Tag Archives: Great Grandmother

April 9, 2013 · 22:03

On Grandmothers and Pioneers

March 8 is International Women’s Day. On this day, men in Eastern Europe send flowers to the women in their lives, while the women finally get a much-needed break from housework.

In the rest of the world though, March 8 does not hold much significance. The odd gathering takes place, but many of my friends have no idea when International Women’s Day actually is. Which makes the style in which I celebrated it last month – at the Fox Club in Mayfair, central London – especially memorable. Within the lovely setting of this private members’ club, a dozen women from across the globe communed, to exchange stories about our lives and those of our grandmothers. What could have been more apt?

The backdrop of a London overwrought with leaden skies and puddles also proved poignant, at least for me. It was cold and drizzly. This is the London I know like the back of my hand. I may moan about it and grumble, but its familiarity makes me feel at home.

Conversation hummed as we sat down to a lunch hosted by the Hong Kong Society Women’s Group. I had been invited to read extracts from my novel alongside Kerry Young, whose debut work Pao was published in 2011 to much acclaim by Bloomsbury. Neither of our novels has any Hong Kong connection, but Karen Luard (who had arranged the lunch) wanted Kerry and I to share our experiences of being part of the far-flung Chinese diaspora.

When discussion was eventually opened up to the floor, there were fascinating contributions from our audience. Because my novel tells the story of a woman who starts a business to save her family, it made many of those present think about the women in their own families, especially their grandmothers. Whether they hailed from South Africa or Malaysia, the stories they recounted had a common thread: they featured stoical old women, all unsung, who were not well-educated but who sustained their families. These grandmothers used whatever means they could: some sewed; others, like the heroine in my novel, cooked. Without so much as a moment’s thought, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers were unwitting pioneers.

And pioneers are not always appreciated, certainly not during their lifetimes. How much consternation, ridicule even, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers could have faced. We think we have an easier time today – and that is true in many ways – but there have been many occasions when I have felt extremely uncomfortable listening to the way male friends or colleagues talk about women, especially about those women who dare to stand above the parapet. Their tone is sneering, coloured by a disdain which allows misogyny in all its subtle forms, to be disguised.

Take Hillary Clinton. I have heard her reviled in ways reserved only for female politicians. Yes there are plenty of male politicians who are hated, loathed even, but I have never heard them discussed in the same scornful tone – one which veers well beyond contempt.

And there are still people today who would not vote for a woman.

April 8 saw the passing of Margaret Thatcher, a towering figure no matter what you thought of her. I arrived in Britain months after she became Prime Minister, and became an adult during her tenure. She was nothing if not polarising: most strong personalities are. Amidst the hubbub, it is easy to forget that she was a pioneer – it could hardly have been a doddle being the country’s first female Prime Minister. As Barack Obama tweeted, “She stands as an example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can’t be shattered.”

I could not have put it better. Thankfully, glass ceilings everywhere continue to fall. But more International Women’s Days will have to pass before we can all truly say that we are as happy celebrating the birth of a daughter as much as that of a son.

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July 30, 2012 · 22:11

In Search of Great-Grandmother’s Name

I don’t know my great-grandmother’s name.

When I began writing my novel, I tried to find out what it was. I didn’t need her name to write my story, but I was curious. I knew she was a devout Buddhist who prayed at the Siamese Temple in Tambun Road, Ipoh, so my first stop was the temple, where I hoped to find Great-Grandmother’s ashes. As a Buddhist, she would have been cremated, and I reasoned that if I could find the urn containing her ashes, I would learn what her name was.

The picture below shows what the Siamese Temple on Tambun Road looks like today: a set of beautiful buildings with elaborate roofs built around a serene courtyard.  Its architecture is typical of a temple, with a large airy central room serving as the main shrine hall and adjacent buildings housing the wooden tablets set up in memory of the deceased. (In case you’ve never seen a Buddhist tablet, here are examples below. They are the red oblong objects standing vertically side by side, some adorned with photographs of the deceased. Like Christian tombstones, the tablets can be elaborate.)

