Eulogies
19 Jul
I don’t mean to keep talking about death, but I just had to make this little video for the family. I guess it’s the closest this blog has ever gotten to anything so personal — my whole family’s in there, along with me speaking in a strange language (and crying badly at the same time), my brother leading prayers and singing hymns, and my father speaking about family history.
The only time I appear is at the 4th minute, and you probably won’t understand a single word I’m saying. I speak about 2 sentences of English in there. The entire memorial was held in English; it didn’t seem right to me to say what I needed to say and know that a substantial number of the family, including my grandmother, and what’s left of gramps, wouldn’t understand a word of it. So I spoke Teochew, although it wasn’t as perfect as I wanted it to be. (I’m reading off a notebook; it was immensely difficult to write a speech in a language that couldn’t really be written.)
My ex-rockstar brother sings for him at 19:53 because grandpa always said he couldn’t make any money from singing. It takes a lot to make my brother read Chinese, or to sing it.
I wanted to put in subtitles, but it’s too much work. A brief translation. (It doesn’t really make very much sense in English, but this is what I grew up on: this impossibly high pitched language, and a grandfather who spoke it to me.)
“Since I was young I was raised by my grandparents. Grandma washed the dishes and the clothes, and brought us to the school bus. Grandpa watched TV, listened to the radio, played with his torch lights, answered the phone. Auntie called everyday to look for grandma and he would pick up. If she called thrice, he would bluff her thrice. Tell her grandma’s not home, she went to Johor. Grandma went on a holiday. Grandma disappeared. Grandma.. “I don’t know where I left her!” Grandpa also liked to play around with his six grandkids and grandma would scold him “you anyhow say”.
He would say, “You silly, you stupid, you ‘ben ben’. Go to the market and buy me satay and durian! And the satay, don’t buy pork… buy the dragon meat satay, it tastes better.”
Grandpa liked to play around with us, and grandma scolded him every time.
He also liked torch lights very much.
Every night, in the dead of the night, he would take a torch to the toilet. Before he got there he’d come into my room. To turn off the fan.
Whether or not I was sleeping he’d scold me, “you silly, the fan is on such high speed, and you’re inside the blanket. What’s the fan blowing at? your head?”
I should have told him, “if I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be able to sleep every night with that torch on my face.”
In his 81 years what he loved most were three things. Torch lights, alarm clocks, radios.
I guess you could say I’m the laziest grandchild out of all six of them. I can sleep all day and not go to school. Dad, mum, grandma would give up on waking me up for school. So the job fell to him. How’d I know he had 100s of alarm clocks by his bed. Every morning if I didn’t wake up for school he’d put 8 alarm clocks next to me… and make them ring at the same time. If I still didnt’ wake up, he’d sit in his room and call my mobile phone and say, “you woman, why do you sleep so much? it’s 10pm! school’s over and you havent gone!”
These last years that I was abroad. Every time I packed to leave granny would worry I haven’t had enough clothes and underwear. Grandpa would worry I didn’t have enough torch lights. Whether I went to India or anywhere else, he’d give me a torch each time. And my bag…he’d tie ribbons all over them. Pink ones.”
cut to brother’s speech… I was crying too much.
