Commentary: What losing my grandmother made me realise about adulting and my childhood dreams
As a young girl, I was obsessed with giants.
Their city, I believed, was suspended above Singapore, just above the treetops.
Indistinguishable from the clouds and sky, the giants could never be seen or heard — only felt. Whenever the branches swayed or the leaves rustled, I was convinced they were in motion.
If anyone were to ask what sorts of things preoccupied me as a kid, trees and giants would be my unequivocal answer. Back then, I thought about them all the time.
My favourite pastime involved looking out of windows at trees and thinking about the giants residing above their canopies.
I particularly loved the view from my grandma’s bedroom window, where, from a height of five storeys, I was able to see the tops of the trees lining a footpath that led to a playground.
Whenever Ma-eh (how I affectionately call my Ah-Ma) saw me kneeling on her bed and staring out the window, she would ask in Cantonese: “What are you looking at, A-Ni?”
A-Ni — her pet name for me since she found my English name too difficult to pronounce — was actually waiting for the faithful moment when a giant might miss a step and come tumbling down to Singapore.
But no enormous beings ever fell from the sky; not even when trees were pruned, moved or cleared.
This convinced me that the giants were a careful species. Their steps were calculated with mathematical precision, their laws of physics different. How else could my Garden City thrive beneath their soles?
The City of Giants, as A-Ni pictured it, was a diverse community that dwelled above: Male, female, young, old — with families and friends; school and jobs and things to do. Some giants were friendlier than others; some more beautiful and statuesque.
In my mind, the exceptionally tall ones were the most mobile: Their longer limbs gave rise to wider strides that bridged the chasms in tree-sparse areas.
The shorter ones, on the other hand, resided above greener parts of the island. Presumably they all ate clouds and drank rainwater.
My childhood understanding of the City of Giants made me very invested in Singapore’s continuity as a Garden City. Every time a tree was cut down, I would pray fervently for another to be planted in its wake. After all, an entire civilisation hung in the balance.
But as windy days and years blew past me, so too did my thoughts drift from the giants.
With time, the overhead city, like my fading childhood memory, began to break apart and recede from consciousness.
The teenaged A-Ni was no longer interested in trees in the way she had once been. And adult A-Ni went about her life as she assumed the giants went about theirs — the two worlds never intersecting.
Outgrowing giants sounds illogical, but that I had done when I stopped thinking about them altogether.
The City of Giants which I had once willed into existence — whose foundations I’d laid, tree by tree — crumbled from sheer neglect.
Meanwhile, life in my own city kept me plenty busy. Who had time to look at trees when they had to study, work, start a family, raise children, tend to relationships, and catch up on rest?
Besides, I thought, there was nothing so special about the view from my grandma’s window.
LOSS IN ADULTHOOD
I wish somebody had told me, in those years I was so busy adulting, that the advent of adulthood is marked by the loss of people you love. The more dearly they were loved, the faster you grow up.
Ma-eh died in November 2012.
When I received the news, my immediate thought was that it was my fault.
I could barely remember the last time I had visited her or looked out of her bedroom window, even though spending time at her home was one of the mainstays of my childhood and continued with some regularity till I entered junior college.
My childhood memory of her is crisp — I can vividly recall the figure she cut as a robust, indomitable grandmother who looked after her many grandchildren, myself included.
The sprightly Cantonese matron who walked me to and from kindergarten never missed a beat with marketing, cooking, cleaning, and childcare.
Ma-eh bought all my favourite foods from the market, cooked all my favourite dishes, nursed me to health when I was sick, watched Hong Kong dramas with me, and chuckled at all my unfunny jokes.
Yet when I try to think of what my beloved grandma was like in her more advanced years, or piece together details about our relationship between my undergrad years and the time I became a working mother-of-two, my mind draws a blank.
Two weeks after her death, when I went to her Toa Payoh flat to pick up some old photo albums for safekeeping, I revisited her bedroom and that fateful window.
THE GREATEST TITAN
The flat aluminium louvres were intact, as if I’d stepped right back into a scene from the 1980s. I stood for a long while with the lever in my hands before pulling on it to see how much the view had changed since the time I believed in treetop giants.
As the shutters squeaked open, I saw the same concrete footpath that led to a newer-looking playground with more updated fixtures; whose rubber flooring had replaced the dirty sand I once scooped in and out of plastic buckets.
The trees I remembered — and that I later identified, with a little Googling, to have been African Mahogany — were gone.
A little further down, a high-rise HDB block occupied the spot where an open-air car park used to be, obscuring the view of the main road.
I fixed my eyes on some younger trees that dotted the remaining green spaces, waiting for a breeze that never came.
My grandmother was the greatest titan in my life, and I had allowed her to fade and vanish, along with the City of Giants.
Ma-eh, muttered a grown-up A-Ni in Cantonese, ngo fan lei la.
“I’m back,” was all I managed to say that afternoon through her bedroom window, though I hope both she and the giants heard what was unsaid.
That I was sorry that I’d been gone, and I was even sorrier that they were gone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rachel Tey is the author of the Tea in Pajamas series and the short stories, The Midnight Mission and The Cynical Sisters, from the anthologies A View of Stars and Missed Connections, respectively. She is the co-founder and academic director of Offshoots Academy and a part-time lecturer at Nanyang Technological University. This piece first appeared in The Birthday Book: Unmasking, a collection of 58 essays on the new individual and collective possibilities for Singapore as we emerge from the throes of Covid-19.
