This is my mom in our first car. In the early years, my parents used to get around on a scooter. Road safety laws have come a long way since those days when several of us would pile on top of each other on the scooter to get around town. Anyway, one day, my mom rode the scooter to the butcher’s to buy some meat for dinner. She saw his prices » Read More
The Fortune Teller
March 10, 2016 by
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 the future. That enraged her. She decided there and then, that » Read More
Mom’s Smile
March 10, 2016 by
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 on a boat to reconnect with her parents. They had given her up » Read More
The Funeral
March 9, 2016 by
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 and gossipy women with too much time on their » Read More
The Hospital
March 9, 2016 by
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, it meant you went, but never returned. We were waiting together at the » Read More