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| Foo Chang Tze and his wife, Goh Lye San, in La Perouse, 2020. |
IT’S ABOUT one month before the first COVID-19 restrictions are imposed in Sydney, early 2020. The Saturday-special nasi lemak that chef and proprietress Alimah dishes out at the Island Dreams Cafe in Lakemba has grown on Helen and I. So, we bring together a few friends, a motley crew of Malaysians and Singaporeans who have made Australia a second home of sorts. There are at the table Jeff and Wah Lee, both Singaporeans, Choo Gark and Brenda, Penangites, Helen and I. Jeff and Wah Lee have brought their neighbour-friends, also Malaysian, and we meet Foo Chang Tze and his wife, Lye.
As the meal comes along, Jeff, Chang and I mark ourselves as survivors — each in remission from some type of cancer. Underlying the conversation is the silent revelry of a “brothers in arms” syndrome. But, while Jeff and I feel as if we have returned from the front, Chang is on precarious ground, the minefield has not been cleared. His condition is delicate and unpredictable. And yet, Chang is the one with an uncanny easiness about him, resolute, stoic, calm, almost uncaring about the uncertainty ahead. I will come to learn this is his very nature.
The couple is very open about the unknowns ahead; the doctors simply cannot forecast how any treatment might work. It doesn’t stop Lye and Chang from making the most of what they have. By all accounts, from all appearances, they are very good at this.
*****
In the weeks and months to come, I visit him a few times, under the cloud of his changing prognosis. I feel I must. The survivor in me recognises a purpose, though I don’t know what I want to achieve. I know only that I need to talk with Chang, build a fellowship, tap into what will show to be a very private person, what appears to me as a well of wisdom and knowing, find out what he has learnt, “where he is”. Departing from my own nature, I ask if it’s alright to visit.
We meet for lunch, most often with Jeff, and once we just sit together in his Birchgrove home, shooting the wind. An inner glow in Chang is nearly always evident in the softest, most gentle, knowing smile. I feel I am in the presence of an extraordinary human being, though some may say Chang is an ordinary man doing extraordinary things. There are none taller.
*****
It’s the first Thursday in July. Chang, Jeff and I are in his living room. Chang is mostly lying on the sofa. His feet are crossed, his arm tucked under his head. His sickness is encroaching upon him more and more. The week before, in a matter of three days, Chang has lost his ability to see. I cast myself back to our first meeting. He is crossing the road for the Island Dreams Cafe, hair billowing in the late southern autumn wind, leading Lye by the hand. Not a care in the world, to our eyes.
On the sofa, his eyes are closed, he is smiling. It’s a smile that says he knows something, and he’s happy to keep it all to himself. So, of course the journalist in me says,“What’s the secret, Chang?”
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| From left are Helen, Lye and Wah Lee in La Perouse. |
The smile broadens, he doesn’t answer. I see a person who makes no claim to harbouring a secret, to being special. So I try another tract. I ask, “What do you feel? What’s going through your mind?” I tell myself if I don’t dive right in, push a little, I will betray my purpose, whatever that may be. More than that, I am wasting his time.
Chang restates my question. “What do I feel?” he says. Then he pauses, contemplating, taking the question seriously. “Nothing. I don’t feel anything. I am not thinking about anything.”
And I say, “You can scream, you know. Get angry. Say anything you want, bro. Jeff and I are just here to be with you.” The smile remains. “I’m okay,” he says. “I’m not angry. I’m not worried. I only worry about Lye, the children.”
I know I am pushing at the boundary of a new friendship when I say, “I think when they see you, your wife and kids must take great comfort just looking at you, seeing how you carry yourself through all this.” He keeps smiling, listening intently, gently nodding at what I say. His demeanour says he is politely rejecting any suggestion he may be special. Just days ago, he went blind. And here he is now, lying on his sofa, serene, like everything is normal. He is a big man but there is no space for hubris.
I don’t know to proceed. So I say, “Chang, maybe I should leave and let you rest. I hope you don’t mind me saying, but I don’t know if you’re sleeping, if I’m disturbing you, because your eyes are closed.” He immediately replies, “No, no. I’m fine. You’re not disturbing me. If I want to sleep, I’ll tell you. I close my eyes because it’s an effort to keep them open. It’s tiring because it’s all dark.”
“Well, you can’t see yourself mate,” I say, “but I’m here, I can see you. And I want to tell you that you’re smiling. You’re always smiling.” He says, “I know, I know,” the smile wider now, colour coming to his face, a big man showing a boyish shyness. “I know I am smiling.”
