3 hours ago
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About a decade ago, my po po (maternal grandmother) entered aged care. As Mum and I sorted through her belongings, I found a sepia photograph, hidden inside an almanac, of my grandmother and a woman I had never seen before. Po Po didn’t like to be photographed and rarely smiled in photos but, in this one, she looked happy. There was also an intimate air to their pose.
I asked my mother about this woman, wondering if she was one of my grandmother’s lost friends. In the aftermath of the Vietnam war, many of them had fled the country in refugee boats but had not survived the journey. Mum said the woman had been the tenant of a spare room in their house and, for years, she and my grandmother had been inseparable. Then, one day, when my mum was about 11, the woman announced that she had met a man and would be going to live with him. My mum didn’t recall all the details, but she did remember my grandmother accusing the woman of “betrayal”. Afterwards, they never saw each other again.
Was Po Po in love with her tenant? On an impulse, I asked my mum this taboo question. She slammed the almanac shut and snatched it out of my hands. Even the suggestion was seen as an insult to my grandmother’s name.
I didn’t pursue it, but the question proved to be a chisel, slowly prising open the vault containing all the unmentionable topics that had arisen between my mother and me over the years. If I could not know my grandmother better, I decided that at least I wanted to know more about my mother and her life. I started asking about her youth. Did she read romance novels, like me? When did she first fall in love? Initially, my efforts were fruitless. Then, little by little, she began to confide in me. She was addicted to romance novels. At 19, she fell head over heels for a tall, handsome architect. He claimed to love her, too, but they lost touch when he fled the Vietnam war.
These questions and their answers eventually paved the way to a profound revelation about my mother’s marriage. For most of my life, I believed that Mum didn’t truly love my dad. They never embraced, or even held hands. Terms of endearment were not in their vocabulary. The lack of affection was common among their Chinese contemporaries, but Mum also often boasted about the six other proposals she had received before marrying Dad in 1979, after the fall of Saigon. Though it wasn’t clear to me why she rejected the others, it always felt as if she only married Dad out of despair – it seemed that, to survive the chaotic postwar years, she needed a husband.
In contrast, every now and then I caught Dad gazing at her with a depth of emotion that I felt could stem only from love. Nothing was too good for his beautiful wife. He would trade his life for hers if circumstance demanded it. After 43 years of marriage, Mum lost Dad to dementia, and he died in 2023. My mother was grief-stricken. She couldn’t eat or sleep and she sobbed all the time. I couldn’t understand the intensity of her grief. “You didn’t even love him!” I wanted to say each time she broke down.
Mum read my mind and, for the first time, she truly opened up to me. She admitted that, at times, she longed for an easier life, for material comforts that my dad couldn’t provide. In Vietnam, he had owned a successful small business. Due to the weak value of the Vietnamese dong, my parents spent all their savings on five air fares to Australia for our family. Once we arrived, Dad worked 12 hours a day as a machine operator in a die-casting factory. Even so, poverty tainted every aspect of our lives. It had been easy for my mother to blame him, but she knew that, in truth, he had emigrated for her sake – because she had wanted to raise her children in a democracy. As she spoke, her eyes had a softness I hadn’t seen before, at least not when she talked about my father. Mum didn’t realise how much she loved Dad until it was too late.
Since then, our relationship has matured into a bond between confidantes. She even admitted that she, too, had wondered if Po Po may have harboured conflicted feelings for her former tenant. It has taken half a lifetime for my mother and me to establish this openness – during this time, she has also become a staunch supporter of my career as a writer, a pursuit she once dismissed as a futile dream. In turn, this change has shaped the relationship I have with my daughter. In place of the formalities under which I lived for so long, ours is a home where openness and vulnerability are encouraged, where I hope my daughter feels safe discussing even the most challenging topics – a home of which I think my grandmother would be proud.
