Welcome to my Blog! My aim is to please and to enchant. I plan to make some of my children’s books available to the public as well as some other writings, whenever and whatever pops into my mind.
I was born in Kuching, capital of Sarawak on the Island of Borneo, two years after WWII formally came to an end. Sarawak, once ruled by three generations of “White Rajahs”, originally belonged to Brunei, whose ruler gave it to the first Brooke out of gratitude for putting down piracy in the waters there. The third and last of the Brookes presented Sarawak to the British Crown after the War. Sarawak remained a Crown Colony until 1963 when it became a part of Malaysia.
I went to St. Teresa’s Convent School for Girls, from kindergarten till Form Five, after which I went across the road to St. Joseph’s School for Boys where, after Lower Six and Upper Six as it was then called, I sat for the Cambridge Higher School Certificate Examinations. I graduated from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, with a degree in English Literature. I have a degree in Education from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I returned to Sarawak and taught Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy and “current modern” William Golding at Marudi Secondary School on the edge of the rainforest.
My dream was to be a librarian – I would order books at the expense of the Education/Culture Ministry, read them first before conscientiously classifying them under the Dewey System, then getting others to shelve them. Or a Museum Curator. Dream on!
I currently live in Germany and make trips to Malaysia where the first thing I do is to make a round of restaurants serving local food. I am crazy about Nonya Kueh. I have no pets, only the birds that come and go in my garden – black birds, robins, thrushes, wrens and finches that sing so sweetly, and many that don’t, woodpeckers, magpies, daws and pigeons. I have also heard an owl call “to-whiih” but not the “who” that Horton heard. And I have never heard the owl call my name. ( “I Heard The Owl Call My Name” by Margaret Craven)