The Saint

I had lunch at a kopitiam today. It's a pretty new establishment in my area. I could never understand my fetish for anything that spells Kopitiam at the end of it (the same way I could never understand my fetish for handbags!) Anyway, I was sitting at my table and the waiter brought me my coffee and lunch. I took a sip. The moment the coffee touched my taste buds, I knew the reason why I love these places.

Kopitiams remind me of my late grandfather, or "Tok" as I used to call him. He was my maternal grandfather. He and I had a somewhat special realtionship, much to my siblings' envy. On the days he received his monthly pension, he would take my mother and I to town with him and somehow we would always end up having lunch at his favourite kopitiam in Ipoh's Old Town area. This wasn't the glossy marked-up prices Kopitiams we have now. Ours was like the ones you see in Lat's cartoons. Nobody speaks to you in English, it's either simplified Malay or Cantonese or a mixture of both.

Tok would quietly drink his coffee while reading the newspaper. (Thank goodness the modern kopitiams at least kept the green-flowered ceramic coffee cups!!) Tok's newspaper was always in English. the NST mind you, because he never liked the Malay newspapers and he felt The Star was tabloid. And he would ask me to read the newspaper with him out loud and he would correct my pronunciations. He told me that I need to be good in English so that when I grow up, I could go anywhere I wanted and talk to the 'mat sallehs". This sounded pretty cool to a five-year old whose best friend were mostly non-mat sallehs (my best friend was a Singhalese boy who thought I was cool because I could spell "submarine" and I could smack him on the head harder than he could smack me).

When I was younger, my parents wanted me to be the perfect child, always getting As and being good all the time. My parents could never tolerate a B or much less a C from me. That was pretty stressful for a child. My sister was lucky because she was number 2, so she could get away with being number 2 all her life. The only person who didn't want me to be perfect was Tok. He used to have arguments with my mother about this and his favourite line was "Your daughter is not a saint, so don't force her to be one." He loved me enough to let me be imperfect and just be me.

Being imperfect is being human, and he taught me that.