“I know Ah Loy thinks he’s at home. He is comfortable disappearing, being the dutiful servant. But I don’t want that. I don’t want to forget my home. And not just for a Canadian passport.”

“Swee Hua, I’m so surprised to hear you talk like this. I thought that seeing what I went through would make you realize what a complicated endeavour that would be.”

“You’re living like a cockroach here, Wei. Come back with me. Reclaim your dignity. We’re not welcome here, and I refuse to die here.”

“But what about your family?” Alfred asked.

“Ah Loy betrayed me. I can’t look at him. I can’t live with him anymore.” Mother told Alfred about how she missed the opportunity to say goodbye to her mother before she died.

“What about your daughters?” Alfred inquired.

“They’re doing well. Despite Ah Loy’s faults, he is a good father. I can’t be a good mother unless I am at home with myself. I hope to come back for them one day,” she said.

As Alfred reported my mother’s intentions, I had no words. I was fighting really hard to stop the tears welling up in my eyes. After a few moments, they just came down and I used the pub napkins to wipe the wetness from my face.

Alfred said that he learned from Cathy that Mother had indeed left Canada after obtaining a permanent resident card for Brunei. After a few months, he received a letter from Mother. It included a picture of her wearing an apron and standing outside a kopitiam. Her hair was blowing sideways, and he could see large rain clouds in the background hovering over the bamboo awning of the open-air coffee shop. Mother wrote that she had found a job with her aunt who owned the kopitiam that sold the area’s famous chicken rice. She expressed regret that Alfred had not come with her but said that she finally felt at home.

Why didn’t she write to us? I imagined what it would have been like to receive a postcard from my Mother in Brunei. How might my life have changed had I only known where she was and what she was doing? Would I have been less sad, less insecure, less dramatic in my youth?

Alfred wrote back expressing warm regards and well wishes for her new life. A few months later, he received another letter. Mother wrote that she had gotten into an argument with her aunt at the kopitiam. After the falling out, she went to her older sister, Ah Lian, in Brunei and asked for a job. Ah Lian’s husband owned a mechanic’s shop and hired her as an office manager. For a time, she was content, but Ah Lian’s husband started making advances towards her.

“Your mother wrote me that her sister called her names and said ugly things to her. She taunted her by saying she was an unwanted, illegitimate child. That your mother was not really her sister.”