To read what is in the current issue click here, buy the current issue now in the Online Shop or Subscribe to Kindred Spirit
Clicking the subscribe now button will take you to the online shop where you can pay online for your subscription.
Subscribe NowTo subscribe by Direct Debit you will need to print and post the special Subscription Form.
* To be viewed and printed, this PDF form requires Acrobat Reader
Transformation - a very personal tale
When I left, my husband said, 'You’ll be back, you won’t be able to cope.' And I replied, 'I’ve done poverty before. You’re rich but you’re so poor in spirit.' The lifestyle change was huge, from a country mansion with someone to do the housework and a full-time gardener to doing everything myself. Having been working for my husband, I was also now jobless. Author Josephine Chai invites us to share the ups and downs of her rocky road to recovery. It was not easy for me to decide to divorce my English husband. Firstly because I did love him, and secondly because I had been divorced before. I felt like a failure and a serial divorcee. It was also scary because if I did, I would be alone in England as I’ve no family here. My sons from my first marriage work abroad. I’m a Peranakan or Straits Chinese, born and brought up in colonial Singapore, in extreme poverty in a kampong, a Malay village of attap thatched huts where there was no electricity and no running water. My mother had a child every other year from the age of 17. Out of her 16 children, only eight lived. My mother took in the neighbours’ washing and sold food and cakes so that I could go to school as my father refused to educate a daughter. Several years on and I had university degrees, a wellpaying public relations career, and was a published author with one failed marriage already behind me. Then I met my second husband. Being someone’s second wife and inheriting his children is tough. You’re a wicked step-mother from the start no matter how you behaved. My step-children ignored the fact that I had a successful career and saw me as a floosie their father picked up from the East. They claimed I married him for his Rolls Royces and Surrey country mansion. They made life hell for me, said I behaved like a peasant because I ate with my fingers and that my English was poor. My husband, whom I had admired for his climb out of his own poverty, was full of guilt for neglecting his children when young, and did not stand up to them. These and other more insidious causes were my reasons for divorcing him
by ks
<< Back to Issue 91
Kindred Spirit, Diamond Publishing, Unit 2, Lynher House
3 Bush Park, Plymouth, Devon PL6 7RG, UK
Tel: 01752 762970 or Fax: 01752 772107
©2009 Kindred Spirit. Unauthorised use of all material is strictly prohibited.