Worth the Loving, Worth the Living

 My mother was not the most romantic person I know but she left behind a few memorable stories of the love shared by happily married people , including her own. 

In my opinion Sibu has never really been able to inspire many to write great romantic novels when it was even once called a “cultural desert".

Her cup runneth over when she gave birth to her first baby boy, the "son of the eldest son" in 1953.

My father fell in love with her because she was good looking, just as he was good looking. A Shanghai born school teacher who came to teach in Tung Hua named him and his brother Hua King, as the most handsome men in the Rajang Valley in 1939. 

When my father first saw my mum she was carrying two tins of river water with a bian dan and that really tugged his heart strings. We as their children thought that it was so romantic!!

Next thing mum knew was my dad came with her first cousin Lau Pang Kwong for a second and "clearer" look. According to my mum's story, my father had wanted to listen to her voice and how she spoke. That was entirely not what Shakespeare said about love. Men loved with their eyes. But dad wanted to hear her voice!!

Soon he was doing some investigation about her character and she definitely had a good CV. He visited Ensurai where her first cousins lived more often with his speedboat and made more friends. Dad was a town boy, very highly educated and from a well to do family and he was admired by the villagers who met him. His father approved of the match because of the origin of the Lau family, which was a good lineage, as her uncle was the Foochow headman then.

My Ngie mah, then was not so sure because she said she could not offer a dowry and my mother was already 24 years old, a bit older than most girls of marriageable age. Mum had wanted to get a teaching job since her mother had come back from China and her father had just passed away and she was just too willing to remain single and help her own family. She had seen too many bad marriages during the Japanese Occupation.

She told us, "During the Japanese Occupation, many marriages were forced. Girls were simply married off to any available man, good or bad, gamblers, drinkers, wife beaters. It was so cruel to place young girls, some below 16 in the hands of those ruffians!!" Mum always felt bad about women who married the wrong men and she was quite a suffragette even then among the women of the Rajang!

There was no obstacle for their marriage except for her acceptance of my father's proposal.

16 years later just before my father's sudden demise, one evening, he suddenly gave mum the most loving statement and treasured appraisal , "Chuo, you are really a good person. You ARE really good."

In 2015,at age 90, she continued to enjoy playing the ever gracious hostess to all relatives who visited her in Kuching. Sharing of food is an act of love.

And mum remembered that statement for the rest of her life, from 1965 until she passed away in 2020, at age 94, just one month short of her 95th birthday. She would have been married to my father, if both were alive, 70 years!

 her life was a total devotion to the love of her life for 70 years.

That is true romance.

She told her daughters a few times, "It was all worth it!|"