Lessons from my School: The Journey of the French Nuns and their Convent Schools by Chen Yen Ling (review)

In 1852, a handful of French Catholic nuns who had endured a turbulent sea voyage of many months arrived on the island of Penang. They had been charged with a mission to establish a school for girls. The institution that they founded was the first in a large network of convent schools—so named because of their founders’ evangelical origins—that are now distributed widely across Malaysia and Singapore. Over the past century and a half, the schools weathered shortages of everything from students to staff, from money to classroom space. They witnessed war and social unrest, evolving alongside momentous transitions such as decolonization and the secularization of education. Their alumnae stretch across generations and include tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of women at various levels of Southeast Asian society. With such an extensive history and influence, it is no surprise that recent years have seen increasing efforts to document the experiences of these schools and the women who founded, operated, and grew up in them.

Chen Yen Ling’s book is one of these publications. As a graduate of St. Anne’s Convent School at Kulim, in northern Malaysia, Kedah, Chen has a sentimental connection to her alma mater and the larger religious community from which it arose. Her work is a combination of institutional chronicle, international history, and personal memoir. Chen takes the reader back to the origins of the Infant Jesus (IJ) Sisters as an order of teaching nuns in seventeenth-century France, tracing the survival and growth of the ‘Dames de St. Maur’, as they were also known, during a tumultuous era in Western European history. As imperial expansion reached deeper into Southeast Asia during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, missionary groups established schools and charitable enterprises that would serve both the colonial need for English-language speakers in their workforce and local needs for education and social welfare services – not to mention, of course, the ever-present hope of religious conversions. As missionary-founded schools for boys and girls alike spread across British Malaya and Singapore, the colonial administration began to take a stronger and more interventionist interest in these institutions. Eventually, national independence and the transition to a more ‘Malaysianised’ educational approach—whereby, among other changes, the convent schools switched from English to Malay as the medium of instruction—ushered in a new era of full secularization and localization.

As an ‘insider’s view’ of the convent schools’ history in Malaysia and even farther back, Lessons from my School has a mixture of strengths and weaknesses. The book was clearly a labour of love for Chen, who had a long career in accounting and the corporate world before shifting to freelance writing. As a non-academic, Chen worked closely with St. Anne’s Convent School in Kulim, the IJ Provincialate in Malaysia, and the Cheras Convent in Kuala Lumpur to conduct her research and publish this volume. Her research included careful perusal of school and IJ annals, consisting in the main of handwritten records by the Sisters of daily activities and observations, as well as personal interviews with nuns and even a journey to France to visit the original premises of the ‘Mother House’ for the Dames de St. Maur.

The combination of authorial passion and attention to detail in the IJ archives helps to create vivid characterizations of individual Sisters, from the small and bewildered band that arrived in 1852 to the generations who worked assiduously to keep their schools alive and prospering across the years. Especially poignant are the accounts of these first Sisters who voyaged to Penang, the youngest of whom was only twenty-two years old, and whose lessons in the English language only began when their ship set sail. For example, the leader of the group, thirty-year-old Mother St. Pauline, was already ill with...