Day before Chinese New Year Eve. The reason why I don't write much is because if I start I can’t stop. But I probably said that before.
Chinese New Year makes me think of my grandma a lot. She used to love Chinese New Year. It’s like she’s the spirit of Chinese New Year in the family.
I know the bad things she did do, the things people told me about her. Not big bad ones, just things like gossip, etc. But those aren’t the things I remember about her.
I remembered the time I went to my friend’s place to do school project. Yanyu’s place. I was only in primary school. She lived in the same block as my grandma. Same level. She asked me to stay for lunch, but I told her I’m going over to my gram’s place for lunch. It wasn’t like my gram had cooked for me already, I just suddenly felt like going over.
She looked in the cupboard, and at last found some instant beehoon somewhere. My gram, that is. She cooked it, and that was the first time I ate instant beehoon. It was the best instant beehoon I ever tasted. Somehow it remained in my mind. It was that old lady who walked slowly to the kitchen to look for and cook that hot savoury soup for her grand daughter. I loved her so.
Every thing I hear those new year songs, especially those really nice ones about the coming of spring, flowers blooming, etc, in like, NTUC, I always think of her. Her lunar birthday is on first day of Chinese New Year. It’s like this really big day for her. She loved green clothes, the kind with flowers on them. When we took pictures, she’d ask if she’s sitting nicely.
I remember the pink kueh she used to make, the kind with glutinous rice in it. She made special kinds for some of us, those without vege for me, just the whole thing full of dough for my youngest uncle. When she got older, my aunt took over the job, but the kuehs were always known as Ah-ma kueh. I didn't eat them for the past many years because they always put them on their altars. Then once she gave my mom a few and said quietly that they were for me, they haven’t been put on any altar.
Then there were the tang yuan, the small pink kind without anything inside. You put brown sugar in the water and get kind of orange sugar soup. And when she ate those peach-shaped pink lotus paste buns, “siew toh”, she dug out the lotus paste. She couldn’t eat it because she had diabetes. She’d give this whole tablespoonful of lotus paste to one of us kids. She was an expert on food.
On Chinese New Year Eve, she’d make one of her sons, usually my third uncle, use this wooden stick to stir a large pan of sticky flour, the kind used to make muah chee. My granddad made the sharks’ fin. He likes sharks’ fins a lot.
She doesn’t like spicy curry though. She got my aunt to make her the kind of curry that isn’t spicy at all, “Chinese curry”, they call it. That was awful.
She isn’t literate, she asked people to dial the phone numbers for her, but she has this stack of calendar paper in her old cupboard, the one day per page kind of Chinese calendar you get at Chinese medicine shops. She’d tear off the ones for special days. The days her sons got married, the day her youngest son graduated, the birthdates of each of her grandchildren, and she’d get someone to write down for her at the back of that piece of calendar paper the special event for that day. And then she’d put it on top of that pile she already has. She kept it for years. That’s her equivalent of a diary, I supposed.
She used to work alongside my granddad at their stall, when she was in her fifties. I wish I knew her then. They told me how she cooked then, even when she was older, she was the kind who could handle very hold things, like a hot pan, with her bare hands and not be burnt, kind. Later my uncle took over the stall, but she still used to go down to the market every few days to sit around, and eat her favourite foods.
My granddad used to have this like tricycle thing. Except the passenger side was more like an open cart, mainly they used it to carry their business stuff, peanuts, flour, sugar, etc, when they were still operating the business. I can imagine my gram sitting on the cart side while my granddad cycled. My dad and his brothers sat on it too, when they were younger. My dad used to talk about how he woke up really early to go to the market with my granddad, how he fell down and got a certain scar.
I liked that cart a lot. To me it was really cool. I think I got to sit on it once or twice when I was young.
My gram was still from the generation who actually used scrap pieces of cloth to make diapers for babies. I had some, my mom told me. That my gram had made. I was the last grandchild to use them, the rest used white cloth after that. I had a patchwork blanket. I forgot if it was my gram or my mom who made it.
I wrote about my grandparents in my soci essay in the first module. In NUS. It was the only essay for which I got an A.
Once someone, at some Social Work workshop, I think, was teaching about “safe place”, that everyone needs that place in our lives where we can feel safe. He told us to think of a time, one time when we feel the most safe, comforted. I thought, and the thing that came to my mind wasn’t my mom, it wasn’t even my dad, it was my grandmother. There was a time when I was little, I was staying over at her house, I was sleeping in her room with her. Her room in that old house smelled of medicated oil. She was afraid of the cold, so she didn’t even on the fan. But she could tell I was hot, and there she was in the middle of the night, fanning me with one of her straw fans, to make me cooler. She was trying to get me to go to sleep, and she said this, “zhud zhud ook, zhud zhud ook”, something like that, it meant to tell me to sleep tightly, something like that. That was my most secured childhood memory. A couple of years ago, the last time she came to my place during Chinese New Year, I told her that. That I remembered that memory. She was sitting on a sofa in the corner of the sitting room, so quietly, while everyone else was in the middle near the television, making lots of noise. It suddenly came to me that my grandparents, who were the centre of the family, were kind of fading away. They used to be the ones in the centre, talking and having authority, but now it was like they were too tired, too old to do this anymore. Their sons were the ones talking loudly, making decisions, while they sat by quietly. My granddad was tired and had gone to sleep in my sis’s room. Watching her sit there reminded me of that song learnt in Hokkien service, the one with “yeo-ah-yeo” in it. The one about no matter how the wind and rain blows, the Lord still holds us so we won’t shake. That’s the song I really wanted to sing to her then, but I couldn’t. Or couldn’t make myself. That I can’t sing to her anymore. All I could do was tell her about my memory. I think that was the closest I came to telling her I loved her. By the time I went to the hospital that week she died, I wasn’t sure she could hear me anymore. With all those stoic people around, I couldn’t make myself say anything anyway, except keep calling her name.
When Chinese New Year comes, I listen to those songs on the street, they remind me of her.
