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My mother’s unfinished love story showed me that joy doesn’t need a happy ending.
We often think joy has to last to be real, but a box of old love letters taught me it can exist in the encounter, not the outcome.
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The Straits Times
2026-06-14
By Rosie Wee
When my mother died in 1967 of stomach cancer at the age of 47, she left behind her journal and a stack of letters written before and during World War II by a man called “JP”, who was not my father.
I was 17 when I found them in a wooden box in her bedroom and read them while seated on the floor, the afternoon light falling across the pages of letters written in JP’s elegant handwriting.
That was the first time I learnt of my mother’s wartime romance – with someone I had never heard of – in a lifetime I could never have imagined.
I was a naive teenager whose understanding of love and romance was limited to what I gleaned from my literature books. I was in no position to truly grasp the significance of what I had found.
I read them once, then put them back in their box.
Life pulled me forward over the next 40 years – university, career, marriage and children. I thought about the letters occasionally, but the past seemed like another country, and I had no map to return there.
After retiring, with long afternoons stretching before me, I opened the box again. The handwriting was the same, and the papers had yellowed. But this time, I was a woman in my 50s, who had lived long enough to understand the vicissitudes life throws our way. I spent more time reading the letters and thinking about my mother – as a young woman, what drew her to JP, and what kind of person he was.
My mother married my father two years after the war ended. She had never mentioned JP or a romance that ended during the war.
My late father had never said anything, either. Perhaps he never knew.
A different side of my mother
From the letters and her journal, I gathered the facts. My mother used to live in a terraced house in Saunders Road, and JP was a tenant a few houses away. He was the son of a wealthy Indonesian businessman and was studying business in Singapore.
He wrote, in impeccable English, about philosophy, family, and the precariousness of life under the Japanese Occupation.
In one letter dated Syonan, Nov 15, Syowa 18 (Nov 15, 1943), he described coming across a photograph of a woman in a newspaper: “I thought of you,” he wrote. “The resemblance – so demure and vintage.” He told my mother: “You will soon be off to the isle of Carimoon (the old name for Karimun Island in Indonesia). Such a place always escapes the horrors of war. Have confidence to see each other again.”
In the letter, he asked her to meet him alone. He had something of interest for her. The tone was urgent, yet tender.
I will never know whether she met him alone, or what gift he had for her. But I do know this: She wrote in her journal about him with equal tenderness. In one entry, she writes of dreaming about JP, looking “very tall and slim with broad shoulders... Never in my life have I felt that thrilled in reality. How I long for these romantic dreams of mine to come true”.
Their relationship had flourished despite the war, but there was no happy ending. Questions remained: What happened to JP? Why had their love not come to fruition?
On my second reading of the letters, I asked my aunt – my mother’s sister – what she knew about JP. She recalled that my mother had a boyfriend by that name, but could not remember what happened to their relationship.
“He probably died in the war,” she told me.
Whatever happened to JP, I am grateful to him. Reading those letters as a woman in my 50s, I was finally able to see my mother more fully.
The woman I had known as “Mother”, who dutifully cooked my meals and read me bedtime stories, had received love letters during the war. She had been a young person who navigated love and loss during Singapore’s darkest period.
It revealed that my mother had experienced a particular kind of joy – the joy of loving and being loved by another person, of being held in someone’s heart, cherished and irreplaceable. She had carried a love that the world’s upheaval would not allow her to keep.
With maturity comes a deeper understanding of joy. We treat joy as an emotion to be sustained. But I realised that joy can be contained in a moment, a season, even a correspondence. It does not require resolution to be real.
My mother’s happiness with JP was genuine, even though their love was cut short. The joy was in the encounter, not the outcome.
Giving my mother a voice
Even though my mother ended up marrying my father, I still wondered: What if she had ended up with JP?
I decided to tell their story. Not as a memoir – too much was missing – but as historical fiction, staying true to the emotional essence of their relationship while weaving it into the larger canvas of Singapore and Malaya’s wartime struggles. The story became my novel, The Heart Remembers, which was published in 2020.
My novel is a gift to my late mother. She lived a life I only partially understood. She loved someone who disappeared into history and made choices I can only imagine. By writing this novel, I’ve tried to document an emotional truth I sensed between the lines of those old letters.
It’s been a catharsis. I’ve been grieving not only her loss, but also the fact that I didn’t know her well enough while she was alive, and that I had so few years with her. I think of conversations that never happened.
My mother never told me about JP. She took that chapter with her. Perhaps this is what she was passing on to her daughter through these letters – an invitation to look deeper and understand that love, longing and loss are the substance of a life fully lived.
I am pleased to have given this full version of my mother a voice.
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Rosie Wee is a retired head of English department in a secondary school, a Friends of the Museums docent, and the author of several books, including The Heart Remembers.
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Finding Joy is an Opinion series about the things that bring us satisfaction, fulfilment and meaning.
If you have a submission, e-mail us at stopinion@sph.com.sg
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A handwritten letter by JP to the writer Rosie Wee's mother was transcribed as follows with the help of the Doubao app.
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(15) If I am not mistaken, you will soon be off to the isle of Carimoon (Note: The historical anglicized name for Karimun Island, also known as Karimun Besar, in the Riau Islands, Indonesia). I trust this will be a pleasant place for you, for such an island always escapes the horrors of warfare. So have faith that we will meet each other again.
As for me, I know how to be careful with my movements. I pray peace and wellbeing will arrive soon, and that everyone may once more live prosperous and happy lives.
Lastly, I wish to meet you at Koek Road Tea Shop tomorrow afternoon at 3 p.m. (short T.T. / a brief visit). This appointment is meant just for you, and I will wait for you there at three o’clock. Afterward, we may go to the museum. You can wander freely in its spacious halls, and we may look upon each other.
Please bring your nicest photograph. If you do not have it with you now, any picture will do, and I will treasure it. I can no longer clearly picture your face in my mind. Before long, I will send you a portrait of myself too, one taken at Broadway or a similar spot. I long deeply to see you.
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