I visited the Siamese Temple with my aunt and uncle, and it remains thankfully smaller than other temples, which meant fewer tablets to examine. Nonetheless we spent a good half hour making sure we hadn’t missed Great-Grandmother.

To no avail, for it turned out her ashes lay elsewhere.

My search took us next to the Sam Poh Tong (Temple), the second oldest Chinese temple built inside the famous limestone caves surrounding Ipoh (see my blog-post My Ipoh). One of my aunts told me Great-Grandmother had been cremated there, so my uncle and I went straight to see the temple caretaker. He was a middle-aged man who sat all day in his cave office with a notebook, cooled by a whirring table fan which stirred the air from the hills.

The caretaker’s first question was what Great-Grandmother’s name was. When we told him we didn’t know, he looked at us through narrowed eyes.

“Hmmm…then, very hard,” he said.

When our faces fell, the caretaker added, “But, maybe possible from the year of her birth.”

Unfortunately we didn’t know the year of her birth, just the exact date of her death. I proudly passed this information on, and was surprised when it didn’t impress the caretaker.

“That, no use,” he declared.

How could the date of her death not help? I wondered aloud. Didn’t they keep records?

The caretaker looked at me as if I were mad. There were records, but not dating as far back as 1941. Didn’t I know how many cremations there had been since? “Come”, he said, “I show you.”

He led us down steps, past a murky green pond at the front in which turtles floated languidly, half dead from the Malaysian heat. On we went, towards a brick shelter which stood on its own in the middle of nowhere.

“In there-lah”, the caretaker said, pointing to the windowless hut. It wasn’t lit, so the man kindly brought an electric lamp which he hooked up. Then, wishing us luck, he left.

We went inside a dark musky room crammed eerily full of the ashes of the long-dead. It was clearly the room for the untended, and I felt the goose-bumps rise on my skin even though I’m not superstitious. The room was cold and damp and stacked from floor to ceiling with clay urns which glared at us from atop the wooden shelves. Amid the shadows cast by our dim yellow light, the urns looked identical. They were dusty, fusty, as decayed and faded as the building which held them, but some of the vessels still retained a haunting beauty; the Chinese writing on their bodies stood out, as if they could never be erased despite the evident lack of care. We searched for an hour, but my uncle and I failed to find Great-Grandmother. It was obviously not to be, at least not that time.

——————

How is it that I don’t know Great-Grandmother’s name?

In previous generations, people didn’t address anyone older by her or his name. This is a bit like ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ in Western culture, except that the Chinese had forms of address for many other relatives (at one time, probably for every relative).

For example, the woman who inspired my novel was actually my mother’s grandmother, or in Chinese, my Big Maternal Grandmother. In Chinese, it is important whether a person is related to you maternally or paternally; traditional forms of address are as specific as that. They were intended not only as public demonstrations of respect – from the young towards the old – but were also a means of conveying the exact blood relationships between parties, so that any listener would understand the ties at once and have no need to ask embarrassing questions.

To give another example, my mother has five brothers, one half-brother and one half-sister. Her second brother is therefore my Second Maternal Uncle. When I was a child therefore, I always addressed him as ‘Yee Kow’ in Cantonese: ‘yee’ meaning ‘second’, while ‘kow’ is the word for ‘Maternal Uncle’. Anyone who heard me would then have known exactly how we were related. It’s like hearing an echo: you open your mouth to speak and what bounces back are your exact blood relationship, which family generation you belong to and your status within the family.

Similarly to ‘maternal uncle’, there are Chinese words for maternal great-grandfathers, maternal great-grandmothers, maternal grandfathers, and so on…everyone down the line, all the way to maternal uncles and maternal aunts. And then, there is a whole other set of words – for your father’s relations. I don’t know when this strict hierarchical custom began. (If you do, please write and tell me.) I suspect Confucius, though I can’t be sure. Such hierarchy must have served a useful purpose at some point, but by the time I came along, the downsides were only too obvious.

One of these is that no one can tell me my great grandmother’s name. There are still people alive today who remember her, but none of them ever heard her called by her name. She came from a generation which expected to be addressed as ‘Big Madam’ or ‘Big Sir’, even by strangers. And Big Maternal Grandmother, in her role as a leading female entrepreneur in her town, demanded and received, justifiably, the respect that was her due. As a result, her real name remains a mystery.

