“My Mother Pattu” by Saras Manickam

My Mother Pattu, Saras Manickam (Penguin SEA, May 2023)

In the opening story of Saras Manickam’s collection, My Mother Pattu, a sixteen year-old Tamil girl named Meena is sent from her home in Penang, Malaysia to live with an aunt and uncle in Mambang, an inland town halfway to Kuala Lumpur. Her crime: writing and receiving letters from a boy at school. This story, “Number One, Mambang Lane”, sets the tone for the collection with colorful Malaysian settings and characters that exemplify Malaysia’s diverse cultures, racial issues and all.

In this first story, Meena takes in her new environment and meets her new neighbors.

 

Mambang Lane itself was a motley community of Indians, Chinese, Malays, and the odd Eurasian or two. Uncle Rama’s house was a sprawling brick with green-and-white bamboo blinds that shaded the porch in the afternoon. Lalli, the half-white, half-Indian girl, lived with her Chinese father and Indian grandmother—I know, I was confused at first too—in a wood-and-brick double-storey house a few doors down the road.

 

Meena also appears in the next story, “Witch Lady”, a creepy tale of an older woman named Millie Smith who was deserted by her sister Judith years ago. Millie tells Meena of Judith’s downfall after falling for a married British man, only to eventually find another—this time unmarried—to marry her and take her to England. But Meena learns that Millie’s story is not exactly as she tells it.

The mystery of Lalli’s heritage from the first story—a half-white, half-Indian girl with a Chinese father—is revealed in a later story from which the book gets its title. In “My Mother Pattu”, young Lalli lives with her father and grandmother while her mother visits about once a month. Her father was forced into hard labor by the Japanese military in World War II and suffered greatly. It was only by happenstance that he met Lalli’s Indian grandparents.

 

When the war was over, my Indian grandpa found him wandering the streets, a young half dead, skeletal thin Chinese man with a tortured face and grey-white hair, who refused to speak of his life before the war. Grandpa took him home and looked after him as if he were a baby. Except for a three-month strain, the men were devoted to each other until grandpa passed away eight years later.

 

This story is full of mother-daughter conflict, but is also one in which young Lalli spends her days with a group of Chinese, Muslim, and Hindu friends. This theme of friendship amongst different races and religions appears in several of the other stories in the book. “When We Were Young” centers around three childhood friends, Arun, Hsian, and Farida. The three are about to head off to university when Farida and Arun have a falling out when their acceptances are announced. Arun wants to go into engineering, but is placed in the less competitive consumer studies program because he’s Indian and the more prestigious engineering department gives preference to Malay students. When the friends were younger they thought they were immune to prejudice.

 

The three of us used to talk all the time about how adults were puffed up with their own grievances, their sense of victimhood. That was their tragedy. And we—we imitated them. That was ours. Anyway, no more already! Hsian, Arun, Farida. We were going to change the script. Out with race differentiation. In with equity, respect and acceptance. How on earth were we going to do that, we had no idea. Not yet.

 

Farida tries to cheer up Arun with a lighthearted joke, but ends up insulting him. Hsian tries to play intermediary, to no avail. Racial prejudice is the topic of another story, “When I Speak of Kuala Lumpur”, told from the point of view of an Indonesian domestic helper who is not only beaten and verbally disparaged by her employers, but also in Malaysian society as a whole.

Manickam gives voice to a wide range of characters, from children to teens to adults. They are of Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and Indonesian backgrounds and come mainly from working class backgrounds. And while most of the stories are character-driven, the vivid descriptions of small town Malaysia add to this memorable collection.


Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.