THERE'S a certain shared reality that gets me a little choked up when I read about the time a teenage Marina Mahathir asked her father: "What does mediocre mean, Daddy?" Looking at her with the smirk that was his trademark, he replied: "It means not particularly good at anything." Oh, she said, making a note to use it in the next essay she needed to write for English class at school. Which was why she was wholly unprepared for his next words.
"Like you."
It's a strange thing to write a memoir with such damning details, but demand that these things are not, in fact, damning at all. Yet, that's exactly what Marina has done in her recent memoir, The Apple and the Tree, a moving and frank work of self-excavation.
In finally telling her story, Marina is doing several things with this book. She's taking the public by the hand on an intimate tour of former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad's family, while recounting her youth against the backdrop of her father's burgeoning political career. The book is her own coming-of-age story by a woman who has been mostly at odds with Malaysian politics. The apple did fall a little further away from the tree indeed.
One of her strengths is her ability to look back not from the high perch of celebrity, nor with the inevitability of hindsight, but with the anxieties of the uncertain. She writes in the moment, as she saw, and felt, and discovered — as events were occurring. Over and over, she asks: "Am I good enough?"
This is despite her own accomplishments as a columnist and activist for women's rights and HIV/AIDS. Marina served as the president of the Malaysian AIDS Council for 12 years until 2005.
In 2010, she was named the UN Person of the Year by the United Nations. Six years later, she received France's highest award, the Chevalier de la Legion D'Honneur in recognition of her work in HIV and women's rights.
For all her achievements, she writes candidly: "My standards for myself are never met, perhaps because they're too high and striving to be as far away from mediocrity as possible. Or perhaps it's the legacy of living under so large a shadow as Dad's."
"Impostor syndrome," she confirms with a shrug of her shoulders, adding: "That remark dad made when I was just a teenager stung and stayed with me. It led to me feeling that I'm not quite up to mark… that I don't qualify to do or be where I am."
Continuing, she leans forward and adds wryly: "Of course, he doesn't remember that he said that!"
Ah dads and their acerbic wit. "You're growing sideways. Do something about it or inherit my diabetic medicine!" my father would yell at me. No beating about the bush, that one. Ask daughters which parent is more likely to help them confront the unpleasant truths about themselves, and most will say "dad".
She understands that, of course. "Tough love," she agrees, nodding. "He had expectations of course. It didn't matter that I was a girl!"
FACING THE BACKLASH
In person, the elegant silver-haired Marina is at once both self-effacing and proper. She's certainly not at all what I expected. Being her father's daughter, I was imagining someone grander, slightly terrifying. But she does wear her exasperation with twinkling pride when I ask her about the recent backlash on her memoir.
"I received flak twice," she corrects me, adding: "One, before the book came out. People started reacting quite badly based on the excerpts that were published. They hadn't read the book of course."
She'd been accused of trying to paint her father in a different light in an attempt to exonerate him from the allegations of misdeeds. She was shocked of course. "The book hadn't even come out yet," she says, adding: "They made their own judgments just by reading those excerpts. They hadn't even read the book yet."
The second round of criticism arose when she wrongly attributed a "shoot-to-kill" threat made to Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s to the home minister at the time. The statement wasn't made by Ghazali Shafie, who was the home minister back then, but was actually issued by Dr Mahathir, then deputy prime minister.
Marina sighs and nods. "Someone pointed it out to me and sent me all the newspaper cuttings. I got it wrong and I apologised. I'm correcting this for the second edition."
She grows quiet before saying: "It's funny how it felt like such a strong memory then, but memories can be wrong. I was barely out of my teens when it happened..." Her voice trails and she shrugs her shoulders again before continuing: "That wasn't the focus of the book at all. Look, I'm no historian and neither am I writing a book about dad's political career. This isn't his story. It's mine."
It's very much her story, told through her lenses as a daughter. But she acknowledges that where Dr Mahathir is concerned, people are generally not ambivalent. Love him or hate him, you certainly can't ignore the man who has towered over Malaysia's political landscape for decades.
