Straight from the heart
What is your favourite month of the year? For me, it is March because it is my birthday month. But don’t ask me how old I am.
I have read somewhere that it is rude to ask a woman her age. Also, in English, there is a distinction between “woman” and “lady” and if you ask a woman her age, you are implying that she is not a lady!
According to one Western columnist, if a woman tells you to never ask a lady her age after you have asked her, she means that it is time for you to mind your own business. She’s telling you that you are not treating her as a lady and hence you should apologise immediately.
Suffice, my friends, to know that I will be one year older and one year wiser this month. Anyway, if you are good in mathematics, after all the subtractions and additions, at the end of my column, you can more or less guess how old I am.
March is also the birthday month for many members of my family including my son, one of my nephews and his twin baby sons.
When I was growing up, there were no birthday cakes for me on my birthdays. I come from a traditional conservative family and on each of my birthdays I would get a red hard-boiled egg and a steaming hot bowl of long-life noodles.
Cakes, especially fancy birthday cakes, were considered Western luxuries. Anyway, decades ago, few bakeries offered birthday cakes that could be decorated as the customers wished.
Now, younger members of my families celebrate their birthdays, especially those of their children in style! A few years ago, my nephew threw a big birthday party for his twin sons at a grand seafood restaurant.
That day, he and his kind wife also bought two separate birthday cakes ̶ one for him and one for me. Their twins share my birth date, March 27, while my nephew’s birthday falls on March 26.
When they happened to be in town, another nephew and his family sometimes took me out for dinner on my birthday. We ate someplace which served good Western food. The venue did not matter to me. It was the thought that counted.
Both nephews grew up in my house. They came to my residence as young primary school boys and left as young men to start their own families. As their aunt, I am glad they remember my birthday after all these years.
My son was born on March 17 and no matter how busy I was, I made it a point to serve him red hard-boiled eggs, a must according to our Chinese tradition, and bought him a simple birthday cake. Sometimes, I just ordered KFC meals for him and others in my house.
In return, he and his girlfriend, who later became his wife, made it a point to bring me out for a treat on my birthday. Cakes were a must on the menu.
In recent years, a trend has been growing towards smaller birthday cakes. You can order a slice of special delicious cake and stick a candle on it. That, I think, makes a small but lovely birthday cake. You just light the candle and make a wish.
Small birthday cakes are good because they can be finished within a short period of time. There is no need to store them in the fridge for days or even weeks!
I am sentimental in March because celebrating the birthdays of my son, my nephews and grand-nephews remind me of how fast time flies. It seems like we welcomed them into the world only yesterday. And now my son is 32 and newly married, one of my nephews is 41 and the father of four while another, 39, is the father of five. That makes me a grand-aunty many times over!
March is my favourite month of the year because I moved out from Sibu to Kuching in March many decades ago. Looking back, I realised I should have been more adventurous and should have looked for greener pastures overseas.
Many of my classmates at St Elizabeth’s Convent School, Sibu went overseas to find jobs and eventually settled down there. My friends and I are thinking of visiting one of them in Australia later this year.
I also joined the old Sarawak Tribune in Kuching as a reporter cum photographer in March decades ago. That marked the start of my long and almost life-long career in journalism.
There have been ups and downs in my career as a journalist. Through the decades, I have served in various capacities in a few newspapers including as staff correspondent in the Brunei-based Borneo Bulletin when it was a weekly, Deputy Editor in the People’s Mirror, Feature Writer and Outlook Editor in the Sarawak Tribune as well as Associate Editor in the Eastern Times.
I have few regrets. Thanks to my job, I have been to many parts of Sarawak and many countries in the world.
When I was at St Elizabeth’s Convent School I never thought of being a journalist. Once, in Upper Six at St Thomas’ School, Kuching, I asked a teacher whether it was good to be a journalist. I think that particular teacher was not trained to be a good counsellor.
His abrupt reply was, “If you want to be a journalist, you can quit school now and be one.”
I stopped considering journalism as a possible career after that.
Looking back at my life, I do agree with Forrest Gump’s quote in the movie “Forrest Gump” that “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get”.
Gump also said that life is a mystery. Tomorrow is a new day and no one knows exactly what will happen next.
Now that I am a journalist; I think about the discouraging teacher from time to time. Yes, I still remember that incident, but I bear no grudge against him. Life is too precious for that, especially as right now is the month of March.
