KUCHING: After 54 years of separation, Jenny Banah Kumari, is on a quest to find her biological parents.
The New Sarawak Tribune reached out to the 54-year-old woman to help in her search, hoping that someone will recognise the details of her story and help her piece together her past.
Jenny’s search began with a few scattered memories of her early childhood.
She said her birth parents were Chinese, belonging to the Foochow ethnic group, and that her father worked in the timber industry while her mother was a homemaker.
She also knows that she was born in August 1969 in Sibu, in a clinic located at the Palace Theatre building.
“My parents were unable to pay for the expensive clinic fees, so they made the difficult decision to give me up for adoption through a middleman – a short and stout Chinese woman – who passed me on to my adoptive mother,” she said.
Her adoptive mother was a cloth merchant who travelled regularly between Sibu and Rajang. Her adoptive parents were Melanau Muslims from Kampung Rajang Sarikei, and her father worked as a ship captain at the time.
Jenny was the youngest of six siblings, with three older sisters and two older brothers.
Her eldest sister, Ai Ling, played a vital role in looking after her younger siblings when their mother was hospitalised at the Lau King Howe Hospital in Sibu.
The Chinese family had even rented a house on Lane 4, Ting Hua Road, in Sibu, where they lived together with the Muslim family for several months while Jenny’s mother received medical care.
Jenny is hopeful that her efforts to reunite with her biological parents after 54 years of separation will be successful.
She hopes that her story will reach her birth family or someone who knows them and that they will come forward to reunite with her.
If you have any information that may help Jenny find her biological family, please reach out to her at 012-880 2253.