I think that a lot of the anger at the book is very much directed at him, I offer placatingly. "Well then, take it up with him! Why me?" she retorts. "Like I said before, people who are angry haven't actually read the book. We've gotten into this environment where people who are so critical are very, very loud. Anyone who doesn't agree doesn't dare speak out. I don't pay attention because it's a lot of negative energy that I don't want to take on."
Why did she write the book in the first place? "Because I went and did my Masters in Biography and Creative Non-Fiction in the United Kingdom!" she replies sheepishly. She'd always wanted to write a book.
"Writing on what subject? I didn't actually know," she admits, adding: "In class, you write about what you know and since I had a lot of stories on my life journey, I started writing."
When she returned home in 2019, Marina kept on writing while also taking up an online memoir-writing course during the Movement Control Order. "One of the exercises they made us do was a 500-word-a-day exercise they called 'morning pages'. Before your mind is polluted by anything, you write 500 words first thing in the morning! I quite enjoyed that exercise and I often wrote longer than the 500-word limit."
At first, she wrote on random subjects. But in the middle of that exercise, Penguin Random House approached her to write a book about being the daughter of Dr Mahathir.
Shares Marina: "That was when I started focusing more on writing about my life. Soon, it was a matter of compiling all those essays, putting them together, expanding them and arranging them chronologically for the book."
It took her about five months to complete the book. "Everyone goes 'wow', but now that I think back, I feel it was too short. I wish I could have edited it better. I forgot about this and that… you know that sort of thing. I wish I'd taken my time with it," she tells me half-ruefully.
Did her father even know about the book? "Well, yes, I mentioned it because I still had to verify certain things like family history with him. To be honest, no one in my family read it before it came out! I gave him my first copy, of course, but I'm very sore with him because he still hasn't given me his book!" The 96-year-old patriarch had also recently come up with his latest book, Capturing Hope.
What did he think of it? I ask curiously. She laughs heartily before answering: "Well, he thinks it's okay, I guess. He never actually said that he liked the book. He of course disagrees with some parts of the narrative. 'I don't remember that!' he told me after reading about my younger days. 'Of course, you won't!' I retorted. 'To you it may be a throwaway but to me, it was significant!'"
UNDER THE SHADOW
There were many significant moments, of course. One of the most significant was his cutting remark about being mediocre. The abhorrence of mediocrity extended to his children and as the eldest, she felt it the most.
"Being called mediocre, not particularly good at anything, was a bit of a shock," she writes in her memoir. "…but it put things in perspective for me. If I had no real talent for anything, what exactly was I good at?"
Her father was anything but mediocre. On finding that he couldn't read everything he needed to do his job as a parliamentarian, he taught himself speed-reading. After a trip to Europe with his wife, he found the French language intriguing and set about ordering books and records to learn how to speak it.
When he saw the beautiful bamboo-fringed river behind their house, he bought plans from his magazines and, with the help of a neighbour, built boats to cruise on it. The first boat he ever built was called Marina I. A backhanded compliment there, I observe and she grins in response.
"I — on the other hand — was certainly no shining star," she readily admits, smiling.
It must have been tough growing up under the weight of expectations. Her brows furrowing, she's careful with her answer. "I think, after having grown up through the war, they have put a high premium on education. And rightly so," she replies.
Continuing, she says: "To be fair, they didn't expect us to excel in sports. I wasn't a natural athlete anyway. But academically, they didn't tolerate any red marks — that was the expectation!"
As an aside, the 65-year-old quips: "My mum should've been more sympathetic given that she struggled through her own studies, but no, she was the enforcer in the family!"
The question of mediocrity dogged her throughout her growing up years while her father went on to achieve meteoric success in the political arena. When Dr Mahathir was elected deputy prime minister back in 1976, Marina found it embarrassing. She decided to keep the news to herself and hoped that nobody at school in England (where she was doing her A Levels) would find out.
"I honestly didn't know how to react," she confesses. As much as she tried to distance herself from what went on back in Malaysia, her father's fame managed to traverse thousands of kilometres across the globe and put her on the spot.
Back in Sussex, she was driven to tears by a student who questioned her on Malaysia's New Economic Policy and how it apparently discriminated against non-Malay minorities.
Under his relentless questioning, she felt stupid and could barely keep her emotions in check. The incident made her conscious about her so-called opinions about many things. Were they her own or was she just parroting what she heard her father say?
