Throughout this blog, I speak often about Iban culture such as lineage, folklore, Kumang, and the ancestral strength that flows through my mother’s bloodline. But today, I want to touch on my other half: the “white man’s” side.
My late father, an expatriate from Carmarthenshire, Wales found his way to Borneo in the early 1990s while serving at Shell Brunei. It was meant to be temporary. A posting. A contract. But sometimes, destiny is hidden in temporary things. During his time in Miri, through a simple house party, he met my mother. He was sitting alone; she approached him. And that was it. History began in the most unassuming way.
He kept coming back to Borneo, a place that would ultimately shape our family’s story.
As a natural result of that, I was born in 1999 in Miri, then a modest oil town, quieter and slower than the rapidly developing city it is today.
My father was an engineer, he worked in the oil and gas industry, constantly travelling for work, moving between coasts, ports, and continents. He passed away far too soon, when I was 23, leaving me with fragments of stories rather than full chapters. While travelling to Portugal, he suffered a heart attack onboard, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing in Santiago, Spain. He was pronounced dead on Friday, 6 May 2022 at 9:30 p.m. (local time). His ashes were later brought back to the UK.
The last time I spoke to him was during our usual FaceTime session, just before he boarded the flight from Heathrow Airport, London. That memory has haunted me ever since.
Since that tragedy, I realised I did not inherit detailed family trees or heirlooms, but I inherited something else: a restless curiosity about the world.
From what little research I have done, and from the stories my father passed down to me.
Through them, I understand this much: I come from a line of seafarers.
My late grandfather, Thomas Picton Jenkins, served during World War II with the Norwegian merchant fleet aboard the M/S Geisha. He was a telegraphist, responsible for transmitting and receiving coded messages across dangerous waters. In wartime convoys sailing from Liverpool to New York, communication was survival. Signals meant coordination. Signals meant warning. Signals meant life. In many ways, he was a man who carried invisible threads between ships in the vast Atlantic.
Before him, my great-great-grandfather was a Swedish merchant seafarer. Somewhere in that lineage stands Agnes Gustafsson, my Swedish-Welsh great-grandmother, who married David Jenkins, a union documented in British records that I later discovered online. In many ways, the archives of marriage and death registries became my way of piecing together an inheritance I never got to hear directly.
It is ironic, isn’t it? That I was born in Miri, a coastal city in northern Sarawak feel most anchored by the sea.
I sometimes think it was no coincidence that I was born here. The sea has always followed the men in my bloodline.
The ocean comforts me. It always has. The word anchor means more to me than most people realize. Perhaps it is grief. Perhaps it is blood memory. Perhaps it is simply that generations before me survived because of water.
Being Eurasian in Sarawak is a peculiar inheritance. The surname Jenkins is not common here. In fact, I only know one Jenkins in Sarawak - myself. In a column by James Ritchie in the Sarawak Tribune titled Sarawak’s Eurasians — A 180-Year Journey, prominent Eurasian surnames were mentioned: Adam, Attenborough, Archer, and many more. Of course, there are not so many Jenkins around either.
Sometimes I wonder whether my surname will end with me. Whether my contribution will be small or significant.
Whether history remembers only the loud, or if it also preserves the ones who quietly carry dual worlds within them.
I have not yet made a monumental contribution to the state I love. But I am building a life that is entirely in my name. Slowly. Intentionally. Rooted in both my Iban and Welsh bloodlines.
Maybe my father travelled across seven continents. Maybe adventure was written into his bones. And maybe that same curiosity lives in me, not necessarily to leave, but to understand. To document. To archive. To write.
Coming from a humble Mirian girl, raised between longhouse stories and offshore engineering, I am learning that identity does not have to compete within itself.
I am not half of anything.
I am whole.
And whether or not history writes my name in bold, I am grateful to exist in this dynamic, peculiar, and deeply personal part of Sarawak’s story.
Forever shaped by it.
Reference:
Ritchie, J. (2021, October 8). Sarawak’s Eurasians — A 180‑year journey. Sarawak Tribune. https://www.sarawaktribune.com/sarawaks-eurasians-a-180-year-jorney/
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