Goodbye Ah Mah

My Ah Mah, my mater­nal grand­mother, used to sew pyja­mas and quilts for every sin­gle one of her twenty odd (or is it thirty odd) grandchildren.

She’d buy yards and yards of fab­ric every year, and when we’d go visit her in Serem­ban, we’d come home with a new pair of jam­mies, know­ing that every cousin would be kit­ted in iden­ti­cal jam­mies that year.

It was 1981 and the last pair I got before I was too old for pyja­mas was the most embar­rass­ing pair of mickey and min­nie pyja­mas a boy could ever be caught wear­ing when vis­i­tors came to the house later than usual.

Ah Mah spoke no Eng­lish and very very few words of Man­darin. She could yell a lot in Hokkien, and in that house­hold my mother grew up in, you needed a strong pair of lungs to go with the strong pair of hands that held the fam­ily of 15 sib­lings together.

Mis­sion school­ing in pre and post-war Malaya meant that a gen­er­a­tional gap widened into a cul­tural and lin­guis­tic one as my mum and some of her sib­lings started going to church and append­ing Anglo-Celtic-Judaic names to their Hokkien-Chinese ones, which were often mis­pelled by inept offi­cials at the birth reg­istries (I have an uncle called Lim Songkok).

Grand­chil­dren arrived from the 60s onwards and were chris­tened, named and in the case of my brother and sis­ter and myself, did not (and still do not) under­stand the com­pli­cated hier­ar­chi­cal nomen­cla­ture of the many uncles, aun­ties and cousins. We’d know of an Uncle Michael, who’d be Uncle Num­ber Some­thing to other cousins, or an Aun­tie Wendy, who’d be Aun­tie Some Other Number.

Ah Mah on the other hand, had lots of dif­fi­culty remem­ber­ing all our names, and used to com­plain about my brother’s and my name.

“Haiyah, mm chye simi Benny Kenny lah. An chua sama kio ka Nee Nee lah!” she’d say.

(Haiyah, dunno what Benny, Kenny lah. Why do they have to all sound like Nee Nee lah!)

And as if adopt­ing for­eign names wasn’t bad enough, sev­eral of my mother’s sib­lings mar­ried out­side of the wider Chi­nese population.

My half-Sephardi Jew­ish cousins’ names came in for Ah Mah’s shelling too.

“Haiyah, mm chye simi Nathaniel lah. An chua sama kio ka neow neow neow neow lah?“

And my half-Welsh cousins’ names, Teck­wyn, Sel­wyn, Edwyn, Eil­wyn and Colwyn…

“An chua sama kio ka win win win win win lah!“

Ah Mah loved every one of her grand­kids, and that’s no mean feat — I remem­ber being part of a fam­ily photo — of almost every kid and grand­kid, num­ber­ing up to 50 plus — where the pho­tog­ra­pher had to cross the street to get every­one in the shot.

That’s like hav­ing to run a pyjama fac­tory. And the patch­work quilt that she gave me before I left for Syd­ney is made of many hexag­o­nal pieces of scrap cloth she’s col­lected and painstak­ingly sewn together. It doesn’t look like much, but it does keep the warmth in.

Ah Mah, Madam Chua Chu, passed away last Thurs­day in Seremban.