Growing Up

Note: I was motivated to write this yesteryear memory of a kampong girl growing up in a village in Johor, after reading the first 24 pages of Awang Goneng’s Growing Up in Trengganu (GUIT). With GUIT in hand, we will not only be given the opportunities to mesmerize the author’s beautifully crafted words, we will also be voluntarily traveling back to the time of the events. We will be given the rare opportunity to view diamonds showering down from the sky, we will appreciate how ice can survive in gunnies, etc. Don’t just take my words; we will all understand what I meant better after buying and reading GUIT.

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School holidays were here. And as always I would beg Mak to send me to Mbah (Javanese’s way of addressing grandparent)’s house, my maternal family home. I had at least two good reasons why I wanted to spend my school holidays at Mbah’s. Back in the 70 and 80’s, Mbah’s place was still quite far from the nearest town, making it the most ideal getaway for kids and teens to roam freely and temporarily forget about school demands, pressures, and curfews. The other reason (which was actually the ultimate ulterior motivated reason) was of course that as much as possible I wanted to avoid helping Mak doing household chores..haha! Cooking, cleaning pots & pans, washing dirty clothes, ironing, mopping floors, etc were (err… and towards certain extent still are, pity Himself!) not on top of my to-do list on weekends and holidays.

When at Mbah’s house, I just loved following her around at the spacious kampong backyard, tending her garden which was planted with tomatoes, peanuts, corns, watermelons, pumpkins, cucumber, and all sorts of green vegetables I normally buy from pasar malam, Carrefour, Giants, Tesco, etc nowadays. I would enjoy joining her and Aunt chasing after the hens, chickens and ducks we had earlier targeted to make delicious lunches and dinners. Sometimes I gave up the chase because I can never sprint as fast as the hens (I didn’t have much troubles cooping ducks because genetically they don’t have talents to be 100-meter sprinters!), so I just jogged while collecting the abandoned eggs inadvertently laid by the hens while being chased after by Mbah and Aunt.

Once Mbah and Aunt had finished plucking the vegetables and catching, slaughtering and cleaning the meats, I knew too well not to hang around the kitchen unless I didn’t mind volunteering pounding the onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, galangal, etc with the pretty huge lesung, I swear I had to strain my every muscle just to lift the batu lesung (thank God blenders are invented!).

So, while the ladies were busy in the kitchen preparing lunches, I knew who I should hang around with, Uncle! He is only a few years older than me, so we were more like brother and sister. I would nag him to bring me to the farm behind the house where Mbah planted coconuts, coffees, cocoas and pineapples. Armed with parang and matches, we would roam the plantation looking for young coconuts to drink, we sometimes can even finish 4 wholesome coconuts at one go. We always made sure we wiped our mouth clean and threw away the young coconuts’ remaining to the bushes else Aunt would be scolding us, demanding reasons why we finished them off ourselves without sharing with her. To cover our track, we made a point to bring back a few freshly plucked pineapples so Mbah and Aunt can make rojak nenas mixed with freshly plucked cucumbers and ground peanuts for deserts. On the way back from the farm behind the house, I would ask uncle to find me red biji saga which sometimes sheepishly grew around the pineapples. I would then ask Aunt to string together the saga as beads for my charm bracelet later.

If the coconuts had all turned ripe and matured which later Mbah would pluck and sold them, we would just roam around to pick up bright red-colored ripe coffee beans, which later Mbah could sell or made home-made coffee herself. But picking up ripe coffee bean from the trees was not fun, it was more like chores. So more often than not, if there were no young coconuts, uncle would bring me to the creek, which sometimes can be the land divider between kampong neighbors.

Sometimes we would bump into uncles’ kampong boy friends who would woo us to join them playing combat-combat (battlefield war zone-like). But when I was tagging along, uncle would politely reject the invitation because the game would be too taxing for girls. We would then just jump into the creek and if were lucky we could even catch a handful of udang darat type of prawns which some of them could be as huge as lobsters. Since we brought matches along with us, we would make lit up some fire to roast and then ate the lobster-taste udang darat there and then.

So by lunchtime when we headed back home carrying with us the pineapples, our stomachs were already full with young coconuts and roasted lobsters. While uncle continued the lunch marathon together with Mbah and Aunt indulging with gulai itik, fried chicken, sambal telur, masak lemak pucuk ubi, etc, I just slumped next to Mbah, dozing off slowly especially with Mbah’s gentle hand caressing my head my hair lovingly…

Those were some of my wonderful memories of my growing up days.

I wonder whether there are others who had the similar kampung girl or boy memories?