In the house I grew up in, we had an altar made of Japanese cypress. It housed carved wooden tablets for my ancestors — small tombstones embossed with golden Japanese calligraphy. The most recently departed ones had names. Not their earthly names, but poetic names for the astral world: Green Mountain, White Goat, Water Angel. At every meal, they were offered a little bit of what we ate, served on small lacquer plates on a small lacquer tray. When we ate out, we took little tiffin carriers with us so that we could bring back tiny portions of leftovers to serve to the ancestors. There was even a miniature milk bottle for a baby brother who was born prematurely. I never thought much about this ritual as a kid. We ate as a family, so it made sense to include family who had passed on, even the ones we’d never met.
My prevailing memories of growing up in Malaysia in the 90s are based on the new age Japanese religion that my parents are lifelong members of. We went to the temple often, sometimes every day of the week, to pray, chant, listen to teachings, give light, watch spirits manifest in others (usually the grownups) or had spirits manifested within ourselves. The temple was beautiful in a humble sort of way, with single-storey, interconnecting buildings sitting next to a working garden, and mature trees and bamboo groves hidden in the depths of a working-class housing estate. Across the road was a playground, and next to the playground was a large durian tree that periodically dropped its spiked heavy fruit on the ground, none of which tasted particularly good. The housing estate contained undeveloped pockets of urban jungle. I remember flattened forest snakes on the narrow road in front of the temple, run over in the night by cars.
The temple was clean and well-kept. We were taught that cleaning the temple was a good way to get rid of bad karma. We revered the simple, meditative cleanliness of Zen Buddhism, rather than the antiseptic wet-wipe obsession of late-stage capitalism. There was a weekly roster of chores to do, as well as a larger monthly clean before important ceremonies. Cleaning the toilets was seen as a particularly holy task, especially if you did it without complaining. But there were other tasks too: sweeping the grounds, mopping the floors, wiping the temple’s many windowpanes. Even today, the smell of dust on a wet rag immediately takes me back to those temple days.
Those with artistic skills, like my mother, shaped tropical flowers such as Birds of Paradise and orchids into ikebana arrangements for the temple altar. The altar was placed in the main hall, which faced the front gates and could be accessed from the side via low concrete steps. The altar housed the physical representation of the holiest being of the religion, as well as its protector — a bronze statue of a fat bald man carrying a sack over its shoulder.
Those who didn’t mind sleeping on the floor took turns to stay overnight at the temple, as volunteer security guards. A story I heard as a child is one where one of the volunteers woke up in the middle of the night, startled by the sound of the metal gates being shaken. Someone outside wanted to be let in. “Who is it?” the volunteer guard asked, not being able to see in the dark. The name given was the name of another temple faithful who had passed away — a tall, middle-aged man who I remember as eccentric but harmless. Despite these stories, and there were many, I never felt scared at the temple, only a profound sense of boredom and loneliness.
When I was 10, I prayed tearfully every night for God to save Kurt Cobain’s soul after he committed suicide. By the time I was 12, I was adamant I no longer believed in God, and instead hitched myself to the magic of words.
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The religion was started in the late 1950s by a charismatic former military man who claimed he received divine revelations from God in a series of fevered dreams. The most critical tenet of the religion is that practitioners can emit ‘light’ from their hands, which has the power to erase negative karma and promote wellbeing. Practitioners can direct this light at themselves, other humans, pets, plants, food, and even inanimate objects such as buildings and cars. There were also some complicated things about molecules, which I could never understand. The teachings emphasised principles of gratitude, humility, and service, as well as the spiritual power of words. And while it has some cult-like tendencies, on balance, it is probably one of the more harmless cults around.
Growing up in a cult, even a harmless one, means you don’t fully appreciate how distinct your lifestyle is from others around you, until you step away from it. I didn’t realise most people’s mothers didn’t sew little white pockets into their training bras to hold the precious locket (which gave us the ability to emit spiritual light). I didn’t know people went swimming, had x-rays, and went through security scans, without worrying about what it did to the efficacy of their special lockets.