"It took me a while to find myself and have an opinion about anything, or even take a deeper interest in politics," she says, laughing, before adding: "In the meantime, I managed to party my way through to the final year!"
Upon graduating, Marina wanted to pursue journalism as a career, much to the consternation of her father, who had a testy relationship with the press. "Thankfully, my parents were liberal in that matter," writes Marina. "As a result, they have one journalist, one businessman, one engineer/businessman, one former businessman/current politician, one homemaker, one vegetable farmer and one communications executive in the family. I think it does make for more varied, if somewhat unfocussed, dinner conversations."
ONGOING JOURNEY
Marina was just 24 when her father was appointed prime minister in 1981 — a position he would hold for more than two decades. "It was a bit surreal," she reveals, wryly.
What is it like being the daughter of the (now former) prime minister? I ask curiously. She pauses for a while, before finally answering with a sigh: "It was tough on both sides — on the personal side and on the public side. There were expectations all around and life was all about juggling those expectations."
Another brief pause and Marina remarks quietly: "I didn't choose to be born to him. But I must say it has been a great privilege. I'm privileged because it gave me the opportunity to pursue what I wanted and it so happened that all I wanted to do was to serve."
She readily admits that being the prime minister's daughter did help open doors. "…but doors were opened out of curiosity, more than anything else. I think people were waiting for me to fail spectacularly. 'Maybe she's not very smart' they might have thought. But I hope I've disappointed them!" adds Marina with a laugh, adding blithely: "It helped when I was trying to fundraise for the AIDS council!"
While she manages to chronicle her father's journey in politics through the lenses of her own personal front-row seat, she's been accused of whitewashing certain pivotal events that have seared in the minds of the public; from her father's ascension as the nation's 4th prime minister for over two decades, the Reformasi period, and his brief two years right up to the day he was forced to step down as the 7th prime minister after leading the historic ouster of the government he used to lead.
"Well, it's not a story about him. It's about me!" she reminds me pertly, adding: "I'm not about to delve deeply into politics, but I have written what I've observed and witnessed. More so, the journey is mine. Let Dad tell his own story!"
Which he did, I remind her. "Yes, but he's not given me his book to read yet!" she repeats again, shaking her head.
Her own trajectory was no less impressive despite the fact that she was told — along with her siblings — that their surname had no currency. They had to prove that they were capable of being good at everything they did. From her first job as a writer, the mother of three has come a long way, albeit with lingering doubts as to whether she's actually earned those accolades for herself.
"It comes with the territory of being Dr Mahathir's daughter," she muses dryly. It's a tough terrain to navigate, she concedes. Her own successes and activism have caused her to become a target for criticism — which she has learnt to take in her stride.
Explains Marina bluntly: "I'm the daughter of a man that many love to hate. But while I wouldn't necessarily defend Dad on anything because I know he'd need no help on that, I refuse to say anything against him."
Their differences (and they have many differing opinions) have been thrashed behind closed doors. "We have this unspoken rule about not criticising each other in public. I might say 'the government' but not him personally, and he never did with me either," reveals Marina.
Nevertheless, The Apple and the Tree reveals a side of Dr Mahathir that's rarely seen — that of a devoted husband and doting father. And someone whose shadow his firstborn can't quite come out of. It's funny how we spend our lifetime trying to crawl out of our parents' shadows. Perhaps there's some comfort that can be found in that.
Marina sums it up perfectly in her preface: "Much like the angsana tree in the Alor Star garden of my childhood, my father looms large in my life. So much of what I am today, from my laser beam focus on causes I support, to the discipline that even surprises me, to my impatience at those who are too slow to understand what I'm saying, even my occasional sarcastic snipe, I know they all come from him. Despite all that, I was and perhaps still am, the little sapling trying to grow out of his umbrella-like shadow, watching, observing, and sometimes, pushing back so that I may breathe and branch out of my own."
The Apple and the Tree: Life as Dr Mahathir's Daughter
Author: Marina Mahathir
Publisher: Penguin Random House SEA Pte. Ltd.
308 pages
Sold at major bookstores nationwide.
