Reflections about my Grandparents
My grandfather died earlier this year, in the middle of the pandemic. A couple years short of turning 100, he died from age-related illnesses and not COVID-19.
Despite being the only one of my four grandparents who was fluent in English, it was a distant relationship. He had lived in Singapore for his whole life and I had grown up in Australia. Our contact was limited to the one time a year during the Christmas holidays where my parents would take me back to Singapore, and the occasional visit to Australia which grew increasingly infrequent with age. When I migrated to America, the visits became further apart still.
He was, in my mind, a typical older generation Chinese family patriarch. Stern, ornery, and outwardly unaffectionate. If he harbored any warmth internally, it rarely showed. My earliest memory of him was of a random afternoon when he was visiting us in Sydney. I must have been about 8 at the time. My parents had left the house for some reason or other, and he had asked me where they had gone. He got angry at me when I said I didn’t know. “Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know. Everything you don’t know!”
By most accounts, my yeh yeh had lived a good life, but perhaps, by his own words, not so much in his twilight years where he lost both his wives - the first in mind, and the second in body.
My grandmother passed away only a couple months after my grandfather.
My uncles and aunts, having just returned home from their father’s funeral, were now faced with having to almost immediately return for their mother’s. This would be devastating at the best of times, but in the pandemic era, the bureaucracy my dad had to wade through to get back to Singapore from Australia was an agonizing heaping of salt in the wound. The Australian government, which had — uniquely among countries — blocked Australian citizens from exiting the country for over a year, had to grant him a special exemption before he could travel. The Singaporean government had to do the same thing. Once in Singapore, there was a short but mandatory quarantine, and on returning from Singapore, he would have to sit through a 14 day quarantine, alone in a hotel room. For a second time. Obtaining the exemptions from the two governments took days, and he ended up missing both funerals.
My grandmother spoke several languages, but English was not really one of them, so my communication with her was limited. A seamstress by background who had migrated to Singapore from Guangdong province in China, she was the family matriarch and could hold her own against anybody. Unlike my grandfather, she was never loud, but was always working things behind the scenes.
Alzheimer’s is a devastating disease, and it took her mind a decade ago. She stopped recognizing people and eventually became mute, consigned to gazing upon Asian soap operas from a chair in her living room. But she was a formidable woman and still she lived for years beyond what anyone expected. I have to think that given the timing of her passing, she somehow knew that her husband had departed and decided to join him.
My grandfather’s other wife liked to joke that whenever a new generation was born in a family, the generations above received a “promotion”. With the passing of my grandmother, the book was finally closed for an entire generation of my family tree. We had all been demoted and were poorer for it.
My grandfather left behind 8 children, 9 grandchildren, and 4 great-grandchildren, together with Fatima, his ever-present maid from Indonesia.
In the weeks following my grandparents’ death, I wanted to write something to mark their passing. A death in the family of one, let alone two, significant figures provokes retrospection and introspection. However, I had struggled with the task. Months later, this meandering essay is the output, and the direction it ended up taking was unexpected to me. Its digressions do come to an eventual point. I don’t have a large number of memories with my grandparents, but they did shape how I now view the world.
My grandfather was the eldest son of my great-grandfather, a mythical family figure who died before I lived. I will digress for a moment because my great-grandfather’s story is far more interesting than anyone else’s in my family.
Born in provincial China in the 1890s, my tai yeh was the son of a farmer and the second child of four. He was orphaned by the time he was 6 and raised by his step-mother until 16, at which point a fortune teller told her that his future was in Singapore. His step-mother sold a cow, so the story goes, and sent him off by ship to Singapore via Hong Kong. On a steamer called the S.S. “Lai Sun”, owned by Jardine Matheson (a British-owned conglomerate that still exists today), the trip from Hong Kong to Singapore took nine days at the cost of nine dollars.
He found employment as an apprentice carpenter at the dockyards. After about a year, he became a carpenter and, with the accompanying raise in wages from one penny a day to five pennies, was able to save and send money back to his family in China. By the end of the First World War, he was promoted to a foreman position, overcoming an opium addiction along the way.
He married at the start of the 1920s and my grandfather was born a couple years later. By the mid-1920s, my great-grandfather became self-employed, starting a company that was given contract work by the British operating the ports, cleaning and painting ships. “There have been many, both Straits and Blue Funnel ships, down the years who have come to know the tall figure and unmistakable voice of [my great-grandfather] ‘getting things done’,” one news article described.
During the 1930s, business had grown and he purchased a house on Yan Kit Road, which today occupies prime real estate in Singapore and is now home to an apartment complex.
From 1942-45, the Japanese occupied Singapore and work vanished for over 3 years. My great grandfather reportedly “grew vegetables, reared poultry and pigs - occasionally selling a piece of his wife’s jewelry to obtain essentials for the children.”
