Hello lovelies,
Today I’m sharing with you my reflection on my recent visit to an elderly lady whom I call ‘Oma’, my feeling of being uprooted in this modern world, and my recent read that glued the experience together.
In the last weekend of October, I embarked on a journey to London by Caledonian sleeper train. It was my first time taking it, and the events that led up to my travel were a stark example of how God still works in history, at least my history.
I didn’t know that I still had a relative living in the UK. When I moved here to study in September 2022, my feet were set with the intention of making new friends and blossoming in new relationships because I knew I had nobody other than fellow students who journeyed for the first time together with me. I turned into a full-time extrovert like a bird out of its cage (considering my past, you’ll get my point).
But a few months ago, my aunt, who lives in Singapore, messaged me out of the blue. It was a welcomed fresh start. As I grew older, there has been this yearning in my heart to reconnect with my family members, spread across the globe if not in my country of origin. Perhaps, that’s the melancholy of being a human—what matters most is the relationship, not career, status, or money.
This aunt—my mum’s cousin—told me that her mother knew that there was someone from our extended family living in England. Through the grandaunt, I made contact with this elderly lady. It turned out that she lives in Woodstock. And after only one call with the lady, I made up my mind to spend my non-fixed bank holiday leave allowance to visit her. It was all decided on a whim because I had booked the holiday but not the destination or accommodation yet.
What started as an unassuming action of bringing Ocean Vuong’s book “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” with me on the journey to read on public transport became an enlightening experience you can read further.
Well, I couldn’t really sleep well on the sleeper train because this silly me didn’t realise there was a duvet all along, tugged far up the bed that I could just pull out. Instead, I slept crouching in the cold almost the entire trip.
Blenheim Park - Blenheim Palace, gifted by the late Queen to the Churchill family.
Anyway, the calling ‘Oma’ comes from the Dutch language, a language still practised by the elders in my origin although not in the daily conversation but only some words assimilated to the culture, such as calling the family members Opa, Oma, Oom (written as Om in Indonesian although I know well that om means on in Dutch), and Tante. That is, in this sequence: grandfather, grandmother, uncle, and aunt.
This Oma is not related to me by blood, but her late brother (RIP) was a familiar Opa figure when I was a child in my hometown. Their family has Japanese roots and the history between the two families spanned throughout generations, predating WW II.
Mori Kichigoro (in Japanese, the surname comes first), the head of their family, travelled to Indonesia in 1917. He wanted to pursue a study in painting in France, but upon hearing that there was public unrest in France, he cancelled the plan and continued his journey to Java. It was before the Japanese occupation of Indonesia.
He married a Javanese lady and they had 13 children—the youngest being this Oma, Nobuko Mori (first name - last name, westernised), whom I visited in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. Her older brothers, Opa Shoji Mori and another who was tragically killed in the war, were close friends of my maternal grandfather. Opa Shoji appeared in my childhood family photo.
The Mori family graves are in the same compound as my maternal extended family in our clan cemetery. Therefore, despite bearing no direct relationship by blood, it feels fitting to call the Mori family part of our own, too. Visiting her felt like visiting a long-lost Oma.
I learned a wealth of information about the Mori-ojiisan (Japanese: grandfather) that he was deported by the occupation and then returned to Indonesia after the war. During the turbulent times of war, our ancestors frequently moved from city to city, finding a permanent home only once the conflict had finally subsided.
But the happiness was short-lived as Mori-ojiisan passed away not long after reunited with his children.
I remember leaving some bouquets and flower petals in their family graves during my holiday this spring. I couldn’t recall if I left the petals on his grave specifically, but I hope I did as it was their resting place there.
Oma Nobuko told her story that led her to settle down in England. Although she hadn’t come back to visit her relatives anymore as her all older siblings had passed away, she still kept in touch with the grandaunt at the beginning of this story, who later shared Oma Nobuko’s contact with me.
Summarised, it took an aunt to contact me — and then I messaged my grand-aunt — had a call with Oma Nobuko to arrange my travel plan — and we reunited.
In Burford.
Now, I haven’t possessed the language skill to make a piece evocative yet, and somewhat it frustrates me as my writing reads flat on screen.
But I’ll shamelessly leverage the help of this book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, to illustrate the feeling of being uprooted and repotted in different soil.
People move out of their homes for various reasons, such as in my family and a lot of people urbanising from the villages, it’s for a better economy. Some of us take this mission even further by going global. Case in point: my aunt in Singapore, another aunt in the US, me in Scotland, and some other distant relatives I could only hear the stories from my parents.
We blend with the locals and eventually create another culture of our own, the original suffused with the new, the new imbued with the original.
