Huen Su Yin is completely calm, even though she is just hours away from delivering her first child. The 28-year-old founder of designer confectionery Delectable by Su barely broke a sweat as she talked about the C-section surgery she would undergo later in the afternoon.
“I’m actually due in 10 days. But since a few days ago, the baby’s movements have changed. As a safety precaution, we’ve decided to have him out earlier,” she explains.
It seems fitting, though, for her to reflect on her bond with her mother, on the verge of entering motherhood herself.
Her bubbly mother, Lily Lau, 57, is more excited than overly worried about her daughter’s condition.
“It’s great news – it means we don’t have to wait for 10 more days!” the enthusiastic grandmother-to-be jokes.
A remisier based in Ipoh, Lau travels to Kuala Lumpur on Fridays to spend the weekends with her husband and two daughters.
According to Huen, her mother is as carefree as they come. “Even if she is worried, she would make it seem as though it’s nothing so you won’t feel the pressure. She knows how to take a chill pill and is always trying to calm me down. I’m more like my dad, who’s a worrier,” she reveals.
Huen and Lau share little physical resemblance – the two seem more like old friends than mother and daughter. Put them in a chatty mood, however, and the familial resemblance would be too obvious to miss. Both are friendly, gregarious extroverts who share a great sense of humour. From baking out of her mother’s kitchen, Huen went on to open her first retail outlet in The Gardens Mall in Kuala Lumpur in 2009, specialising in customised multi-tiered cakes and swoon-worthy desserts for birthdays, weddings and various events.
Four Delectable Treats outlets later, she is as passionate as ever about baking. The construction management graduate currently has a team of seven to help her with her daily dealings of fondant and sugar paste.
While studying in Australia, Huen had to learn to cook and she spent hours experimenting with the broiler in her rented basement apartment. Easy cake mixes followed and soon, the Ipoh girl was making a small fortune selling baked sweet treats via her blog, Cookingismypassion.blogspot.com.
When she graduated, Huen jetted off to Florida’s Notter School of Pastry Arts, returning home six months later with a diploma in European pastry.
From the outset, Huen says she received a lot of support from her parents; her mother has full faith in her abilities to succeed.
“When I first started my business in Australia, my dad was nagging at me all the time. He said that I should be spending more time on my studies instead. My mum did a lot to help calm him down and basically, made things less stressful for everyone – she’s always the mediator in the family. She gave me a lot of freedom and I really appreciate the trust she’s always had in me.”
Lau, who admits to not being a good cook herself, recalls encouraging her daughter to chase after her passion.
“I told her: ‘You can do whatever you want as long as you pass your exams.’ And she proved herself. When she came back here and started taking on all the orders, I could see that she was really into what she was doing. I would sit with her, in our kitchen, sometimes until 3am, just to keep her company as she made the cakes from scratch,” she says.
To Huen, Lau is a boundless source of energy. “My mum is full of imagination. She has helped me with lots and lots of ideas. She was the one who suggested that we have a popcorn machine in the shop,” says Huen, gesturing towards the vintage contraption standing outside her outlet in The Gardens Mall.
“My mum is very fun – I would say that she’s still the same person she was when I was a child. She used to be the one egging everyone on to play board games in the dark during power cuts. And now, she still says strange things, and still wants to eat any funny-coloured food that she sees. She’s really adventurous and I think that has influenced a big part of my work. Through her, I learned how not to be afraid to try new things.”
Everlasting support
Fashion designer Keith Kee is no stranger to the local celebrity scene. In 2010, he caused a stir with the RM380,000 bridal gown he designed for supermodel Amber Chia. His work has also graced the Miss Chinese Cosmos South-East Asia and Miss Chinese Cosmos International beauty pageants, as well as last year’s Miss Astro Chinese International pageant.
He is all smiles when he speaks of his 68-year-old mother, Ooi Guat Sin, whom he visits weekly in Penang.
Sporting a deep red tan, Kee has just returned from a five-day holiday in Maldives, where he was attending a client’s wedding.
“It’s true what people say: A mother’s love is truly unconditional,” quips the 37-year-old. “My mum has made a lot of sacrifices for the family and yet she’s never been bitter about it. She’s filled with so much love. I don’t recall ever getting a hard time from her. No matter how difficult things got for the family, she would always smile her way through. That’s the one thing that inspires me the most.”
During his tertiary education days, Kee, the youngest of five siblings, had to overcome financial worries and his father’s disapproval of his career choice, which was deemed “a girl’s job”.
“My interest in fashion started way back when I was a child,” he says. “I was the only one among my siblings who enjoyed being ‘mum’s little helper’ when it came to her sewing jobs. At seven, I was making dresses for my sister’s Barbie dolls. I became quite popular among the neighbourhood kids as the go-to guy for designing paper dolls as well. Looking back, my mum could’ve stopped me from doing all that, but she never did. She’s always been really supportive of all her children. No matter what we wanted to do, she’d say: Just go for it. And we knew that even if we failed, she would always be there for us.”
Kee remembers how his mother, a retired seamstress, used to painstakingly wade through knee-high water to get him and his siblings to school whenever heavy rain flooded his hometown in Teluk Intan, Perak.
“My mum would get me and my siblings to stand on the table. She would wipe us down, put on our shoes and one by one, piggy-back us to the bus stop, which was 10 minutes away from the house. She had to walk really slowly and always made sure that none of us got wet. It’s the most beautiful thing any mother can do for her children.”
Kee’s relationship with his mother has strengthened further over the past 13 years, when the designer started commuting between Penang and KL to serve clients in his two boutiques.
“Every week, I spend Tuesdays to Thursdays in Penang and Fridays to Mondays in KL. It was a real challenge when I first started out – finances were still tight then and I could only travel by bus.
“My mum used to stay up to two or three in the morning to wait for my call to make sure that I had reached KL safely,” Kee recalls.
“At that time, a lot of landslides on the highway were reported in the news. So each time I got on the bus, I worried over accidents on the road and how I might never see my parents again. I suddenly realised that I needed to show them how much I appreciated their love, in case something happened to me. So one day, while saying goodbye to my mum, I gave her a hug and a kiss and told her: ‘Ma, I sayang (love) you.’ ”
Kee’s mother was taken aback at first, but has since warmed up to the idea. Slowly but surely, Kee got his father, retired factory worker Kee See Juat, 73, to accept his embraces as well.
“My dad is still a bit shy, but my mum hugs me very, very tightly now whenever I leave for KL,” Kee reveals. “Life is short; I want to take every chance that I can to tell the people I love, that I love them.”
Pillar of strength
Fashion and accessory designer Harmini Asokumar, 25, would’ve never started a blog site selling customised jewellery if it wasn’t for her late mother, Santhana Kumarie.
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