The Stories We’ll Tell: A Love Letter to Growing Up Malaysian

Sometimes I wonder about the storytellers of tomorrow.

I’ve always been a natural storyteller. It’s how I make sense of the world, by connecting moments to memories, and experiences to emotions. But lately, I’ve been asking myself: what stories will today’s children tell when they’re my age, ten or twenty years from now?

Will they understand what it meant to be a kampung girl, heart racing with excitement at a kenduri, competing with other girls for the coveted role of the bunga telur girl? That mix of pride and shyness as you handed pastel-colored eggs to guests, feeling suddenly grown-up and important?

Do they know the freedom of cycling home from school with friends, the hot sun on our backs, stopping at a small warung to pool our coins together, just enough for one bowl of 50-sen ice kacang to share among three or four of us? We’d argue over who got the most red syrup, and the corn kernels at the bottom felt like treasure.

The textures of childhood are changing.

Today’s children won’t feel the breathless joy of teng-teng or rounders after school, chasing each other across dusty fields, laughing whether we won or lost. They won’t know the particular scolding that came from being caught “fishing” at the river, that blend of anger and relief in our parents’ voices because they were more worried than mad.

I remember lying at home for a whole week after falling from a tree, my body aching but my spirit lifting each time friends appeared at my window, updating me on everything I was missing. No video calls. No texts. Just their faces pressed against the glass, making me laugh despite the pain.

There was a slowness to joy that taught us patience.

Waiting seven whole days for the next episode of our favourite TV series felt eternal. But it also felt communal, everyone at school would gather the next day to discuss what happened, theories flying about what would come next. The anticipation was half the joy.

And those packed bus rides in the sweltering heat, watching other kids lick ice cream while we stood squeezed between strangers, school bags heavy on our backs. It wasn’t fair, but it taught us something about wanting, about waiting, about the sweetness that comes when you finally get what you’ve longed for.

I’m not romanticising hardship, nor saying today’s children have it easier or harder.
They have their own challenges, their own adventures. Their stories will be different, shaped by technology, by a pandemic, by a world that moves faster than ours ever did.

But as HR professionals, as parents, as adults shaping the next generation’s workplaces and world, I think about this often: how do we honour the wisdom of our experiences while staying open to theirs?

The stories we carry, of community, of resourcefulness, of finding joy in simplicity, aren’t just nostalgia. They are lessons in resilience, empathy, and connection. They remind us how to lead, how to listen, and how to build cultures that feel human again.

Maybe that’s what we pass on. Not the exact experiences, but the essence of them, the belief that connection matters, that patience has value, and that the best moments in life rarely fit in a screenshot.

What stories from your childhood still shape how you show up today?
I’d love to hear what memories make you who you are, whether you’re from a kampung, a city, or somewhere in between.

Because maybe that’s how we bridge generations: not by making our children live our stories, but by teaching them to tell their own, with depth, wonder, and gratitude.

Zielda Zainuddin is the founder of ZZ People & Culture Solutions, a boutique HR consultancy helping Malaysian businesses build culture-first workplaces. When she’s not consulting, she writes, professionally and spiritually, about the experiences that make us human.