Ocean Vuong’s prose in the book—his sentences are profoundly poetic and evocative, it’s a shame really that we have the same 26 letters in the alphabet but he could pen down his experience as beautifully as in his poetry but mine is so blah—captures the thoughts, feelings, joys, and struggles of a Vietnamese immigrant son in the US.
From facing outright racism to attempting to assimilate, from the taste of American milk to the memory of his grandmother, the readers are drawn to the nuance of the upbringing and Americanisation embodied in the main character, “Little Dog”. With the Vietnam War and American history peppered throughout the background, it gives a clear angle of how Little Dog views and experiences his new world consequently in ways distinct from those who were born and raised in the US.
I’m Feeling Unmoored
Despite being born and raised in a homogenous culture of my birthplace, I couldn’t shake off the confusion I have around my ethnicity.
Unlike Oma Nobuko’s employer who wrote down his family history starting from his great-grandmother (or so, I may be mistaken) as a means for future generations to explore their ancestry, writing is not my family’s strong suit. It was due to the war and partly the low literacy back in the day.
I don’t know the story of my great-grandfather nor am I certain about his ethnic background. All I know about him from the stories passed down by Mum is that he got Chinese and Dutch heritage. Typically, the Chinese keep their surname even after they changed into Christian names, but I suspect that the heritage was from his mother’s side so the family name was not passed down. The Dutch part is also uncertain because we don’t know the surname, either.
Learning from Mori-ojiisan’s experience, he adopted an Indonesian (Javanese) name as well. So did his children, as I remember Opa Shoji’s tombstone featured a Javanese name.
After the visit, I still had no information on my ancestry yet. Well, I took a 23andme test last year for health reasons, but it didn’t mean much in the ancestry report section because it only says East Asian descent, with Indonesia-Thai-Myanmar 99% and Vietnam 1%.
But I guess, I can celebrate different festivals from different cultures.
When I was younger, I struggled with my identity as well because the Javanese with darker skin tones teasingly called me Chinese while the Chinese said I wasn’t fully one of them, either.
Growing up in Western education and international companies since my Den Haag uni experience, my identity faced an even greater challenge. Indonesia as a country is already heterogenous by ethnicities, but in the Western world, the distinction is drawn less by ethnicity and more by race. When asked, I say I’m an Indonesian, because that’s what my passport says.
However, I noticed that people in the West are also diverse. Those Americans with European ancestry due to the war or even the British one from the old time wars, they may also only know their ancestral story from the oral history.
And perhaps, when one has spent long enough in a certain culture, it no longer matters. My skin and my ancestral might contrast with the local culture, and yet I’m here, deeply connected with my local friends and family members throughout the world. That’s what truly counts.
My mum looks more Chinese than me, and in the Chinatown market we went to in my hometown, nobody batted an eye about her ethnicity. Not because of her look, but because the history of East Asians in South East Asian countries dates back hundreds of years—we’ve been living together and intercultural marriage has always been common.
Feeling unmoored here doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s due to not knowing my exact ancestry. It’s not finding the right word to describe that I’m a tapestry waved by threads of different colours and materials.
By recognising the perspective on being ‘uprooted’ comes from the lack of knowledge, I can mould a new perspective that I can leverage my identity fluidity to understand others better and hold space for those marginalised without affiliations by society.
(Credit to Jenna Park for her article where I followed the link about story and narrative that holds us back)
Closing: A Pebble in the Pond
More than a century has passed since Mori-ojiisan first set foot in Central Java to begin a new life. Over time, his journey became a part of my ancestors’ story, weaving itself into the intricate tapestry of my family. The world around us has transformed profoundly since then. The war that shaped his life eventually faded, only to give way to new conflicts. For as long as humanity endures, it seems we are forever living amidst one kind of war or another.
He could never have imagined his paintings now scattered across the globe, leaving fragments of his soul in the homes of unknown collectors, leaving only a few returned to his descendants. Through his legacy, I have encountered countless gentle, loving souls—proof of how a single pebble, dropped in a pond, sends ripples to the farthest shores.
Our human sight is limited, but God’s hand, ever weaving through history, leaves a mark across centuries with remarkable precision. It makes me wonder: after I am gone, how long will my impact linger in the lives of others? Some will inherit my clothes, some living in the flat I now live in; others who read my thoughts may relate to and form new thoughts—like how I derive my thoughts of other writers’ legacy, living or dead. We are each a collage of countless lives intertwined, our actions leaving traces. No matter how small, that outward ripple traverses beyond what we could ever foresee.
Read my prose about the identity as well, here
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The Gentle Roadmap is a publication centred on my reflection on a holistic healing journey. As a practising Catholic, the articles sometimes portray my layperson experience with the faith. If you like my writing and want to be notified of new posts, please subscribe (it’s always free). You’re always welcome here regardless.
Until next time,
