i didn’t know it, but you are one of the most important people in my life - one of my constants that accompanied me from childhood through young adulthood. i know you will be with me for the rest of my life.
there are so many golden memories we have shared. i wish there had been someone to capture them all - your primness and fussiness, your faux annoyance, your doting smile.
you were here before my memories even began, holding chubby little me and looking at me like i was the most precious thing you had ever seen. i take pride in being able to squeeze a proper smile out of you on camera, because of the prim barely-there smiles you favour.
in my early childhood, you came over just about every other day. you’d drive your manual nissan sunny carefully, wearing your sunglasses and looking more chic than i could ever hope to. you always had fisherman’s peppermints and fox sweets in your handbag, and always slipped me a sweet treat before afternoon naps on my dreamy blue mattress. afternoons with you were the best, where you’d close the heavy curtains and turn on the air-conditioner, and pat-pat me to sleep.
i remember fighting with you over the channels on every single television available to us. you always wanted to watch teletext, astute investor that you were, and i always wanted to watch little bear (but also i just wanted to annoy you sometimes because it was hilarious getting you riled up). that’s how you became mama bear to me. (and yes, you more or less always gave in to me. i know you enjoyed these little fights too.)
yes, i also definitely deliberately aimed the fan at your hair occasionally, delighting in your ruffled feathers as you crossly patted your hair back into place.
thursday lunches with you and kong-kong were the best. i felt like a little princess going out with you both to the hotel, eating my favourite dim-sum and scampering around the hotel between courses. some days we’d eat at jack’s place too - it will always have a special place in my heart because of how much you enjoyed the experience of eating there.
whether at thursday lunches or sunday dinners, you always checked to make sure i was enjoying the food, and that i had eaten enough. you always advocated to order the dishes i really loved, and made sure to take note of what i liked so that you could remember to order it again the next time round. you always gave me the last coveted piece of food.
i definitely get my love for ice-cream and grocery shopping from you. perhaps my favourite memories are the golden afternoons where we’d share a 25-cent vanilla cone, then go to ntuc where i’d push your trolley around and take pride in carrying your groceries. i still do this for amy all the time, even though she complains that i’m too obsessive about keeping the trolley neat.
on the drives home, you’d always complain about everything under the sun. i have no idea why, but your complaining is the funniest thing ever and you’d always ask me faux-sternly what i was laughing at. i don’t know if you knew that sometimes i’d tell you a triggering detail just to provoke another mini-rant, just for my entertainment.
your home was more or less my second home. so many of my sun-tinged memories were forged here. i’d delight in digging up your tiny garden, only to hit the paving of gravel perhaps 20 centimeters into the ground. i certainly felt like a little adult, wielding the little trowel and thinking i was helping the plants flourish by “turning the soil”.
somehow, you’d allow me back into your spotless house (i always tell people i’d be willing to eat an entire meal off your floor, it was that clean), sternly instructing me to scrub my hands and feet clean before continuing to run amok.
you allowed me to drape a mattress and your comforter over the clothes rack in the spare room, where i loved to build my own blanket fort and hide out. even though you probably thought it was silly, you indulged me anyway, just like you did my soft toy show-and-tells. i am so glad some of my soft toys got to meet you; i loved shocking you with fog, and i am sure he will remember you always too. fatty will probably remember you, since he remembers anyone who calls him out for being fat.
perhaps the adult in my life who was the most supportive of my sweet tooth, you always offered me chocolates from your fridge. fearful of my mother’s reproach, i started to decline when i grew a bit older, but looking back, i wish i had accepted every one. it’s not like i didn’t sneak a truffle or two sometimes, when my cravings overcame my ability to resist.
you were always so happy when i slept over. only upon looking back that i realize your half-jokes about when i would sleep over again were not as much jokes as much as they were your way of expressing that you love and miss tiny me. i’m so sorry i didn’t realize before it was too late.
you’d complain that i was a “lazy pig” who was hard to rouse from bed and loved to nap, but you did so with a smile - and you were the one who would always turn your air-con on on full blast and ask me to sleep, you totally set me up! somehow, sharing a room with you, sleep was never far from me, even though the same cannot be said about the mosquitoes.
but my favourite memories of you have to be family dinners. not the sunday dinners, where i had to dress up in stiff frocks and be on my best behaviour as the littlest hotel heiress. just the regular dinners at your house, where you captured my heart with your food, which has always been and likely will always be the best home-cooked food to me. where dinner always started at 6pm, and being the playful kid that i was, it’d take multiple shouts to tear a reluctant little me away from my blanket fort and trot down the stairs.
i used to clamour to eat at your place all the time. i probably upset my mom because i said nowhere else had food like yours, especially the food at our own house which was way worse. (this is objective and i still stand by it - you’re the only person that consistently cooks vegetables so delicious you have me scrambling to finish the entire plate.) she commented that you probably added msg to your dishes, but i always believe you didn’t - your dishes were always delicious in a way that no artificial flavouring could achieve.
