A Tale of Two Cousins: on the role of chance and the privilege of migration

Of all the cousins I hung out with on this trip back to my father’s homeland of Borneo, BJ was by far the most affable. Timidity, according to my father, runs in the Hiew bloodline, but both BJ and I are genealogical aberrations in this regard. Before this trip, I have little recollection of our earlier relationship, but for a single task that I performed for him six years ago, while we were both living in England. While I was off attending plays and debating Marxist theory on a semester abroad in London, BJ was hiding from the immigration police in Birmingham, slaving away in torrid conditions in one of those shady Chinatown restaurants. He needed a bank account in which to deposit his savings, so he could send them back home, and I, being the one legally resident in the UK, duly set one up for him to use. Over the holiday, while reading Jared Diamond’s “Guns Germs and Steel”, I began to consider: What sort of factors led to BJ and I, born of the same grandfather, living in such perversely different situations? Why did I get the lucky end of the global opportunity fortune cookie?

BJ is a large man by any standards. Built like a Samoan rugby player, his tanned, square face carries an omnipresent grin, intimating his laid-back, gentle nature. If he were an animal, he’d be a giant teddy bear, custom-engineered for hugs. We got to know each other over games of Rummy, sitting out on the cool veranda of his stilted wooden home, hand-built by his father and uncles many years ago. We never brought up that time in England—I wasn’t even aware of his being there until my father explained the purpose of the bank account. Besides, we were both back for Chinese New Year, and the holiday climate, coupled with the area’s lethargy-inducing humidity, discouraged soul-searching, economic inequality-questioning dialogues. Instead, we kept to gentle chatter about more recent changes and munched on rose apples, casually tossing the cores over the balcony and shuffling the mahjong piece-like cards between games, our rhythms as relaxed and languid as the jungle that surrounded us.

But having finally gotten around to reading “Guns Germs and Steel”, which argues that natural environment was the chief cause of our European-centric world, I had to wonder about BJ and mine’s disparity. Related to Diamond’s belief, I think that our current social positions have much less to do with any pre-disposed differences so much as the social environment in which we were born into, selected by that most random and unfair of ball-hoppers: birth.

For one, BJ was born to my Uncle Kon Loi, the third child of sixteen. Kon Loi came into the world in 1943, while Borneo was still under Japanese occupation. My grandparents were illiterate, hard-nosed farmers, and of the many sacrifices they had to make in order to survive, Kon Loi’s education was one of them. In fact, of Kon Loi and the seven other siblings who precluded my father’s birth, all left school early. They worked in the fields, tapping rubber trees and tilling crops. Thus, Kon Loi came to be a blue-collar worker in the logging industry and cash crop farmer, and BJ was subsequently born into a family of comparatively limited resources.

On the other hand, my father Michael had the good fortune to be born in 1952, when the political context was by no means easy but relatively better. Most importantly, while his siblings were tilling the fields, he had the option of keeping his nose in textbooks, studying by kerosene lamps and occasionally—when teachers at his lackluster school failed to show up—teaching himself. I don’t doubt that my father’s natural ability had a lot to do with his success—he ended up topping the state of Sabah—but of course, who knows whether Kon Loi, if granted the opportunity, could also have done similarly? Additionally, when my father considered taking a regular-paying job as a cinema manager while waiting to hear back from foreign universities, an elder brother, Choi, urged him to pass on the immediate option and go abroad instead. This brother, whom we stayed with over Chinese New Year (his house is on the same original Hiew clan plot of land as Kon Loi and several other uncles’), later contributed significant savings to support my father’s studies in New Zealand.

My father put things simply: “Your uncle has done more for me than I can ever repay.”

The rest of the story goes smoothly. My father completed a Master’s degree in metallurgy in New Zealand, where he met my mother, and their two children were raised eventually in Australia and the United States.

Another significant advantage I had over BJ is that, being born in Australia as an ethnic Chinese, the government treated me no differently than say, a citizen of British or Italian descent. On the other hand, BJ and my other cousins, just as was the case with our parents, face significant discrimination within their homeland. Malaysia has an ethnic quota system designed ostensibly to “pull up” the ethnic majority Malays, but that in turn results in Chinese and other non-Malay citizens facing enormous competition for the comparatively scarce university slots the state allots for them. While my father’s O levels were among the highest in his state, his matriculation was far from guaranteed. Meanwhile, his Malay peers, whose results paled in comparison, breezed into college and the cushy civil service careers the government provides them.

So in addition to being born to university-educated parents who have successfully made the climb from village peasants to private schools and suburban stability, perhaps my biggest advantage compared to BJ was simply not being burdened by state-policy discrimination. Where my playing field can be considered quite fair, BJ’s has been stacked from the start by local elites, soaked in ethno-religious politics and corruption.

