Before the roads diverged

For the first 14 years of my life, I was an only child—until my little sister Judy came into the picture. Being the sole focus of attention back then, I naturally became the centre of attention for both sets of grandparents. We were living with my maternal grandparents in Seang Tek Road. When my parents married in 1954, my father moved into that household, which I believe was a fairly common arrangement in post-war Penang—grooms settling in with the bride’s family.

Unlike my mother’s side, my paternal grandparents had nowhere permanent to stay. No house, not even a rented one. My maternal grandparents or maybe, great-grandparents, on the other hand, had rented the house in Seang Tek Road a long time ago, and it had taken on the role of a kind of traditional family home, the kong-chhu (公厝). It was where extended family gathered during big occasions such as the Emperor God’s worship during Chinese New Year, prayers for the ancestors during the seventh lunar month, and of course, the winter solstice festival or Tang Chek (冬至). Relatives would come and go, especially to visit my maternal grandmother, who was the eldest among her siblings.

Her side of the family was large and lively. She had regular outings to visit relatives, too. The closest lived in Noordin Street, headed by a formidable cigar-chomping old lady I still remember clearly. Among her siblings, she was especially close to her younger sister who stayed in a kampung house in Ayer Itam. They had a car, so most of the time it was the sister who came calling. When we wanted to visit them, we’d catch a bus from Dato Kramat Road, either a municipal one or the green Lim Seng Seng bus. Her other brothers were scattered around Hutton Lane, Gopeng Road, Green Garden and Lim Lean Teng Road. I was told there was a fifth brother who died during the war, but nobody ever spoke much about what happened to him.

My paternal grandparents, meanwhile, were hit hard by the Japanese Occupation. After the war, my grandfather struggled to find work. My father had to leave school before completing his Senior Cambridge exams to earn a living. My earliest memories of my paternal grandparents were of them staying in a room along Malay Street with my aunt. I haven’t been able to trace that house anymore, but back then it was considered the groom’s “official” family residence when he got married. From there, they moved into a room in Green Hall—a gloomy upstairs space that also served as an office for a Chinese association. The stairs led to a dimly lit upper floor, and their room was right at the back. Lighting was poor in those days—just a bare incandescent bulb dangling from the ceiling.

It was in that dimly lit room at Green Hall where my paternal grandfather passed away. In the middle of the night, someone called at our home in Seang Tek Road to inform my father of the death. We arrived to see him on the bed, lifeless. The lightbulb was dim, the atmosphere heavy, and the air felt a little stale. The undertaker came and his body was taken to the Toishan Convalescent Home for the customary three-day wake.

That was my first encounter with death in the family, and I remember it vividly as something unsettling and difficult to process. The funeral home was dim, stark and solemn, filled with shadows and the smell of burning fake paper money, the silver gin-chua (银纸). Family members and acquaintances came and went, offering condolences, burning joss sticks, folding paper offerings. To me, it all felt like a blur. Ceremonies and rituals which I didn’t fully understand, but was expected to endure. Death wasn’t something people talked about openly. The adults moved around, and they wailed loudly when they cried. I didn’t feel grief the way they did, not exactly. What I felt was a strange sense of fear, of helplessness with no-one to talk to. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be sad or respectful, but as a nine-year-old, I was scared.

To this day, that three-day wake has stayed with me—not because of ritual or family unity, but because it was the first time I truly felt the presence of death. Not abstract, not in stories, but real, and final. It marked the end of something, but also introduced a part of life that, until then, had been hidden from view. I think that’s why I’ve never forgotten it. Perhaps one day I should write about it properly.

After Green Hall, my paternal grandmother and aunt moved to Carnarvon Lane, and later, came to live with us in Seang Tek Road. What began as my maternal grandparents’ traditional family kong-chhu eventually grew into something more: a shared home where the two mothers-in-law, each from different background, came to accept one another’s presence under a single roof. Once, that might have seemed unthinkable but times had changed, and so had the circumstances that bound us together. After finishing school at Penang Free School, I headed off to Tunku Abdul Rahman College in Petaling Jaya, graduating in 1976. I joined the Straits Echo but lasted only six months before moving on to Ban Hin Lee Bank. In 1980, everything changed. The landlord reclaimed all four units of the Seang Tek Road property, supposedly for development which, as it turned out, never happened. But we were evicted anyway, and with very little notice.

By then, our family circle had shrunk a bit more. There was just my maternal grandmother, my paternal aunt, my parents, Judy and me. We somehow squeezed into my grandmother’s sister’s house in Lorong Zoo Tiga. It was there that my last grandmother passed away. Around the same time, Judy left for Singapore to pursue a nursing career. That left only the four of us, and in 1984, my father bought a small flat in Seberang Jaya. We moved in, thankful for owning a property at long last but not long after, in 1985, my mother, who had been unwell for a while, passed away.

Following Chinese tradition, I married Saw See within 100 days of my mum's death. We moved to the Semilang area in Seberang Jaya, where our two children were born. Then, in 2004, came the big move to Bukit Mertajam after we grew tired of our Semilang neighbours. That’s where we’ve been ever since—21 years and counting.