My Father’s Legacy

by Linda Liew Chee Cheng (she/her)

My father’s legacy was his sense of adventure. I guess that is intrinsic to the Hakka people, we are nomads, wanderers. That’s where my father’s wanderlust came from. He left his home village in Meixian, Guangdong, southern China, at the age of 19 in the early 1950s to go to what was then known as Malaya, now Malaysia, to seek his fortune.

There in Penang, he met my mum, who was a first generation Malaysian. My mum was a feminist then, because she refused to speak my father’s language. They met, and throughout their married life, they did not have a common language that they spoke around us kids. He wanted to bring his roots to our family home so he spoke Hakka, and my mother replied to him in Cantonese. This was the sound of my childhood - of my parents speaking to each other in their own mother tongues, the tones and intonations echoing throughout the house, the expressiveness in their voices bouncing off the walls.

My mother was the one who disciplined us, and my dad was the mediator. There were seven siblings, and he never treated any of us as a favourite. He took me to hawker stalls for lunch after school where we would eat yam rice (wu tao faan). I thought I was special and the only one he did that with - not knowing that he did that with all seven of his children without us knowing at the time! I only discovered that later in life when us siblings were talking about our favourite memories of him.

It was his dream for us to go back all together as a family to see where he grew up. In 2017, after he had passed away, we fulfilled that dream as a family. 19 of us across three generations travelled from different corners of the world to his small village in Meixian to see our ancestral home, as well as the new homes for our relatives there that his remittances helped to build. I was so in awe of what he had achieved, raising seven children in Malaya as well as looking after his family in China and helping provide a good life for them.

I look back on my life now, having raised two children in the UK and still trying to visit home when I can. I think about the times that I have found it challenging, and think about how my father must have coped with that too. That sense of adventure, that sense of striving for more, that wisdom - that is my father’s legacy.

by Linda Liew Chee Cheng (she/her)