i promise i will learn the recipes that are close to our hearts. it is so fortunate that you passed a few on to my helpers - much as you disliked them, i know you wanted me to be able to enjoy the dishes i loved so much. i regret that you never got to try food i personally prepared, but i will always vividly remember the taste of your cooking, and strive to recreate our dinner classics. please excuse me while i list them:
- finely chopped chinese cabbage / phuay leng with sukiyaki beef stir-fry
- phuay leng and garlic stir-fry
- prawns in tomato sauce with white onions
- sausage or scallion omelette
- chicken abalone chinese cabbage button mushroom soup
- crab meat ball and bamboo shoot soup
there is no price i would not pay to get to eat a dinner together one last time, and perhaps even be the one to cook it for you.
you are so inspirational. i do not know any other person who truly started with hardly anything, lived through the horrors of the japanese occupation, then turned their lives around to become so wildly successful. amy says during your first job as a cashier, you began dabbling in investments, and subsequently ended up fired because you were checking stock indices and planning investments on the job. she says you have the midas touch, and i definitely believe that - everything you touched is cast with a golden hue in the halls of my mind. you got to fall in love with kong-kong, and travel europe and america, and have two beautiful daughters who love and care for you like no other. i wonder how ruby feels about this loss - surely your broker had to be close to you in some way, given how often i saw you calling her.
despite starting with nothing, you worked and saved and invested to build up your reserves. you even kindly offered to sponsor my school fees, knowing that my brother is such a financial stressor on my family. i dearly wish you had been able to see me graduate - i wanted to tell my parents to give up one of their tickets to you at my graduation, because i know it was such a dream for you to see me become a fully-fledged doctor. i will study hard and strive to be a good doctor in the years to come. i will do my best by all my patients, and strive to have a heart for them and their family just like your doctors did for you and ours.
in spite of your family turmoil, you were the only one who had the heart to check in on aunty betty, calling her daily to engage her, even when her own children had disowned her because of what she had done to them. you made amends with your other remaining siblings in your later years, and i hope that was healing in some way.
you definitely have a place in the hearts of the old ladies in church, who always ask after you. even though church may not mean the same thing to you that it does to amy, pauline or even myself, i know it was special to you, because you made time for it - and you were never the kind to spend a moment frivolously (well, besides watching those awful channel 8 dramas. not that i will ever admit i would be riveted to the terrible acting whenever i was sprawled out on the sofa after dinner).
i have no idea how i missed all the signs that you were getting older. perhaps i didn’t want to see them.
when you fell in january 2019, i thought that might be the end of the road. i am so grateful to the surgeons for bringing you back from the brink that time. it was touch and go, but you were always such a fighter. i admire your zest for life and your willingness to cling on for dear life to any chance to survive. i am so thankful that you were able to get discharged last july/august, and that we had almost a full year more where we could still spend time with you, and bring food to you.
you fought so hard to get this second operation. i will always think of the what-ifs and wonder how long more you could have had with us, had you not gone - but deep down inside i know this is exactly what you wanted. you always were so bold and proactive about wanting to get the best out of life, and i know that given a second chance you would still have gotten the operation. you were hopeful almost all the way, and it breaks my heart that while you were still conscious at the end, you were aware that the surgical outcome was not as we had hoped for. it breaks my heart that your last days were spent in the hospital, not in the comfort of your warm and cosy home that you had worked so hard to maintain.
you are so loved. i’m so sorry i never had the courage to tell you this while you were still awake. i wish i had known that last weekend was the last time your eyes would be open. yesterday, i told you all the things i never dared to say while you were still awake. i wept over the seeming unfairness of it all, and how fast it all happened. i begged for another dinner together. i told you it was okay to let go; you had to be tired - if not in spirit, at least in body.
at the time, i wasn’t sure if you could hear me, but after steven and joel went, i am sure you were there. amy told me that your blood pressure was fluctuating but still holding up when gemma left 10 minutes prior to their arrival. by the time they entered the room, the blood pressure dropped to 50/30, and your heart rate had slowed from your usual tachycardic state to 55. joel said a prayer over you, and then amy watched as your vitals dropped to zero. amy said it took less than 5 minutes. the timing is nothing short of miraculous. i knew then that even when the time was up, you fought so hard to stay, just to say goodbye to steven and joel. your spirit and tenacity always astound me.
i miss you so much already. you loved me so much and so well and i’m so sorry i never made enough time to show you how much you mattered to me as well. but you have fought the good fight, and finished the race. you spent your whole life working and striving for a better life. you deserve eternal rest and peace.
i hope you are somewhere better now. somewhere where you get to eat everything you wanted to, somewhere sparkling clean and comfortable, somewhere nice and fancy, where the breeze is gentle and won’t mess up your hair. i hope you’re able to walk arm in arm with kong-kong again, and embrace eternity with him.
in time, i too will join you. one day we will have sunday dinners again.
until then, safe travels and rest well.
i love you.
p.s. don’t be a worrywart. we will be fine, i promise.
stormborns
blakekathryn
gummygunk
pixelskylines
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
prguitarman