I tell Chang about a book I am writing, on the spiritual journey since my diagnosis, how I feel blessed with God’s presence, my hope that the book may bring some comfort to others. On the same track, I broach the prayer and Bible-reading sessions he has, when he connects on Skype with a family member in Cardiff, Wales. I ask him if it helps. The smile widens again, his cheeks flush deeper. He looks cheeky. “It’s good for them, lah,” he says. There is no disparaging of anyone else’s good intentions here. Chang’s grace and kindness shine through, the light of a sick man putting everybody else first, ahead of what he might need, ahead of what he might not need.
And I blurt it out, not having thought about it beforehand: “I want to write about you,” I say. “But, only if you say, yes.” Then, I have to give him a sense of the impression he has made on me. I confess, one fighter to another: “Chang, I thought I was strong. But you, man, you are something else. You inspire me every time I meet you. I am in awe. I know this may sound presumptuous, because we’ve only just met, but I need to say this. If I don’t say it, I’ll feel like an idiot when I go home. God is with you. This is what I see when I look at you — a man at peace, in the presence of God.”
And I ask him, “Do you feel the presence?” His reply is swift: “No. No I don’t.” He says it like he is pleading. It pains me. I get the sense he is saying things he has never given voice to. I tell him: “You don’t have to pray, man. We’ll pray for you. God is already with you.”
Chang looks serious again, but the smile is still there. “Thank you, William. I am at peace.”
About two weeks later, Chang, Lye, Jeff and Wah Lee come to our Oatley home for lunch. Chang has two serves of the south Indian food we have cooked. I tell Lye about the book I feel compelled to write, that Chang has given me permission to write about him. I am careful not to refer to Chang in the third-party sense. I am aware he is now blind, and he can’t see when I may nod in his direction to draw him into the conversation. So when I speak of him, I say “Chang” and sometimes I touch his arm when I say his name, and Chang understands. He knows that it is I who is coping with his blindness.
I tell Lye I want to write about Chang’s smile, how it leads me to sense, undeniably, that her husband is in the presence of God. Chang smiles, wipes away a tear. I don’t know if it’s from emotion, or his condition, the eyes that do not see. But I know he is comfortable to hear this, because there may be a tear in his eye, but there’s also that smile, which over-rides everything else.
And it comes to me. I am looking at that smile, and I am finally seeing why the journalist in me sees a story in Chang. People need to know about Chang. People need to know about his serenity, quiet and glowing at the same time, amid the madness, the sickness. Knowing about Chang will help people who may themselves be in need of comfort, strength, faith, belief, a lesson in the human ability to cope.
You can “go placidly amid the noise and the haste”, as the American Max Ehrmann wrote in 1927. The human being can be supreme, stand above it all, and reign over everything in serenity. He may not sense the presence, but Chang is of God’s design. This is what underlies the story of the man I have come to know in Chang. This is another reason I have been saved. I have work to do.
*****
I ask for his full name, how to spell it. Foo Chang Tze, he says, nodding with each syllable; C H A N G, as in sang.
That Thursday afternoon in August, we have a few comforting hours, each of us easy with one another, the inner warmth like a balm after the cold snap of what always feels like an extended winter to people like us, from the equatorials. It doesn’t need to be said, but we are all grateful for the fellowship. The shades of our endurance and experience have brought us together. At the centre of all this is knowing that we are the richer for knowing Chang. And he’s hardly said a word. It’s that smile.
*****
Chang needs to be helped to the door as the party prepares to leave. Lye is by his side. I hold open the gate by the driveway as the couple comes through our front door, heading for Jeff’s people-mover. Past the porch step, Lye turns to face Chang. “You follow me,” she says. Face to face, their arms are raised to one another, Lye gently clasping Chang’s fingertips. Wife looks at husband’s face. Chang’s eyes are closed. Chang is smiling.
Lye begins to step backward, taking the lead. The afternoon light is kind on a picture of love, and loving. As Lye steps backwards, Chang is prompted to move forwards. Lye and Chang look like they are dancing to their very own waltz.
*****
In November and December 2020, my wife and I are invited for dinner at Birchgrove twice, in Jeffrey and Wah Lee’s home. Lye and Chang are there both times, along with other Malaysian couples. Lye is by now familiar enough with Helen and I to ask me to bring my guitar. Chang will like the music, she says.
The group singing carries very well in the acoustics of the kitchen. More than once, Chang cries. The smile always returns. He even asks for Sweet Caroline, sings along to it, smiling happily. Everyone else calls up the lyrics on their smartphones. I move to sit on a stool right next to Chang, and play a couple of softer songs that I sing myself. His fingers mimic the plucking. Sometimes, his fingers keep time, tapping the tabletop. On the second visit, we add carols to the list. Chang’s emotions overcome him again. But we are always encouraged to continue because Chang’s smile never fails to return.
