There are several reasons why this blog has seen a dearth of entries of late; one of them has to do with hospitals. My grandfather was recently and suddenly diagnosed with prostrate cancer in the advanced stages.
This is a man I live with, and have lived with, all my life. The only days I don’t see him are the days when I’m out of the country. To see him go from the sprightly and curious funny old man who always had too many questions to ask and too many things to do, to bedridden and slightly depressed about needing people to help him with the most basic of functions, is really quite shocking. No longer do you see this short, bald man in his Chinese singlet and shorts, torch in hand, shining a light on my face while I’m sleeping while on his rounds; no longer does he venture to annoy me with his pointless but funny questions about anything and everything.
But we learn. We all do.
In the midst of morphine-induced hallucinations, this intensely private man who has seldom spoken about his life as a boy in China — possibly because of the bad memories he associates with the mainland, as an orphan and later as an adopted child — he began ‘seeing’ Japanese soldiers in the hallway. Suddenly he was ten, all over again, in 1940, right smack in the middle of the Japanese incursion into China. The Japanese soldiers were there at the door and they were going to take his father away. Somehow knowing his father was about to die, he’d begged his father to come home to see them one last time. He did, and my great grandfather soon numbered among the millions of the Japanese’ bloody Southeast Asian adventure and its shocking body count.
Anpo, in Chaozhou (Teochew), where I’m two generations removed from. His father dead, my grandfather as a boy of ten, was standing by the port one day watching what I imagine must have been pure chaos — the scene of Chinese fleeing in droves, and Japanese soldiers descending upon the town. My family is full of accidental travellers and nomads — hardly surprising then, how I turned out. While watching the chaos of the port before him, a Japanese woman asked him if he’d like to go “somewhere”. My ten year old grandfather said yes, and he claims he was picked up by some adult and shoved into a boat whose destination he was quite unclear of. So it could have been anything, any place. It could have been Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand. Malaysia. France. Any African country. We coastal Chinese types have proven ourselves capable of landing ourselves in other peoples’ land, and doing better than we would have back “home”. On my travels through Southeast Asia I was struck by how the Chinese communities that stuck on in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, were overwhelmingly Teochew — I spoke my language far more often in the Russian Market in Phnom Penh than I do even in Chinatown, Singapore — and they were flourishing, even after having assimilated into Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian or Lao society. While interrogating an old Teochew couple in Phnom Penh on their journey from China to Southeast Asia, and life under the Khmer Rogue, they called me a gagi nang, “our own people”, and all this talk about my ancestral home whose name I only just learned hit me: what if grandfather was on the boat to Cambodia? Indonesia? Thailand? I could very well have been Cambodian myself. Teochew Chinese Cambodian, but still.
After spending more than sixty years in the nan yang (‘south of the ocean’, what the Chinese used to call Southeast Asia then), he’s now lying in a hospital bed in Singapore with not many more years to his name. I suppose he can count on how this family is gathered around his bedside right now, infinitely curious about his story; a wife he still loves, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who adore him. All of us gathered about his bedside, and important matters are the order of the day’s discussion.
Chinese New Year, and what sort of sea cucumbers and abalone we should purchase for reunion dinner.
“The Chinese make these huge sea cucumbers these days… but if you ask me they look a little plastic,” my aunt volunteers her learned information. “We shouldn’t buy these edible things from China, if you don’t know their origin.. it could be dangerous!”
My grandfather offered his sagely advice. “Buy the sea cucumbers from India. They’re quite good and they cost twenty or thirty dollars. They don’t become too soggy when you cook them too.”
I’m not one for sea cucumbers or abalone. But this year, in what will possibly be my last reunion dinner at home for a while, I won’t complain about sea cucumbers or abalone invading my food, and it will be the first time. Because all I want from 2008 is for this man to be home, not at a hospital, for the Chinese New Year; and for him to remain the sharp, funny and hilariously snarky old man I know, love, and live with, for as long as he can. I don’t know what I’d do without him.
possibly related
Ah Gong and I /
Because the Chinese Can Copy Anything /
Know Your Camel /
Two Hundred and Nine /
Happy Munjen New Year /
Hospital Bedside Story
There are several reasons why this blog has seen a dearth of entries of late; one of them has to do with hospitals. My grandfather was recently and suddenly diagnosed with prostrate cancer in the advanced stages.
