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Posted at 20 Dec 5:48 pm. 0 comments
The balls of dough need to be handled firmly, but not too aggressively or gently. I’m rolling tong yuen, mini ones. This year we’re not adding red bean or sesame filling. I achieve some semblance of uniformity without too much extra effort and with a sprinkling of pride.
A head pops in the doorframe. “Wash your hands,” I order Phil. He’s six foot three gangly, compliant inches. He takes on the small ball of pink dough. “It’s your color.” He glares at me.
I declare my white balls stormtroopers. He declares his breast cancer. We form wedge and scissor formations with our doughy soldiers. I send in a spy. Our armies encroach on each others’ territory and suffer in the arctic snows of excess flour at the top of the tin baking dish. A particularly tiny ball of breast cancer is locked in an inescapable embrace with a stormtrooper. Two stormtroopers are infected with the enemy when Phil finishes and begins helping me roll the white with pink-tinted fingers.
Apparently, I am told after we finish with help from my grandmother, only good things should be said while rolling the tong yuen balls. Acceptable topics of conversation do not include wars and cancer and how much that roll of unshaped dough resembles a fat white maggot.
He appears again when we’re boiling the tong yuen. I call him over to watch as our handiwork is dropped individually into the pot and fished out into bowls of cool water when they float. The completed products will be divided into bowls and presented on the altars, then reheated and eaten. After the ceremony, after the joss sticks have been lit, the paper offerings burnt into the delicate lacy petals of a great ash-flower, I am pleased to see our unique half-pink-half-white baby has landed entirely by coincidence in Phil’s bowl.
Our relationship has been built thus far on food. I’d tried bonding with Lizzie first over shopping, not a topic I’m terribly interested in, and drinks and music at No Black Tie, which she isn’t terribly interested in. I couldn’t think of something I might have in common with my sixteen year old half-Aussie male cousin until my grandmother urged him to eat more for the umpteenth time at dinner one night.
“Stop smiling,” he told me.
“It’s so good to have someone else be the focus for once.”
“Your turn will come again soon,” he threatened.
During dinner at a Japanese restaurant I challenge him to eat the plate of green wasabi. “Halves,” he dares me back.
We eat the wasabi plain.
His eyes water. I have difficulty swallowing.
Having a brother, as far as I am concerned, must be awesome.
Even now, with my wrists still red after half an hour, my mind isn’t changed. He came up behind me, grabbed my wrists and tried to make me take the durian on the spoon. “You touch it, you eat it,” he said, and we wrestled. A foot hooked behind his knee did nothing. Stepping on his toes of iron did more damage to me than to him. I bumped his wrist against the box and exclaimed, “You eat the whole box!” but he wasn’t having any of it. We were still in the throes of a deathmatch when his father and sister came along and voiced concern. “Don’t be so rough with your cousin, Philip.”
Rough?
Communication comes in many forms; I’m happy with this one.
Posted at 21 Nov 2:38 pm. 0 comments
Granddad fell down some steps, fractured his spine. To help him deal with the pain they gave him first morphine, then a new pill. In the hospital bed he is shrunken, diminished.
Ants, he says the first day of his new medication. Ants.
What ants?
Ants. He grabs my arm, squeezes. There, there. And there.
We three are gathered around the bed, wife, daughter, granddaughter.
What ants?
Can’t you see? He blinks at the ceiling. He points.
Maybe they need to keep the hospital cleaner, my grandmother says gently and leaves his side.
An hour later there are more ants.
A whole trail of them from behind the wall-mounted TV, crawling over the ceiling. His arm moves urgently, trembles.
So many ants! He says. Get rid of them.
You’re seeing things, my grandmother tells him briskly. Close your eyes. Rest.
For a moment he faultlessly mimics lucidity, precisely matching her imperious tone. I’ll give you a thousand dollars for each ant you catch.
We cajole him, play along, practise tough love. It makes not one whit of difference. The ants won’t be denied.
He won’t sleep. He is the most active he’s been for months, even before he fractured his spine. He’s been awake for four days and counting and that means so have we, in shifts. We’re exhausted. He shows no signs of slowing, but the hallucinations are getting worse.
He sees our names written in glowing letters behind us. He is disgusted by the water dripping through the ceiling boards. He tells the photographers to get the flash bulbs out of his face and tells the strange dark man who visits him late at night to leave him alone. He is in a speeding car without brakes, at the train station, standing in the middle of the road, in a shoplot he once owned and sold a decade ago.
We are worn out. We must be there every second in case he should try to get up or pull the oxygen tube from his nose or hallucinate that we were kidnapped. Patience is a precious commodity; his querulous demands that we deal with his ever-changing surroundings are taking their toll.
A book about Alzheimer’s I recently finished is stuck in my mind. It says patients respond better if the carer makes an effort to deal with them in their world instead of forcing them to confront reality.
So I reach for invisible objects for him, fetch him non-existent phones, point out for him his trousers which aren’t there, an absurd, ceaselessly changing pantomime of domesticity.
It must have fooled him enough into believing I can see what he does because he grabs my arm, pulls hard, pulls harder. My head is on the pillow, twisted up at the ceiling.
See the ants? he whispers urgently. See? See?
I nod. I can’t speak. From this point of view, his point of view, the world looks very different.
Posted at 01 Aug 2:07 pm. 0 comments
We’re in the car on the way back and Mum is ranting about my grandfather. “All he says is no! He’s so negative! If he would only think positive thoughts, he would find himself so much happier!”
At times like this I could jolly well murder the ‘Think Positive!” brigade.
