Goodbye Uncle Cheng Guan

This afternoon I received a phone call from my sister that our last surviving uncle, my dad's youngest brother, had passed on earlier this morning.

I last saw him a year ago, when we went to pay our respects during the Lunar Year celebrations.

The older generation is now history. Our paternal family is a huge one. My grandfather came from China at the tender age of 12, to seek a living in Malaya (as it was called then). He started off as a cook, according to my dad. He worked very hard and whatever he saved, he bought land and planted them with rubber, coconut and coffee.

He became a wealthy man and as all wealthy men did in those days, he returned to China to get himself a wife. He had in total 5 wives, my dad's mother being number 3. A man's standing in those days was reflected in the number of wives he had and of course his household. My father had many siblings from his other mothers too. There were more than twenty of them.

Unfortunately I didn't get to know all of them even though we stayed in the same compound. I don't know who or where my cousins are too, as we moved after my grandmother passed away. We had to sell the house we were living in to pay off funeral expenses.

It was not easy to be part of a large family and whose grandfather was an eminent person in the community. "Face" was most important and the funeral was a grand one with two brass bands and stilt walkers dressed in ancient costumes accompanying the hearse.Traditions and rituals had to be observed strictly under the eagle eyes of the surviving grandmothers.

I asked my sister to help me pass on "white gold", a sum of money to help with funeral expenses when she attends the wake tonight.This is usually enclosed in a white envelope and is the custom among the Chinese who attend wakes.

My late uncle was a simple and very kind man who lived on the estate where he cultivated rubber, coconut and an orchard with durians,rambutans and mangosteens. He also reared pigs and chickens and ducks. I remember staying with him and my grandma during my school holidays. Our water came from a well and my younger brother and I had to look after the young chicks as there were always hawks swooping down on them. We also helped him to chop up banana stems to make swill for the pigs.

Goodbye Uncle Cheng Guan. You have gone to a better place. Thank you for all the wonderful memories of childhood.