My name is Dorothy Pow Choo Loader and I just recently turned 50 in February 2009. I am a full-blooded Chinese but I was given for adoption when I was just a week old. My foster parents, Ronald Alywn Loader (from Wales, England) and Lucy nee Lee Fah Chew (from Malaysia) have long passed on when I was 13 and 31 respectively. I only came to know that I was an adopted child when I was 16 years old.
I have only one adopted sibling who is 2 and half years older than I am. Her name is Ann Chin Choo Loader and she presently lives in England with her husband, Ronnie Choong Choon Tat and her 2 sons Chee Seng and Chee Wah. Chee Seng married last March and his wife is called Ah Ying.
My father gave me the name Dorothy which means 'a gift from God' and I came to know that my grandmother (father's side) was also called Dorothy. My foster father was a divorcee when he married my foster mother and he had a daughter from his first marriage of which I was told was also called Dorothy. To top it off, my aunty (younger sister of my foster mother) was also named Dorothy. So it seems, Dorothy was a pretty popular name in the family.
The name Pow Choo and Chin Choo has Chinese meanings. Pow Choo means Precious Pearl and Chin Choo means Mother of Pearl.
Ann and I are both adopted children however in Ann's case, she is blood-related to my mother. Ann is the youngest daughter of my mother's younger sister (my mother being the eldest in a family of 13 siblings). When my aunty was pregnant with Ann, her mother-in-law threatened to give the child away if it was a girl. Ann has 2 elder sisters and an elder brother so when Ann was born, my aunty pleaded with my mother to take Ann as her daughter. Thus being in the family, Ann does not have any adoption papers and is therefore was considered the Loader's true daughter.
In my case, I came to know that my birth parents were Chinese and I had several siblings. My birth mother was 36 years old when she gave birth to me and my twin sister. It seemed that my mother was sick and bedridden and the family was very poor and thus they had no choice but give both twins up for adoption.
My foster mother came to know about me from her Ahmad (chauffer) and by the time she went to see me, my twin sister was no longer there. She was adopted by a European family whom my mother later came to know was her own neighbor i.e. the Alvis family.
So it turned out that when I grew up till about the age of 3, my twin sister Rosabelle became my childhood friend and neighbor until my family left the English settlement in Bukit Besi to travel abroad.
As a child I grew up thinking that I was a Eurasian. My father was a Mechanical Engineer and the family traveled and lived in a couple of states in Malaysia. He was employed as an Engineer in the Govt. Works Department then known as Jabatan Kerja Raya (JKR) and was regarded as an expatriate. We lived in Petaling Jaya and later in Bentong, Pahang. When his contract was over, my father was employed by a private company called the Rahman Hydraulic Tin Mines in Klian Intan, Perak.
Upto the age of 8 years old, my family was living in high society and my parents lingered with the rich and famous, high government officials and royalty. As children we were cared by servants and my mother became a social welfare worker. Unfortunately, tragedy struck when one day at work in the tin mines my father was run over by his own jeep which had a faulty handbrake. The jeep was parked at a slope and it went downhill and my father attempted to chase after it. He tried to get into the driver's seat but slipped and the jeep ran over him.
It broke my father's right knee and he had to receive treatment in Penang Govt. Hospital for a couple of months. The company terminated his services, my mother stayed in Penang to be with him and my sister and I were taken care by one of my mother's good friends, a Malay OCPD in Kroh, Perak. Every fortnight 'uncle Zainal' would put the two of us in a taxi and ensure we reached Penang and spent the weekend with my mum and dad. We stayed with Uncle Zainal for a couple of months until my mother bought a chicken and pig farm in Gertak Sanggul, Penang.
I liked living in the fishing village very much and made friends with the village children quickly. Early in the morning my father would drive us to the main bus-stop of the village after which we had a one-hour journey by bus to Georgetown. From there, a hired trishaw would take us to our school, Light Street Convent. After school, it was the same way back to the village.
I was 9 and my sister was 12 and living in the fishing village was like paradise. We had a servant who looked after us so all I did was play with the kids immediately when I came home. We played at the beach, dug for sea shells, swam and had bonfires at night. Caught fish in the stream and caught spiders for fighting. Each day was never a dull moment. My family was the first in the village to have a black and white television and every evening all the village children would gather in our house to watch television.
Time seemed to fly and I was liked by old and young of the village. Then things took a turn. The chickens on the farm caught a disease and died. My father felt home sick and wanted to return to England and so my mother sold the business, packed a bag and sent my father off on a plane and we went to stay with our Chinese grandmother in Petaling Jaya.
My uncle (mother's younger brother), his wife and 3 daughters lived with my grandmother. There were no rooms available so my mother slept with my grandmother and my sister and I slept on canvas beds in the lounge. We lived there for a few months after which my mother rented a room. She worked with the Red Cross, we went to school and when we were at 'home' was confined to a small room. Our meals came from a tiffin carrier and my sister washed and ironed our clothes.
From then onwards, it was a life of either renting rooms or renting houses. My mother then joined the St. John's Brigade and worked as a secretary, we walked to school and continued to eat meals out of a tiffin. I began washing my own clothes when I turned 11 and it was also the year that my sister found out that I was an adopted child. She took it quite badly because from that day onwards, I sensed that we were not as close as we used to be and we began to have different interests.
My mother lost contact with my father after a year or so since returning to England and therefore I didn't know whether he was dead or alive. By the time I was 13, my mother had joined a friend's company in Singapore that sold medical equipment and she was in-charge of the office in Malaysia. It was at this time that she received news from the British High Commission that my father had returned to Malaysia and this news came as a surprise as well as a shock to all of us.
It was reported that my father was found wandering in the airport in the wee hours of the morning looking for his family. The British High Commission was contacted and my father was put into the Majestic Hotel in Kuala Lumpur while they located my mother. As she was formerly involved in social welfare and knew prestigious people it did not take long for the family to be reunited again. However, due to my father's ill health he died after ten days from a stroke and I never got to introduce my father to my class mates.
My mother retired when I was 16 and rented a house of which the rooms were sublet to tenants. She was then receiving a meagre allowance from the Freemasons of which my father had been a member. Ann was then working and had a boyfriend while I was still schooling and did all the household chores. It was during one spring cleaning that I found my adoption papers and my mother told me all about my origin. Months later she opened a Prawn Noodle business and had a small stall set up in the morning market. Everyday upon returning home from morning school, I would help her prepare the next day's prawn soup besides doing the usual household chores and cooking dinner for the family.
Tragedy struck while my mother was in the midst of her booming business. She had a bad fall and she was thus forced to sell her business. We shifted house and my sister got married when I was 18 years old. I had then finished my secondary education and was already working.
My sister rented a house and my mother and I went to live with her. Unfortunately my mother had a second fall and as both Ann and I were working, my mother decided to live in the temple of which she was one of the disciples. I later went up to join her and after that resided with my aunty (mother's younger sister) who lived a few roads away from the temple.
I got married at the age of 25 and returned to my husband's hometown in Alor Star. I miscarried my baby girl six month into my pregnancy which resulted in us returning to Kuala Lumpur. We rented a room in Petaling Jaya and by 1986, we had purchased our first 2-bedroom apartment in Shah Alam. In 1990 a son was born into the Ong family.
My mother died in 1991 of old age. She was 78. In 1994 I had another child, a baby girl however she died when she was 4 months old from congenital heart disease. She was diagnosed as having Edwards Syndrome and had a hole in the heart. It was a traumatic experience for me since I had lost my mother and now my child. But 1995 I was blessed with a healthy baby girl.
