The first time I read these exact words was sometime in the mid-1960s in a letter that a young woman brought to me because she could not read. In those days illiteracy was rampant so it was not unusual to get help from a reader.
I was already able to read quite well in 1962 when I was in Primary 3, and my first reaction to the letter was, “Oh, I heard similar words a few months before.” Let me explain.
Tears! Buckets of them, it seemed, were shed a few months prior when the young woman’s fiancé was leaving to join the armed forces. This was soon after the Indonesia–Malaysia Confrontation or Borneo Confrontation began in 1963 stemming from Indonesia’s opposition to the creation of Malaysia.
As a friend of the young woman’s little brother, I was a familiar visitor to the family home, and so I was right amid the tears, which was quite confusing for my little brain.
The shedding of tears did not make sense to me as I thought that there should be gladness that the young man was going for what was considered an honourable job with which to support himself and his wife-to-be.
Towards the end of the farewell gathering, the family and friends discreetly moved to the veranda and other parts of the house to give the betrothed couple some semblance of privacy in the kitchen.
I, however, was “permitted” (tolerated was more like it) to remain close by, and within my hearing, the fiancé said, “Wait for me, my love. I will come back for you.”
At the age of ten, my understanding of matters of the heart was fuzzy at best, but being a nosy little boy with a big mouth I couldn’t help butting in.
“Why wait? Can’t you just take her with you?” I asked, to which the young man just laughed.
“I’ll be staying at a training camp for six months,” he said.
Well, that was that, and before sunrise the next morning, he was already walking along a well-trodden jungle path that connected the village to the Kuching-Serian Road. There was no motorable road yet, so it was imperative to start early to catch a Kuching-bound bus.
At this stage, you might ask how letters from far away could reach the village since without a road, regular postal deliveries were impossible to make. Well, the postal office had a simple yet effective solution to the problem.
Right where the main road intersected the jungle path to the village some enterprising Chinese families had set up a row of shops. One of the families served as the caretaker of a box where postmen deposited letters addressed to the village people. Each village had a pigeonhole inside the box. All the villagers had to do was ask for the box to be opened whenever they wanted to check the mail.
Now, back to the tearful farewell, it was one of many that happened in the village during the Confrontation years and after that during the fight against Communist insurgents.
For some reason that I could not pinpoint and explain, a number of the young men who entered military service, regular police or the police field force in those days tended to get engaged to be married to their girlfriends or got married outright around the time they were about to leave for combat training.
I bring this up because an uncle who was a policeman said that his one driving desire to get married soon after joining the force was to have children to carry on after him if he got killed in a battle. He was rendered speechless when I reminded him that his family would have a hard life without him.
A cousin who was also a policeman said the same thing. Even my younger brother (now deceased), who was a corporal in the army, thought along the same line, especially when he and his men patrolled the dangerous zones along the Malaysia-Thailand border.
Two deaths did come on 27th June 1965 in a well-coordinated attack by armed raiders from Kalimantan, Indonesia who overran Siburan police station eighteen miles from Kuching.
When the news reached the village, it was on everyone’s lips for several weeks. It was a sobering reminder of the real dangers of being in the military or police.
We learned that while the thirty or so raiders escaped unscathed, two policemen — one was Chief Minister Stephen Kalong Ningkan’s younger brother — and six civilians were killed.
Among the injured was a distant uncle of mine who was stationed at the police station. A shot took a chunk of flesh from the upper part of his arm. I saw the wound when he took off his shirt to bathe in the river behind our village house. He was on paid time off while recovering from the injury.
Anyway, regarding the left-behind women, I wondered why not one of them rejected her suitor. Didn’t they care that some of them could suddenly become widows? Were they blinded by love, or were they just brave?
The norm for married women in those days was they went to live with their parents-in-law even when the husbands were elsewhere. As for the betrothed ones, they had the option of remaining with their families until after their marriage.
What do I think of them? Well, notwithstanding their feelings which were hard to fathom, I have great appreciation and admiration for them.
Of course, I wasn’t privy to everything they went through, but I gathered from various sources that most of the men did say or wrote at one time or another, variations of the heading of this story.
Having read several letters from some of them and heard mostly good news about the rest from their families and other village folks, I thought about them from time to time in my adult life.
Below are bits and pieces of the letters that I can still recall.
“Promise me you’ll wait for me … I’m saving all my love for you and I will be home soon.”
“I don’t know when I’m coming back, but I will keep myself for me and you. I’ll be back for you.”
“I don’t know what the future brings, but I want you to be with me.”
“I may not come today, but I’ll be with you again.”
“I pray for us every day, my love. Be patient. I’ll come back for you.”
Years later, as an adult, I sometimes played a game in my mind to see how much I could remember the letters that I read and wrote for the women. Not very much, I fear, but I still remember that though they had different individual characteristics, they were similar in several ways.
Above all, they were all in love — according to my mother and aunties — so they held on to what they promised and what they were promised. Most importantly, the men all promised to come back for them, remember?
Patience was also one of their virtues. They waited and looked nowhere else. They had made their choices and stuck to them no matter what.
As humans, they must have been pressured by doubts and by certain naysayers. There was no shortage of negative-minded people around, but they remained consistent with their emotions.
Being mentally and emotionally positive, they were optimistic in their outlook, confident that things would work out right in the end. Such positivity saw them through many odds and challenging moments whenever doubts crept into their minds.
Those who came to me to have their letters read often made my mother smile. She observed that they were always cheerful and bubbly, and had that extra bounce in their steps.
Stoicism was also a major character trait among them and they all seemed to have the “whatever will be, will be” mentality
. Naturally, while writing this story the lyrics of a song that I used to sing when I was a young boy came to mind.
Que sera, sera
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Qué será, será
What will be, will be
When I grew up and fell in love
I asked my sweetheart what lies ahead?
Will we have rainbows day after day?
Here’s what my sweetheart said
Qué será, será
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Qué será, será
‘I will wait for you as long as it takes. I will love you every moment across time.’ ― Lauren Kate (Born March 21, 1981), American novelist
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the New Sarawak Tribune.
