Every time we head back to Batu Pahat, Johor,
my family looks forward to the food.
But food takes on another dimension in BP.
It is also part of my father’s memories of his youth,
and it makes us feel closer to that part of our family.
This evening, we went for Laksa. Just 10 minutes away
from our family home.
While my mother’s side were more ‘urban’ Penang townfolks and my
maternal grandmother involved in tailoring, dad’s side has dealt with
trades ranging from small tracts of coconut plantations and oil palm,
to house rentals and animal farming.
I remember when I was little I would play with my cousins
in the coconut sheds at the back of my grandparent’s house in
Bagan (a district in BP), and running in the little trails between
its terracotta-coloured soil and the small river by the house.
In the very same area, my dad used to catch fish, crabs and try to
avoid snakes.
I love the idea that we played in the same vicinity, but during different
spans of time.
.
.
Before his generation, dad says, the family was uneducated but pretty
determined business folks.
His grandmother, who he never tires of telling me about, was the
matriarch of the family, the most thrifty
and money-savvy. She would be the one to acquire our relative family wealth
back in those days, eventually owning land and some little businesses.
However, dad says, she always looked at you funny if you took put
more rice on your plate than necessary.
.
I am somewhere between a third and fourth generation Malaysian (dad + mom).
Great grandmother had been born in China, essentially a ‘slave’, or
someone sold as a servant girl for another family.
But somehow, she managed to come here, bring up her own huge family,
and with hard work & penny pinching, set them up comfortably through present day.
My father speaks about her with hush, admiring tones.
I love hearing about my great grandmother .
Just now, eating laksa at a small stall on Jalan Peng Kai,
my dad points out the man dishing out bowl after bowl
of laksa like he was in a speed competition.
His family, like many Batu Pahat natives, sent their children
overseas on the sweat of these small trades.
This man, dad reminds me, sent his children overseas
with these bowls of laksa.
I guess I’m very much like dad – we really admire the ethos of hard work.
Pure busting your balls, sweating your heart out working because
you know no other way.
I have been born lucky, and do not need to work as my
great grandmother did, but I certainly hope to remember
this ethos, this era’s spirit, and keep it in mind throughout
my life.
I also frequently try to remind myself not to complain about work,
and to please please please stop it if I do! Susah though, everyone does it.
I am blessed to have it, and enjoy what I do.
Dad tells me how he used to come to
eat at this laksa stall about three decades ago or so.
It is pretty good laksa. Tasty, but not too cloyingly heavy & over the top.
The kind that leaves you satisfied and not nauseously guilty.
A bowl is RM3.50 (big).
Dad says this stall probably sells hundreds of bowls a day.
Looking at how the man was dishing them out,
I did not doubt this.
.
In many parts of Batu Pahat you still feel a sense of the old
town back then. The streets are still so wide, the shops
still small & buzzing. I can almost imagine my father as a young boy
buying cendol from the stall we love.
Or coming to the famous hawker centre by the Batu Pahat river
at Jln Shahbandar, asking for a bowl of fishball noodle soup
served by the same family through the generations.
I love it that every time I come back I ask my father more and more
questions, and I take more and more pictures.
I want to make sure that I keep these in the collective family memory,
and I guess I feel a certain responsibility because I am the
journalist in the family. I record so many other people’s histories
and I have yet to do my own.
I guess this is what growing older does to you.
Or perhaps I am just super nostalgic that way.
xo
