About Me

I consider myself a quiet and low profile person. Additionally, my former landlady in Nedlands, Perth, Western Australia once told me I was an “intense” person. Well, she might be correct as well …

I was born in my mother’s village at the outskirts of Kuala Terengganu, a city on the east coast of peninsular Malaysia. My paternal grandparents then raised me in their hometown of Jerteh, 110 km away. Jerteh is a town that sits near the Terengganu border with Kelantan. It is geographically and culturally very close to Kelantan. So much so that the dialect we speak in Jerteh is Kelantanese and not Terengganu’s.

In Jerteh I was schooled at Sekolah Kebangsaan Pusat Jerteh. I suppose my childhood years in Jerteh were like any other kampung boys’. On my way back home from school I’d stop by clumps of bushes by the roadside to collect the sweet-tasting kemunting. More often than not my white school shirt would be stained purple with the ripe kemunting fruits, much to the displeasure of my grandmother. In the afternoons I would attend Qur’an reading class at home. My grandmother, known as Mak Pesah, was a village Qur’an teacher. As such my home would be abuzz with my counterparts who came to learn Qur’an with Mak Pesah. Then I would sneak out to a nearby river and had a great time with my friends wading, diving and swimming in the pristine clear waters, and lying on our backs on the river’s white silica sands. Sometimes when I returned home late from the river, Mak Pesah would be waiting for me with her rattan cane. Not every time, but just enough to show me who was the boss….

In spite of that, I did quite well in the primary school’s year 5 national examinations that I was selected to go to a semi-boarding school in Kuala Terengganu, the Sultan Sulaiman Secondary School fondly known as SSSS, at Kuala Ibai. SSSS was an English-medium secondary school and as such I, coming from a Malay-medium primary school, had to transit for 1 year to intensively learn English, in what was known as Remove Class.

At the school’s boys hostel, the Asrama Putera, I made friends with one Manan Ngah, who had this talent playing guitars. I asked him to teach me play the instrument, but I could not stand the pain on my fingers strumming the taut guitar strings. The only song I could play was Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water. In lazy afternoons and weekends, my dorm friends and I would gather around someone’s lower-deck bed and savor Manan’s guitar rendition of various hit songs of those days. Manan, years later, shot into Malaysian limelight with scores of hit songs, and became one of Malaysia’s well known composers. I might not have been a nondescript person I now am, had I been able to withstand the finger pains. But I have no regrets..

I stayed at SSSS for 4 years. At the Form 3 national examinations of Lower Certificate of Education I achieved sufficiently good marks that I was selected together with scores of my classmates to go to Form 4 at full-boarding school Sekolah Menengah Sains Terengganu (a.k.a SMS Terengganu) in Gong Badak near the Kuala Terengganu airport at Telaga Batin.

I must have done very well at SMS Terengganu that based on my teachers’ forecast of my performance at Form 5‘s Malaysia Certificate of Education examinations, and a glowing testimonial letter from her, and after a series of national interviews and eliminations, I was selected to be in a group of 10 students from Malaysia’s premier boarding schools to go for pre-university matriculation studies in Perth, Australia.

I was still a teenager, and quite a backward kampung (village) boy at that. Perth was  a quantum leap to me. At the time when my school friends were still enjoying their post-examinations holidays, I was sent off to Perth on one of Malaysia Airline System’s last Boeing 707-300, with a transit stop at Jakarta’s Halim Perdanakusuma International Airport.

I was a bewildered kampung boy abruptly transplanted into alien, western surroundings. I stayed there 6 years before returning to Malaysia in the mid 80’s. I vowed I had had enough of university, after a tough time navigating through University of Western Australia’s electrical engineering course. I failed year 2 and had to painfully repeat that year. Nevertheless, in the mid 90’s, with a charming wife and two toddlers in tow, I left my secure job in laidback Dungun, Terengganu and went to Colchester, England for an uncertain struggle in University of Essex’s post-graduate program.

Thus I broke my Perth vow, just to prove to myself that I indeed had inner strength and capability, to overcome any obstacle, in spite of prior setbacks. A full-time Master of Science degree program in the U.K. normally took 12 months. But I purposely sought a shorter, more hectic and more challenging 9-month program. Again, to prove to myself and to show to my children, that I could do it.

Nordin Ibrahim