——————

For a Western reader, the traditional Chinese form of address may actually be a saving grace. All of the characters in my novel address their older relatives according to their familial relationship, such as ‘Big Brother’ or ‘Second Sister’. This relieves the reader of the need to remember a great many Chinese names (see my blog-post What’s in a Chinese Name?). Alas, traditional forms of address were used only for people who were older; those who were peers or younger were called by name (which still means a healthy dose of Chinese names in my story).

——————

How did my great grandmother end up in the room for the untended dead? This, sadly, is one of the results of our cultural loss. Big Maternal Grandmother sent her sons to a leading mission school, where they learnt to speak English and adopted Western culture. Her sons also took on the religion of the West, Christianity, or alternatively, became non-religious. Only the wife of her third son – my Third Maternal Grandaunt – remained a Buddhist, and it therefore fell on this good woman to look after Great-Grandmother’s urn and ashes. When Third Maternal Grandaunt passed away, Great-Grandmother’s urn stopped being tended. It has since lain at the Sam Poh Temple, cast into a dark room with other unloved urns. 

Of course, our story isn’t just about cultural loss; my family bears responsibility too. One of her sons could have taken the trouble to re-learn Buddhist rituals and to look after Great-Grandmother’s ashes, as she would no doubt have wanted. This isn’t as straight-forward as it sounds; unless you’re exposed to Buddhist rituals, you wouldn’t know what to do. In any event, no one took the trouble, and I feel sad when I think of it. It’s enough to spur me to continue trying to discover her name. Is there a Malaysian equivalent to the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency? If so, I would like to hire this formidable detective.

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December 3, 2011 · 20:34

She Arrived on an Elephant – Why I’m Writing my Novel

My novel is based on my Great Grandmother, whom I first heard about when still quite small. I remember being shown a black and white photograph in which a rather plump woman stood, wearing a patterned blouse that was fastened by an enormous brooch. “That’s grandma,” my mother told me simply. It turned out that was the only photo ever taken of my Great Grandmother and it was brown with age even then; it revealed a forbidding-looking woman, someone a child would be frightened of, despite the semblance of a smile on her round face. This impression was reinforced whenever Great Grandmother came up in conversation; with bated breath, the adults around me would exclaim – “Wahh! Very fierce ah!”

I was told Great Grandmother came from Siam (now Thailand) and was a Nyonya, words I hadn’t heard before and which seemed too complicated for my little brain to deal with. For years I didn’t dig any further, content to simply associate the word Nyonya with spicy dishes and with the kueh I enjoyed (see my previous blog post). Those who know me may find this hard to believe, but the fact that there was something I liked eating was actually a big deal – because I hated eating as a child. Every meal was a tortured ritual in which my mother was forced to slowly hand-feed me. I took so long to eat that by the time I finished, it would almost be time for the next meal. The net result was that for me, all meals blended into a single nightmare, so it must have seemed like a gift from heaven to my poor mother when she discovered that I would happily devour Nyonya kueh.

Over the years as I grew up, I remember being told that I was just like my Great Grandmother – stubborn and fierce. The comments weren’t necessarily intended as compliments, and initially they didn’t please me. But they were repeated so often that I became curious about the woman who had inspired them. Eventually I felt I had no choice except to find out more. It was then that I heard how she raised nine children on her own, unaided, with nothing to fall back on except her wits and business acumen. She couldn’t even read and write, but that didn’t stop her from establishing her own business. For a woman in Malaya in 1910, that must have taken guts, something Great Grandmother appeared to have plenty of.

Hers was a story I had long intended to write, but creative writing didn’t fit in with the fast world of finance. I was seldom at home and worked such insane hours, often in far-flung corners of the world, that there was barely time for sleep. Everything else fell by the wayside; in those days writing seemed a hazy dream to be pursued later, a bit like golf.

