LJI | Season 10 | Week 05: Fear is the Heart of Love
My parents met on a double blind date in a foreign country. Well, technically and at the time, it was only foreign to my mother.
Many people, when they hear the story, comment that it was fate that led to my parents meeting. I’ve never been one to believe in fate, though. The idea that the outcome of a person’s life is predetermined by an all-knowing, all-powerful higher being has never sat well with my inner control freak. But even when I recall the story, I cannot deny the fate-like nature of how they met.
Their story begins in July 1976. At the time, my father was a fighter pilot in the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF). During that month, he and several other pilots were tasked with delivering the RMAF’s retired CAC Sabre fighter aircrafts from the Butterworth Air Force Base to the Indonesian Government. Upon successfully doing so, he returned to Butterworth, and after a couple of days leave, was scheduled to begin flying the F5 jets, which the RMAF had only recently acquired. On the day this was to occur, however, an unfortunate and deadly accident took place on the Base’s airfield during a routine exercise, effectively shutting it down for the next 10 days.
At the same time this was happening, my mother and her friend had just arrived in Malaysia. The pair had spent the previous couple of months travelling throughout Europe and had decided to fly out of London two weeks earlier than planned. On their way back to Australia-where my mother was born and raised-they stopped over in Malaysia to visit my mother’s brother who was living in Penang with his wife and young daughter. The day they arrived, they met my uncle’s insurance agent who just so happened to also be an acquaintance of my father’s. This insurance agent asked my mother and her friend if they wanted to go out with a couple of RMAF officers (for something to do) and they were quick to agree that that would be fun.
Back on the Air Force Base, and with the airfield closed until further notice, my father found himself with an unscheduled 10 days of downtime. Now, normally, whenever he had more than a weekend scheduled off, he would return home to see his parents and four younger siblings, but for some inexplicable reason, he chose to stay in Butterworth. He told me recently that he didn’t know why he chose to stay. “I just… felt like I needed to,” he said with a casual shrug. “I really can’t explain it.”
It was on one of these days that he and a fellow officer were approached by none other than the insurance agent who told them about “a couple of Aussie girls who want to go out with some Malaysian pilots”. They said, “Sure, why not?” and the next night, they showed up on my uncle’s doorstep, dressed in their finest and ready to spend the evening with two foreign women they had never met.
For the next 10 days, my parents were inseparable, and when it came time for my mother to return home to Australia, both were utterly miserable. My mother cried the entire flight back home and my father spent the next several days feeling lost and empty. But they remained in touch. My father wrote my mother a letter and called her a couple of times during the first week they were apart. During the second week, however, my mother received a second letter in which my father asked her to marry him.
Their wedding took place in Australia on December 31st 1976, in 40°C heat. It was a small affair with only 22 guests-one of who was my father’s best man; someone he met for the first time on the day of the wedding-and the reception took place in the living room of my maternal grandmother’s house. They didn’t have a first dance and the majority of the photos that were taken were somehow ruined when the film was developed.
On January 2nd 1977, they left for Malaysia where they lived for the next 13 years before returning to Australia with four children in tow. And as of December 31st 2016, they have been married for 40 years, and in addition to their four children, they now have two children-in-law and seven grandchildren.
It was a very brave thing that my parents did in marrying each other, and not just because they hadn’t known each other for very long. For my mother, she not only married a “black man”, but she also packed up her life and left her family and friends to move to a country she wasn’t familiar with and where she couldn’t speak the language. For my father, he not only married a “white woman” (interracial marriages being a big no-no back then, particularly in Malaysia), but he also did so without even introducing her to his family beforehand (another big no-no).
What an enormous risk they both took.
I asked my mother recently if she had ever felt any trepidation leading up to and after marrying my father, but without any hesitation whatsoever, her answer was unequivocally, “No.”
“I wasn’t scared by the idea of marrying him even though I knew very little about him. I was scared by the idea of not being able to marry him and of not being able to have him in my life,” she said. “I mean, could you imagine what my life would be like now if I hadn’t married him?”
So, was it kismet, or merely a happy case of being in the right place at the right time? I don’t know.
This is what I do know. Being in my 30s now and having been single for several years, I really have no designs on getting married one day. I’m not totally adverse to the idea, but I’m not actively seeking it out and I know that I wouldn’t have a problem with being single for the rest of my life. But if I were to get married one day, it makes me glad to know that I have parents whose life and marriage is something I can look to as a positive example of a loving and wholly committed relationship.
