Finding the roots

While on the way back from a morning jog with my mom, we stopped by a coffee shop to have some fishball noodles for breakfast. What transpired during the breakfast was a little history about my mom's family and how they arrived here Southeast Asia from China.

My grandpa arrived in Malacca in the early 1910s during the First World War. There were riots in China where my grandpa was from (my mom can't recall the name of the town in Mandarin) and his family was looking for a way to escape to Nanyang - Southeast Asia in Chinese. They did not have enough money to buy boat tickets and as a last resort, they gave away my grandpa's youngest brother to a rich family in return for boat tickets. After the agreement was made, my grandpa's youngest brother was brought to another family without his knowledge, and the rest of the family journeyed down South.

Their boat arrived in Malacca, a port town south of the Peninsula Malaysia. In the beginning, my grandpa worked in rubber plantations as a living. Shortly after the war ended, my great-grandmother decided that it was time for my grandpa to find a wife. After looking at a few young women's photographs, my great-grandma selected my grandma to be her daughter-in-law, and my grandma was soon on her journey to meet her future husband in Malacca.

While working in the rubber plantations one day, my grandpa's younger brother accidentally killed a man while felling the trees. In a moment of panic, the entire family uprooted and moved to Penang, an island northwest of Malaysia. And that is where they eventually settled down, having children and more grandchildren.

I don't have much memories of my grandpa who passed away when I was very little. However, I do have fond memories of my grandma who was kind and compassionate. A devout Buddhist, she was always seen carrying a string of Buddhist pearls and chanting away. Her favourite outfit was the samfu, a matching flowery top with trousers. She was a healthy old lady and spoke with a musical-like accent in Teochew.

I guess I'll never find out what really happened in my grandparents' time. Even my mom said that what she knew was told to her by my grandpa, never verified by my grandma. But I will always cherish these small snippets of history that reminds me of how lucky I am to be born in Singapore and at this time in the history of mankind.

Another year older...

Perhaps another year wiser? I hope so.

Got a nice surprise package from Mr. It yesterday! It says photos on the customs sticker and I was sure that it was one or two photo frames with pictures of us both, judging from the size of the package. Then, later that night, I waited for him to be online so that I could open the present "live" in front of him. Et voila! It was such a nice surprise that brought me to tears - it was a box of 100 photographs that we had taken together. I don't even remember some of them. Then I felt guilty that I wasn't in the HolyLand with Mr It.

We need to start celebrating birthdays together soon.

Quoteworthy

Your worst enemy cannot hurt you as much as your own thoughts unguarded.

But once mastered, nothing can help you as much.

Never say never

I met S for dinner tonight. It was pre-arranged a week ago via text and the last time I saw him, I was still undergoing treatment and hairless. So naturally I was quite looking forward to the meeting, since we would have quite a bit to catch up on.

S and I knew each other back in London, when we were both single, through friends of friends. It's not that we have great chemistry or that we naturally click but somehow we managed to stay in touch for many years. At one point we were meeting up every Saturday after my French class and his Spanish class, talking about our lives, the bad dates we went on and any relationship troubles (mostly his). Just like that, we kept our friendship going. He was a big Credence Clearwater Revival fan and his birthday falls on the 29th February. You can say that he's an old soul, he still digs Bruce Springsteen up till today.

When I saw him sitting at the table by himself, I was reminded of how good looking he was. His carefree blonde hair and pale freckles that peppered his face and arms. We said hello quickly and after a few minutes, got over the initial awkwardness and dived into updating each other with our lives (and I also got used to his Northern Irish accent). It has been a year ago since we met and he has been in Singapore all this while and completed his MBA. I, on the other hand, have completed my cancer treatment. I've also asked along another friend, hoping that some kind of potential romance could emerge.

In the short two hours we met, we spoke again of our relationships and once again of his uncanny experiences with hysterical women. If you told me three years ago that S and I would be having dinner along Clarke Quay in Singapore, I would have laughed out loud in your face. Life really is a strange beast isn't it? You never know what is waiting for you around the corner.

We finished the night early as he had another party to hop to. As we said our goodbyes, I had an overwhelming of the unpredictability of life. Of course we said would meet up in the following year and stay in touch but meanwhile, who really knows what life would bring in the next few months?

Fear

"Fear is the great thief of time. For cancer patients, one thing they want is to have more time, and fear just devours that." - Kriss Carr

The seed of contempt

These two weeks I have been thinking about relationships and marriages. Partly because my good friend Dubi is writing a special article on the big "D" - divorces, and another of my good friend, Xiao is also doing her own research on marriages, in preparation of her own.

What Dubi shared with me from her numerous interviews was that divorces normally happen after an accumulation of unhappiness which often stem from trivial incidents as "He doesn't like me to take my baths after I come back from work". Sounds shocking doesn't it? What happened to the age old give-and-take or treat your spouse with the respect of a guest? It seems that if one is not able to accept or let go of any misgivings that the spouse has done, the accumulation effect will end up in a big explosion one day that leaves you to wonder, "where did that come from?" The answer to that is, it came from that small seed of contempt in your head, and it just grew exponentially into this disproportionate ugly thing.

So the moral of the story? Don't be anal and in spite of all things that happen, learn to remember that your spouse and you form an unity, one that must transcend beyond the "fairness" of who is right and wrong.

In transit

It's been a while! Well, not exactly a while but a whole one and a half years.

It was a storm and I had to hold tight to my ship, and focus, focus, focus. Now the storm has subsided and I'm rebuilding my ship...it's not easy but everyday I am trying. Some days are good, some days are bad. But most days are okay.

In the meantime that I've been away, I've started something else, for a life elsewhere. Let's see how things go from here, or there.