Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Khoo Bee Neo - My Ama

Ama had spent a lot of time with us kids when we were staying in PJ before I was 3. She came down often to look after my eldest sister and brother when my parents were busy. Since I was too young, my memories of her time with us in PJ was when she grabbed hold of my wrist, while using 2 fingers to "walk" up my arm chanting "chang chang kentut, wow wow wow... ketiak busuk!" ending with her tickling me until I begged for mercy.

My most memories of her was when she lived in her Melaka home. We'd go to Melaka every school holiday to spend time with her and my cousins. Again, my memories of my younger years in Melaka were only limited to those times I spent with my cousin Karen and that we used to visit her home with her carefully tended garden.

She would often sit at the back in the kitchen with her beloved dogs at her feet while she smoked cigarettes and drank hard liquor. I remember her bringing me to the market a few times. She'd buy the necessary produce and then hail a trishaw to get back home.

Being uneducated, she could hardly speak English, let alone pronounce our English names. Karen became Karan (which didn't make sense to her since karan means electricity in Malay), Kelvin became Kebin, Janice became Nyenie, I became So Eng. My cousin Karen remembers more.

Always putting others before her, she would often cook a delicious and complete meal for her dogs, like fried chicken with gravy and boiled rice. Right after feeding her dogs, she'd proceed to have her own lunch - a couple of cheese biscuits. Then, she'd also sleep in the tiny back room of her house, leaving the front 2 rooms available whenever we came to visit.

She's also famous for her Nyonya dishes, she being Nyonya herself. I loved most her salted vege with duck meat/bones soup and her kangkung belachan which she would pound with her pastle and mortar. She would feed us to no end, ensuring there was always food in the house in case we got hungry.

Her personal must-haves were a bottle of tiger balm, minyak cap kapak and bedak sejuk. These items are still present in her cupboard, unopened. It was from her that I learnt how to use these elements. I still use bedak sejuk til this very day.


She was also always conscious of her white hair and would often visit the local saloon and proudly step off a trishaw with her grey hairs in full black. I wish we could have somehow dyed her hair before she was buried, she would have loved that.

Also known for her DIY capabilities, she would often try to heal us using stuff from the kitchen. When my brother had a cut on his scalp, she rushed to rub coffee powder on it "to stop the bleeding" she declared. The nurses weren't too happy trying to clean up his wound after that! Mine was a white spot on my wrist, panau. I had seen a doctor about it and given some medication to put on it. For weeks it still didn't go off until we paid our usual visit to Amah who spotted it at once and proceeded to rub this root (I still don't know what it is but it looks, smells and stings like ginger) furiously on the spot until my skin grew red and tinged in slight pain. It was gone within days. Amazing huh, for someone who never had an education. Better than the doctor who tried to cure me.

Though I've never seen her painting, but she loved to paint various articles at home in striking colours. There's a green chair on my auntie's porch alongside a blue trolley. Her old nyonya items like an antigue trunk made of steel was also painted a maroon. Mind you, these paints are meant to be used on wood so they have that standard satin look. If you see anything in the house that is of that finishing, it means it was her handiwork. Oh, her fridge she also painted green, plus a wooden cupboard in bright yellow, all using the same wood paint regardless if it were metal she was painting.

Only at the funeral did I know a bit about her painful past. She was adopted (and was named Khoo Ah Keoh, which means "pick up") and abused by her adopted spinster mother. Later when she got married at her tender late teens, she was then again severely abused by her mother-in-law. She was the second wife of my grandfather as the first wife couldn't take the abuse from the mother-in-law. Coming from a rural area somewhere in Batu Pahat and shifting to Melaka when she got married, my Ama had nowhere to run.

Never having been shown love, she had difficulty in expressing it. But her way of taking care of us when we were young, giving us ang pows whenever we'd come to visit, nagging us to get married quickly to have kids, was her various ways of showing her love to us.

When we kids started going overseas to study and later migrate for my cousins, she would only know we were going to Eropah even though we were going to Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Since we didn't manage to come back more often then, she would ask us if the government could build a bridge from Malaysia to Eropah!

I miss her. She was my closest grandparent and I always knew she loved us with all her heart. So do we love you too, Ama.

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