Then, two years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Because it was cancer, it meant I had to have not only surgery but also radio- and chemotherapy. For someone with needle-phobia who doesn’t take any drugs and faints at the sight of blood, the entire process proved very stressful – although I didn’t feel it at the time. It was only after my treatment had finished that I realised life had changed. For months afterwards, I felt adrift. No matter how much I slept, I couldn’t seem to regain my previous energy. My confidence waned, and there were days when I wondered if I could ever be the person I once was. I knew then that I had to alter the way I lived.

As a result, I began to do things I never did before. I stopped rushing around. I scaled down my business. And I discovered writing. I had heard about cancer survivors who had found a lifeline through creative self-expression, activities like pottery or singing, as well as writing. At a low-ebb one day, I simply sat down with a blank Word page and just started typing. Magically, as the sentences flowed, I could literally feel myself getting better.

Within two months, when I asked myself whether there was anything I would regret not having done if my life were to end tomorrow, I knew at once what the answer was. It was clear then what my next project had to be. Great Grandmother had already waited far too long.

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November 7, 2011 · 01:04

My Great Grandmother’s Cakes…

 …well, not literally. These are modern photographs, and sadly, not my own, but they convey the wonderful colour and intricacy of the ‘cakes’ my great grandmother would have made.

The ‘cakes’ feature heavily in my novel, as does the cuisine of the Nyonyas (explained below) – to the extent that my editor wryly told me one of the chapters made her very hungry! Which I took to be a good sign, given that I didn’t include pictures in my draft.

Now here’s what’s interesting about the ‘cakes’, which I will refer to henceforth by their Malay name of ‘kueh’ : they are wheat- and dairy-free. This makes them perfect for those of us who wish to avoid gluten and animal milk. Alas, I have to say the kueh are not for the weight-conscious, because they generally include copious amounts of coconut milk, coconut cream or grated coconut (sometimes all three!) as well as palm sugar (that lovely semi-viscous brown stuff you want to stick your fingers into). So the kueh may help with allergies, but not with girth…

Before I write more about the kueh, I should say a little about the formidable women who created them. The kueh you see here weren’t made by just anyone – but by a small community of women in Malaya known as the Nyonyas. This is important in my novel because the main character is a Nyonya (just like my great grandmother on whom the character is based). Therefore, the cakes the women made are known as Nyonya kueh. Which begs the question: who were the Nyonyas? 

The short answer is that they are women of mixed Malay-Chinese heritage going back centuries (from the time Chinese traders first arrived on the Malay archipelago). The timeframe is important, because there may be many people with mixed heritage, but very few have managed to evolve a community with a culture as distinctive as the Nyonyas’. The Nyonyas succeeded by combining local Malay values and customs with the beliefs and traditions of their Chinese husbands, in very particular ways. For example, the women – who were Moslem – took on the religion of their husbands, converting to Taoism. I mention this because religion played an important role in Nyonya life, and bowing before an altar table, lit joss-sticks in hand, is a recurring theme in my story. 

Of course in modern Malaysia, the fact that local Moslem women were able to convert from Islam to another religion, is never discussed. (It isn’t allowed today; today in Malaysia, if you’re born a Moslem, you remain a Moslem).  Which is another reason why Nyonya culture is so unique and fascinating: it developed during a time when Malaya truly was one. I will have more to say about this in a later blog. Watch this space!

Now, to come back to Nyonya kueh. There are many varieties, all delectable and delicious, and some have symbolic significance. For example, the red ones below (angkoo) are traditionally given to relatives and friends to celebrate a baby’s first month on earth. I remember my first taste of angku when I was three: how the skin, made of glutinous rice flour and sweet potatoes, felt soft; the filling, of crushed mung beans, even softer, and bursting with flavour. I didn’t know what the flavour was at the time; now I’ve learnt it’s the scent of the pandanus leaves with which the beans are steamed. Simply delicious!

So, with all these varieties, you may well ask why I haven’t made any Nyonya kueh yet. The answer is partly because I fear the work, Nyonya cuisine being notorious for its sheer labour (when done properly, with no shortcuts), and partly because I haven’t had time to source the necessary ingredients in London. I’m referring here to exotic things like pandanus leaves, green pea flour, and natural colourings from for example, the clitoria flower (I haven’t made that up). Once I’ve made my first batch of Nyonya kueh, you’ll be the first to see the results!

 

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