After the Japanese surrendered and departed the island, my great-grandfather “gathered together a work force of under-nourished human beings — he provided a basic wage, free board and a hair-cut thrown in. His workers gathered strength and were soon able to produce good results in their work on the ships.” The company grew to “200 men” and business flourished.
My great-grandfather didn’t speak any English, but somehow managed to communicate with the British who ran the port.
[He] recalls an occasion just before the war when Captain “Pinky” Johnson, Master of the “Glenaffric” became so infuriated with the foreman who was unable to predict when the work in hand of converting a coal bunker on his ship into a Palm oil tank would be completed. Captain Johnson stopped work for four hours, until [my great-grandfather] appeared in his cabin. An estimate of time required to complete was established there and then so that the Master could plan ship business ahead and inform all concerned regarding sailing time. [My great-grandfather] and Captain Johnson became firm friends, respectful of one another ever afterwards.
By the time the 1970s arrived, he had two wives (in a bigamous relationship which was legal at the time), 9 children, and 28 grandchildren. And he apparently loved throwing parties.
By the time of his death, my great-grandfather had built intergenerational wealth - not just in his business, but through the various property he had acquired over the years. Houses and commercial property built on British Malayan swampland and beachfront that would eventually develop into the heart of the island nation of Singapore. None of his children needed to work and, not too soon after my great-grandfather’s death, none of them really did. The business soon fell out of family hands.
Before and during retirement, as the family tells me, my grandfather fostered a penchant for gambling on horse racing and would lose literal suitcases of cash. At one point, it is said that he put up entire bungalows he owned as collateral and promptly lost them.
Eventually, he tired of the racetrack in time to lead a comfortable, albeit more modest life, but not in time to spare his children from seeing their multigenerational inheritance evaporate, along with the family luggage.
In the closing paragraphs of a newspaper profile written about my great-grandfather in 1971 were these words: “His advice to his three sons, now partners in the business is, ‘Be diligent, hard working and thrifty.’”
He died a few years later.
My grandfather was an imposing figure. As the eldest son of his generation, he was shown a level of outward deference by everyone in the family that produced that aura. He was the sort of man that even rambunctious kids would quiet down around (and if they didn’t, they’d learn to soon enough).
He was never cruel or abusive to me — he just had the manner of an elder Chinese man who had been the head of a large family for decades and had become accustomed to people doing what he said.
As a traditional Chinese family, the older generations were big on imparting “Confucian values” to children. The two that they focused on the most were filial piety and family harmony. Ostensibly, those values are admirable — essentially respect for elders (whether in the same generation or above) and thinking about the family as a communal unit where “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”.
As a child, the concept of filial piety was explained to me through a story about a father and son who were trying to sleep in a room full of mosquitos. The son, in a display of filial piety and sacrifice, would let the mosquitos feast on his uncovered arms until they were full, so that his father could get a good night’s rest. “Would you do that for me?” I remember my dad asking me.
On a day to day level, these values translated into the mundane — greeting elders by their proper titles, inviting elders to “eat rice” when sitting down for a meal, not talking back, that sort of thing. All things drilled into us by parents and other relatives, accompanied by the constant drumbeat of, “if you don’t do what we tell you to do, you’ll reflect badly on us and embarrass the family”.
Apart from a younger American cousin who coincidentally has a doctorate in Confucianism, there are no Confucian scholars in our family and, for them, what these values appeared to boil down to at the end of the day was “do what your elders tell you to do”.
My dad migrated from Singapore in the late 1970s, as did two of his brothers. He ended up in Australia, which is where my life started. This had a predictable impact on my upbringing.
Many children of first generation immigrants have to grapple with cultural identity issues when growing up. Some more than others, but it is definitely a thing for Australian-born Chinese (or “ABCs”, an abbreviation that also works for American-born Chinese). At home you learn how to behave in one way, and at school you learn about another way. This dichotomy sometimes leads to ABCs being called bananas - yellow on the outside, white on the inside. It is an amusing but imperfect analogy.
The conflicts between these “two worlds” created a constant tension that I think my parents struggled with as much as I did. After all, they were themselves adjusting to a new country and culture at a time where non-White foreigners were not the most welcome (the White Australia Policy had only formally ended half a decade before my parents arrived).
My parents’ response was pretty typical. They impressed upon me their version of Chinese cultural values, passing it down as received wisdom. Then they doubled down, pitting those values against those of the Western world around us — an “us vs. them” battle combined with a warning not to follow Western ways, where kids disrespected their parents and the focus on individual rights over “the good of the family” was selfish and a surefire route to moral ruin and destitution. Needless to say, there was always a sense of cultural superiority pervading all of this.
