Notes from China (3) – learning about my Ah Tai

Meet my great-grandmother. I called her “Ah Tai” though her real name is Lee Sin Moi. She died in 1990 if I remember correctly, so I have very little memories of her. What I do remember vividly was that every time we went back to KL to celebrate CNY, we all had to line up and greet this old lady who was all wrinkly and bent, and who spoke some incomprehensible (to our young ears anyway) language. Used to scare the hell outta me and I’d just utter the usual greeting and run out of her room as fast as I can. I have more memories of her funeral as I was older then. I remember how her open casket was placed in the living room for a few days. How my Ah Suk made us kids line the body with those yellow prayer papers. And I was too scared to actually lay the paper on her so I just released mine from a height just above her body and let it float down. I was only about 10 years old at the time, what do you expect?

You can call me Lulu Ee

The same weekend of the Gambier photo outing, my cousin Evelyn and her family visited from Singapore for a week. Because the family is based in Singapore and occasionally Oz, I never quite had the chance to spend time with her kids until this visit. In fact, the visit also marked Asher’s debut to the Kuching set of the family.

It’s not cool being referred to as Ee (I’m still in denial about my age ), but coming from 3 adorable cheeky monkeys, I didn’t quite mind after a while. Oh, unfortunately I made the mistake of calling them cheeky monkeys out loud and the 2 older boys basically adopted it as their new catchphrase. Oops, I hope the mummy doesn’t come after me for that.

Since I bought the Canon 50mm f/1.8 II lens for my sister’s birthday, I had to ‘test’ it to make sure it was working. The boys proved to be good models. In fact, this is how camwhore they are – if you whip out your camera and point it at Asher, he will stop whatever he is doing and just sit in front of you, looking at your camera expectantly. He’s about 2 years old only, mind you.

More at the Flickr photostream, including this shot which is possibly my favouritest of the lot:

The maths gene went to my brother

As proven by his 2 sen on the petrol price increase posted on his blog today. Having read it, I must say it’s quite a piece of work for a 2nd-year uni student. I is impressed! Another sign that I gots to stop picturing him as a wee 12-year-old in my head. Ooops, sorry Boy, did I just embarrass you there?

On another note, I just remembered why I can’t take part in any protests in Kuching even if I wanted to. It’s because they’re all organised by political parties. And as past experience has thought me, involvement with them is a big no-no to the Firm.

Blah.

TGIF, eh?

Moi Yen is real

Whilst talking about the recent Sichuan earthquake over lunch today, we progressed on to the subject of China and my upcoming family trip back to my ancestral village in general.

Well, to satisfy my lunch kakis’ as well as my own curiosity, I took up their call and googled up Moi Yen. Guess what, the place really does exist! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this stage. -_-”

Anyway, Moi Yen is known as Mei Xian (Mandarin), which is a county in the prefecture of MeiZhou, which is in Guangdong province . Apparently, the character “Mei” is the character for some plum blossom. Learn more from the Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meizhou.

The next step of course, is to search for pictures of the place:

http://www.pbase.com/getg3/hakka

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sohingpong/sets/72157594549522904/

First impressions: nice rustic scenery, I oughta have fun with my camera on the trip. But I’ve just had a closer look at the pictures. Dirt road, no hotel, generator electricity…………right…………. Think I can start to panic yet?

Pa’s 57th Birthday

Pa turned 57 two days ago.

Pa’s 57th Birthday