The awkward thing was that my in-laws were much closer to my own age than I was to my partner’s, and that was the sum cause of much unease amidst her friends and family. Yes, there were those who were totally accepting, but there were also an equal, if not greater number, who eyed our relationship with suspicion – I being the main target of such suspicion.
Questions filled the equatorial air – why would she want to partner him, is he rich and many less delicate suggestions and innuendos fluttered like dead rats on barbed wire. I was learning, through mindfulness, to lend a deaf ear, blind eye and any other such disabled organ to the subject – but it was far from easy. Occasionally the old London lad would rear his shaven head and want to take these individuals on at full tilt, but as I say – I was learning.
I think that, perhaps, it is an unwritten rule that after traversing two Malaysian states and traveling in excess of four hours, you must eat. Not just eat, but consume. Consume platefuls of Chinese fried chicken which Colonel Sanders with give his eye-teeth for, and noodles. Plates full of strange and wonderful noodles – the likes of which I have never before tasted. That midnight snack had the fortunate ability to drag my thoughts from the impending meeting with the 'in-laws', our first such since our clandestine mock wedding in Cambodia some weeks before. The meal was all consuming – I consumed it and it, seemingly, also consumed me.
We pushed off from the midnight hawker site, and headed to my wife’s family’s new home in Butterworth. Arriving post midnight had distinct advantages – everyone being tired and longing for their beds, being one. Beds, sorry did I say beds, for beds read mattresses on the floor. My father-in-law herded us all – my partner, myself and my partner’s two teenage boys, into one room awash with mattresses on the floor. I could almost hear my father-in-law’s internal dialogue – ‘You may have married my daughter, but you’re not getting up to that sort of thing under my roof. You and the children will sleep together – that will cool your ardour’. Being tired, I was ardourless anyway.
Sleeping only deferred the big meeting. That potentially fraught meeting was further delayed, the next day, by my 'mother-in-law' being asleep when we visited. 'Mother-in-law' had jogged her morning jog and was resting when we arrived, so off we toodled and had some breakfast – by then I needed the caffeine, or more likely a double whiskey but as no whiskey was to hand caffeine would have to do. Amidst yet more food – prawn mee, yew-char-kueh and a particularly good cup of ‘white’ coffee, we talked. My partner and I talked of everything except the forthcoming meeting with her parents.
Anxiety deferred is not gratification deferred, and there had to be that moment when I would come eyeball to wall, rather than eyeball to eyeball as my wife’s mother was so much shorter than I. The immediate hug by my 'mother-in-law' and the warm handshake by my 'father-in-law' had my doubts and anxieties melting away into that fine equatorial day. I honestly don’t know what I was worried about. Of course they could have been saying just about anything in Hokkien, but the vibes told me that I was home safe, accepted - provisionally at least.
