Stories from my Grandmothers

(Sun Yat-Sen memorial – Zhongshan, Guangdong) Searching for my heritage… Trans: All that is under heaven belongs to the people.

While in Singapore I had the chance to visit my grandmothers, who I hadn’t seen for a long while. It was during my study of modern Chinese history last year that I realized I knew very little about my grandparents’ past. There is so much of local history that I never learned, because I had opted for a more Western-centric curriculum during A-levels. I suppose I had been more interested in the future back then, but it was partly due to the generational language barrier. After a summer in China my Mandarin has much improved, though not as much as I would have liked it to, but sufficient for most purposes. So I decided to ask about their past.

My first grandmother tells me her story in a mix of Mandarin, Berhasa and Teochew, the latter two of which I have a very limited understanding of despite years in the military and cannot speak at all. So it may be that some of what I heard may have been misunderstood. She was born in the late 20s, and like many Teochews in the great Diaspora, her family left the misery of the warlord era and came to Malaysia. When she was a teenager, her family was coerced into supporting (i.e. protection money) the Malayan communist front, which at the time was probably sending remittances to finance the civil war against the KMT, which got them in trouble with the colonial government, and she went into hiding. Being caught would have meant repatriation to the mainland.

On a side note, she was probably born around the same time as one Chin Peng a.k.a. the Plen who later became the leader of the communist front and the colonial authorities’ most wanted man. I came across his autobiography at Select bookstore and flipped through it, imagining him coming around my grandmother’s village as a young student leader calling for support for the revolution.

There were more stories from that period about some relative who had been captured by pirates, which I thought was pretty amusing. Another relative did repatriate to the mainland and served in the liberation army, and was posted to Hainan island after the war. Perhaps if I ever have the chance to visit Hainan I shall go find his descendants.

My other grandmother speaks almost no Mandarin at all, despite a steady diet of channel 8 soap operas. I tried to speak to her in Mandarin and she replied in Teochew, which I suppose is really my fault for not knowing it. Unfortunately , having been born in Singapore and marrying young she did not have stories as interesting (no pirates or communists), so I asked to see old photographs and documents. This was the first time I saw a birth certificate from the colonial era. It was written and signed in English, and I suppose they had used the services of a writer, or perhaps it was simply transcribed by the colonial clerk. Perhaps if I have more time I will look into the archives.