My father had a leadership role at the temple and spent many of his (and therefore our) evenings and weekends there, offering prayers, providing pastoral care, and doing other temple things. A polyglot, he learnt Japanese during middle age and once won a vacuum cleaner from a Japanese speech competition. He was the rare member of the temple who understood the meaning of the Japanese chants we memorised and regurgitated.
During the day, my father worked as a GP at a clinic he ran with my mother, also a GP. He grew up in a working-class ethnic Chinese household in Penang, where my relatives practiced a mix of Taoism and Buddhism. Ultimately, however, he was a child of the sixties. The bookcase in our childhood home was filled with books on palmistry, astrology, the occult. There was a Quran, a Bible, and probably the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He had lived multiple lives by the time I was born, and I could not square the strict, traditional father I knew with the evidence of a wilder, more interesting man I could see on our bookcase.
My mother was raised by a single mother in a large Cantonese Catholic household in Kuala Lumpur. Unlike my father, she grew up speaking English, having gone to a convent school. Their family is a large and close knit one, with seven sisters and one brother spread out all over the world, and a bond tied to my maternal grandmother (Poh Poh) that can’t be broken by distance.
My parents have been in the religion for over 35 years, after one of their patients introduced it to them. It remains the most consistent cornerstone of their lives. Being in the religion complicated their relationships with their families, especially among my mother’s Catholic relatives, who were shocked that my siblings and I were not baptised. It must have been hard for my mother, who is hugely devoted to her family and expresses herself in classic Virgoan ways, even though she’s not a Virgo.
My father’s family is complicated and karmically charged enough as it is, even without throwing a cult-like religion into the mix. I had a different story in mind when I first started writing. I wanted to write about my father and his Hakka Chinese family, and all the stories of deaths and hauntings I heard as a child, such as the ghostly figure who has been known to make its way down the steep stairs of my father’s family home, dragging a ball and chain behind it. I had spent the longest time immersing myself in other people’s cultures. It was no longer enough. I wanted to know more about where I came from, a hunger that became more powerful when I started to learn about te ao Māori and the importance of whakapapa.
To help me with the original piece, my father emailed me a 10,000-word character biography he wrote about his parents and intricate mix of adoptive and biological siblings, of which a number died prematurely. The piece was in Chinese, a language I’m no longer fluent in, so I got it translated via ChatGPT.
My paternal grandparents (Ye Ye and Nai Nai) were part of the great migration of Hakka Chinese people from southern China to Malaysia. In typical diasporic fashion, Ye Ye left by himself to find work, first in Indonesia and then Malaysia. A hard gambling Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor who I never got to meet, he could have died many times over, including in the hands of Japanese soldiers, before my father was even conceived. Winning a lottery ticket just as he was about to give up meant he could send for Nai Nai to join him in Malaysia after the second world war, and our family line could continue down this branch.
For both my parents, I can see why religion is such an important guardrail for them, and how it has shaped them through every part of their lives, even as the name of their God changes. It’s too scary to imagine the chaotic force of the universe otherwise. It reminds me of a Japanese movie I watched as a kid, where a couple died in a car crash and wandered through purgatory for all eternity, unable to move forward.
The Japanese religion of my childhood is still a big part of my parents’ lives. It gives them purpose, routine, and a ready-made community no matter where they go. They have since moved to Tāmaki Makaurau and now go to a temple in Mt Roskill that is located above a discount bike shop. It is a lively and multicultural place, and often hosts events for the local community. The site backs onto the motorway, where temple volunteers have turned a disused piece of land into a flourishing garden planted with courgettes, tomatoes, and grapes that taste like Japanese candy. Temple members take good care of it — they weed it regularly, say nice things to the plants, and give them lots of light. The fruit and vegetables from the garden are some of the freshest I’ve ever tasted.
Szening’s memoir concludes our week-long series of stories commissioned by Wellington writer Joanna Cho, who was guest editor at ReadingRoom this week. Monday: Joanna on her year of living dangerously and well. Tuesday: romesh dissanayake on Australia’s referendum vote. Wednesday: Angelique Kasmara on her dad who was able to escape the Indonesia genocide of 1955 to come to New Zealand.
