My son attends Wesleyan University, CT. 

The name is not unfamiliar to me.

When I was a girl growing up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I attended the Methodist Girls’ School, first Junior, then Senior.  Our brother school was the Methodist Boys’ School on Petaling Hill up hundreds of steps above Chinatown.  Past the school and higher up is the Wesley Methodist Church. 

It is to John Wesley that I owe it all.  That I am who I am:  a renegade Chinese-Malaysian living in Guatemala.  If not for the Methodists, I wouldn’t have learnt English, which opened the door to many new doors.  I was the heathen soul, you might say, that is the vessel for Manifest Destiny. 

How to explain the totally uncharacteristic change of mind on the part of my father, the Chinese coffee-shopkeeper? My birth certificate has three stamps in the space marked “School.”  The first stamp is that of “St. Teresa Chinese Convent,” but this has been crossed out with the endorsement of the Ministry of Education.  The last of the trilogy is the Junior Methodist Girls’ School.  Ama used to complain how she was the one to have to do it all, trudging the miles with her paper supplicating everybody for help. “Because I am uneducated, I never went to school… so now my daughter must.”  All Abah has to do is to say the word.  Thus is my schooling, spirited away from the Chinese-speaking Catholics to be given to the English-instructing Methodists.      

“MGS.”  Those are the red letters of the school monogram over our hearts, this patch of curly capitals sewn into the left-breast pocket of our white uniforms.

                “MGS.... Monkey Girls’ School,” taunt the people, on sight of our uniforms.  At the base of the monogram is a genie lamp with the slogan, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet”.   I am not sure what the words mean, but they sound quite magical.  In my mind’s eye, I see a lamp underfoot: not very much of a perch, and with a dizzying view.      

Fridays is Chapel in the Hall when the red hymnals are handed out.  Singing exalts my heart, swelling it.   Singing starts and ends the service, with a preacher in the middle.  I like to sit in the last two rows and play the monkey.      

“Our Father who Art in Heaven,..”  In his long, white robe, God strides the skies with his paintbrush.      

                “Thy Will be done…”   ‘Will be done’ is a verb, I know.  So this is a Being so potent he gets his very own possessive, Thy, which works like a noun.  “Thy will be done…” Thy is almost the same as Tai, big.   Thy is a scary one:  what kind of a father sends his son to die for the sins of countless strangers, people who aren’t part of the family?  At the same time, He is puny and pathetic.  What kind of god cannot change, with a wave of His wand, the nature of sin by wiping it away? 

To Jesus, on my knees I pray, promising to accept him as my Savior if I get an A+ for Arithmetic.  When it works, I am infinitely disappointed in this Son of a God who can’t see through my ploy.  Jesus is not Chinese; I can tell from the pictures.  How can his Father -- Son and Holy Ghost though he be, which just doesn’t add up -- be the God of my people?  

Even so, when I am alone, the only one I can turn to is Jesus.   

Abah has kicked Tai-jieh, Big Sister, out of the house because of her big belly.  In front of Abah, we are forbidden ever to say “Tai-jieh” or bring her up in any way.  Sundays, when it’s Hainanese Chicken Rice one week and Boiled Pork the next, Ama packs me a tiffin to take to Tai-jieh.  With instructions to go and come quickly, before my absence is felt.  For Sundays are insanely busy. Sunday, with its throngs of people wanting a cup of tea or coffee, or to place bets, or to reward themselves with breakfast after Mass at the nearby Church of the Holy Rosary.  Sundays are crazy with much crossover.                   

Having escaped, I linger.  Delinquency is the more delicious when expressly forbade.   The longer I stay away, the more reluctant I am to face the fire.  At long last, caught out and chased home by Tai-jieh, I sneak up the stairs only to have the bad luck to run into Abah at the very top. Whence I am dragged by the ear, squealing painfully every step of the way.  Into the kitchen with its stacks of firewood.   Enraged, Abah barely pauses as he selects a log slender enough to be used on my legs without breaking bone.   Along comes a gambler on his way to the bathroom whose open-mouthed curiosity we must endure.   Salt is rubbed on the wound minutes later when the gambler emerges from the bathroom and, finding Abah gone, subjects me to his snickers.  So why am I being beaten, what did I get caught for, could it be for gambling?       

