At 80, her mind remains sharp, her wit quick and her laughter infectious. One can’t help but listen intently as Longuet, who hails from Paris, describes how she found love and subsequently planted roots in Malaysia.
The year was 1971 and Longuet, a single mother, had just arrived in Duyong Island, Terengganu with her children. The island was famed for its skilled boat builders, and Longuet intended to order two sailing boats: one for an acquaintance, the other for her to sail the Pacific Ocean.
“I wanted to go to tropical countries filled with nature. Just to see how people lived, not because I wanted to live there,” she recalled. She had always loved to sail, having learnt the basics when she was younger.
Her first impression of the island is hard to forget. “It was all green, emerald. Chengal and coconut trees covered the island. There were sandy beaches, and water from the estuary of the Terengganu River surrounded the island.”
Between the gently swaying trees, she saw wooden houses with nipah roofs. It was a far cry from sophisticated Paris, but the sheer beauty of the island took her breath away.
As she explored, she found herself drawn to how the locals lived and learnt how to speak Malay from the boat builders. “I first learnt words like ‘besar’, ‘kecil’, ‘panjang’, ‘satu’, ‘dua’, ‘tiga’, how many metres, feet and inches.”
Still, it was only meant to be a temporary sojourn as she waited for her boats to be completed. But then, she said, she got “kidnapped” – by love, that is! Specifically, a man named Wan Othman Wan Abdullah, who was better known on the island as Awi.
“He had thick eyebrows, sparkling smile, broad shoulders and long legs,” she recalled. “He was handsome and charismatic. He understood me, so we got on well.”
Love blossomed between them, and they decided to get married. But his mother wasn’t pleased: Awi was the son of an imam, while Longuet was a Caucasian woman who was about nine years older.
Still, the couple didn’t give up. In the early days of their marriage, they lived in a small house and had to eat on the floor because they didn’t have a dining table.
They eventually had four children and lived a happy life on the island, together with Longuet’s four other children.
Her mother-in-law, Longuet shared, eventually warmed up to her. “She had diabetes and her leg had to be amputated. I looked after her. After all, she was my mother-in-law. She liked me in the end.”
The couple also set up a boatbuilding enterprise in an effort to keep the island’s heritage in sea-vessel construction alive. Longuet’s ability to speak English, Malay and French was handy as they had foreign customers.
Seeing that some of these visitors needed accommodation, the couple started a charming guest house called Awi’s Yellow House.
The locals, Longuet added, accepted her; in return, she built a library for the community, filled with books about architecture, art and botany, among other topics.
A voracious reader who enjoys writing, painting and researching, Longuet even completed her master’s degree in architecture, having developed an interest in the traditional Malay houses on Duyong Island.
The grandmother of 26 and great-grandmother of nine – with a 10th on the way – will be graduating with a PhD in ethnobotany next month, and is also planning to write her memoir.
Sadly, Awi passed away in 2019 from cancer. But even towards the end of his life, he remained charismatic, she shared fondly.
Although Longuet never ended up sailing the Pacific Ocean, she found love in Malaysia: love for an island, its people and culture, and for a wonderful man. And it has led her to spend more than half of her life in a country thousands of miles away from where she was born.
Even so, where does Longuet consider home? “I am an ‘orang bumi’ (person of the earth),” she replied. “Wherever I stay on this earth is my home.”