the shadow of the golden-domed Sultan Mosque, the Malay shopkeepers played bird-call whistles to enchant the kid. We admired the Peranakan bowls and teapots for sale at the Little Shophouse, and, some doors down, smoothed our palms on pink and green sarongs hanging from the eaves. On Arab Street the cloth traders called us into the cool of their shops, to their draped saris, to their printed Indian cottons and piles of neatly folded sheets.



’Round midday down Haji Lane, the nighttime bars and slouchy after-hours hangouts were shuttered, still. At noon the shishas had yet to be lit.

On the seventh day of the lunar new year, I found myself in front of the Kuan Yim Temple on Waterloo Street, with the aunties in their wide straw hats selling blushing lotuses in red and pink. The air was tinged with the burning of ashy-tipped joss sticks, a perfume sharp and soft and familiar all at once. Inside, the great hall chattered as the devout kneeled in front of the Kuan Yin statue and shook containers of bamboo fortune-telling sticks. I was tempted – I am always tempted – to give it a go, but I fear I will not know what to do with the information.

I moseyed along to Sim Lim Square, instead, where I knew fate held for me a new digital camera. “I want to go back to the Kuan Yim temple later,” I said to Mowmy while the Song Brothers shop uncle wrote me a bill, and there must have been something in my voice the good man mistook for piety. “I give you special price,” he said, looking up. “Screen protector and extra battery,” he said, and here he tapped invitingly on the no-name battery he placed on the glass countertop. He wordlessly typed the figure 20 into his calculator and spun the display round to me. “No need lah, uncle, no need, no need,” I said, for I wanted neither an extra battery nor to take advantage of ill-gotten gains by name-dropping the goddess of mercy.

By late afternoon most of the flower-sellers in front of the temple had packed up their carts, though the ice-cream-sandwich man was running a busy trade among the hanging chrysanthemum garlands. My mother practices her own brand of Buddhist Catholicism, but she lit a pair of joss sticks all the same, and raised them to the sky. She was one among the crowd still milling, praying, hoping.

In KL we breakfasted on char siew buns and sweet kaya buns, on slices of buttery kueh lapis, on oranges and tea. Early one morning we drove over to Yin Ma’s, where she toasted us light, cripsy apom – coconut milk pancakes – that Tua Kim had driven back from Taiping the night before. We went from one aunt’s house to another’s, from one aunt’s snack-laden living room table to another’s. One afternoon we rang the doorbell at Ai Chin Ee-ee’s; she emerged and ushered us into the kitchen for slices of orange cake and deep pink dragonfruit.

Family visits are great, and we gossip in Hokkien about mad uncles and our cousins’ ang moh partners. To the grandaunts in cotton blouses and sarongs, a stiff leg is deng cha cha – hard as a stick. A niece, tanned from holidays in the sun, is or gui gui – black as the devil.



We ate and napped and napped and ate, and one day we went to the neighbourhood playground for ten minutes of slides and swings before the late-morning heat felled us. In four days we headed south along the highway to Port Dickson on the coast. We had been handed great pomelos and fat mandarins for the ride, and red-topped plastic containers of home-made biscuits and crisps. We packed ourselves and our bounty into Ge Ku’s car, Maeve sat with her stuffed-toy cat named Catty, and we drove, blissfully unaware, into the terrible crush of holiday traffic. Near Seremban, a tour bus sat, steaming and conquered, in a ditch by the side of the road.

What should have been a one-hour drive took two and a half. It was evening by the time we came to the vacation flat at the PD World Marina Resort. There is a charm in faded seaside destinations years after their heydays, like that of one-time top-billing cabaret singers now smiling with lips painted a little too red and reminiscing in throaty voices about the good old days. This charm was not evident downstairs at the entrance to C Block, one dirty white building in a congregation of its similarly scruffy siblings.

Our father had driven up from Singapore to meet us. He had arrived a couple of hours before we had, and he had cleaned and scrubbed and wrung the mop. He came downstairs, now, shirtless and already in holiday mode. Some things you close your eyes to, like the empty carpark and the lift that doesn’t work. From the balcony on the tenth floor, where the breeze cooled and calmed, the lagoon stretched out into sea.



When were the salad days of Port Dickson? Did post-war teenagers cruise along Jalan Pantai on scooters and borrowed cars, windows rolled down so the sea breeze kissed their Brylcreemed hair? Did they smoke cigarettes like would-be rebels in cat’s-eye spectacles while sultry-voiced songbirds crooned “Bengawan Solo” and the Hokkien hits of yesteryear?

