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My mother's father

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Death in a family curiously bonds its members at this crucial time. I did not know my mother's father. I didn't think my mother did too, since she had never mentioned him except while talking to her siblings but even so, she always referred to him as "your father". He was always "your father" or "your grandfather", never "my father". While I recognise that it is a direct translation from Hokkien to English, I can't help but notice the awkwardness of this address.

So to me, my mother's father was only in name: a grandfather I never knew and never saw during Chinese New Year or weddings/funerals. My mother never mentioned him, nor what he did in the past. When probed, she would mumble something in reply and change the subject. But my mother would never mince her words usually. So I always thought she hated her father and wouldn't be affected if he should pass away. Well actually I thought he would just go on living and surpass everybody else since he has been living but has always had a non-existent life, which is theoretically not possible but has since been ingrained in my young mind as a child.

However, on the morning of his death, I woke up to hear my mother telling me in a sniffly voice that: "your grandfather has passed away this morning." I knew then that she had felt something for her father since she had evidently been crying, despite her hatred for him. Perhaps she did not hate him, perhaps I had used the word incorrectly. Perhaps the word should be "disappointed". My grandfather, my mother used to say in the rare times she mentioned him, had been a bad man. And his vices of drinking and smoking were precisely that which killed him. Liver cancer, I heard, the cause of his death was.

I didn't feel anything when I was told of his death, and I didn't feel ashamed because I didn't know how. I also didn't know how to associate shame with him. During the rare times that I actually saw him, I was forbidden to greet him. I was also forbidden to speak to him, not that I would start a conversation as a junior but the fact that my mother forbidded me to was disturbing to me as a child. If I questioned her, she would say various accounts of how he was a bad man who left my grandmother when she was little, so that she had to raise all ten kids by herself. And also that he was a bum who did nothing but smoke and drink all day and hadn't a decent job to support the family. To my mother, that was an important criterion for choosing a husband and that was also why she chose my father. That was also what she had imparted to me as a young girl. She warned me repeatedly of the bad man who lived in the alley, and of the various things he could do to me if I wandered off alone without her.

But all these years, I couldn't help but wonder about my grandfather's side of the story, his account that I imagine might somehow defeat my mother's. I had always secretly hoped that my mother was wrong and I was right so that I could meet my grandfather for real. Then I could ask him why he did those things that my mother said he did in various accounts, and from which I had stringed together a list of possibilities of what he did. Perhaps what I thought I knew wasn't what my mother said at all, perhaps I had imagined it so, perhaps I had taken my mother's bits and pieces and made them whole in the only coherent way that I knew. Yet all these wonderings were futile since I knew that I wouldn't be able to get my grandfather's account, even if he had not died. I knew that ever since I was a small child that asking wouldn't give me any answers, so I kept quiet and observed all the solemnities in silence. I felt that perhaps it wasn't my position to know, like that big secret that only belonged to adults and I was a kid still (at least in their eyes).

If there was anything good to be said about him, it was that he doted on my mother most. I felt it terrible that he should be hated by his favourite child all these years as a child. But now that I am beginning to see from my mother's perspective, I find it even more terrible that my mother should have loved a father who abandoned his wife and his kids, in short abandoned her. Perhaps my mother would have said more in her mother tongue if only I was able to converse in it with her. And although I can't speak in their language, I can still listen. I can still tune in to what the adults are saying about "your father".

11:46 pm
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