Growing up with Ghosts by Bernice Chauly

by Bernice Chauly

She is Chinese, he is Punjabi. It is 1966. Loh Siew Yoke and Surinder Singh fall in love and marry but face opposition from their families. Their first child brings peace, but tragedy soon strikes.Haunted by the untimely death of her father, Malaysian writer Bernice Chauly embarks on a journey to unravel the mystery surrounding a curse that is thought to have plagued her family. She traces a hundred years of her family history to Fatshan, China and Verka, India to recount and relive her ancestors lives against the histories of India, China, Singapore and Malaya. Through prose, letters and journals in different voices, the author creates a layered portrait of how two families traversed time to collide through love and death.'Growing up with Ghosts' is a moving memoir of the author coming to terms with grief, history and bloodlines.

Genres: Nonfiction, Autobiography

Unknown Binding

First published September 15, 2011

About the author

Bernice Chauly is the author of six books of poetry and prose: Once We Were There (2017, Winner of the Penang Monthly Book Prize), Onkalo (2013, “Direct, honest and powerful” —JM Coetzee), Growing Up With Ghosts (2011, Winner of the POPULAR-The Star Readers’ Choice Award for Non-Fiction), The Book of Sins (2008), Lost in KL (2008), and going there and coming back (1997).

Born in George Town, Penang to Chinese-Punjabi teachers, she read Education, TESL and English Literature in Canada as a government scholar. For over 20 years, she has worked extensively in the creative industries as a writer, teacher, photographer, actor and filmmaker and has won multiple awards for her work and her contribution to the arts in Malaysia.

Chauly has served as Festival Director of the George Town Literary Festival since 2011, the only state-funded literary festival in Malaysia. She was also an Honorary Fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP) in 2014, and was awarded residencies at the Nederlands Letterenfonds in Amsterdam and the Sitka Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska. She is the founder and Director of the KL Writers Workshop, and currently lectures at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (UNMC). She lives in Kuala Lumpur with her two daughters.

Reviews

[Q · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book but I can't recommend it. In summary it really sounds like something I would be into: Chauly traces three generations of her Punjabi & Chinese family through narrative as well as primary and secondary source material including letters, journal entries and newspaper clippings, touching (slightly) on the political and historical context surrounding the lives of her ancestors. I love memoir, I love family sagas, I love politics, I love exploring racial identities and diaspora and transnationalism, and the context of decolonising Asia in the 20th Century is both unfamiliar and fascinating to me.

But I struggled to finish this. I often like fragmented narratives but this felt more messy and indecisive. I can understand being cautious around the ethics of representation and the issues of historiography when writing a book like this, but ultimately you just have to make the call and then follow through. Work out how much research you want to do, how you want to use it, and how much you'll make up, and make structural and stylistic decisions with those things in mind. And given that Chauly is writing for the public, after the death of both her parents and most of the other family members mentioned, I would think that the story needs to be engaging as much as it needs to be faithful.

Instead I felt that Chauly was tentative and apologetic about her choices. For example, there were some sections written in the first person as her grandparents, which were very brief, choppy and vague. They really failed to establish a vivid sense of time, place or character. It felt like she was scared to imagine anything that wasn't based on corroborated stories. If that were the case, she would have done better to stick with third person (or first person as herself) so that she could delineate her speculations from testimony, though that seems unnecessary to me. I got the impression she didn't do much research on the period in general and I think this is kind of a trend in amateur pomo memoir, actually, where people rely solely on testimony and then research around that instead of doing a lot of general research to be able to give more authentic, detailed background to the story.

I was going to say that it wasn't so much badly written as poorly constructed or awkwardly organised, but really it's all those things. One of the most egregious offences for me was the inclusion of pages of her father's letters to her mother during their courtship. As the blurb, cover image and marketing material all suggest that this "Chindian" (Chinese/Indian) marriage in 1966 is central to the story and Chauly's identity, I expected the courtship to be climactic. Instead Chauly relies on parts of her mother's journal (towards the beginning of the relationship) and later on, her father's letters. And obviously I'd love to read my own parents' journals and letters but I wouldn't expect anyone else to be interested. The father's letters in particular are awful because they cover the part of the relationship when both partners are seeking approval from their unsympathetic families for their interracial marriage, and it should be a tender and dramatic time. But his letters are really dull - essentially just lots of "please" and "love" and "darling", full of unnecessary practical detail - which is fair enough because he's not a writer and he's not writing for a public audience. Having his letters without her responses also makes the narrative lop-sided. I found it a mind-boggling choice. Some brief excerpts would have worked much better.

Anyway, there were a few bits in this book that I did enjoy - for example, Chauly's mother's time in Australia, her father's time in Europe and her own experiences in Canada were all interesting in their own right but also good to read that coming-of-age/overseas travel narrative from a Malaysian perspective. On the other hand her "return" visit to India I found weird, uncomfortable and pointless but I always cringe at these diasporic pilgrimages to ancestral lands. Not to point the finger because I have done things along those lines and might do so again, but still. There was a lot of naivety in this memoir which wasn't to its credit.

