My mother was born in 1926.

As a child, she was given to the Catholic orphanage.

Where the nuns brought her up.

She was as short as my father was tall,

A fact that rankled with her.

Because her friend nicknamed them,

Panjang and pendek, tall and short in Malay language.

She was a rather unusual woman of her time.

For one thing, she was educated.

Not many women of her time were.

And she was very proud of that fact.

Very proud she knew English.

Today, she would be a career woman.

She was born at the wrong period of time.

She had 13 of us, when being a mother

Was never a big thing for her.

Yet she brought up, on my father’s single salary.

I could never understand how she did it.

She never put on airs.

She never tried to be anything she was not.

She was unfailingly honest in that.

She knew her roots, from humble stock.

And never tried to be anything else.

In that, I hope I am my mother’s daughter.

She had a sense of humor.

And a gift for telling stories.

She could get on a stage,

And send her audience into peals of laughter.

She could make a little tale,

Like the travail of stealing a penny at the orphanage,

Into a fascinating humorous story.

Making her audience split

Their sides with laughter.

Late in life, she realized her dream.

Writing book after book.