A Malaysian ex-student has just shared on her Facebook wall The Straits Times’s video on Robert Kuok, whose recent Robert Kuok: A Memoir has already sold out only one day after publication.
I remember Robert Kuok's mother very well — she was my (maternal) aunt's Buddhist master who lived in Johor Bahru.
She'd always bring a huge bag of oats from their flour mill in Kuala Lumpur when she came to visit us. Nobody else in the family particularly liked Western-diet ingredients like oats and milk, so I'd have all the oats to myself!
She also brought me a table lamp and a book about the tulips in Keukenhof Gardens from Holland after she went to visit her eldest son, Philip Kuok, when he was ambassador there. It was all very exotic for a teenager!
The old lady (whom we called Ah Por ["grandma"]) had :
* a maid (an unmarried woman with no relatives to whom she'd offered shelter);
* a driver called Ahmad (who'd make one trip a day to the market, and now and then to the temple the old lady had built somewhere outside Johor Bahru in the countryside, spending the rest of the time cleaning and polishing the car, a Morris Minor). The Kuok brothers bought the old lady an Audi (I think) for her birthday one year, but she went on using her Morris Minor;
* a parrot called Benjamin with a vicious beak -- he'd only allow the old lady to touch him; she'd call him Benji as she scratched his neck and he'd bend his head;
* a pair of dogs (Morning and Evening, one born in the morning and one in the evening);
and
and
* a cat called 珠小姐 zhū xiǎojiě / Miss Pearl, who lived in a bird-house contraption at the bottom of the garden, atop a pole, high above the ground, so that Miss Pearl had to walk this long, long, long wooden ramp to get to it at night.
(Johor Bahru, Malaysia, 1960s)
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