FEATURE: In Memoriam, My Grandma

This is a tribute to a woman I have greatly admired, I regret not expressing this love and admiration as much as I should when I had the chance. Hopefully, in this space, my love for Grandma flows freely for the first time into a sea of eternal love – a body of inspiration for all who have been afraid to express love and display passion. Fear not now...

She’s been there all my life, always a source of love, strength and peace. She was there the day I took my first step; the day I spoke my first word, learned my first English alphabet, wrote my first Chinese character; the morning my eyes filled with tears because mommy couldn’t send me off on my first day at school. She was there when I failed Math test for the first time, the day my heart broke over some bloke, the evening daddy caned me for being such an incorrigible rascal.

I never doubted she would always be there – to see me graduate from university, witness my wedding, name my first child. I was wrong. She had beamed at my university degree but she would never be physically present on my wedding day or at the birth of her great-grandchild.

Ephemeral
… this world is
Ethereal
… now she is
Flitting free
… but anchored in memories
This grandma
… we shall all miss

My beloved grandmother left us that quiet afternoon of August 12 2003, the day the world lost yet another sparkling jewel. She was 98.

All my life, her presence had always been taken for granted, or simply because I couldn’t bear the thought of her eventual passing one day. Today, I feel her in spirit, guiding me through life like she’d always had. Like the day she, the spunky lady of 70, pushed the 2 little imps, my sister and I, in our prim little pram, in the direction of my mom who clocked out of work at 5pm some kilometers from where home was.

Grandma was mom to me in many ways. Lucky me, I was the apple of grandma’s eye. Maybe because I was the first long-awaited child of her youngest son – my father. Much to my sisters’ envy and my mom’s dismay (you see, she tried to maintain meritocracy in the family), grandma always managed to save the best of goodies for me.

Oh wisdom…
See yourself in her centenarian gaze
Untouchable
But flow you will
This young creek must fill today

She would be the first to wake every morning, making sure I had a full breakfast – which had to include a glass of milk until I graduated primary school – and my lunch box packed for recess. Then she would stand on the threshold, her gaze holding my receding figure as I sprinted off in the distance; I knew she would have come with me had age not caught up with her and wrecked the muscles in her legs.

Looking into her ageing gray eyes, one saw wisdom beyond her years. Married with kids at an age when I was only about to shed my adolescent shell, grandma was one hell of a tough lady. Why, she’s seen 2 World Wars, not including the Korean and Vietnam Wars closer to home, and the 2 Gulf Wars of recent times.

Like the old Chinese saying, she had certainly “consumed more salt than we have rice”.

Abandon…
Material pleasures
Revel in…
A simple kind of life

My grandma single-handedly brought up 7 children on the demise of my grandfather when daddy was a very young boy. Thrift was a virtue that ran in the family. With that, she saw all her children through school. At a time when many families were plagued with poorly educated offsprings, grandma’s children would go on to graduate with diplomas in teaching – all of them. That, in those days, spoke volumes.

Never one to indulge in luxuries, grandma preferred to savour the simple pleasures of life. As a young girl, I loved the presence of grandma’s few close girl friends who dropped by our home every other day. They would discuss mundane daily matters animatedly, gossip about other mutual friends, share recipes… I do not recall many occasions when grandma ventured out of home but when she did, a trip to the temple was quite certain. I have missed the flowers that she would bring home from some of those trips… “put these in your bath water… be blessed by the Goddess of Mercy”. Her strong religious beliefs have filled a spiritual void in me, a space that I can seek refuge at on the gloomier days of my life.

This is her life story…
One tale of victory and glory
One made of many short takes
of perseverance, diligence, dignity

Grandma sure could appreciate a great tale. She could not read… but she loved stories from the news that we filled her in from time to time. She sighed at the freak incident of a young man swallowed alive by a monstrous python – “to think I’ve lived this long to hear this weird tale”. She cursed all the new wars “didn’t the world wars break enough spirits”. Those horrific days must still be very vivid in the eye of her mind that her account of the Japanese Occupation atrocities always triggered a deep chill down my spine.

After all that she had been through, it was small wonder that Grandma found some form of cathartic release in television dramas that revolved around life struggles. In many such programmes, there were scenes that she could exemplify with real life stories. Although the small screen images were fiction, Grandma’s stories were a true account of the plight of early immigrant Chinese – a story of resilience and diligence – one like her own, and one that subsequent generations should heed as the mantra of life.

Aye, grandma’s stories do get repeated. Every little thing reminded us of the grand old lady. A neighbour gave us a bowl of vegetables yesterday and my mom immediately said, “it’s your grandma’s favourite. She loved it. She’d ask me to get it whenever I saw it at the market but she’s also always so afraid to eat it.” It’s a species of tall leafy green vegetables, which I have always known as (in Hokkien) “toa chye”, which translates to “big vegetable”. The “toa chye” has “wind” and would cause her joints and back to ache. But its soft and smooth texture was pleasing to her almost toothless mouth, not to mention the sweet fragrance that emanated from the pot when it was simmered with pork that even I found it hard to resist!

The pain in her joints and back would intensify nearer the change of “seasons”. In the Chinese calendar, there are 24 “seasons”. And Grandma could approximate every single one of them by heart, or took cue from the intensity of the pain in her bones. She would then ask me to consult the calendar and confirm her guess. I didn’t understand the significance of these seasons initially, except that they caused her more pain than usual.

Is change painful
the old bones will tell
for better or for worse but never for the fool
the wise will embrace
Change is the start of every great tale

The 24 seasons may be significant in several other ways but the one that I know of, each “season” marks a different stage in the farming cycle and were religiously observed by farmers in China where Grandma came from many years ago, whose livelihood depended solely on the harvest of the crops. A bountiful year meant meat on the platter for the next spring celebration (Chinese New Year); otherwise, the entire family would usher in the New Year hungry and cold, and praying for a better harvest that year.

She may not have much to keep her stomach filled, much less to experiment with, in those early days, but my Grandma was a very decent, if not the best cook, that I know. Every guest has only words of praise after tasting her fragrant chicken rice with my mom’s homemade chili sauce, sea cucumber boiled to perfect tenderness in thick black sauce with ginger and wine, hard-boiled eggs simmered in black sauce spiced with Chinese star anise and garlic, rice dumplings with meat fillings, yam rice, mixed porridge, and the list could go on till I drool.

This is her legacy we uphold. My mother had been a good student in Grandma’s kitchen. The fragrance of these dishes fills the air on the few occasions when we offer ancestral prayers – death anniversaries, the Hungry Ghost Festival and the eve of Chinese New Year. On other days, the chicken rice, yam rice, and other delicacies from Grandma’s recipes make regular appearances in my mother’s kitchen.

With every dish and every whiff, the memory of dear Grandma creeps into our minds, her timeless stories remembered and revered as the guide that keeps us from stumbling, walking this uneven path of life.

She is sorely missed
… but never forgotten