Here’s my paternal grandparents. My grandmother should be around 19 when this picture was taken, my grandfather presumably in his late 30s. This was 16 years after he left China and arrived in Palembang. It was his third marriage, first in China, second in Jakarta; to my grandmother’s older sister. My grandmother came to live with them when her sister was ill, helping her to tend their two daughters. When the sister passed away, her dying wish was for her to continue tending her daughters, and her brother in law; and that was the beginning of their life together.
She had always told the story in a bittersweet tone. She, just starting her sweet young adult life in Bandung working in a seemingly fashionable fabric shop, was then thrown into a lifetime bond with some man she hardly knew – even as a brother in law – who spoke no Indonesian. But they ended up together, with no love or romance to start off, but worked their way to have 10 kids. (Yeah, we made fun of that fact, too.)
She’d been suffering from Dementia this past couple of years and had been dormant lately. She just passed yesterday.
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Every one was torn between not wanting to lose her and not wanting her to continue the suffer. I don’t think I’m the best at showing my emotions to her, but she still was that one grandmother who’d expectantly waited for me and my sister to come every other week with a homemade Sayur Asem. Having the same dish every other week can be boring, especially if you’re other grandmother also knew about this fact and decided to cook the same dish. So I did get bored and refused her cooking; to which she quickly offered some options from the surrounding food sellers. (Now as I look back I think my mom must have told them it was my favourite, and they were just being grandmothers.)
She had forgotten my name the last time we were talking last Chinese New Year. Our last ineraction was while she was in bed sleeping – or laying awake with her close shut. It was a couple of days after my birthday in September and how I felt about it. And then, slowly but unexpectedly she lids moved and her eyes looked at me, slightly smiling, and asked, “Whose (birthday)?” I then continued my story.
My grandmother always had a story to tell if you asked her. I never thought her as a storyteller until I put down this passage. She loved talking about her youth, soap operas, and celebrities. She could recite you the last episode of her favourite soap opera and about the old grandfather who – she thought – was hitting on her at church. She had a thing about vanity: her hair is always black and nicely cut, she liked to put lipstick and powder on, she compliments my skin suppleness – a trait which I owed her, at 83 her skin was not too shabby too. I did a small interview with her earlier last year to have a good idea of her youth, because we hardly talk about it and I have this obsession to my Chinese root. (Living in the suppression didn’t allow them to think that it’s okay to tell the story.) I remembered she once recited a story of life under the Japanese oppression, but she could only go as far as singing the Japanese song that I still couldn’t find what it meant. I kept wondering whether or not what she was telling what actually happened or if it’s something she made up. She seemed to struggle in picking up her memory folders: a young girl from Cirebon who went to explore Bandung to create herstory when it took an unexpected twist.
I wonder how many of her stories had been left untold.
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I don’t remember if I gave a kiss the night I left, she had always been the one who left me a kiss – a sniffle on the cheek, rather than a peck. But I did wonder what it was that went through her mind all those moments as she laid. I think she’s there but also not there. I wondered if in her mind, stories kept passing in a non-chronological order and she’d been occupying herself all those time when we thought she was idle. I wondered if she’d solved it and had sown together the moving image of her life; that she finally got her-story together for one last time when she left.
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