My family heirloom
When my father retired and we moved out of the shop, he took along the signboard that had adorned the front of the shop ever since it opened for business more than half a century ago. It was a simple sign with the three Chinese characters of the shop’s name in gold against a black background.
For more than 10 years, the signboard laid, wrapped in red paper, inside the little store room below the stairs in the house we moved to. And when I moved to my own apartment this past January, the signboard came with me. For a while, both my sister and brother thought we’d thrown it out when we cleaned out the house after father left us in April 2005, but no, I’d kept it.
Actually, for almost a year, the signboard remained in the little store room until recently when I found someone to restore it. And when it was restored and he brought it to my sister’s house, I just couldn’t believe my eyes – he’d done a really good job, restoring it with new black lacquer paint and gold leaf on the Chinese characters. Before this, we’d never been able to really see the black and the gold because the signboard had never been cleaned (due to Chinese superstition not to clean it in case the shop’s good luck got wiped off).
This morning, my contractor came by to put up the signboard in the apartment. Here it is:
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The signboard means A LOT to me because it reminds me of the hard work my father put into the shop, and the help my mother gave him. It represents their labour of love to the shop that no one wanted.
Here’s the shop with the signboard (indicated within the white rectangle) hanging above the entrance. The black and white picture shows the shop in the 1950s, and the colour picture in the early 1990s.
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