Farewell to three friends

The last three weeks have been kind of a mixed emotional for me. No doubt I have been satisfactorily busy and my time had been well occupied with scheduled activities, but there had been unwelcomed and unexpected events as well. And what can be more unwelcomed than news of people passing away: people that I've known for quite a while, more than 40 or 50 years.

On 19 August, our very much anticipated Ban Hin Lee Bank reunion dinner was held at a major hotel in George Town. When my wife and I stepped out from the lift, we had heard loud laughter from the end of the corridor. "That must be Lean Hin," we told ourselves. His laughter was unmistakable to us, we had heard it so many times before, during our work days and even during those years when we were no longer part of the BHLBank family, it had to be him. But when we arrived at the foyer where people were mixing and registering themselves, Lean Hin was no-where to be seen. The registration list didn't even have his name; so he couldn't be present at the reunion. But how strange it was to hear a laughter so distinct that it sounded so much like him. And it wasn't me alone who thought that. My wife had felt it too.

The next day, word filtered through our grapevine that Lean Hin had passed away from a heart ailment. He had been feeling poorly and hospitalised for more than a month. However, nobody outside his immediate family circle was aware of this. We were all shocked but perhaps no-one felt more shocked that my wife and I.

We had known Lean Hin since 1983. He was a fellow Old Free, a member of The Old Frees' Association, but many years my junior. We never met in the Free School. My wife was working in the bank's Bukit Mertajam branch and Lean Hin had  joined the staff as a clerk in that year. Friendly and personable, he eventually ended his career in BHLBank as the branch manager in Kamunting. This was at the point when the bank was taken over by Southern Bank. Later, he worked at the Penang Turf Club for a number of years. He would have been 60 years old in 2023.

There was another surprise three days later. A friend told me that his uncle - his father's brother - had passed away on the 23rd morning, aged 92 years old. I had known Chong Kee Kian for a very long time. Sometime in the  late 1970s, he had dropped into Hooi Lye Association in Kimberley Street on a Sunday afternoon. He had heard about the Penang Chess Association having our chess playing sessions there and was eager to have some social games with us.

I saw him coming in and looking at many of the players but no-one paid him any attention. Myself being curious about him, I struck up a conversation and before long we were exchanging pieces on the chess board. And that was the start of a friendship that lasted decades. It turned out later that Kee Kian was also an Old Free. While playing chess was a hobby for him, his real passion was ballroom dancing When he celebrated one of his milestone anniversaries, he invited my wife and I to their anniversary dinner at a major heritage hotel and he and his wife practically spent the whole evening oozing their way around and across the floor. The perfect partner for one another, I had observed then.

After the Covid-19 pandemic set in, his health took a turn for the worse. But then, he was already almost turning 90-years -old. Warded many times in intensive care, I learnt, and each time recovering sufficiently. But he was no longer strong enough to venture out on his own. I can't quite remember the last time he went to an OFA annual dinner but we greeted one another like old friends do.

Last Tuesday, I received a message from Chee Wooi to tell me that his father had passed away that morning. This one too, I also couldn't believe the information. Saw Boo Pheng dead at 71? I never knew he was sick, let alone dying! I took me some time to fathom it but it had to be true as the information had come from his son. But what had happened? Sick for some time, relapse of an old illness after a seven-year reprieve. Darn it!

The last time I had been in touch with Boo Pheng was in 2020. We had been messaging one another and had promised to meet for a cup of coffee, which never happened because of the pandemic. We never got in touch after that but strangely enough in the last week or so, I suddenly thought about him. His name sprang to mind. I should get in touch with him, the thought in my head swirled around. How or why it did that to me is quite a mystery but it happened. Unexplainable.

Anyway, Boo Pheng and I go back a long way. We met in May or June of 1972, at Han Chiang Primary School. Playing chess. He playing for the Technical Institute team, me for the Penang Free School team. Our schools had met in one of the preliminary rounds and we were playing on the second board. Strangers to one another but by the end of the game, a friendship had been struck. 

A friendship that took us through the decades. In 1989, fate brought us together to collaborate on writing a beginner's book on chess with yet another friend. The publishers wanted a book in Bahasa Malaysia and Boo Pheng was there to help with the translation. That he was a teacher and also a chess player helped to smoothen the translation because he knew what I wanted. So my original script was in English and he duly translated it into Bahasa Malaysia. Catur, the book was called. Funnily enough, when the publishers later wanted an English Language version of the book, I could not find my original manuscript and I had to translate the contents from Bahasa Malaysia back into English.

But away from chess, he and I had one more thing in common: durian. I remember in the 1990s, he would telephone to ask me to join him on a durian hunt around the fruit stalls of Balik Pulau and Paya Terubong during the durian season. For me to travel all the way from Bukit Mertajam to meet in Paya Terubong already tells people how durian-mad both of us were. Our durian adventure lasted for only three or four years when finally, I grew tired of driving all the way out.

So there it is, three stories that I had to get off my chest. Glad to have known you guys: Lean Hin, Kee Kian and Boo Pheng. Rest in peace, forever.

#Friendship #Loss #Remembrance #EmotionalJourney #InMemoriam