I sang once, I hear, at the Royal Port Dickson Yacht Club. I have vague memories of this – I think I may have worn red, and I think I may have sung “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. My mother says I did not win, and she was fiery with indignation. This is the sole souvenir I have of PD, although my sister remembers ham sandwiches, as well, at the club.



We drove into town and our father pointed to the barracks where he’d gone to military school as a fourteen-year-old. “We camped and played sports,” he said, saying nothing about marching up and down the square, and there was something in his voice that was light and free. “Here,” he said, and he pointed out the window without stopping the car, “is where I spent the night in the lock-up for carrying a passenger on my bike.” Can you see your father as a fourteen-year-old, a fifteen-year-old, tanned and rangy, with a shock of hair and a big grin? I see a boy on a bicycle and he is riding down a dirt road one night, but I don’t know if this is my father or a Lat comic.

We went to the one super superstore in town called Billion, and the Chinese lanterns were red in the night. At the Hotel Merlin Bar & Restaurant, we dined under the auspices of a dragon, a phoenix and the Double Happiness. We slept. In the morning there were hot prathas for breakfast, with coconut and dhal curries, while the teh tarik man made us sweet coffees and teas in glass mugs.

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.

Curries, curries, everywhere, but the pratha tastes like it’s for hippies. The feasting’s well and truly begun, with the lazy Susan at home heavy – constantly – with dishes of food. We are like the prodigal daughters come home, CC and me, and it is just as well there is no older son glowering in the background. There were curries galore last night, veg curry and dhal curry and chicken curry, and beef curry spicy enough to make you stop talking. Even with Mowmy’s twelve-grain wholemeal pratha – (This is a woman, a medical doctor, who said, when three-year-old Maeve offered her a Pez, “No, thank you, Poco, candy rots your teeth.” The kid blinked.) – it was a meal to make you wipe your plate clean.



There is so much green here. My mother’s garden bursts with shades of moss and grass and leaves light and dark, while in the streets bird’s nest ferns grow, full and lush, in the crooks of the wide, spreading raintrees.

There were globe lanterns hanging from the trees tonight at Dempsey Hill Green. A nineteenth-century nutmeg plantation, the site was eventually cleared and converted, after the nutmeg blight of the late 1850s, for army use. The barracks’ long, low buildings stay, today, and the lights of their fancy restaurants spill invitingly over the slope. Tonight, the air was laced with the perfume of frangipani blooms. It is a seductive scent, the kind of fragrance that lures young men into the thick of tropical greenery, certain they glimpse the back of a lithe, long-haired woman just beyond the trees.

We were one girl, first, waving madly, then two, then – falling into the chair – three, and very hungry, at the RedDot. “What,” we asked the waiter and pointed at the menu, “is a ‘Pompin Potato’?” “It is, um, potato,” he said, and here gestured to his general left in front of him, “and cheese,” gesturing right. “Yah,” he said into the silence, confirming himself. Then: “Not too sure.” We were fed, nonetheless and eventually, and it was fine, kind of meh but fine, but more importantly we were left to natter while the black ceiling fans whirred in the wood-framed ceiling. Life runs away with us on different sides of the world, but in one evening with the lanterns hanging from the trees, the stories are shared and the days fall away.

I grew up here, with the coconut trees in the front garden. Mornings, there is a bird who calls cu-cu-cruu.

We are sticky all the time. Our necks are sticky. The insides of our elbows are sticky. I grew up sticky all the time. Schoolchildren in Singapore have a smell about them – not a bad smell, just a particular one – that is a combination of humidity and stickiness, canvas shoes and concrete floors. There is a respite from the heat only when the rain comes, and at night, when the lizards click and buzz outside.



There is respite, too, in a cold, eighty-cent glass of soybean milk from the drinks auntie at no. 34. We escaped into the Maxwell Road hawker centre this afternoon, Mowmy and me, and sat in the shaded cool for noodles and soups. We were in full view of the you char kway stall, where one uncle rolled the long strand of dough and folded it in half, one uncle deep-fried the pastry, and one auntie fished for the golden you char kway and drained it on paper towels. Two stalls down, the biscuit uncle did a fine trade in knotted plastic bags of butter biscuits.