On Monday morning, when I read that Tun Dr Siti Hasmah Mohd Ali had died, I sat still for a long time.

She was 100 years old. A century is a life we instinctively call long, full and blessed. But numbers do little to soften a goodbye, particularly when someone remains so vivid in memory.

To Malaysians, Tun Siti Hasmah was many things: one of the country’s pioneering Malay women doctors, an advocate for maternal and child health, a public figure devoted to social causes, and the woman who stood beside Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad through decades of political life.

The Tun Hasmah I remember, however, is also the woman who played my daughter’s piano from memory, picked up a violin, danced Joget in my living room and, at the age of 97, announced that she intended to learn Korean.

I was living in South Korea then, as the wife of the Malaysian Ambassador, and had the privilege of hosting her a few times.

For one lunch at the ambassador’s residence in Seoul, I had prepared a formal welcome speech. I spoke about the many roles she had occupied over the course of her life — doctor, public figure, wife of a prime minister — and about the generations of Malaysians, particularly women, who admired her.

The formality did not last very long.

After lunch, she sat at my daughter’s piano and began to play without sheet music. Later came the violin. Before long, we were dancing Joget together in the living room.

She had spent more than two decades as the wife of a prime minister, yet she carried none of the distance that such a position might have created. At 97, she was slight in frame but astonishingly energetic. She sang, danced and played music with us for hours, seemingly untouched by fatigue.

On another day, I accompanied her through Insadong, Seoul’s old neighborhood of calligraphy, paintings and traditional crafts. She delighted in everything. We bought paintings and clothes — at age 97, she still enjoyed looking beautiful. We had afternoon tea at the Grand Hyatt, admired the cherry blossoms and visited the mosque in Itaewon.

In retrospect, those days hardly felt like diplomatic hosting. They felt more like taking an elder around the city — sometimes almost like being with a mother, or a grandmother.

Before leaving Korea, she told me quite seriously that she wanted to learn Korean when she returned to Malaysia. I later sent her several Korean-language books, which delighted her.

She was 97.

At the time, I simply found it charming. Only much later did I realise how characteristic it was of her. At 97, she was still curious enough to begin something entirely new. The world remained interesting to her.

Yet what stayed with me most deeply was something quieter: she never made me feel like an outsider.

I was born and raised in China and later made Malaysia my home. Life then carried me into circumstances I could never have imagined when I was younger. As the wife of a Malaysian ambassador, I was acutely aware that I did not fit the conventional image of the role. My background was different. My mother tongue was different. Much of my cultural experience was different.

In such surroundings, one becomes very conscious of difference.

There is one form of acceptance that arrives after you have demonstrated that you deserve it: you have adapted well, integrated well, understood the culture, proved yourself useful. That recognition can be generous and sincere. But somewhere within it lies the idea that belonging had first to be earned.

Tun Hasmah never made me feel that way.

She did not appear to register me first as someone from elsewhere and then make a gracious decision to include me. There was no sense that I had passed some invisible test of being “Malaysian enough”.

I was simply there.

We ate, talked, walked through Seoul, shopped and danced. Nothing about my presence required explanation.

Perhaps that is one of the rarest forms of acceptance: not being told that your difference is acceptable, but discovering that it has never become an obstacle in the first place.

Tun Hasmah had that quality.

She did not make people feel the weight of her stature. Nor did she make difference into a performance of tolerance. She met people with an ease that left very little room for hierarchy or self-consciousness.

These seem like small things. But character is often most visible in small things.

Public figures are remembered through offices held, causes championed and historical events witnessed. Tun Hasmah’s life contained more than enough of all three.

But when I think of her now, history recedes.

I see Insadong.

I see the cherry blossoms in Seoul.

I see her at the piano in my living room.

I hear a 97-year-old woman telling me, with complete seriousness, that she was going home to learn Korean.

And I remember something she probably never knew she had given me.

For many years, I struggled with the question of where I belonged. I had left the country of my birth and built a life in another. I had entered rooms and roles in which I was constantly and acutely aware that my story was not the conventional one.

Tun Hasmah never asked me, in words or otherwise, to justify that story.

In her presence, I did not feel that I had to become someone else before I could belong to Malaysia.

She simply made me feel that I already did.

Perhaps that is my most personal way of saying goodbye.

Thank you, Tun Hasmah.

May you rest in peace.

(Lin Yi, an ambassador’s wife who loves to read, write, and observe different cultures.)