Memoriam the Second

My grandmother on my father's side passed away at 3am on Sunday. She had been sickly even before that; this was, I think, the fourth time in a year or so that she had been hospitalised with complaints of difficulty breathing. She had already been unable to sleep without the help of an oxygen concentrator, and her mobility was already extremely limited due to her breathlessness. We were informed of this by a group call on the family Messenger at around 6am. At the moment the immediate concerns were to pay off the remainder of her hospital bill and bring the body home, and then to alert everybody who was still sleeping and had missed the group call.

This happened in Johor. A significant part of the family was in Singapore and unable to return: Fourth Aunt, Third Brother, Fourth Sister, myself, and various other cousins and in-laws. Others yet were overseas. As I told someone, geographical distance helps a little with emotional distance. But there always comes a time for remembering.

I know very little of my grandmother's early history. I know she suffered some unknown but serious illness, back when my father and his siblings were still young; the medical bills at that time were bad, and I remember being told that that was a time when their regular meals consisted of a little rice and a lot of water. I don't know if she was formally educated or to what extent. I know her family was separated when she was young; one of her sisters still lives in the mountains of Guangdong, and my father visited them some years back. She came to Malaysia, and at some point in time was arranged to marry my grandfather. I still don't know very much about her, and it is something of a point of guilt now that I know very little of the social circles she had.

She was an immensely good cook. She would have had to be, to provide for nine children and then many, many grandchildren. She made traditional Teochew foods and festive snacks and that watery porridge that goes with salted black beans and a deep-fried fish so crunchy that the bones snap and crumble when you bite into it. She made those sticky red teardrop-shaped things that I still forget the name of, and she always made enough of everything to feed as many mouths as were in the house. I remember visiting during my A-Levels years, when I would always have two heaping bowls of rice every meal to go with the vegetables and meat, and there would always be a large bowl of Maggi with eggs and more vegetables on the day I had to catch the bus to leave. She also accumulated food, a hoarding habit she shared with my grandfather. The snacks and cookies that appeared every Chinese New Year would not disappear until the next Chinese New Year, unless you visited and went around eating everything. One thing she did not hoard was KFC. For some years whenever we visited and asked if there was anything she wanted - it was always KFC. I don't think she'd had any KFC in the last few months, not since her hospitalisations began, when the doctors started restricting her diet.

She had a wicked sense of humour. When my siblings and I were very young my parents off-handedly mentioned that we ought to learn some Teochew, and as she and my grandfather were visiting at the time we asked her to teach us something. And so the first Teochew phrase we ever learnt was li di zui jin chao, "your mouth stinks". Some time later we learnt ka chang ang ang, "red butthole". I cannot count to ten in Teochew, but I can tell people if they need to go brush their teeth. She pretended to have forgotten her luggage when she went to my sister's wedding, and only at the last minute produced her finery, and all was well. She was not mean-spirited, but she made things funny.

She had her faults. She loved gambling, and she would travel to Genting with my uncle sometimes. When the Marina Bay Sands opened in Singapore, and before COVID shut the borders, she would also go there. She would collect the license plate number of every new car that anybody in the family bought, or the license plate of any traffic accident she passed, and buy that number in the lottery, and sometimes she even won a little prize. She loved KFC, a little more perhaps than was strictly healthy. She did not do the exercises she should have done, which perhaps would have improved her condition after the hospitalisations. She was something of a product of her time; I remember a cousin snapping at her when she kept telling his wife to do some housework. She was passive, compared to my grandfather; he still looms larger than her, in my memory; he was the one with the temper and the loud voice and the motorbike and the gun, she was the one in the kitchen or cleaning the house. I don't think she ever expressed disagreement or even dissatisfaction with him, or at least it was never in my hearing; even after he passed, she let my uncle take leadership of the family. But that is I think the way she was brought up to be.

I remember when she would visit us, back when we were young. We would write letters to my grandparents in terrible Chinese on torn-out exercise-book paper, the only time we ever wrote 您 in any casual writing. We would always write that we missed them. Once they appeared on our doorstep quite out of the blue, and she said that it was because we'd written that we missed them in our latest letter, and that was one of the ways I learned that words can make things happen when you write them to the right people.

It's strange, watching all this from so far away. I have not been there for the ceremonies or the cremation, the eulogies or the crying - not the way I was there when my grandfather died. This time we have recorded Facebook Lives, or the short videos on the Messenger group, or the picture of her death certificate, photographed and shared almost as soon as the doctor on duty signed it. There's a vague guilt about not feeling worse about not being able to be there. There will be a strange emptiness in the house the next time I visit, when or if the borders reopen; I don't think they will be very quick to clear out her room and throw away her oxygen concentrator, her walker, or her other things. There will be a new photograph on the wall, another small stack of fruits and things arranged in front of it. Maybe there'll even be KFC on a plate.