According to my dad, mom planned on having four kids. This pic shows the four oldest kids – and that would have been it – neither I nor half my siblings would have existed. Then my mom visited a fortune teller. He told her he could see her husband marrying a second, younger wife in…
Found a pic of my mom smiling today. That’s rare. She usually looks wistful, stoic, maybe a bit weary. I don’t know if that was just how she was, or whether she was ill without yet knowing it. I know that just before she found out she had cancer, she had travelled back to China…
All my parents’ martial arts friends were there. A large group dominated by housewives who were Tai Chi students of my dad. There were one or two who remained life-long family friends, but I never cared for the majority of them. Even at that young age, I saw them as a bunch of privileged, mean…
I remember clearly the day my mom had to pack her bags to be admitted to the hospital. At 5 or 6 years of age, my understanding of the difference between illness and death was that if you were ill, you went to the hospital, stayed for awhile, then you came back. If you died,…
A couple of years ago someone in a Malaysian Facebook Group posted a link to SerembanGirl.com – a blog they’d stumbled upon, and which they’d enjoyed reading (well I think they did). They were wondering if anyone knew who the owner was. It occurred to me then that I should probably edit the Seremban Girl…