'We Three'

My apologies for not posting last Monday - I was on a getaway, during which I had a most relaxing time. Thankfully, it was a short one because I'm really not a sun, sea and sand person. The best part of the holiday, however, was being with my two friends, Stephanie and Beverley, who were visiting from New Zealand. We knew one another when we studied at Victoria University of Wellington and the last time I saw them was in 1999, when my family and I were in New Zealand for our university's 100th year celebration.

Stephanie and Beverley are twins; I knew another set of Kiwi twins during my student days - Christine and Dianne - and a twin, Karen from America, whose sister didn't come over with her. While people may be intrigued by twins, they would find triplets fascinating and I'm fortunate to know one. She is Datin Noor Azlina Yunus, who I got to know on my first writing project and with whom I've become friends. Azlina, also known as Joy Hooper, was born in Feilding, New Zealand, on 12 December 1946. She and her sisters, Judith and Jillian, were minor celebrities who had their lives documented by the press until they were 21. In 2007, the sisters decided to write We Three - A Memoir of the Hooper Triplets, which was self-published in 2009 and given to family and friends in New Zealand, Australia and Malaysia.

I have posted earlier on sharing memories and this is a perfect example of one - a book that invites us into the lives of Joy, Judith and Jillian, sharing the times that they had together with their parents before they went their separate adult ways, each with her own story. Joy met her Malaysian sweetheart, Yunus, while studying at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, married him and moved nearly 9,000 kilometres away from home. Judith headed north to the University of Auckland, where she met Vietnamese student Thong Nguyen. They lived in Vietnam after their marriage, moved to Auckland after they were evacuated from Saigon in 1975, and eventually settled in Australia. Jillian, also a graduate of the University of Auckland, was the one who married a Kiwi and lived her entire life in New Zealand. 

The book has lots of photographs, a reminder to those of us who would like to write memoirs the importance of archiving the many family pictures that have been taken through the years. The Hooper triplets decided to produce their memoir "as a record, in an economical format, for our immediate families, for a wider pool of relatives and for close friends who had witnessed us growing up or had, in some way or other, been a part of our lives." Incidentally, Azlina/Joy is the one on the left on the front cover (the photo was shot when they were four years old).

Azlina, as she is now. She has edited countless books on art, crafts and culture, and is the author of a number of books, including Songket Revolution and Malaysian Batik.