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.