Keeper of Sweetness & Promiser of Colours.

18 May 2021

I like looking at metallic containers that are used to hold hard candies.

But it’s only recently after buying one from Daiso that I understood my compulsion to study and touch candy tins.

These keepers of sweetness remind me of my late maternal grandmother. In my childhood, she was my constant supplier of Morinaga candy in round tins.

Each evening when she returned from work at the ABC Brewery, I would help myself to her bag and search for my present.

Once in my childish impatience to shut the tin, I closed the cover on my fingers instead. Blood gushed and dripped freely where metal met flesh.

My grandma was traumatised, while I was more concerned about having blood on my candy.

After that blood letting episode, it would be a long time before I would see my beloved candies again.

My maternal grandparents raised 10 children on their meagre combined incomes. Money was always short, but they never made their children or grandchildren feel poor.

I remember one night when I was in primary 2, my grandma told me she would buy me a new box of colour pencils on her way home from work the next day.

Those words would become her last words to me. That night she woke up in the middle of sleep with a terrible headache, and passed on of stroke. She was only 50 years old.

Although I only knew my maternal grandma for just a few years, she is present in every candy & colour that I see these days.

So I believe regardless of our financial constraints or length of life span, every gesture performed in the spirit of love & generosity continues to live on, long after the giver is gone.