Afterwards, squeezed into my space between the bed and the armoire, it is into my patchwork blanket that I sob, “What a Friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and grief to bear…”

Monkey King, with his full bag of magic tricks -- leaping mountains in one bound at the same time changing form -- is more playful.  But MGS is the territory of Jesus’ Father.  Drafted into P.O.L. (Pupil’s Own Language) class, I land by default in Mandarin class.  For Chinese automatically means Mandarin even though it is Cantonese, really, that is my mother tongue.  When I get a “D”, the solitary red mark in a sea of A’s and B’s, I feel both abandoned and diminished by our slant-eyed gods.  Ours are the idols.               

If Jesus isn’t Chinese, that’s good, so then he can’t judge me.  Not by Chinese standards, for sure.      

To Jesus’ cheek do I turn, after many a caning.  The Greek gods are the ones for having fun but they have ceded themselves to the Roman Empire, which has in turn converted to Christianity.  Like Paul, once Saul.  In this race of the gods, Jesus is the long-standing winner.   

“This is my Father’s world,” brag we schoolgirls, driven by the music of the spheres to tough out just exactly whose father’s world it is.  “Onward Christian soldier, marching as to War…” with its military beat is a good one to counter the stupor of a hot, humid Friday noon.  But the Top Two are “Nearer my God to Thee” and “Rock of Ages”.  Dirges, as Mrs. P.S. Wong, who plays the piano and leads the service with room for requests, never fails to remind us. 

“O, Come All Ye Faithful” “Joy to the World” “…”For unto us this day is born in the city of Bethlehem a savior, and he is Christ the Lord…”  Christmas pageant, Standard Six, is Miss Alves at rehearsal screaming at us as she pounds the planks of the platform under her piano.  By a miracle, I am the only one of the cast to be impeccable in my timing -- Albeit in a minor role:  the anonymous double of the actor playing Everychild -- thus earning the praise of Miss Alves and skipping her fire.  Eurasian Miss Alves who says her name like “Elvis.”  Throughout most of Standard One, until I saw her name in print in our school magazine, The Beacon, I thought our music teacher was Miss Elvis, the sister of the king.

“He Lives!  He Lives! 

Salvation to rejoice;

 You ask me how I know He lives

He Lives…

Within my Heart.”

 One year with Easter approaching, I pass myself off to the Christian Youth Fellowship in order to sing in their choir.  Caught goofing off during rehearsal, I am punished with a solo. 

“Let there be Light, God said, and there was Light.  And God saw the Light, that it was good…”

I am a prefect:   lighting the flame of my candle from that of a retiring prefect. 

When it is my turn to be the prefect on afternoon duty, I am led by morbid curiosity to ferret my way through the ceiling into the next room, to land myself in the Storeroom next to the Art Room.  Dazzled by the gilt and wealth of framed reproductions -- mostly Impressionist -- I find there, I cannot resist becoming a kleptomaniac.      

Another day, I steal a hymnal to take home.  Alone again naturally, I sing the songs, but I can’t get no satisfaction.   

Brightly gleams the Lamp at school, overshadowing the Chinese household.  I flee to books, leading a double life.  Weekends are when our coffee-shop is the front for the numbers racket run by Abah for the syndicate.   This is the business that gives us our daily bread:  this is the business we must serve; its slaves are we.           

A few years after Big Sister’s departure, it is Second Sister’s turn to leave, for higher studies this time.  This puts me at the mercy of the two boys, especially Second Brother.  One day, he touches me in a thrilling way.  It happens about the time Ama opens up our rooms above the coffee-shop to indulge the gambling habits of men:  bus and lorry drivers cursing through in a steady stream, days at a stretch, to play mahjongg, dominoes, fan tan, poker, Russian poker, or gin rummy.  There is more attention of the inappropriate kind. 

“In the beginning was the Word,…”

I bury myself in a pile of books from many places.  Without meaning to, I see The Sound of Music six times.  Enchanted, I vow to grow up and run away someplace with streets of people bursting into song. Some place far away, the opposite of a Chinese place.

At the age of twenty-one, crossing oceans, I land myself in Hawaii on a scholarship.  Finishing, I go to Mexico, southward drifting to Guatemala, where an unfortunate combination of visa exigencies leaves me stranded for two months.  Losing myself, I find myself.  I go away, seven years later to return.     

In time, I bear two children.  Together, we grow.  The bond of life is our devotion.    

These days of course, we’ve all gone secular but Wesley is to Methodist as MGS is to Wesleyan.

“Let the lower lights be burning; 

                Send a gleam across the shore;

                Some poor struggling, drowning seaman

                You may rescue, you may save.”