Before I arrived, my mother was a flight attendant for Malaysia Airlines. It wasn’t her job; it was her calling. Going by the stories my father told of her, my mother loved the vastness of the skies—the liminal space between destination and departure.
My mother told me a joke. When she was a child in the sleepy town of Tapah, she and her friends would mock the accent of the ‘gweilo’, the white man. “Puut dee fu fee kum di mau see,” they’d chant tonelessly. In full tonal colour, the Cantonese phrase means, “Scoop up some ash and cover the cat poo.” Malaysia’s rapid urbanisation led to my parents’ migration to the ‘big city’. Their children grew up speaking the Queen’s English at home and Bahasa Malaysia at school.
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Poetry from Brandon K. Liew and Daryl Lim Wei Jie 林伟杰
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A poem from Hon-Wai Wong
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A poem by Jack Malik
- Tags: Es Foong, Issue 37, Malaysia, Melizarani T. Selva