We grew up idolising this woman, this maternal head of the family household.
One of the things that I want to do to keep track of, is the awful things that she tends to say to me, and the rest of the family, so I don’t see her as an ultimate martyr and or some sort of saviour person. Of course I think the savior figure that she plays in my life is due to her being my primary caregiver as I was growing up– actually that’s putting it lightly. The most important years of my life, she was the only one who was there for me.
But there are a few things that she doesn’t do well at all. For example she definitely sees us as wandered. And I don’t mean wanderers in the good sense. I mean more like 流浪汉 līulānghān– and this might be because she was one herself. She had traveled from Malaysia to China, and in some ways got abandoned there, or I should say, here. So in some ways she now sees people in the same way, so she’ll make little stabbing remarks to that effect. Because it’s Chinese New Year (which is actually just New year), there is a surplus of dumplings because the aunts made them. So I went to get them on 初二 chū’er or 初三 chūsan, and she was looking so amazing and healthy.
But the next thing that came out of her mouth was, “After you’ve finished the dumplings, you’ll be back to eating crumbs again.”
It was actually pretty shocking to hear. What did she think of me? Did she think I was some kind of vagabond?
In a funny, weird way this also intersects with one of my therapy sessions. One of the hardest things that my therapist had told me was that I saw myself as a vagabond- a līulānghān. That that was the way I saw myself.
Was my grandma the same? Did she see herself this way because she had left her entire family behind in Malaya?
I guess when I wanted to write about the things that my grandma did to upset me, it turned into something much wider-reaching, and wide-ranging.