Priscilla helped me twist it onto my wrist. “Ma had this, but I knew it wasn’t hers. It originally belonged to our po po, but I believe Po Po gave it to Auntie Swee Hua. Ma told me it didn’t really belong to her because she wasn’t her true daughter. I remember Auntie Swee Hua frantically searching for it when I was visiting. I even helped her look for it. When Ma died, I found it among her things. I thought maybe one day Auntie Swee Hua would return, and I could give it back. Instead, you’re here. Giving it to you is the next best thing.”

I hugged my cousin, touched by this gift. As I was embracing Pricilla, the giant rides around us clanged into motion, spinning, whirring, and squeaking. The sight of the Ferris wheel rotating reminded me of the windmills standing tall above the undulating grasslands near Pincher Creek.

Pricilla gently pulled away. “I know you must miss her. I miss Ma, too.” It was both awful and comforting that Priscilla understood the void our mothers had left.

With Winston and John, we took turns going on the rides and watching a napping Leo. Throughout, my cousins happily told John and me tales of their childhood in Brunei. I envied the large family gatherings with buffets of food and the stories that the uncles, after a few drinks, would laugh over. A favourite story included a dramatic re-enactment of how they avoided working for my stern grandfather by hiding in the water under the docks in the Brunei River. I glimpsed another life I could have had. Father had kept too much from me.

However, I felt a shared experience in how we interacted with our elders. We laughed over our slapstick attempts to solve their internet and tech problems imitating their inherited gestures and mannerisms. It was the first time I had genuinely laughed out loud during this trip, and the first time I felt like I didn’t need to explain or hide anything about my family. I soaked up our merriment and savoured my cousins’ familiar lilting accents. They were absent from my past, yet now I felt like I was granted membership into a club I hadn’t known existed.

My mother’s bracelet looked familiar around my adult wrist, and I twisted around like she used to. I wasn’t accustomed to the weight it brought to my arm, and the clanging sound it made against the bar strapped across my lap on the Ferris wheel delighted me. A second chance was being granted to me.

至Arrive

NESTLED BETWEEN THE LIMESTONE MOUNTAINS was the town of Ipoh. Although its glory days of the boom from the tin mines were behind it, the city was still charming. Settled in the urban valley were low buildings with a colonial touch, their age betraying them. The windows of the buildings looked bruised and battered, their wooden shutters faded and warped from the heat. I imagined a shiny and vibrant array of colours among the buildings in Ipoh’s heyday, the various gowns each building had donned now revealed through layers of paint that flecked off the edifices because of the monsoon rains, revealing old, and older, hues from a different time. Money from the tin mines, as well as members of the Hakka Miners’ Club, had long fled. I wondered if there had been another girl like me, who had looked out of the back window of a car, saying goodbye to her hometown when her father lost his job at the mine. During her childhood among the pink mountains, did she know Ipoh was in danger of becoming a ghost town?