Oh, another thing that bothered me (I promise I don't hate this book! I was just hugely disappointed by it) is that the title seems like a rip-off of Maxine Hong Kingston whose The Woman Warrior has the subtitle "memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts" and this wasn't acknowledged anywhere. I have some issues with Kingston's style of memoir too (more in China Men than The Woman Warrior) but it tops this book several times over and also gives you a sense of how this could have been written differently, and better.

[Simon Yoong · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best reads in recent years. A beautifully written story of love and loss and self discovery interwoven with an ancient family curse.

[Atiqah Ghazali · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story opened to a prologue, "I remember the day my father stopped singing." From that sentence onward, I knew this book is going to be melancholic and would make me miss my parents.

To be honest, it wasn't a breeze for me to read the first two parts of the book. Amass of different narrators, four generations of characters, nonchronological period of time, all these factors nearly made me give up. It was hard to get in depth of the story as the plots feel kind of jumpy. One moment, my heart was ready to be broken, but after 10 sentences, I was clueless, again.

Once the author shares the diary and the letters of her parents in Part III, the story or plot begins to be more consistent. Though some letters made me go "Auwww.", I knew the next part would leave me sobbing like a baby. Part IV, I couldn't imagine how gruelling hard it must be for the author and her mom. As much as I could picture the moment, it wasn't a reality for me but it was for them.

Part V, the author divides it to two era, 80s and 90s. I was able to follow through with the story as my grandmothers somehow sounded very much like the author's and when she was in search of her family's lineage. The last part, Part VI was quite eerie for me especially on the curses and snakes.

This book has it all - sadness, death, romance, love, drama, family, mystery, religion and racial issues. May we live our lives as what the author's father whispered to her, "Kessi ta derri na, sheer vengu rei."

[Dalal · Rating 1 out of 5]

ماحبيته واحسن شي بالكتاب اسمه صراحه :)

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unusual narrative style. This is one of those books that takes you on a journey through history from a personal lens. I greatly enjoyed this book.

[tasha_reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

'She is Chinese, she is Punjabi and the peace maker of two families'
•
I just finished reading this book last week and it was a great effort of the author collecting her ancestors' materials such as scrapbook, pictures, letters and interviews the family members to make this book. It mixed up all the good, grief, happy, sad, tragic memories of her family ever since then. I was touched on how her parents fight for their unblessed love at first untill they have the families' favor. I felt the sullen when the author's mother is dying and being surrounded by her children and beloved people at her last moment. Its just I was a bit feeling 'away' of the Letters her father gave to her mother (but it was acceptable considering the era), but that's it.

Addition: Malaysia is well-known for its multiracial, multicultural, multilingual & multiple of multi-something country. We were born to have colorful characters. ☺️

[Rozaini Haji · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story revolved around
4 generations,
3 countries,
and
2 races.

It was interesting reading things which is quite similar with your life. Author is senior to me probably by two or three years. We were brought up in the same town. Both my parents were teachers like hers, both met at the Teacher's College and both ended up marrying each other after college.

All my life I had grown up listening to the tales repeated by my mum and her friends on the exciting life they had at the teacher's college and reading this book was like having a peek at my mother's life during her younger days.

However, the resemblance of the author to my life stopped there. She loss her dad at a very young age and she was brought up both in Chinese and Sikh household, which is quite fascinating to read too.

Nowadays I am quite drawn to stories in the pre-indepence period. Not quite sure why but the hardship they had to go through making me ponder over the comforts living in the present time.
Alhamdulillah.

[Lyla Ibrahim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think it was amazing. Bernice Chauly told the story of her parents from their own words, and little of hers. Much of the originality of the story is kept this way. I liked reading all the letters and journal entries transcribed in the book. Some of them have lengthy description that I don't really like but nevertheless, this is a great memoir. Read this!!!

[Farah Adil · Rating 1 out of 5]

لم استطيع انهاء الكتاب شعرت ان الكتاب يحتوي على الكثير من الاسماء والاحداث التي لا فائدة منها حاولت بكل جهدي ان انهيه وان اعجب به لكن الكتاب مثقل بل اسماء والشخصيات والرسائل التي لم استطيع ان اجاري ربطها
ومن رأي الكتب التي تُكتب بطريقة تتابع الاجيال تكون خالية من الحبكة او الابداع لانها تستوحى من احداث حقيقية ووقائع مسجلة .

[Justine · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not what I was expecting, hence was disappointed.