This combination of factors has now manifested itself in our current polarized situations—what one might describe as “inverse immigration.” While BJ was willingly having his labor rights abused in England, in order to send back remittances to his family, I was jaunting around Europe looking at cathedrals. He now works in Singapore, which is much closer (and less lucrative). I, however, unsatisfied with my white-collar job in Washington, voluntarily moved to the developing world, where my income is substantially lower than it was in the West. From a practical perspective, my move to China must strike my relatives as utterly illogical—highly wasteful even—but given that it has finally forced upon me a language in which we can converse, they appeared very supportive of my decision.

In such a way, I am making up for the non-material costs that my life in the world of abundance involved: the cultural schism, the poverty of my extended family disconnect. Growing up, I considered myself apart from my ‘bumpkin’ relatives: I was Australian, and as such noblesse oblige. It was only during college, having developed an understanding of the inter-dependent nature of our lives, that I really began to appreciate our connection. BJ and I exist within different economic spheres and cultures largely because of the random timing of our births—to different brothers, born into different times, as well as the sacrifices they made for my father. But just because our professional lives span divergent paths doesn’t mean that our emotional and social ones must too. After all, we are the Facebook generation.

When the subject of life goals has come up, for years I have grandstanded earnestly on themes of social justice and poverty eradication, on expanding devotion to the wellbeing of my tribe (and thus studying something like engineering, as my brother does, rather than politics) to that of my species and planet. But life in China has helped temper such singular idealism; I now feel a responsibility to perform both.

Coming from a migrant family like my own is not about guilt or burdensome self-accomplishment as it is about recognizing and embracing that privilege. That very uncle who funded my father’s education—and subsequently my own opportunities—has a son, Damon. My father brought him to Australia to live with my family for several years, attending the same high school as me. He is now a CPA in Brunei, and is planning to settle back in Australia. Similarly ambitious is his younger sister, Jenny, who is currently studying literature in China. She is 21, beautiful, and dazzlingly bright—the jewel of our family. Over dinner the other night, she shared with me her aspirations to be a professor and a novelist. I plan to support her in whatever ways I can from Beijing (she lives in Sichuan), and in so doing, continue this legacy of providing mutual support, as well as simply develop our own friendship.

This trip home to celebrate the New Year also involved the sensory thrills of diving off Mamutik island and climbing Mount Kinabalu. But when it comes to the true value of the holiday, my time spent together with BJ, Damon, Jenny and our other cousins revealed even deeper depths and greater heights of understanding.

Return to Malaysia

I used to loathe coming back to Malaysia. In past trips back to this house, I remember hiding upstairs with my brother, listening to my Discman, allowing it to transport me away to a world of self-tortured grungey rock songs and the familiar culture which they embodied. Together, my brother and I would lament our predicament: the odd food, the cold bucket showers, the over-attentive relatives and the heat…that relentless, humid Borneo heat. Summer trips back to our parents’ homes were to be endured, not enjoyed. We had long since shrugged off any efforts to teach us Chinese, and Malaysia’s combination of poverty and foreignness repelled us long before these same characteristics would, somewhat perversely, draw me back to it years later.

Four years ago, fresh out of college, I returned to Malaysia with a newly discovered desire to re-connect with the very roots I’d actively ignored in past trips back. I wrote posts that leapt from solemn immigrant story to ethno-political analysis to exuberant travelogue. In the mean time, I began to consciously attempt to develop friendships with my myriad cousins—on my Dad’s side alone I have 13 uncles and aunts, meaning dozens of cousins. In a certain way, it planted the seeds for my move to China: I had found my inability to communicate utterly frustrating, and had yearned to learn more about my ancestral origins.

Now, almost four years after that last trip, I am back once again and still trying to develop those family ties that never really grew in the first place. Prior to coming, I’d spoken excitedly to friends in Beijing of how nice it was going to be to actually communicate with my extended family for the first time, now that I speak Mandarin. My tutor and I coined the term “immigrant’s tragedy” to describe the irreconcilable disconnect between me and my long-deceased grandparents, with whom I never shared a single sentence, and I arrived eager to unveil my newly acquired tongue with all of my relatives, but particularly my cousin brothers and sisters.

On my father’s side, other than himself, no other siblings emigrated, and so most of my cousins all grew up together. One another’s best friends, they make for a tight knit young generation of Hiews: the boys sit around betting over late night card games and watching ESPN, the girls go shopping in town together. One lives in Brunei with his wife, a number are migrant workers in Singapore, and despite limited economic opportunities, many have stuck around Sabah. Though far from being wealthy, they are on the whole far better off than our parents, who grew up malnourished, my Dad’s older siblings sacrificing their education at a young age to help their parents to tap rubber for income.

