My year of living dangerously

ALL of us have lived through at least one life-changing year during our lifetime when life, as we had known it up till then, was turned around, up in turmoil or we had faced an upheaval from which we had either ended with a positive and happy resolution, or which had a negative impact on us for the rest of our lives.

Mine was in 1973.

The prelude, or if you prefer the preamble and introduction chapter, to that eventful year had started in 1970, when in March I had joined the Borneo Company Limited, a British-owned international conglomerate at the age of 20 in Kuching, and was posted to the Guinness department with Alan Cheng Kuo Chiu as my boss.

By the end of that year, I was transferred to our Sibu branch also within the same department where I worked till early 1973.

Sibu was an amazing experience for a young bachelor for whom it was a first time away from home and living on his own within the private quarters of other expatriates from England and Australia.

There, I had established life-long friendships with many, including Shookry Gani who was my nearest neighbour. We had frequently travelled together visiting the outskirts, outstation and upriver and downriver markets where he had peddled his cigarettes and me, my Guinness and Gold Harp.

I was transferred back on promotion back to Kuching in February 1973, and around March, my ‘year of living dangerously’ started to unfold with its unexpected tapestry of unforeseen and untold wonders, and opened up a personal journey of adventure and surprises that continue to this day – 50 years on.

My new department back in Kuching this time was in Tobacco. In those days, we were the market leader selling brands like Benson & Hedges, Lucky Strike, 555 State Express and Player’s Gold Leaf. We were No 1 by far, with 75 per cent share in the market.

I was a non-smoker, but for the duration of my time there, I picked up the habit, but was able to throw away my last cigarette the day I was transferred out – I have not touched one ever since.

I had a great team of sales staff and administrative support, among them were brothers Denis and Daniel Then.

Interesting aside now: at my farewell party in Sibu, my boss’ wife Mrs Yong Crane had cheekily whispered in my ear when I was back in Kuching to ‘go check out the Then’s sister’ whom she had heard was a ‘beauty, and very eligible’!

Obviously she had seen me dating a few Sibu lassies by then.

During those days, we would pay market visits to all the outlets no matter how big or small, which stock and sell our cigarettes throughout the First and Second divisions.

One night in March, I had returned with my sales rep Daniel and our coastal market sub-distributor Jamaloi in his ‘tuk-tuk’ diesel wooden motor vessel from the fishing villages all along the coast from Kuching to Simanggang.

Neither of us had taken a proper bath in three days, and we were smelling of diesel fuel, sweat and fish. Daniel had telephoned his sister Doreen to pick us up at the Blacksmith Road jetty where we had landed. Today, the Riverine Sapphire apartments rise above where the jetty had once stood.

On that dark and moonless night, she had stepped out from her Fiat 124 in a flowing purple floral long-gown, like something out of a Disney movie, and of course, thunder and lightning struck – for me! She just shyly shook my proffered hand when introduced and drove me back home.

It took me all of a few days to find an opportunity to pay Daniel a visit to his home right after that. They were staying at Deshon Road and I was just a mile or so away near the Sarawak Club.

The next few days, I was like a busy bee trying to find out anything and everything about that ‘vision in purple’. Happily, I was able to glean that she was single and without a boyfriend (BIG sigh of relief!) but there were many suitors who had tried to date and were trying and that she worked at the state Education Department.

In those days, the office was sited within the Square Pavilion, now the Textile Museum opposite the Grand Post Office, and that her parents and brothers were extremely strict with her (challenge alert ahead!).

Opportunity arose when I had to drive brother Daniel home one day after work (his car was in the workshop) and she was sitting on their porch outside, so I took the chance to get down and a drink was offered, and a conversation was sparked.

It took many more ‘casual and opportunistic’ visits and one fine day, I built up enough courage to ask her out on a date to watch the movies – of her choice.

She (and I’m sure her brothers/sisters-in-laws made her do it) picked a morning show of Elvis in ‘Jailhouse Rock’ at a matinee on a Sunday at the Odeon Cinema, and tagging along were her brother, his wife and three daughters age ranging from four to 10.

Five months plus of regular nightly visits and trips to food vendors, hawker stalls as well as to posher places like the Aurora and Le ‘Coq Dor (on top of the Electra House), and also at the Sarawak Club, were date nights.

By July, on her 21st birthday, we had also gone on overnight picnics (always with family members chaperoning) to my father’s Semariang fish-research farm where there were several  bungalows and to Matang, Bau and the usual limited picnic dating spots of the 1970s.

Six months later, around the end of September, I proposed to my future wife. A month later, I was informed of my transfer to our Miri branch by January 1974, and I had to be physically there two months’ earlier for handing-over duties.

In those days, it was unthinkable for couples to stay together under the same roof without a proper betrothal and the entire rigmarole of getting engaged, married and going on honeymoon, etc.

So we set a date for our engagement, which was in October and our official wedding date on Dec 11, 1973. The honeymoon proper would have to wait as I could not apply for leave while on an official transfer assignment period.

On looking back at my ‘personal year of living dangerously’, words and phrases like ‘a whirlwind romance’, ‘swept her off her feet’, ‘love at first sight’ and many others spring to mind – clichéd though as they may sound, they are mostly true.

But so too are these other side of the mirror of ‘a long-suffering relationship of ups and downs’, ‘never go to bed angry with each other’ and ‘opposites attract, but familiarity breeds contempt’.

On Monday, this Dec 11, my wife and I celebrate our 50 years together – happily and mostly content, ofttimes at odds, but more or less in acceptance of each other’s shortcomings and strengths and always determined to make it work.

The Good Lord has blessed and strengthened us through the years and I would like to share this favourite quote of mine (by Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke) with you as I conclude: “It is a question in marriage, to my feeling, not of creating a quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow.

“A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development.

“But, once the realisation is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

“Therefore this too must be the standard for rejection or choice: whether one is willing to stand guard over the solitude of a person and whether one is inclined to set this same person at the gate of one’s own solitude, of which he learns only through that which steps, festively clothed, out of the great darkness.”

Praise be to God! Amen.