Many of my friends and I, and later my students took art lessons from Mr. Wong Jean Hiang, whom we all called Ah Giu because he was the brother of my maternal Third Uncle's wife.
the name got stuck with him and he was known as the Artist Uncle.
Recently I saw a water colour of his on fb and it brought a lot of memories back to me. I have not lived in Sibu since 1987 and that seemed a long time ago. Having said that, the riverine scene depicted by his water colour had actually disappeared from the life of Sibu since the 1970's.
But, in my mental scape, I will always remember the evening walks my father took us to the river side, after an early Foochow dinner at 5.30 p.m. On the days he did not play mahjong at the club he would take us for a walk and enjoyed the sunset. That was the time when he bonded with us, telling us stories. He might have been very tired but he would instil in us some moral lessons.
Boats brought loved ones home and also took them away. Life could change by the arrival of the wrong people too in the wrong boats. My grandfather made a fortune out of his three motor launches and that was how he and siblings could further their studies in China.
At times he would carry my brother, Hsiung and tickle him. We had just moved to Sibu from Pulau Kerto and those were really good years. After he started working at his quarry we did not watch the sunsets anymore because he would have to drive about an hour to reach home.
In the last part of his life, he would have dinner and then rest a little, and take a small exercise walking up and down the foot path to our house. It would be way past the sunset. We could even hear him slapping himself, trying to kill some mosquitoes as we studied upstairs in our rooms.
We used to say, " Papa and his mosquito wars." My father saw many wars in his life, the preparation for war in Beijing and Nanjing, the Japanese War and the Indonesian Confrontation. He was a pacifist. He did not even like quarrelsome people.
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