Two days before Australia Day, 2021, we are with Chang and Lye, their friends and family, at his hospital bedside. I have my guitar and I sit by his bed, at first just playing, then playing and singing. Before long, the ladies say, Play something we can all sing to. And so I fall back to the song-list we had all made up those two nights of singalongs at Jeff and Wah Lee’s. By the time we get to Sweet Caroline, Chang’s eyes are open, and he slowly reaches his left hand across to his right side, where Lye sits. Chang is reaching for his wife’s hand. At the same time, she dabs at his eyes.
It’s time to go, let Chang get some rest. I pack up and go back to the big man. I put my hand to his chest and say, “Boss, I’ll see you again, OK. Maybe later this week, OK, handsome?” Chang replies. “OK.” And there’s that smile again, on Australia Day. I can hear Chang’s words to me, that July afternoon in Birchgrove. “I am at peace.”
*****
Australia’s federal government conducted a postal survey in November 2017, to determine support for same-sex marriage, and to recognise such unions within a legal framework. Controversial by its very nature, the survey sparked a political, public and civic debate among supporters and opposers.
Many Australians objected to how such a law would necessarily change the traditional, Judaeo-Christian, Anglo-Saxon definition of marriage, which was the union of man and woman, “as God intended”. This belief diminished entirely the Australian twin principles of secularism, and separation of state from matters of religion in all spheres of government, including the mandate to legislate.
Supporters argued that providing a legal framework to same-sex marriage would offer the people in such unions the same rights and protections accorded to people in ‘traditional’ marriages and, crucially, the rights to an inheritance after one partner may pass away.
Chang and Lye take their vote seriously. Lye is in favour. Chang is divided and torn — not the sort of person to stand in the way of someone else’s happiness, he nevertheless has his reservations, believing that those who oppose it on religious grounds have the right to their opinion. Chang remains undecided.
It is during the weeks leading to the vote that Chang discovers he has a malignant tumour in his brain. Soon after diagnosis, he undergoes his first operation to remove the growth, and comes home to recuperate and recover. Lye is his constant and ever-present carer.
On 7 November 2017, the day of the vote, Chang is unable to do the necessary paperwork. Lye marks her postal voting papers and asked her husband if he has decided how to vote. He chooses to vote “yes”.
Lye is very pleased for her husband, and asks Chang what has brought him to closure, in a matter that has caused only uncertainty. His answer is plain, simple, powerful. Chang says: “Because everybody deserves to be cared for by someone who loves them.”
*****
The Australian survey saw 7,817,247 people vote “yes” (61.6%), and 4,873,987 vote “no” (38.4%). Another 36,686 were uncertain (0.3%). A total of 12,727,920 people in the Australian electoral roll participated (79.5%).
On 9 December 2017, legal recognition of same-sex marriage came into being in Australia under the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017.
*****
The October 2020 afternoon Lye shared this anecdote on the same-sex vote with us, Helen and I have just enjoyed a lunch of Lye’s Nyonya yam cake and my wife’s savoury waffles.
It has been a full half-year since Chang and Lye have had a consultation with his oncologist. During that consultation, in May, Lye asks how long Chang might have left. The oncologist says the tumour has grown very rapidly in the three months before. He says he expects it will be another three months or so before the malignancy “takes over”, so to speak. Lye also recalls the oncologist saying that Chang is very strong, and no one knows how long he may hang on. By Lye’s calculation, three months from the time of the consultation would bring them to August, or thereabouts. Chang insists to his wife he has heard the oncologist say, “around six months”.
In time, Lye will come to ask Chang if he will stay to celebrate the 35th anniversary of his marriage to Lye, on 12 October. He says, OK. She then asks him to stay for the 3rd birthday of his grandson, Lucas, and Lye’s own birthday. He says, OK. And Chang stays. Lye then asks if he will stay till Christmas, New Year. This time, he says, “I will try.”
Christmas and the New Year see Chang enter palliative care in hospital. He passes away about 10.30pm on Australia Day, 26 January 2021. It’s about six months since the consultation.
POST SCRIPT
Foo Chang Tze was born in 1960, in Kuala Lumpur. He grew up in Malaysia’s capital and studied at St John’s Institution, where he completed the Malaysian Certificate of Education (MCE), in the science stream (the MCE is Malaysia’s version of the GCE, or General Certificate of Education, which students sat for in Malaysia’s colonial time).
He left for Melbourne on a student visa and completed his Higher School Certificate (HSC) there. He then enrolled in a Bachelor of Agricultural Science programme at the University of Melbourne, and later completed a Masters in Business Administration at the University of NSW. He met Goh Lye San — “We were playing badminton together,” he says — when Lye was pursuing a degree in chemical engineering at Monash University. They married in 1985.
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