Mum, Mah Mah, Ah Zor

According to my mum, I was a fussy baby. Being the first grandchild on her side of the family, the first baby to land in the household of fiery, straight-talking Changs, I was certainly fussed over. 



My great-grandmother and grandmother: the two women from whom I learnt the mysterious love of kin. They adored me, asking for nothing in return. It was my mother who suffered the weight of expectations. 
















Here I am probably three years old, leaning on mum's back as she washed clothes in the side yard of the house on Meyer Road she had married into. She hated household chores, something I have inherited from her. She told me and my brothers that we must never step over books. She wasn’t much of a reader and yet she chose to name me after a heroine in a Taiwanese romance novel.

She said that she dreamt of a baby with a thick mop of hair before giving birth to me. It was a baby in a poster she used to stare at. I don’t think my hair is thick, but that image of my mother, whom I got to know as someone who had been rudely awakened from dreamland, is one that I like very much. 

She is a tough mother, as tough as she is tender and unschooled in the ways of the world. Just two days ago we bickered during a Grab car ride home. The driver would have heard us. Telling each other off and then grudgingly making up, each giving way to the other using the most indirect words and furtive gestures of mother-daughter love.  I am blessed by the incomprehensible love, oftentimes spiky, sometimes as soft as petals, of these fierce Chang women.

[The above is an edited version of a post on Instagram.]