While living in Brooke Drive, we saw a lot of poverty as well as extravagance.
My mother was a most sympathetic woman, a good neighbour and a good land lady. She even allowed some of the tenants to owe up to four months of rent, while we as a family tightened our belts and made do.
Mum believed in being gracious. And to her, a bit of food on the table was adequate. She did not ask for more.
She would always think of her own relatives and ask them if they had enough to eat.
"Enough to eat," as a comforting answer, the Foochow way for her ears.
We had two women as neighbours. One was the Ah Moo who was less than 4 feet tall. Every now and then, sometimes every day, she would come over to our house, and when mum had chicken, she would get one good piece as a snack. Sometimes a bowl of soup. Ah Moo found my mother a good counsellor, with a good listening ear. She would go home feeling happier.
It was good after years of poverty (she and her 3 married sons all lived in a three bed room flat until one of the sons managed to buy a lorry and put down a deposit for a low cost house). Today her eldest daughter in law, a widow, Golden Flower, lives in her own house!! My mother respected her husband because he would never forget to pay his rent, no matter how late it was. He only earned RM400 as a odd job man, as he only attended one year of school. For years we as kids saw him going to work barefooted.
Whenever my mum met up with Golden Flower , they would both have tears in their eyes and speaking of the days they were neighbours.
We saw a drawing by Lat and that was exactly the kind of house Brahim and Anna demolished to be transported to her kampong down river. Our school teacher Miss Rose Wong had once lived in that house.
This is the story of Anna (not her real name) and Brahim who lived in the workers' Manang. Brahim was Anna's Iban Muslim convert husband. She did odd jobs for the contractor along our road and helped my mother to run errands. Anna was good in talking. On the first day of Chinese New Year, she cooked curry chicken and kelupis for my mother. We were over the moon by the special gift. It was our first big Halal gift for Chinese New Year. Mum of course reciprocated with a big angpow.
One day she asked my mother to advance her some money so that she could buy the old wood from the contractor. Her husband had gotten the job to demolish the wooden house near our home. So mum helped her pay the contractor Mr. Lau and the husband and wife took two weeks to take down the wood, plank by plank. They shipped the wood to their kampong. That was the last my mother saw Anna, and her cash of RM800. That was 1976.
So somewhere in a kampong down river, there is a wooden house whose wood was paid for by my mother.
Mum only wished for the best for all the poor women she made friends with. She had been poor when she was young.
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