Whirlpool and disarray (memory tiles/memory pieces)

One can imagine a hardworking granny, hunched over the tiny pieces on the tiled pavilion, with her thumb moving in vigorous friction against each glass. Each piece is utterly immaculate, like a terracotta warriors. As though my grandmother was the original artist of the tiled green pavilion, each day, she takes an assortment of pieces and arranges them into her thoughts as a whole for the day. She was gathering these undamaged memories that have come like uninvited distant family members, and coagulate them so to ignite another round of impromptu game of Majong.

These impromptu games, lively and full of swearing brought together people from far and wide. They were the long forgotten sisters from who had resided in China, my great-grandmother who had died when my grandmother was still a young child, or my grandfather who had spent most of his life in England, or the woman that had owned the store four doors down in the birth place of my mother, a small fishing village of Sai Gong. They would sit around the Ma Jong table in full allegria. I pause for a moment, searching for an English that embraced the exultation of allegria. I could not think of one. So I continued. My grandmother would fling her arms around drawing full circles in the air, magically encircling these characters back into her present. The players would mimic this action as they create multiple whirlpools atop the plastic Ma Jong pieces of green and white.

What a seemingly a common process in this game, would affect my grandmother more adversely than one could imagine. These ghostly characters that appears in her impromptu gathering would mix the tiles in preparation for a new round. The carefully constructed combination of ingenuity of each game would collapse in the man-made whirlpool. However, in doing so, they were simultaneously swirling my grandmother’s memories into dizzying circles. In time, the chatting would subside, the circles to which the hand was drawing would become smaller and smaller, until finally, the pieces would rest in disarray. Perhaps, if she was equipped with the agility of the blessed youths, those winning combinations would not be so difficult to rebuild. However, as the word resonates, perhaps…

Moment of Old Clarity

Can you see all the stories inside her? It takes us to bring them out...

A Moment of Clarity

She had stared bleakly into the some sort of bluish-greyness, ringed by a charcoal band. This is the colour of my grandmother’s eyes. She was not looking out of them but rather looking upon the surface of those blue grey corneas.

One line on her face traversed the smooth surface of her skin, burrowing into it like a crevasse formed over the million years of earth’s formation. From where I was standing, her memories could very well have been formed at the birth of these crevasses, millions of years ago. However, beneath the bluish-greyness, it told me that these memories have came from the past millennia to meet us today. Four crevasses meant that my grandmother had traversed more that I could imagine. Together with the mountainous nose, the changing levels of the depths in her eyes, and the smooth, ploughs of her lips, she held a landscape of memories on her face.

The moments of clarity for my grandmother are unusual. Clarity of the past comes like a surprise birthday party that you thought everyone had forgotten.  Clarity of the present extends its gratitude so seldomly that we throw another surprise party in graciousness. The day we navigated her apartment building presented one of those gracious moments.

We had circumnavigated the block around the complex and had taken a rest at the first bench. From the bench, we strolled back carefully across the pavilion of the apartment building where my grandmother lives. Tiled seats and mosaic flooring shimmer across the pavilion. It is an incredible sight of thumbnail size; green square blocks lined one after another, spanning across a platform the size of a football field. The wetness on the tiles is a reminder of the recent rain. It glistened in staccato like the bubbles that reach the surface of your glass of champagne. The dampness doesn’t dry beneath the towering oaks of twenty storeys. Rather, I imagine the droplets on the tiled floor gathering like children at a preschool, holding hands, and waiting for the wind to sweep them up and above so to land on another complex across the road. However, all this ravishing beauty could only be found in my retrospective thoughts. The fear of my grandmother slipping on these tiles outweighed the fanciful imageries. The place was a slippery slide at the water parks for the geriatrics. However, rather than stretched out faces like children in fearful joy, there are stretched out faces of sheer terror. Twenty more lines are added in an instant to those that had already been eighty years in the making. The glistening staccato are trickery for my grandmother’s failing eyes. The towering grandeur of the building eats the sunshine that many are already deprived of in a city permanently layered with smog. The dampness of the ground can hardly be handled by those with the stamina to walk to two legs, let alone by those whom have acquired an extra one for support. It doesn’t make sense.

So we walked carefully across the pavilion because her legs were now like fibreboard. I wanted to get her home, despite the huffing and puffing that escaped when she attempted to gather herself at the bench. She was gathering her breath, gathering her heartbeats so that she could order them in a regular rhythm, gathering her splintered bones and smoothing them out into strong legs again. There was a lot of gathering that had to be done. I just wanted to get her home. In the safety of a dry floor, cushioned couch, and more importantly, a handy phone call away for help if needed.

It was coming up to six o’clock. Dinner was closing in before her eight o’clock bedtime. When we arrived at the apartment, she fell deep onto the couch sighing over and over, repeating ‘Oh… I am useless. What is the point of living’. I starred at her as she tried to rub her legs back to life. I am burrowed in a frown, lips slightly ajar, waiting for the healing words to come out of my mouth. All I could come up with was an echo of a ‘No…’ I had no idea what it was like for her. How could anyone understand someone else’s pain? Perhaps if she could muster the belief that with each breathe she could release the pains from her legs. Particles of pain would gather in her mouth and out it would go. Out the window, falling gingerly upon the pavilion below, damning it for being so damp and utterly scary to walk upon. Could she? Could this possibly make her day any better?

I looked out the window and formulated that the light of the day meant it was dinnertime. The sun was setting in greyness of the smoggy sky and beeping horns in peek hour traffic was the alarm for dinner.

‘Granny! Do you have to take your pills before you eat?’ I barked into her despairing rant.

She replied with a sudden return of someone I once knew, ‘Of course! I am getting it now.’ The tragic drone of her despair momentarily gathered up and swallowed back to the depths of her legs. She pushed herself up from the sofa and I leaned over to help her. She followed the call of the pills living in the kitchen and I watched from where I was standing.

The dramatic change of voice had hit me like a surprise party. My burrowing frown like a valley of my brow began to rise like a mountain. My chest rose, mimicking the return of my grandmother’s stamina. These surprises were surprise parties for me, and not so much for her. I graciously celebrated the return of my grandmother from my childhood. She had had a moment of clarity.

The Evolution of a Story

I wanted to write my grandmother's story. Granny was granny. Like all other grannies I imagined. She looked after me when I was little and now, I try to look after her. Or I should probably say, now that I am in the UK and she is in Hong Kong, I try to look AT her. What I mean is that as a storyteller, I am attempting to look at her past and explore the evolution of a story she once told me. A story that was told with so much angst and passion, it was like watching the over dramatised mime on stage. However, she was not miming. Her storytelling had taken her somewhere else, far beyond the couch at which we sat. Her London grey eyes suggested not only recollecting this memory, but reliving the experience.

The Day Candice Started Blogging

Blogging for me was the icing on top of a cake. To me, it looked gruesome and uninviting. I knew it was full of sugar and butter. However, everybody else loved it. To be loved, don't we all need to put some icing on the cake for show?
Although this is not a real cake, it looks good enough to eat...