My first grandfather was on my dad's side. He passed away when my dad was young, fifteen, I'm told. I have often asked my great aunts and my dad what he was like. By all accounts, he was intense, intelligent, compelling, charming, passionate, and taken to drink. I quite like the tales. His gravestone carries a photo which I often recant as resembling a famous actor, Chow Yun Fatt: thick, black hair, black glasses, a full, white Chinese face, dressed smartly in a shirt and dark tie. My dad isn't the type to praise another man too keenly. But from what I suppose to be his reserve about my granddad I figure my granddad must have been a strong character. I wonder if he had Chow's on-screen intensity, his great, almost frightful grin. Yes, my great aunts often say that he was a wonderful man, gregarious, effusive, and perhaps they are disposed to fondness, to nostalgia. They said he was at Raffles, survived a bombing that nailed his entire classroom, worked as an editor at the Straits Times, died when his liver gave out. My dad's brother, my uncle, says that intelligence sometimes skips a generation. I hope he doesn't mean I'm smart. But the stories end there. I have no one else to tell me about him. In a way it's difficult to treat seriously a person you only hear about. But I think often about what a grandfather of mine would think of me, whether he would be proud.
My second grandfather stayed with us when we were young. We had a mansionette, if that's what they're called, a little two storey flat in Hougang. We slept upstairs, parents and children two to a room each, and my step-grandfather downstairs, his grilled window towards the corridor. I think we were on the third floor. I remember he had a tummy, he yawned loud enough to be heard throughout an entire bus, no mean feat to a child. He often went shirtless while sitting at home, and I remember amusing myself by poking and prodding his chest. He drove a van and it made warning beeps at a certain speed. The story most told of him and me is that he once sent me to school and being displeased at sitting in his van instead of my dad's car I stepped out and kicked his van. He drank soda water, which tasted awful, and he watched wrestling, which was fucking awesome. We weren't allowed to watch but the rest of the time we saw the undertaker on this little ten inch tv, a cathode ray tube thing. I don't know what he was like, except that he spoke less than I remember, and made more grandfatherly sounds in replacement. When he passed away my sister said that he told her which of his big rings on his hands were real and which were not. They were ugly, garish things. He passed away and I don't remember much more than that, other than wearing socks and walking down the road at his funeral. I remember my dad sitting at a table, tired. Strange, I don't remember it as a sad occasion. Maybe it had some air of inevitability toward it. I haven't recollected my thoughts about him until now, and that makes twenty plus years. When my mum came back recently we went to a temple on a really hot day, where a little ensconced portrait of his was kept with many others, in a side hall where recorded prayers were played on repeat. I remember my mum crying, saying that she had returned. I don't remember what he looks like from the photo. I guess that means his memory is well treated.
My third grandfather lived in a one room flat in Chinatown. My parents referred to him as the Chinatown Gong Gong (not to be mistaken with the Hougang Gong Gong). We visited him three times or so, not more, as far as we were children. I once bought a cup for him, when I was eighteen or so, and I remember feeling extremely put out that he didn't seem too enamoured to receive my present. My mum who was there chided him, a little roughly, that he hadn't seemed too appreciative. We rarely visited him; when we did, it was usually at night, and we usually didn't stay too long. Nothing much was said, except my mum who spoke to him in Hokkien, a dialect I could not fairly grasp until more recently. Over the past year or so I visited him three times. He seemed worn out, a little threadbare. We had dinner, we had hor fun downstairs. He spoke in a chesty, reticent, and simple manner. I read him his letters, explained the damned CHAS scheme to him in Hokkien. I brought him a bottle of Yomeishu, and he chided me for it, embarrassed to receive a gift. The second time I went to visit him I knocked on the door for a really long time. I wondered if he was there, or however else it might be. After a while the door opened. He was hard of hearing, and he was about ready to turn in for the night. He had a radio and a television, a lot of video CDs which he showed me, and a lot of photos of him and his friends and family, travelling in various parts of China. They were exactly what they were, photos of people, old photos. He had a window which faced the back part of Havelock Road, towards the Ministry of Manpower. It was quite a good view from the flat, to be honest, and the wind came through, wu hong or hong beng dua, as was polite to say. He worked in a hospital as a janitor for forty something years, and my mum said that he used to prepare the hot powdered milk for her. He divorced my grandmother, I am told because she gambled too much, and she stayed in the flat that they bought. He still wore the wedding band on his left ring finger. He was hard of hearing but he understood just fine. He had vision problems, but in his resigned way he would say that it was sometimes worse, and sometimes not so bad. All this in Hokkien. After a few visits I stopped. When my mum asked if I still visited him I said that I didn't feel like visiting him, I don't feel that I should be visiting him. It's difficult to explain things to my mum. I didn't want to sit with him, grandson to grandfather, and feel like a stranger, given the distance our lives had taken. I didn't want to sit there and feel pity for him. It was a difficult emotion for me to deal with. There was little I could have done. He was happy to have someone to visit him. I don't know if I felt that I did so as his grandson. That was the difficult part. Today, I was about to go home when I thought of him. I thought, hey, I should ask him to stay with me in the flat I'm buying, at Bedok. That will fix everything, that's obviously the right thing to do here, to ask him to stay with me. At his door, the gate was broken apart, the door handle chained to the nearest part of the gate. Partial boot marks marred the exposed tiles at the front of the door. It was all there, and clear. I knocked and shouted to him, hoping he was in there, and he wasn't. The police said they had taken him that day. It seemed a matter of fact, a coincidence. Years ago, I stood in a burned out room when an enormous fire had ravaged my grandmother's flat. It was blackened, completely destroyed, what a war zone might have seemed. The scene at my Gong Gong's door was just the same, it was completely evident. I offered, on perhaps my second or third visit, to take him to a church. Where there would be other lao lang. He declined. I think in my mind I was, alright, maybe next time. May God have mercy on his soul. God is a merciful God. What does that mean? That means that God cares. I hope that's enough.
Chinatown Gong Gong, Chin Swee Road Gong Gong. Farewell, old man.
