~*being sentimental is not a crime rite?

Sometimes I really wish I wasn’t such a sentimental freak…then I won’t be crying over the past and most of all, I won’t be keeping mementos of the past and I won’t be having load full of shoeboxes filled with paper, cards, scrapes of notes, broken spoons, old driving licenses (and I mean really old! Like way back into 60’s!) and many more unidentified items.

However, I can’t help it if I’m born with feelings and the desire to fill myself up with everything ancient! It’s funny how I always try to soak up my legacy and there’s no one better to relate family history to me than my grandmother.

I visited her earlier. And she thrives on people visiting her. Old age really is not fun, because all you’ll ever look forward to is having visitors. However, I hope to debunk the myth I’ve just presented. Either way, it’s amazing to see just how my grandma’s eyes lights up when she sees me…I’m probably the only few grandchildren who actually pops over to see her, not because I feel obliged too, but I love her company and I love it when she tells me stories…reminds me when I was younger where she teaches me Chinese nursery rhymes. Or when she pulls down an orange from the altar table for me…being around her is about feeling like a baby again.

We sat near the porch, me sipping warm coffee while she told me stories…her memories are limited to her younger years and there’s nothing better than to listen to her childhood memories. She was flipping photographs of herself back in China (I dug all up all of her black and white photos from my dad’s store room and arranged in chronological order for her) and she told me the events according to the pictures. It was like being transported to another era. A time where she traveled by herself to Malaya (as she fondly calls Malaysia) via Singapore and how happy she was to see my Grandpa waiting for her by the port.

She talked about her life in Malaya and the conflicts between family members, her first few English words (which comprises of multiple ‘NO, NO, NO’ she uses to chase English boys away), how my dad was as a baby, how she followed my grandpa around during business trips, and how she didn’t know how to use electrical appliances. The story that made my eyes welled up with tears was about her little dog back in China who overheard my grandma’s plans to join my granddad in Malaya. It refused to eat, drink, sleep and eventually died a few days before my grandma was bound to leave. She said she has never cried so much in her life when she found her dog dead under the table.

All her stories only make me so much more proud to be where I am today. Their experiences, emigration, sufferings and conflicts only makes my legacy so much more interesting, so much more steeped in history than I’ll ever know. I am probably the luckiest of my lot to have grown up knowing my grandparents.

I kissed my grandma’s forehead as I left and told her I’ll be back to chit chat with her again. It’s days like these I wish I wasn’t so sentimental because I always try to remember everything, absorb as much i can…I’m afraid nobody is ever going to tell me such stories ever again.