4.10.2021

 

“We all carry, inside us, people who came before us”  ( Liam Callanan) 

 

One of my children  said this to me..” mak, nobody reads blogs nowadays. It’s not the trend to read long messages. People are into short messages, lots of images , short video clips etc. 

 

Yes.. indeed I am aware of that. It’s the trend now to be seen on social apps like the ig, the tik tok, the you tube, the Fb ,  to name a few that I know of. It is the trend to share your every life, your daily routines on these platforms and have thousands, millions of followers on your account. And by the look of it, making side income from the number of likes and subscribers that one has.

 

Well... these apps were introduced to me quite late in my life. After my working days are over . Well, the early platform , the fb, I do have an account as early as 2014, if I am not mistaken. Then, it was something interesting and new  to share your storyline etc. and to see what others are doing in their life. But after a while it got kind of  ‘boring’ . Well, I still have my account but I hardly post anything nowadays. Just log in to follow certain accounts that are of interest to me. Maybe to post  the occasional comments on a friend’s  or relative’s page to wish them well and so on. 

 

My late father, after his retirement researched and published the family tree journal 

( Mengenal Asal Usul Keturunan dan Keluarga Wan Kedah) .Actually the research was done over a 30 years time frame. He finally got to sort them  after he retired from the civil service. So much information was published in that book . I got a copy as soon it was ready for circulation for all family members of the Wan family in 1991.

 

When I got the book from my late father, then I just flipped through the pages, read here and there and that was it. Of course I was intrigued by the amount of information that was shared in this book. 

 

I only actually read and showed genuine appreciation and interest after I retired in 2017. And that too only was about 2 years ago. Both my husband and I were roped in to do the family tree for his family. It started off with just building the family  tree of all the 300+  members in the Hj Taib Family using one of the apps purchased online. But one thing led to another. I got interested in finding out more about the life history of my late father mother and mother in law who migrated from the island of Jawa , Indonesia. It had been an interesting journey. Interviews with my siblings in laws, doing research online on the migration of Indonesians to Malaya in the early 1940s opened up a new perspective to me. The more I discovered , the more I wanted to write them all down and share with the rest of the family members. So we managed to print a book entitled “ Mengenal Asal Usul Keturunan Dan Keluarga Allahyarham Dimyati @ Hj Taib bin Mustafa Dan Allahyarhamah Wakirah @ Hjh Rugayah Bt Daslan.”(2019)

 

I think that  assignment was the starting point for me. To embark on  my own journey of putting everything down on ‘paper’ while I can still  have the faculty to do so. I wanted to share my life journey from as early as I could recall., my early years, my school years, my university years, my marriage, my family. 

 

My daughter thinks I should have these writings in print, bind them and distribute them to members of the family. Well , to be frank, I am not too sure whether it will be read so soon. Just as I did with my father’s book. 30 years later ! 

 

So I am keeping these writings on this blog . I will keep on writing my thoughts, anything at all. I want to leave this for my children , my grandchildren and my future generations to come, Insha Allah. 

 

I hope that one day , if any of my children or my future generations wished to know who was their mother, their Tok Wan Zek, Tok Nenek Wan Zakiah, they will be directed to this blog. 

 

This is my legacy.  

 

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here” ( Sue Monk Kidd)