Many people, when they hear the story, comment that it was fate that led to my parents meeting. I’ve never been one to believe in fate, though. The idea that the outcome of a person’s life is predetermined by an all-knowing, all-powerful higher being has never sat well with my inner control freak. But even when I recall the story, I cannot deny the fate-like nature of how they met.
Their story begins in July 1976. At the time, my father was a fighter pilot in the Royal Malaysian Air Force (RMAF). During that month, he and several other pilots were tasked with delivering the RMAF’s retired CAC Sabre fighter aircrafts from the Butterworth Air Force Base to the Indonesian Government. Upon successfully doing so, he returned to Butterworth, and after a couple of days leave, was scheduled to begin flying the F5 jets, which the RMAF had only recently acquired. On the day this was to occur, however, an unfortunate and deadly accident took place on the Base’s airfield during a routine exercise, effectively shutting it down for the next 10 days.
At the same time this was happening, my mother and her friend had just arrived in Malaysia. The pair had spent the previous couple of months travelling throughout Europe and had decided to fly out of London two weeks earlier than planned. On their way back to Australia-where my mother was born and raised-they stopped over in Malaysia to visit my mother’s brother who was living in Penang with his wife and young daughter. The day they arrived, they met my uncle’s insurance agent who just so happened to also be an acquaintance of my father’s. This insurance agent asked my mother and her friend if they wanted to go out with a couple of RMAF officers (for something to do) and they were quick to agree that that would be fun.
Back on the Air Force Base, and with the airfield closed until further notice, my father found himself with an unscheduled 10 days of downtime. Now, normally, whenever he had more than a weekend scheduled off, he would return home to see his parents and four younger siblings, but for some inexplicable reason, he chose to stay in Butterworth. He told me recently that he didn’t know why he chose to stay. “I just… felt like I needed to,” he said with a casual shrug. “I really can’t explain it.”
It was on one of these days that he and a fellow officer were approached by none other than the insurance agent who told them about “a couple of Aussie girls who want to go out with some Malaysian pilots”. They said, “Sure, why not?” and the next night, they showed up on my uncle’s doorstep, dressed in their finest and ready to spend the evening with two foreign women they had never met.
For the next 10 days, my parents were inseparable, and when it came time for my mother to return home to Australia, both were utterly miserable. My mother cried the entire flight back home and my father spent the next several days feeling lost and empty. But they remained in touch. My father wrote my mother a letter and called her a couple of times during the first week they were apart. During the second week, however, my mother received a second letter in which my father asked her to marry him.
Their wedding took place in Australia on December 31st 1976, in 40°C heat. It was a small affair with only 22 guests-one of who was my father’s best man; someone he met for the first time on the day of the wedding-and the reception took place in the living room of my maternal grandmother’s house. They didn’t have a first dance and the majority of the photos that were taken were somehow ruined when the film was developed.
On January 2nd 1977, they left for Malaysia where they lived for the next 13 years before returning to Australia with four children in tow. And as of December 31st 2016, they have been married for 40 years, and in addition to their four children, they now have two children-in-law and seven grandchildren.
It was a very brave thing that my parents did in marrying each other, and not just because they hadn’t known each other for very long. For my mother, she not only married a “black man”, but she also packed up her life and left her family and friends to move to a country she wasn’t familiar with and where she couldn’t speak the language. For my father, he not only married a “white woman” (interracial marriages being a big no-no back then, particularly in Malaysia), but he also did so without even introducing her to his family beforehand (another big no-no).
What an enormous risk they both took.
I asked my mother recently if she had ever felt any trepidation leading up to and after marrying my father, but without any hesitation whatsoever, her answer was unequivocally, “No.”
“I wasn’t scared by the idea of marrying him even though I knew very little about him. I was scared by the idea of not being able to marry him and of not being able to have him in my life,” she said. “I mean, could you imagine what my life would be like now if I hadn’t married him?”
So, was it kismet, or merely a happy case of being in the right place at the right time? I don’t know.
This is what I do know. Being in my 30s now and having been single for several years, I really have no designs on getting married one day. I’m not totally adverse to the idea, but I’m not actively seeking it out and I know that I wouldn’t have a problem with being single for the rest of my life. But if I were to get married one day, it makes me glad to know that I have parents whose life and marriage is something I can look to as a positive example of a loving and wholly committed relationship.