In 1977 I married and moved to far-off Kuching City, the capital of East Malaysia. This was remarkable since before then I had not even been aware that there was such a place in this world. I still remember the enquiring looks the travel agency employees gave me when I booked my ticket, and how I too felt like some kind of alien.

When I first arrived in Kuching, I was very homesick and there were many things I was unaccustomed to. The biggest of these was the language. The Malays speak Malay and English, while the Chinese speak the local dialects of their ancestral places of origin, with a smattering of Malay and English. Some who have received a Chinese education can speak Mandarin, but their grammar and some of the expressions they use are different from the Mandarin spoken in Taiwan. Quite a few Chinese have had an English- language education and can only speak English, not Mandarin. This is to give them better employment prospects-preferably to become civil servants-and to acquire a higher social status and get more respect. This is a legacy of Malaysia's days as a British colony. Meanwhile the aborigines speak their own languages, so actually the only local lingua franca is English.

When a group of Chinese friends sit down together to eat, they speak English or Fujian dialect, otherwise they will have difficulty communicating. The mixture of Chaozhou dialect and Malay spoken in my mother-in-law's home often drove me to distraction. Thus I and my husband, who completed his university education in Taiwan, agreed that as Chinese, at the very least we should make sure that our children got an education in Chinese. The Malaysian government allows Chinese schools at elementary, junior high and senior high school levels, which is something very rare in Southeast Asian countries.

Our two sons are five years apart in age, and went to the same Chinese school. Although the school also teaches Malay and English, Mandarin is the medium of instruction. Most importantly, being educated at the Chinese school taught my sons to understand our deep and ancient Chinese culture with its moral and ethical values. At home I also did my best to give my sons a clear knowledge of Chinese traditional festivals, their meaning and typical foods (because my sons are big eaters). At first they didn't understand, but now they know that Qingming Festival (Tomb Sweeping Day) is a time to earnestly remember and venerate our ancestors, and we would go out into the countryside to pay our respects at grandfather's and grandmother's graves. The Dragon Boat Festival with its dragon boat races commemorates the patriotic poet Qu Yuan, and we eat zongzi (steamed rice dumplings) in his memory. At the Winter Solstice, my sons were delighted at the stuffed glutinous rice balls which they had rolled themselves. And at Chinese New Year, we would close our doors tight to keep out the ferocious beast called the "Year," and set off strings of firecrackers to drive out the old and usher in the new. Of course what my sons loved most was receiving their red envelopes of New Year's money. Every time we made a trip to Taiwan we brought our sons along to deepen their impressions, and the moment we left the airport they would have the feeling of returning home, and be overjoyed that they could read the Chinese signs and advertisements along the roads. We treasure every minute of life in our own homeland.

Today my elder son is 18 and my younger son 13. Although three years ago we moved to Australia, where they are inevitably being influenced to some extent by Western thinking, their deep-rooted "Chi-neseness" hasn't changed at all. This is mainly because my sons know they are Chinese. Wherever we are and through however many generations, we will always be Chinese, and my sons are proud that they can read Chinese and speak the language of their motherland.

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Though far from the old country, thanks to our painstaking efforts our sons Wei-ling (above) and Wei-ti (below) feel a great sense of attachment to Chinese culture, and are proud to speak the language of their motherland.