Children receive their spoken accents not from their parents but from the classroom, and this inexorable process serves as a daily reminder that a child is being shaped by a foreign land in ways a parent can’t prevent. Instead of figuring out how to bridge the divide, many parents tended to amplify it instead. How could you expect otherwise, when your assumed worldview is that two cultures have fundamentally conflicting values?
I don’t blame my parents for this. It’s completely understandable.
My parents were are ill-equipped to deal with this as much as my primary school teachers were at dealing with racism — that is to say, they had never been in that situation before and all they could do was resort to what they knew best (which, in the case of my teachers was reciting to me the aphorism that “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me”, after I had thrown a rock at a kid who had been part of a group of bullies calling me ching-chong Chinaman and pulling up the corners of their eyes to make them slanty).
The problem was tough to deal with in 1980s country town Australia, but my situation was far from unique. This is something that first generation immigrants have struggled with since times immemorial. How do you preserve and transmit your identity to younger generations and not lose it to a foreign culture?
Part of it is the fear that the family traditions and values that had been passed down for generations would end with their child and it would be their fault. A natural response is perhaps to fight this by instilling a fear of “the other”.1
Through the years of trying to reconcile playground pressures against home pressures, I was definitely not the most filial son. A not insignificant part of that was due to my own personal shortcomings. That said, if you are going to own a parenting style you also have to own at least some of the results.
I did enough to go through the motions whenever I was around extended family. Best behavior always in front of yeh yeh. But the family ideals never quite sat well with me.
I think the idea I rebelled against the most was the idea that respect is a right of the elders and it is not something that ever needs to be earned. That, as a child, you owe an unrepayable debt to your family for their sacrifice of feeding, clothing, educating, and caring for you.
On its surface, there is nothing inherently bad about the concept of respecting one’s elders, or the ideal of acting for the good of the group over the desires of the individual. But when applied without nuance, these principles are too easily manipulated into to a weapon for simply getting your way just because you are older. They are too easily twisted in a way that enables elders to maintain the status quo. To dismiss dissent as disrespect and selfish troublemaking that disrupts social cohesion. A way to maintain power and unaccountability. To me, the innate conservatism in this aspect of Asian culture bears a striking resemblance to the Republican party of today.
There is a frequently-used quote attributed to American political scientist Francis Wilhoit: “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
“Respect for elders” smells like one of those laws. When the power to rule by decree comes ranked by age, and relative age is unchangeable, that is a strong incentive for those with that power to maintain “tradition”.
I do believe that elders deserve respect. I also think that everyone deserves respect... until proven otherwise. That said, I understand that family is fundamentally different to strangers. Being family comes with a much larger reservoir of imbued respect — they are family! But we shouldn’t conflate respect with authoritarianism. I also believe that respect must be ultimately earned, and it will start to break when it is assailed by hypocrisy, arbitrary or unreasonable decision making, or simple bad behavior. “Do as I say and not as I do,” is not the most effective way to teach behavior and can breed resentment.
Alas, we are all human and fallible.
Here’s an example that’s fresh in my mind. In the aftermath of my grandmother’s death, a family WhatsApp group was formed to coordinate logistics.
At some point the WhatsApp group devolved into a geopolitical discussion about China versus America, with my father taking such a strong position boosting China that you’d think he was a CCP mouthpiece. Among the claims he made was that the “re-education” of Uighurs in Xinjiang was innocuous and news otherwise was just western media lies. The debate had been raging on between my uncles for some time, when I picked up on a stray comment my dad made (”CNN MSNBC BBC NYT The Atlantic Vanity Fair are no better than Fox News”), to which I replied “🙄 don’t talk cock”. (“Talk cock” is a slang expression in Singapore meaning to talk nonsense, and not as vulgar as the presence of the word “cock” would imply. It is apparently influenced by the English phrase “cock-and-bull story”, which is not a vulgar expression either.)
Several messages later, a family member jumped in:
So I left, and the following exchange ensued:
Here’s where the rank hypocrisy is. The family member who had called me out had, in the months prior, been hauled in front of the rest of their siblings, having been caught doing two separate things with respect to their father that were far more serious than an offhanded comment I made about my father’s political opinions.
As the sordid matter had a legal aspect to it, several of my uncles had actually pulled me in to discuss the situation when they had initially discovered it and were investigating. This was unusual because the elder generations normally kept family matters to themselves, and this group of people had for many years told me that those sorts of affairs were none of my business.
I was added to a family group chat where the matter was being discussed. I was silent up until the point when an explanation from the family member in question didn’t hold water for me, and I called it out by asking a question. I was ignored, but the basic response was “This accusation should have been in private chat.” In other words, in a 1-on-1 setting with no one else to hear, even though it was genuinely a family matter. I was later told (via an intermediary, offline) in no uncertain terms by the spouse of the person in question that this was not a matter for my generation, and I should just butt out. There was, of course, no response on the merits of the point that I had made.
