Something Old, Nothing New.

It is smooth and shiny and has figures clinging onto the surface: a dragon, two goats cavorting under a banana tree, a rooster as big as the banana tree. Around the knob at the centre of the  chipped lid runs a beautiful circular pattern. It’s a small green jar and is the oldest thing I remember from my childhood. My mother used it to store salt.

My mother's ginger jar

 It must be about 600 years old.

The jar had belonged to my maternal grandfather and it survived all the transfers and house-moving my parents had to face during Papa's mata-mata days. (My parents had lived in Kota Belud, Sandakan, Labuan, Jesselton, kepayan, Tuaran, Menggatal and Penampang.) Somehow it wasn't in the fire that had turned our entire house into ashes. Now it stays with me, the collector of odd family objects and chronicler of the family ‘history’.  

Beautiful pattern on the lid

I’m keeping it simply because it had belonged to my grandfather and maybe to his father before him. We don’t know how he came to own this ginger jar which had travelled, from a pottery in China, across the South China Sea to Borneo. 

(Read more about Chinese green glazed porcelain dragon ginger jar here.)

I don’t know about you, but I like to keep old objects such as this jar because they remind me of people who have gone before me; people who have lived, loved, died but we, their descendants, frequently know nothing about them. Often we don’t even know their names because the Dusuns used to regard saying the names of one’s elders disrespectful.

Old things—whether or not they have any monetary values—should be preserved. How else would we know of our past or our ancestors if we have no regard for our original language, our culture, old stuff?

The top of the bare hill, Nodo, was an old settlement. (Click to enlarge)

At the risk of being chastised, let me just say that the old settlement site (in Kampung Nodo—which I had mentioned in my book,) should be preserved for its historical value. No doubt the site is now part of somebody’s property and he can do whatever he wants with his land. No one can prevent him from cutting terraces on the slopes for the cultivation of crops. People are free to climb up the steep hill to see the place our ancestors had called home. They are free to take away shells and ancient, broken pottery as souvenirs of their visit. 

However, a hundred years from now, when our descendants want to study about their past, let's hope  they’ll discover another old site, another place, where the spirits of the long departed hover in peace and what used to be their homes lie undisturbed. 

Long Ago in Tambunan

Some of you may have wondered what school was like in the good old days when text books were a luxury and library books were non-existent. Let me tell you about what it was like in the Toboh school where I taught long, long ago.

The students were housed in two wooden buildings. The floor of each block was about two to three feet above the ground and rested on sturdy stilts. There were probably two or even three classrooms in each building—I really can’t recall. A narrow verandah ran down one side of the building and every classroom had a single door which opened into the verandah.

At home in Toboh. L to R Margaret Mary, me, Flora, Veronica, Theresa, Nora

The bigger girls wore sky-blue, cotton uniforms but the younger kids were allowed to come in their everyday dresses. They all sat at a longish desk—two to three students to a desk and a rough wooden bench. There was a small blackboard in front on which I wrote copious notes and drew pictures for the students to copy. I didn’t know any better. I wanted to pass on all the knowledge I had accumulated!

One end of the building was turned into two rooms: the principal’s office and the teachers’ room. We, teachers, squeezed ourselves into a room with just enough space for a small table, a few chairs and a bamboo book rack. During recess we had coffee and local cakes brought from the nearby shop which was run by a haji and his wife who were probably Javanese.

With two of our students, Joanna (left) Maria (smaller girl seated in front)

A thin wall separated our staffroom from the office. If Sister Ann Joachim had the time to listen, she could probably hear all our conversations.

English lessons were always started with a drill on grammar. The school had thin booklets which had been manually printed on an ancient printing machine. Each page resembled comic strips. There were pictures drawn in little boxes and below each box, a verb. Copies of this booklet were distributed at the beginning of each lesson and the girls learnt to use the correct form of each verb in sentences.

On one of our long walks. Note the huge boulders.

One day the word was ‘post’ and I had to construct sentences using the various forms of the verb ‘to post’. Somehow my mind went blank and skipped back to the time my friends and I were playing with ‘put’ way back when we were in primary Four! I remembered someone had asked “what’s the past tense of ‘put’?” and we all shouted ‘putted, putted’.  Now, seven years later, I was in front of a classroom teaching these girls the various forms of ‘to post’. And I had completely forgotten if the past tense form was ‘post’ or ‘postED’!

Unknown to me, Sr. Ann Joachim had been listening! She rushed into my classroom and said: ‘I didn’t hear you say ‘postED”!



Sr. Ann Joachim loved hiking with us.





Except for a few old maps and posters, the school possessed no teaching aids at all. There wasn’t even an old printing machine! We printed all our materials, including test papers, at St. Martin’s, where there was a hand-cranked machine. To get there we were forced to depend on the goodwill of the parish priest who drove the mission’s lone vehicle: an old and cantankerous Land Rover.

At one time we had to make the two-mile return trip on foot because our ‘driver’ was busy elsewhere.  

In those faraway days, there was no rushing for the canteen during recess because there wasn’t any in the school. The nearest shop was the haji’s and it was a five-minute walk from the school. The kids didn’t go hungry, however, because the convent cooked huge pots of dark coloured grains (wheat?) for them and recess meant queuing up for a bowl of ‘mush’.

Toboh was really remote then and the school had very little. We made do with what was available. Of course it helped that we had excellent role models. The white missionaries had been there since the 1920s. They had put up with all the inconveniences and had been quietly educating the local folks.