11 November 2021

Seeing colourful friendship bands from Nepal transports me to my childhood days of watching my grandmother roll coloured cotton threads into necklaces and anklets for babies in our village near the Singapore River.

Parents of restless babies, or babies with no appetites would come to our verandah to ask my grandma to make a thread necklace or anklet for their child.

Apparently her hand rolled cotton accessories worked like a charm because babies’ mood and appetite improved once they started wearing them.

I have no idea who taught my grandma to make these things or how they came to be associated with auspiciousness & protection for babies & children.

After all, my grandmother’s personal life was far from auspicious. At 7 years old, a change of family fortune sent her sailing from Kinmen Island to Singapore to be raised as my grandfather’s future bride. She never saw her own parents again and would spend her whole life pining for her childhood home.

At the age of 26, my grandma lost her husband and her two little daughters to a lightning mishap. Her last child who was my dad was only 8 month old then.

Overnight, by “an act of God” as lightning strikes are categorised in insurance claims , my grandmother became a widow and a single mother.

She laboured at a factory shelling prawns to provide for her in-laws and son. Her gnarled fingers bore witness to her contact with the unbearably icy water that would also give her a lifetime of aches and pains.

Later on the bank where she kept her hard earned money would go bankrupt and her first grandchild who was me, would contract childhood poliomyelitis.

So by the above accounts, my grandmother was an incredibly unlucky woman. Logically, she should be shunned and babies shouldn’t be wearing anything her hands had touched.

Yet parents regularly dropped by our home to seek my grandmother’s advice or ask reverently for a piece of her cotton threads to soothe their sickly child.

Perhaps ironically, my grandma’s incredible ability to absorb terrible losses and misfortunes, and still lived to produce beautiful embroideries for wedding couples and cotton anklets for babies, have given her the status of a lucky charm. 😊

And because my grandmother refused to be defeated by the bad luck in her life, her only grand daughter whom she constantly worried about because of her handicap had the opportunity to speak at an event to honour women brilliance where she was seated at the table with women leaders, including Singapore’s first female president.

6-6-2021

As these days we can’t travel on a whim, the things I bought on my trips to Nepal and Kinmen Island in the past have taken on a relic-like significance.

In 2019, I visited Kinmen Island, the birthplace of my ancestors for the first time. Kinmen sorghum liquor is well known among wine aficionados. Revenue from its sale world wide plays a huge part in education funding for the island’s children from nursery to university.

The little island between mainland China and Taiwan even has its own ceramic factory dedicated to the creation of sorghum wine receptacles to mark historical and social events.

When I bought these two bottles of sorghum wine during my trips in 2019, I had no idea a pandemic was also brewing.

I got them mainly because the wine came from grains that were grown, harvested and fermented on an island that my grandmother was born, left and pined for all her life. And of course the little glasses that the islanders took their celebrated elixir in had to come home with me!

I love drinking with little glasses and cups. Firstly, they are very very cute. Secondly, they pace my alcohol intake so I can relax without becoming intoxicated. The thimble sized holders of Kinmen Sorghum encourages me to sip and savour, instead of gulp and guzzle.

When I take a sip of this “rocket fuel,” as the liquor is fondly known for its high alcohol content, the sweetness of fermented sorghum caresses my tongue and perfumes my mouth, while heat sashays up my nose, dances my brows and warms my ears.

I don’t know when we’ll be able to visit my grandmother’s beloved birthplace again. So for now I shall drink the precious remaining liquor mindfully, and make every sip count.

And through mindful consumption and usage of resources like in the days of our forefathers, may we turn the little that we’ve got to lots, so that we may win the war against the pandemic.

2 Feb 2021

I was born in the Year of the Water Rabbit. This year my lunar birthday fell on 22nd Jan 2021.

My paternal Kinmen grandmother was 50 years old when I was born. I was her first grandchild. As a mother who had lost two daughters even before they turned 5 years old, my arrival must have felt as if one of her little girls was being returned to her.

Thus I was raised with much care, and given every chance to wear whatever beautiful clothes available to children of my neighbourhood.

On the same day as I gave thanks for my birth, I was happy to see a Facebook feed from Kinmen Blog explaining the origin of my grandmother’s surname, 翁 (pronounced as “weng.”)

One of my dominant childhood memories was of her pointing out the chinese character of her surname on her citizenship document, and getting me to pronounce it accurately. That could have been the first chinese word I laid eyes on.

I made my first trip to my grandmother’s birthplace on her behalf in 2019 and walked the streets she might have played on in her childhood.

As I stood under the golden brush strokes bearing my grandmother’s family name above the entrance of one of the many ancestral shrines that dotted the island, I felt energised.

Perhaps there’s a reason for my deep affinity with black ink strokes against vermillion & scarlet, and gold characters against black. What may appear tacky to some feels like home to me.

I think when ancestor veneration is forbidden or discouraged in the name of progress, religion or politics, we lose our connection to the wisdom and protection of our forebears.

And for me this loss can never be compensated by promises of power or paradise.