Thinking positive in this day and age is no longer just a stepping stone to success, it’s being touted as the key to all but world domination. They’ve taken the encouraging “You can do it” to “You can do whatever you want to” and morphed it into an accusatory slogan with half-voiced subtext that goes: “If you can’t, hey, it’s your own fault. You’re a pathetic loser and a failure and you’ve only got yourself to blame. Please crawl into your little negative hole to wither and die there alone because you don’t deserve to be loved by anyone.”
“Mother,” I say tightly, “He says no to change because he’s afraid and he’s afraid because he’s senile. It’s a condition. Positive thinking is not going to cure it. Are you going to tell me next that cancer can be cured by smiling?”
As Nitemare observed correctly: “He didn’t decide to become senile because he was having a bad day!”
I just want to say there’s no golden key to success (certainly it’s not positive thinking) that we’ll discover even if we read a mountain of self-help books. Therefore, it’s okay to fail, sometimes. Sometimes things just are the way they are. Sometimes you get Alzheimer’s or senile dementia and it’s only going to end in one way. Sometimes you find yourself in circumstances which just cannot get along with you. Sometimes something in you has just chewed all the shit you can swallow and you want out.
It’s okay.
In today’s hyper-achieving society, where seven-year-old kids get sent to tuition until 8pm after a day at school and carry their own weight in books, where twelve-hour workdays aren’t at all uncommon, failure doesn’t seem like an option.
But it’s okay.
It’s okay to not work yourself into emotional frenzies of stress and depression because things won’t go the way you want them to. It’s okay to take a deep breath and mentally let go of a goal, thereby conserving your strength and clarity of thought for the next, bigger step. It’s okay to tell yourself that failure should not and does not diminish you in any way. It doesn’t take away the love you have for your nearest and dearest and the love you have for you. It should not damage your personality, integrity, character.
And so if I could get it through to my deeply frightened and alone grandfather, I’d tell him I can’t fathom how hard it must be for him to leep losing bits of himself every day, but we’ll be around him to love him and help him through it until the end. And that he doesn’t need to keep on striving to ‘be useful’, because we love him for who he is and everything he has been to us, not what he can do for us.
Sit back. Take a deep breath. Let peace in. It’s okay.
Posted at 30 Jul 3:29 pm. 0 comments
In my day, when someone had a cold you gave them vitamin C, warm chicken soup and a box of tissues and sent them to their room to sleep it off. Before the week’s end they’d be better. Sometimes a particularly nasty case dragged on another week, but if it did – so what?
“Your mother’s been ill for what, three days now?” my dad said when he called up. “Take her to the hospital.”
“It’s not H1N1,” I retorted, reading between the lines.
“How do you know?”
“She’s only got a runny nose, for starters.”
“There you go, talking like you know it all. Doctors can’t even tell if it’s H1N1 or not and there you go like you know everything.”
My dad: well-respected and feared by many, but he has his really dim moments.
He tried to dissuade me from going to Sarawak too when I was on Day 4 of a cough that Mum had taken five days to recover from (and promptly passed on to me). “It could be H1N1, how would you know? It could turn into pneumonia.”
I touched down in Sarawak the next day, experienced instant recovery and proceeded to run in the rain, hike, club, drink, dance and scream myself hoarse at the Rainforest World Music Festival.
Speaking of which, three perfectly healthy friends of mine actually pulled out of Rainforest last minute, forfeiting their air tickets and paid accommodation in a move that still makes me sigh when I think about it, even though I vowed to be understanding. The rest of us had great fun. We’d have had more fun if everybody had been present, but c’est la swine flu paranoia.
Dear H1N1-phobic persons, please go out and get some perspective. The grip on reality comes free.
Posted at 28 Jul 2:56 pm. 0 comments
We’re in Graytown and I’m on a mission. It’s fallen upon me to nudge my grandmother closer to accepting the idea of coming down to KL to live with us. Caring for my grandfather is taking a toll on her mental and physical health. She does a spectacular job, but she does it with only the help of a maid whose favorite words are “Aunty, buatlah sendiri.”
“Why won’t you move?”
“You can’t get cucumbers in KL for 50 cents,” she answers with that wry smile that says she knows the reason is entirely inadequate, but her advanced years have earned her the right to pretend it’s sufficient.
That sense of economy took the place of an education, which was disrupted when the Japanese invaded Malaya. It held her in good stead throughout her marriage, her businesses, her investments; despite her accomplishments as a homemaker I always think of her first and foremost as an astute businesswoman. Together, she and my grandfather built from nothing a life of privilege for their children, who have never experienced the childhood she describes as her own. Money has been almost an obsession, and an understandable one given their beginnings.
So when she goes on to tell how my grandfather has been making imprudent decisions in his age, how she bites her tongue and utters not one reprimand, it comes as a bit of a shock. We’re in the kitchen, I’m weighing a nutmeg’s hard, perfumed heart in the cupped palm of my hand, rubbing my fingertips over the flat, fleshy red-orange veins that encircle it. She’s leaning back in her chair, looking tired and resigned and strangely, distantly amused.
“I don’t want to pressure him. I told him he’s just lost his confidence. Senility, you can’t recover from. Loss of confidence, you can. Do you see,” she says, abruptly changing the topic, “how he looks so much better? He used to be so haggard and thin. Now he’s put on weight.”
Her tone resembles that of a mother talking about a habitually wayward child, love mingled with despair, hope and denial. Unique to that mix is the pain and bewilderment of having the man she’s shared sixty years of her life and achieved so much with degenerate into a mockery of himself.
As she lists the many elaborate eastern and western remedies she singlehandedly prepares for him, it begins to dawn on me that right now her previous triumphs have faded to near meaninglessness. For all he frustrates and pains her, at the cost of her own health, she continues to give freely. The reason is this: every day her husband is alive is a new, fiercely important accomplishment for her, time bought by her own tireless, meticulous hands.
