Meeting up

This weekend is very special. Yesterday I met up with my former classmates for a simple lunch at the Sunway Pyramid shopping complex in Kuala Lumpur. Last evening my daughter Grace and I had dinner with my youngest brother and his wife. Earlier today my two younger sisters fetched me after church service and we had lunch in the Midvalley Megamall.

There were four of us who met up for lunch at Sunway Pyramid had been classmates from form one until we completed our secondary school education. Yuet Wah and I continued to form six while Mo Tsing and Eu Kwan did not. Yuet Wah went on to varsity while I went to the UK for teacher training at Brinsford Lodge in Wolverhampton. Mo Tsing and Eu Kwan went their separate ways. However we have been keeping in touch all this while and Saturday's lunch was arranged by Yuet Wah when I flew into Kuala Lumpur from the Land below the Wind. Since MAS introduced its promotional cheap flights it is now more affordable for me to fly in to visit my daughter Grace who works in Kuala Lumpur. It's a two and a half hour flight from Kota Kinabalu to Kuala Lumpur.

Mo Tsing chose the restaurant. It served Teochew food. We opted for plain porridge and orderd a la carte dishes to go with the porridge. Yuet Wah decided on the fried noodles ( mee sua ). We chose the yam paste & gingko nut dessert. Over our meal our conversation centred on........ guess what? Our grandchildren of course!! We are now grandmas, the modern generation grannies, who are educated, independent and mobile.

From left: Peggy, Yuet Wah, Eu Kwan, Mo Tsing
We all had another thing in common. We help our children to look after our grandchildren. Our children go to work and we are the ones that fetch the grandchildren home from school, see to their meals and ferry them to their various activities. However, Eu Kwan's grandchildren haven't started school proper yet so she babysits them at home. She has three, the youngest being a few months old so her work as grandma is really cut out for her. She has a lot more to do than the three of us. Yuet Wah's and my granchildren are in primary school so they are older and easier to manage. It's a matter of cooking their meals for them, and being their chauffer.

We don't mind doing this as they are our flesh and blood, so to speak and if we don't help them, who will? Baby sitters are not an option as these children do not really need babysitting and maids cannot be trusted as they have been known to abuse children under their care. Housemaids are hired to do the housework and the older generation, usually the grandparents, supervise the children even though there is a maid in the home. We stopped having a maid after she abused our trust and the privileges given to her.

Mo Tsing has two grandsons who are still very young, the older being 2+ and the younger about ten months old. She doesn't look after them as she is still working. She babysits when required. Eu Kwan says the boy is very handsome. I asked Mo Tsing to put their pics on Facebook so that we can look at the photo albums. Before the end of the meal we had exchanged email and I exhorted them to sign up for Facebook. So I'm looking forward to meeting them again on Facebook.

Mo Tsing is a very dear old friend. When I entered form 1 in the Methodist Girls' School, Kuala Lumpur, I could not speak a word of Cantonese, the lingua franca in Kuala Lumpur. Neither did I know how to hold a pair of chopsticks. She was the one who took me under her wing. She taught me to speak Cantonese, how to use chopsticks and she introduced me to peanut butter. She also taught me how to sew so that I could sew my own clothes. Coming from a large family, this was a very important skill as we could not afford to have our clothes tailored.

Dinner with my youngest brother was at a restaurant somewhere in Cheras, a suburb in Kuala Lumpur. The food was Cantonese. We had steamed towfoo, crispy belly pork, smoked chicken and leafy vegetables sauteed with minced pork and mushrooms. We found the food to be tasty except the smoked chicken which had a very pungent odor. My brother Allen, as I discovered later, has a side of him which I didn't really know until last night. I learnt that the stray dogs around his home usually wait for his return each day as they knew he would give them dinner and dinner was different each day. Sometimes he even gave them breakfast!! I know my brother is a very kind and generous person but I didn't realise that his generosity and kindness extended to stray dogs as well! He has also just adopted a stray cat, a white cat which has been named Putih. Coincidentally my poor old cat was also named Putih as she was white as well, with lovely blue eyes. Unfortunately she was run over by one of my neighbours while I was out of town. We enjoyed a lovely dessert of dragon fruit from Allen's own garden.

This morning my two younger sisters, Doris and Rosalind fetched me after church service and we went to the Midvalley Megamall for an early lunch. After a walk-through viewing what was on offer at the restaurants, we settled for one which had a variety of dishes. I had dry curry mee, Doris chose assam laksa ( noodles in a sourish spicy soup ), while Rosalind settled for roti jala ( noodles rolled up like a tube) which came with a bowl of chicken curry. Doris also selected a variety of nonya kuih for dessert and we all had kopi-o ( black local coffee ).

Assam Laksa

Dry Curry Noodles

Roti Jala

We chatted about Doris' children, two of whom are in the UK, one doing his finals while her daughter will be completing her masters soon. Rosalind's two girls are undergraduates in Australia. My children are all working and independent. Time has flown by so quickly. I find it almost incredible that I'm a grandma on the wrong side of sixty. We reminisced about our younger days and the experiences we had gone through. All too soon it was time to leave and as they dropped me off at Grace's place, I realised how precious family is, siblings and children and grandchildren. With age comes wisdom as the adage goes, but sometimes it comes only after the fact, more often than not, only on hindsight. God Almighty is good and has been very good to our family. We thank Him for his blessings.

Doris, Rosalind, Peggy

Assorted Nonya Kuih