In my mind, this was just another example of maintaining unaccountability under the guise of “respect for elders”. As I have grown older, I have found the act of reconciling words and actions increasingly challenging.
My parents always said they treated me far more leniently than their parents did. My mother would tell stories about how, as a schoolgirl, if she was slow to rise from bed, her father would lift up the covers and lay into her with a rattan cane. I have no doubt about this, and I do given them credit them for moderating how they disciplined me.
But I don’t think they were being more lenient. That would imply they were being soft relative to their parents, which I think is a misleading and even dangerous characterization. I believe they didn’t follow in the exact footsteps of their parents because it was a conscious decision to not treat me in the way they had been treated as children. And perhaps a subconscious understanding that maybe their parents took things a little too far sometimes.
To be certain, corporal punishment was still a prominent part of my childhood and my hand found the wrong end of a rattan cane many times. To this day my dad — a physician who sparked my interest in the sciences — believes corporal punishment is the most effective way to ensure compliance and that the child will “grow up right.” “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is still an expression he favors. I have seen enough of the world — both anecdotally and in research — to know that this is an outdated and scientifically incorrect statement.
But positive change comes in increments, and I guess that is better than no change at all.
My grandfather too, apparently mellowed with age, and to his credit, he also held some relatively progressive, non-traditional views. For one, it was recognized that he never held the common Chinese attitude that favored sons over daughters. Before old age brought with it mobility issues, he would also fund annual reunions for our extended family, which formed some of the most memorable experiences of my youth, giving me the opportunity to meet aunts, uncles and cousins that were living in various countries.
Whenever I challenged the Confucian principles my family tried to instill on me, a common, relentless refrain was, “Just wait until you have your own children, then you will truly understand.”
I now have my own kids. So then, what do I think now?
I find that I am constantly thinking about how I will help my kids — the product of 4 different cultures! — to navigate the issues of identity, values, and tradition. If I was challenged by what to make of my identity growing up, what does it mean for my children of mixed ethnicity and mixed nationality, growing up in a country that neither parent is from?
I find myself as a first generation immigrant, married to another first generation immigrant from another culture. I find myself grappling with the same issues my parents did, trying to figure out how to raise their child in the best way they could. But I also find myself as a second generation immigrant, and a person who has had the benefit of growing up in a developing multicultural society and now living in a perhaps more developed one (although one that is also still very much developing).
I recognize that for all I have said about Chinese values above, there is something valuable to take from them, and that the other extreme of Western individualism is also fraught with serious challenges. As with almost everything in life, the best path is rarely found at the extremes.
I find myself wanting to teach them Chinese values and customs, because I think that membership in a family and tribe brings with it a sense of belonging and being a part of something larger. I grew up with those values and customs and they are a part of my identity despite their flawed implementation. I think understanding where one comes from is important and understanding culture provides essential context.
Over the years I have also seen how my wife’s Northern European family works and operates. As with any family and any culture, there are good aspects and bad aspects. In my wife, I see the positive outcomes of that culture and know that there are many paths to raising a successful child that parents can be proud of — paths that don’t involve canes or needing to call family members by formal titles to “show respect”. I also want my kids to know of those ways.
Importantly, I want to enable my kids to feel like they can be a member of several tribes — evaluating each with a critical but open mind; discerning their strengths from their weaknesses; and understanding the commonalities between them, instead of only focusing on the differences that seem incompatible. You can’t read the label from inside the bottle.
Much of this essay focused on the shortcomings of my family’s cultural values and it does not portray everyone in the best light. But that is not my takeaway and it should not be yours.
In all cases, I have had the fortune to never doubt that my parents love me, and I am sure that their parents loved them. While parenting methods may differ, and sometimes provoke strenuous disagreement, everyone is trying to raise their children in the best way they know how.
Based on my experiences growing up, my contribution towards incremental improvement will be to try to keep a flexible and open mind for my kids, and to not fall prey to preserving culture through dogmatically and rigidly imposing tradition in a way that perpetuates unreasonableness, arbitrariness, or unaccountability.2 My hope is that my children will be able to chart a path for themselves and their future families that blends the best of what they experience and discards the worst.
Interestingly, years later when studying in California, I had an Israeli friend, who had never been an observant Jew before, find herself starting to eat kosher and partake in other customs that she had otherwise ignored at home. Finding herself in a foreign land, she explained that she was suddenly drawn to the things that she viewed as her identity, and to find a sense of belonging and understanding that only occurred when hanging out with other Israelis.
One day my kids will find this article and my hope is that they will read it and call me out on any hypocrisy. Accountability should not be a one way street.