[Fadillah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am Punjabi, a sardarni of the Khalsa. Of the pure, from the tenets sprung from the loins of Guru Nanak. From the plains of the Punjab, and the wheat fields of Amritsar. I am Chinese, from the port city of Canton, from Fatshan, from Lam Soy Chea, from the village of fishermen and of joss stick makers. I had two childhoods. A childhood with my father and a childhood with my mother. This is a love story, of how my parents found each other. This is a life story, of how I found them and how I found myself. I grew up with ghosts. I grew up with the dead, and the voices that resonate. I grew up with myth. I grew up with grief, and its untold stories. In Ipoh, in the heart of the Kinta Valley, in the light of pre-war shophouses, cloth merchants and food. Of pigs, of slaughter, of tears. I grew up in Penang, in my grandfather Bapuji's house. Of snakes, and the Granth Sahib. Of my grandfather's typewriter and his white turban. I speak from five voices and I speak from my own. These are our stories.
- Growing up with Ghosts by Bernice Chauly
.
The book is split into six parts: The first part talks about the author's grandfather's and grandmother's backgrounds and where they came from. The second and third parts tell the story of the author's parents – their childhoods, how they met, and fell in love. Even though both families were against their relationship and the author’s mother was hesitant at first, they got married. They settled in Kelantan, where the author and her siblings were born. In the fourth part, the author shares how her father’s death changed her sense of identity. She felt disconnected from her Indian heritage and was raised to identify only as Chinese. In the fifth part, the author decides to learn more about her roots, especially her father's family. She collects everything she can find, like letters, conversations with relatives, and recipes from her grandparents. The final part describes the author's trip back to Punjab, India, where she seeks to lift a curse affecting her father's family. She visits relatives and tries to understand her grandfather’s land and her identity. I think I summarized the book well but noticed some issues. While I appreciate the letters and journals included, I believe they would work better as an appendix rather than being part of the main content. Reading from the author's point of view could have provided deeper insights. However, the book still succeeds because it includes bits of history, genealogy research, and old photos that add authenticity. Although the book might seem long to some, it covers four generations, three countries, and two races, so the length makes sense. Overall, it’s a great memoir, with just a few minor issues I mentioned earlier. I definitely recommend it!

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in a patchwork style, piecing together a scrapbook of memory, journal entries, letters, snippets of national history, geneology research, old pictures, interviews with extended family members interwoven with parts of her own life story, Chauly brings us along her lifelong journey of searching and healing from a lingering and still raw grief of the tragic loss of her father at a tender age of seven.

I appreciated the unique eclectic style she has used to bring us along her journey.

I wished for a deeper emotional analysis and linkage of how her past has shaped her as a person. There are glimpses of relationships and life events that are mentioned in passing which I think would have added greater insight and depth if explored. Namely, the glossing over of racism and complexity of race relations between her Chinese and Punjabi/Indian side, what it meant to grow up among her Chinese relations as a biracial child, (unless she completely passed); some tensions that seem to be aluded to with mom later in the book.

The sections of letters from her father to her mom when they were courting, could have been trimmed and were a bit laborious to get through. The pace moved along, though, about halfway through the book. So stick through it and the pace picks up.

[Ilya Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is actually my first memoir and I was not expecting to enjoy reading it, but the writing style absolutely captivates me. I love how it’s written like a fictional work so it was very easy to immerse myself in the writing. Since it is about the author’s ancestral history and personal memory, I find myself constantly consumed with strong emotions in certain parts. The early parts of the book in which she includes a first-person narrative of her great-grandparents experiences were hard to navigate as I was constantly confused as to whose perspective is whose but I eventually got the hang of it.

Tldr; my first memoir and I love it because of the emotions it evoked in me.

[Nassim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It tells a lot about Malaya, the origins of the people their struggles, hope and happiness. It also reminds me of the Singapore TV series Growing Up. This book also gives self reflection to those who can relate to the story. I recommend this book.

[Mardheanna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tried my hardest to read through those love letters (barf), maybe I just need to be in the right mood. Though this book had its moments~

[Amiza · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's a pretty great read about self discovery and connecting to one's root.

(had to read this for the sake of an assignment but it was such a nice read)

[Mohammed Al-Bahrani · Rating 1 out of 5]

الكتاب مليئ بالأسماء و الأماكن و اعتقدت من العنوان وفكرة الرواية انها ستكون رواية ممتعة ولكنها خيبت ظني وحتى لم استطع اكمال القراءة

[Esraa · Rating 1 out of 5]

الكتاب في تفاصيل مالها داعي و اسماء كثير مالها داعي مستحيل شخص يقدر يكمله قصة الروايه و المترجم كويسين بس الكاتبه فشلت في مهمتها

[Azura Mustafa · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took Bernice Chauly 23 years to finish her 'Growing Up With Ghosts'. Such a wonderful biography, credit to her, I enjoyed every single page of the book

[Eleena Bakrie]

very mystical and enlightening in several ways. went through the book really quickly because i was excited about the culture laid thick within the writing really. happy i read it.

[Aiman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sebuah buku yang barangkali adalah jawapan kepada pesoalan kenapa masyarakat Malaysia boleh tinggal dalam kepelbagaian kaum.