While only a few days in, I’ve found this re-integration process harder than I’d imagined from back in my frozen Beijing home, where I’d romanticized the approaching trip as much for the emotional warmth of a Chinese New Year spent amongst family as the meteorological type promised by their equatorial location. I’d somehow neglected to consider the first problem: just because I speak Chinese does not mean I have solved our communication impasse. Naturally, when the clan gets together as they do over New Year, they speak our mother tongue, Hakka, which is much closer to Cantonese than Mandarin. While I can often guess what the topic of discussion is (Malaysian Chinese scatter their speech with seemingly random English phrases, like “open-minded” or “second hand”, words that have definite local equivalents), Hakka is different to the point where I can’t pick it up simply by listening. It’s only in one-on-one conversation that I can get them to speak Mandarin with me. And even then, of my uncles and aunts--some of whom spent little time learning it in school--they speak it with such a heavy accent that I struggle to understand them.

If I had to choose one thing I envy of my cousins, as the supposed ‘lucky one’ whose parents made it to university and the West, it would be their natural bond, the obvious close-knit camaraderie that they share together. The mischievous eight-year-old cousin brother I recall playing hand-drawn dice games with is now toughing it out in an electronics manufacturing plant in Singapore, but at least he has a number of other cousins there to support him. Tragically, my two youngest cousins—now 16 and 11—lost a father and mother respectively (from different families) while mere infants; thankfully, the extended family has helped to fill the void as well as possible.

This is what family used to be all about, ever since hunter-gatherers first got together around the fire to discuss Aunt Mildred’s divorce. It’s what the various Asians in my hometown sought to replicate through the community ‘Chung Wah’ association group dinners and events that we’d put on. It’s what expats like myself find ourselves instinctively recreating, having consciously left our previous social circles behind. Ironically, I had to first try to connect with the citizens of the P.R.C. and then various backpacking hosts across India and Iran before I decided to come back and do the same with my own blood.

And yet, after forging cross-cultural friendships with mafia bosses in Amritsar and young freedom fighters in Mashad, I have found it surprisingly difficult to break the ice with those supposedly so close to me: my own cousins. Somehow, my global citizenship can involve a loose Facebook network that spans the five continents of abstracted “one human family” goodwill yet can’t remember all the names at the “one Hiew family” New Year dinner. On one hand, it’s still a language and culture barrier issue. But it’s also in large part simply the fact that, for the last 25 years, I have been only an occasional blip upon my cousins’ otherwise closely connected lives, and all the ambitious family-embracing intent in the world can’t make up overnight for all the emotional capital that they have built up with one another over this time.

And so I start from the beginning, getting to know my cousins’ English names and learning about their careers and lives. With those living in Singapore and Chongqing, we find commonality in our perception of Mainland Chinese (in an example of diasporic snootiness, we agree that they tend to be noisier, spit a lot and have less manners). With Ken--who I taught dribble moves on the basketball court four years ago--I discuss his favorite NBA team, the Los Angeles Lakers. And with Hua, the beloved youngest cousin of the clan, I rehash our one shared trip to a crocodile farm four years ago. There’s certainly no revelatory “So that’s what your childhood was like!” discussions taking place, but gradually, I am establishing a rapport with each of them.

For some of my fellow immigrant friends in Australia and the United States, they have lost touch with their extended family back home and are not particularly concerned with reclaiming it. That’s fine. About 10 years ago, when my family stopped here en route to our new lives in America, I was still unequivocally that way as well. But, like so many of us carrying hyphenated identities, somewhere amidst America’s multicultural mash-up I acquired the compulsion to explore questions that had always felt half-answered. In Washington, when people enquired as to my accent, I’d robotically respond: “I’m from Australia, but my parents are Malaysian-Chinese.” I often wondered if I knew what that second clause truly meant. About what sort of historical and cultural depth I could fill in for myself, beyond the token exoticism that my answer might have offered to others.

Two and a half years after I set off to satiate that nagging curiosity, I’ve gleaned plenty of insight into just what those obligatory ethno-cultural identifying tags actually represent. I’ve devoted significant time to learning about my family at a broader level, through studying Mandarin and visiting my grandparents’ Chinese hometowns and reading books about Chinese emigrational history. Now I just need to spend a little time getting to know who my family is at the individual level, each with their own dreams and struggles and distinct personalities. And that, at a most fundamental level, may be the most satisfying discovery of all.