Books: “When the Future Comes too Soon” by Selina Siak Chin Yoke

The story starts with an expectant mother, searching the streets for her husband after an attack from the invading Japanese Imperial army. You think “that is love”; how otherwise would she leave her four children, then risk not only her own life but that of the unborn child’s. She finds him hiding in his office, with a bottle of whiskey. It was not love. It was loyalty. Mei Foong ensures her family’s survival with her strong sense of duty. In the novel’s afterward, Mei Foong has a new husband, new children. Her old family, like the pre-war Malaya, are changed, only to live in her memory.

Somerset Maugham wrote in his short story collection, “the imagination lingers here gratefully, for in the Federated Malay States the only past is within the memory for the most part of the fathers of living men.” Jordan Melic also alludes to this ephemeral nature of the Malayan archipelago culture, in his book, A tree to take us up to Heaven. This independence from the past is not to diminish the horrors endured while under the Japanese army by any means. I believe it to be an emphasis of the shape-shifting country. There is flexibility in its people – a determination to thrive in their own way while incorporating and modernizing, seamlessly moving forward so not to be caught unaware by a future that comes too soon.

“When there is ugliness all around, we must remind ourselves that beauty exists in this world.”

“By then I had reconciled myself to mine. I had chosen Wong Weng Yu; I was a wife and a mother. I had to live with the inescapable fact that five children needed me. It was my duty to learn to be, if not happy, then at least content.”

“’And here, I brought you a small gift.’ He held up the hardback book so that the golden peacock and the title on its cover were visible. ‘Pride and Prejudice!’”