Our house was surrounded by rubber trees. And in school, teachers would ask us to collect those biji getah (rubber seed) for maths and daun getah (rubber leaves) for arts and craft. Quite fun! I spent hours collecting those biji getahs even though the teacher only needed like 20 from each of us. I figured if I bring more, the rests could use mine as well. Haha! We had to go through the kebun getah to get to school, to go to shops and to wait for the bus that went to town. The most popular shop in my village was the shop we called Kedai Dak Piang, a.k.a. The Piang (the name of the owner) Shop. The shop was boxy and it's made of wood, it didn't have metal shutter, instead they used wood planks and a few latches to close the shop. Amazing! Every plank had a number so they knew which one should go to which place. It opened very early like 7am and closed around 9pm.
This shop offered almost everything the villagers needed. As a kid, I was most interested by the display of biscuit variety in large containers with transparent windows. Every time I drooled seeing those biscuits. You could buy them in kilos or grams. It'd be such a pleasant treat if my mom would agree to buy some. The thing about my mom, she loved those hard biscuits, particularly the one we called biskut tongkat, the cane biscuit or biskut lutut, the knee biscuit. DO NOT imagine candy cane! This biscuit is evil! It's so hard, it could make your gum bleed. Dunk it in hot black coffee, that's how you eat the e-biscuit.
And this shop also offered credits to the people. You could take as much provision as you needed, pay a bit of money and the rests were recorded in your 555 book. They were very efficient in calculation (using those chinese sam-pua calculator) and I'd never seen one time that they became angry if the people couldn't pay them on time. Mr Piang always gave me one sweet whenever i came visit. Such a nice man! I always sat on a bucket of rice and waited for my mom to finish shopping. When my mom ordered for a kilo of dried chillies, Mr Piang made a triangle container out of paper, put the chilies in and tied it with raffia strings. Awesome use of recycle materials! One thing I wish this shop never had was the smell of rubber. Urgh! It was truly truly stinky! But that's the villagers source of income those days, who was I to complain. Once the shopping was over, we (the kids) needed to bring all those heavy provisions home. Mom always told the others to let me take the lightest one. I'm the youngest, mah!
My house was not that far from the shop. If we were to take the regular road, I would say half a kilometer. But, we always took the shortcut across the rubber plantation. The house was big, Limas style with stilts and attap roof. It's not easy to maintain the attaps because they needed constant changing, I think every six months or so. One advantage of attap roof in comparison to zinc roof is that it's cooler. The main problem with attap roof is... water leaks after sometimes! My mom would buy around 100 attap every half a year to change the ones that were ruined. It's a tough task I'm telling you because we needed to carry 100 of those back and forth around a distance of 2 miles. One mile go and one mile back. I hated it when it's time of the year. My additional job, started when i was 10 was to climb the roof and changed the attap. It's not that hard but it was quite dangerous for a 10 year old girl, wasn't it? Haha! That's why I became so angry when a 32-year old guy told me he didn't know how to drive to KLCC. Such a wuss!
My childhood activities built my character. I didn't have Barbie dolls, I made my own dolls using hard paper. I didn't have board games, we use empty cans to play policemen and thieves, I didn't have television, I spent my free time on top of a tree or under the house imagining things. The world is changing and I'm happy that Tia has a chance to have a better childhood than me but I wouldn't trade mine for anything. :)
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