What I'm Looking Forward To Most

The morning after our arrival in Kuala Lumpur, we set out in Uncle Sam's comfortable roadster for an important overnight trip to the family's home city of Ipoh. Lucilla and Sam, the youngest members of their generation of the Ho family, have a particular purpose in mind: they want to arrange additional care for their oldest brother, Choong Pak. Choong Pak's been blind since his early fifties. Now in his eighties, he is bed-ridden and in very poor health. Choong Pak is unable to look after himself but naturally wants to remain in his own house; there he at least knows his surroundings by touch, even though he can no longer move about the house without assistance.

Choong Pak already has the most honourable sort of assistance: a daughter who's dedicated her life to looking after him. Kath's diminutive cousin Chun, sister to cousin Lin in Singapore, lives with Choong Pak, and does her best to nurse her father, attending to his daily needs. A fall several years back left Choong Pak with a broken hip, and with the fear of further injury that keeps him confined to his bed in a room in an older house in a quiet and sweltering neighbourhood of Ipoh (a city that, upon our arrival, appears to me to be badly eroded by Malaysia's oh-so-humid hard-on-the-architecture climate).

But Choong Pak has inherited the stubborn determination of his mother, and doesn't want to move to a home where he can be given care by a team of nurses. Who would want to leave their own home? … Lucilla's Mama named her four sons after parts of the Cedar tree. Choong Pak means 'leaves of Cedar' and so is the eldest (the tree's top, if you will). Choong Chee means 'Cedar branches' and so is the middle son. Choong Kan, Lucilla's other brother in Kuala Lumpur (who is away on a visit to Taiwan---we won't get to meet him on this trip) was named 'Cedar roots'. And the youngest son, Kath's affable uncle Sam, our host and dauntless mountain-road expedition driver, is Choong Lam, which means the whole Cedar bush altogether.

Our two-day trip by car to Ipoh and back is central to our visit to the South East Asian side of Kath's family; Marcus and Lucilla's primary motive in planning a just-before-Maeve travel arc out of China and up the Malay peninsula is to tackle Choong Pak's stubbornness and to help Chun help her father as his situation worsens. I am reminded of the dedication of my own aunt and uncle Dolores and Paddy, who lived with my maternal grandparents in Dublin when they grew old, and looked after them in their last years, assisted by their siblings in every way possible … The bonds of brother and sister to their parents, and to each other, is the universal that binds Malaysia's 'world away from Waterloo' recognizable in its essence.

The visit to Choong Pak's home is bittersweet and revealing. Kath and Marcus and I wait in the front room, or step out to wander the covered veranda outside the front door that serves as both carport and shaded garden for each home I can see on this blisteringly sun-beaten street. (A stroll to the end of the street quickly convinces me that I'd best stay out of the heat, under the veranda's relative cool). While Sam and Lucilla visit with Choong Pak in his bedroom, do their best to convince their oldest brother to accept the services of a maid---Chun alone cannot carry her father to the shower to wash him every day, and has to rely on friends to come each day to aid her---Kath and I peer in wonder at the intricate handicrafts crowding the shelves and cabinets of the front room, and at the welter of well-tended plants in a the dazzling outdoor garden.

Chun's life strikes me as both sad and lonely. But she has made an art of it, turning her isolation in Ipoh into a Daoist meditation in devotion: to her needlework and origami-like paper constructs, to her rich and riotous garden, a visual splendour in the shade of the carport; and ultimately to her father. As Lucilla's voice rises insistently in the back bedroom---she will brook no refusal from her Cedar's top brother---Chun shyly bestows Kath and I with gifts she has made for Maeve and for Robyn: beautiful handknitted dolls.

Finally, Lucilla's will wins out over Choong Pak's (no surprise there---I'm married to her daughter, I know how strong Fong women can be). Then Kath and I briefly meet Choong Pak, and squeeze his hand, and watch him cling in shyness to his pocket radio, the one treasure he holds to as a lifeline to the vast outer world he lost when he lost his vision.

Later that night, retreating to the Ritz Garden, the best hotel in this bedraggled overgrown cliff-enclosed valley city of Ipoh, Kath and I bow out of a dinner with one of Lucilla's childhood family friends, as we are both feeling burnt out by travel. We're in dire need of some downtime. Well, at least I am … Sleep has been very hard to come by for me since leaving Waterloo. (The night before, at our wonderful K-L family reunion dinner, young Hui asked me when we'd left home; I told him the 21st. "Oh, just six days ago?" I had to pinch myself. Surely it's been six weeks!)

Our trip to Ipoh represents the apogee of this South East Asian side-arc out of China. Tomorrow we begin the return journey, back down to Kuala Lumpur, then back down to Singapore, then back into China to meet our mystery daughter. Maeve feels all the more mysterious to me here in Ipoh because she feels farther away than she did when we were back home, preparing her bedroom, folding her clothes into her drawers and putting up her room's decorations. My head is fuzzy from a week's lack of sleep. I'm disoriented, O.D.ing on travel at this point. We've been uprooting ourselves so often that there seems nowhere to stand, get my bearings.

But here in Ipoh, as Kath slips easily into sleep, I gaze up at the ceiling, trying to relax and recapture my dad-to-be anticipation … I know what's coming, just over a week away. It's a gift just for me. A priceless witnessing that accompanies meeting our mystery-baby. I've been relishing the thought of this gift for the past few months, ever since Kath and I decided how best to handle the crucial first week with our first child. Maeve will be upset, that's a given. And we've been told it's easier for her to focus on bonding with one of us during the first few days, rather than with both of us.

So my role, at first, is one I look forward to, and feel grateful for. I'll get to take video of Maeve meeting Kath. I'll get to have the front row seat on a transformation that'll take only days, really, then continue for a lifetime. I'll get to tape a baby girl being taken up in the gentle arms of a strange woman; and I'll watch this baby assess Kathleen; and I'll witness this baby gradually decide she is secure with her. I'll get to witness, over several days, Maeve's dawning realization that she has been placed in the arms of someone who's kind, and reliable, and beautiful, and soothing, attentive to every need, quick to respond to any cry, oh-so-strong and safe.

I'll get to watch our baby Maeve begin to appreciate the amazing woman she's been handed over to, a woman I love and admire more than words can articulate. I'll get to see our baby slowly fall in love with her mother---and this witnessing, I am more and more certain, is the greatest privilege of my life. It's the gift that being fortunate enough to fall in love with Kath has bestowed on me, undeservedly.

Forget witnessing the moon landing when I was nine. Next week I get to see little Cai Ling change by degrees from an adopted mystery into our daughter.

That is what I look forward to most.

Is it any wonder I cannot sleep?