This is a man I live with, and have lived with, all my life. The only days I don’t see him are the days when I’m out of the country. To see him go from the sprightly and curious funny old man who always had too many questions to ask and too many things to do, to bedridden and slightly depressed about needing people to help him with the most basic of functions, is really quite shocking. No longer do you see this short, bald man in his Chinese singlet and shorts, torch in hand, shining a light on my face while I’m sleeping while on his rounds; no longer does he venture to annoy me with his pointless but funny questions about anything and everything.
But we learn. We all do.
In the midst of morphine-induced hallucinations, this intensely private man who has seldom spoken about his life as a boy in China — possibly because of the bad memories he associates with the mainland, as an orphan and later as an adopted child — he began ‘seeing’ Japanese soldiers in the hallway. Suddenly he was ten, all over again, in 1940, right smack in the middle of the Japanese incursion into China. The Japanese soldiers were there at the door and they were going to take his father away. Somehow knowing his father was about to die, he’d begged his father to come home to see them one last time. He did, and my great grandfather soon numbered among the millions of the Japanese’ bloody Southeast Asian adventure and its shocking body count.
Anpo, in Chaozhou (Teochew), where I’m two generations removed from. His father dead, my grandfather as a boy of ten, was standing by the port one day watching what I imagine must have been pure chaos — the scene of Chinese fleeing in droves, and Japanese soldiers descending upon the town. My family is full of accidental travellers and nomads — hardly surprising then, how I turned out. While watching the chaos of the port before him, a Japanese woman asked him if he’d like to go “somewhere”. My ten year old grandfather said yes, and he claims he was picked up by some adult and shoved into a boat whose destination he was quite unclear of. So it could have been anything, any place. It could have been Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand. Malaysia. France. Any African country. We coastal Chinese types have proven ourselves capable of landing ourselves in other peoples’ land, and doing better than we would have back “home”. On my travels through Southeast Asia I was struck by how the Chinese communities that stuck on in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, were overwhelmingly Teochew — I spoke my language far more often in the Russian Market in Phnom Penh than I do even in Chinatown, Singapore — and they were flourishing, even after having assimilated into Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian or Lao society. While interrogating an old Teochew couple in Phnom Penh on their journey from China to Southeast Asia, and life under the Khmer Rogue, they called me a gagi nang, “our own people”, and all this talk about my ancestral home whose name I only just learned hit me: what if grandfather was on the boat to Cambodia? Indonesia? Thailand? I could very well have been Cambodian myself. Teochew Chinese Cambodian, but still.
After spending more than sixty years in the nan yang (‘south of the ocean’, what the Chinese used to call Southeast Asia then), he’s now lying in a hospital bed in Singapore with not many more years to his name. I suppose he can count on how this family is gathered around his bedside right now, infinitely curious about his story; a wife he still loves, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who adore him. All of us gathered about his bedside, and important matters are the order of the day’s discussion.
Chinese New Year, and what sort of sea cucumbers and abalone we should purchase for reunion dinner.
“The Chinese make these huge sea cucumbers these days… but if you ask me they look a little plastic,” my aunt volunteers her learned information. “We shouldn’t buy these edible things from China, if you don’t know their origin.. it could be dangerous!”
My grandfather offered his sagely advice. “Buy the sea cucumbers from India. They’re quite good and they cost twenty or thirty dollars. They don’t become too soggy when you cook them too.”
I’m not one for sea cucumbers or abalone. But this year, in what will possibly be my last reunion dinner at home for a while, I won’t complain about sea cucumbers or abalone invading my food, and it will be the first time. Because all I want from 2008 is for this man to be home, not at a hospital, for the Chinese New Year; and for him to remain the sharp, funny and hilariously snarky old man I know, love, and live with, for as long as he can. I don’t know what I’d do without him.
possibly related
Ah Gong and I / Because the Chinese Can Copy Anything / Know Your Camel / Two Hundred and Nine / Happy Munjen New Year /