hollerback@you

30DLC - Your favourite internet friend | 1:05 AM

The 30 Day Letter Challenge
Write to - Someone you would like to meet.

Dear Grandpa,

I'm talking to you, father of my dad and not my mum. Both of you didn't marry my grandmothers. I've not heard much good about my maternal grandfather. But today my wadrobe collapsed internally and somehow or another, its paternal grandfather day today.

I want to meet you and find out more about you. Its so hard to relate someone to the words I read that you loved my grandmother so much. You wrote so much to her. You had a gift of words, and i want to hear that for myself. I want to know how you managed to make my grandma wait for you, live for you, alone with only her children and an incomplete family just because she didn't get to you first. I want to know how you managed to live with yourself and let her suffer. I've never heard my dad utter a bad word against you, only to your first family. At least you met me. You came to see me when i was so young, just a newborn, and you acknowledged the need to meet your grand daughter once.

I hear that you were so talented. You were revered, your gift for words didn't just give you a column in the newspapers every day in Penang, but it gave you a following who turned up at your funeral to send you off in tears. I want to read those words, I want to know what it was like to be you, to be my father, and to be living with the conscience of four other beings on your mind. I knew you were great. But especially today, i just want to find out why. Am i anything like you? Is my dad exactly like you? What would you want me to say if one day my kids ask me about you?

Maybe its just a day today that i yearn for my roots. Ben and I have never grown up very close to any older relatives. Migrants to Singapore, grandparents and the closest relatives were in Malaysia, where my parents had already given up their citizenship rights. Nana can only return to Malaysia now and point out run down buildings which she raised my dad, but i can't imagine nuts there. Grandma, and the other grandma as well, just don't really bring up the subject of younger days often. They can point out relatives to me at alternate chinese new years, and i forget them and their stories anyway. There are too many of them, with too many relations. The younger generations are also no longer there, and you can bet these chinese new year gatherings will stop happening and drop in scale as the years go by.

I want to know as well, if you were back in the living realm and ruling our extended family hieracy. Would you do it with an iron fist? Would you make many changes? Would you reconsile with those who hate your guts? Would you ask me to follow your footsteps, or my dad instead?

It would be very interesting, wouldn't it?

Stay cool,
Joy

Labels:


the photo dumps | i don't trust my hard-drive

  • 30DLC: Letters to Love
  • Favs: unforgettable

    • About Joy

    i eat SOIL
    & i spell my name as SHOY
    & i look good in ALUMINIUM FOIL.
    i treat lovers as my TOYS
    & i flirt with girls* and BOYS
    & my next target's ---
    cause i am JOY

    copyright KAIQI&ANAN(:



    This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

    Valid XHTML 1.0!

    Valid CSS!