Posted on 7 September 2009 @ 13:58 in Family, Memories
It recently occurred to me that my mother might’ve been a scrapbooker, maybe even one of the first in Malaysia. Except in those days (the 50s and 60s), it wasn’t known as scrapbooking, at least not in this part of the world, and there weren’t all the fancy scrapbook albums, accessories and supplies. Instead, there were just photo albums.
My sister, brother and I each have our own baby albums. These are simple books with black pages, hard board covers with designs, and photo corners used to hold the photos in place. The photo corners in my baby album are plastic and still in good condition, while the ones in my brother’s album are paper, some of them fraying. I think my sister’s album has paper photo corners, too, but I don’t have it on hand to check; she took hers with her after she married.
My brother’s baby album
Mine was a bit more ornate; but it was also four years later
Further back than my sister’s baby album, there is also my parents’ wedding photo album. Even further back than that are photo albums commemorating the 25th anniversary of the family’s Chinese medicine shop, as well as the opening of the family’s second Chinese medicine shop. In addition to photographs, the anniversary albums also had newspaper clippings of congratulatory messages advertised by business associates. Many of the photo corners in these albums have lost their adhesiveness so flipping through the pages is often an exercise in caution not to let a photo slip from its original page.
Some of the congratulatory messages in the
shop’s 25th anniversary “scrapbook”
All our albums also feature identical family portraits taken every year on, or around, our parents’ wedding anniversary. The portraits were taken at professional photo studios, but not during regular business hours. Since both our parents worked and couldn’t take time off for the sessions, we had to do it after business hours. Good thing the various photo studios were owned by my father’s good friends who agreed to do the photography in the evenings. Every year, we would put on our best clothes (chosen by mother in our younger days) and troop into the studio for the portraits. Each annual set would feature one of the whole family, a second of our parents, and a third of just us kids. The early portraits were full-length shots; these changed to half-body shots beginning from the year my sister and brother decided they didn’t want to wear shoes and asked that the slippers not be shown in the photos.
In addition to our baby albums, we also have other photo albums through our growing years. The designs of each successive album give an indication of the changing tastes and times. From the simple books of black pages and photo corners, we moved on to fancier self-adhesive albums with stiffer board-like sticky pages, each overlaid with a film cover the same size as the page. To mount the photos, the film is lifted off the page, the photos put in place and the film repositioned over them. The film can be lifted off again and again; unfortunately, over the years, the sticky pages lost the self-adhesiveness so that the photos are no longer held firmly in place.
From these self-adhesive photo albums, we moved onto photo albums with pockets. Those were the last complete albums that required time spent selecting photos to include in each album. Latter albums were throwaway albums that came back with photos sent for developing, each sufficient to display either 24 or 36 pictures, depending on the size of the film roll used. Once the photos went into such albums, they stayed there, and the albums accumulated into stacks over time, the intention to sort and refile them into bigger, more permanent albums, diminishing with each passing year.
And then, there were no more albums. At least not for me, as I’ve moved on to taking digital photographs which do not require physical albums to file them.
And now, in my mother’s footsteps, I am ready to become a scrapbooker. A digital scrapbooker.
For a long time, I thought scrapbooking was a forward looking hobby, good for storing memories for future generations. In fact, that was what my mother did for us, store our baby and childhood memories for us to look back in later years. That’s what a lot of current scrapbooking examples show, too (including my friend Karenika’s excellent site). But recently, I realised scrapbooking can be used to look back, too; it’s a form of memoir. And I have lots of old family photos to organise into scrapbooks; all the various photo albums mentioned earlier are with me, and I’m sort of the family historian.
However, I don’t really like physical scrapbooking – the physical pages and the pictures will deteriorate over time, and there can only be one copy which will be difficult to share with the rest of the family (my sister, brother, as well as our cousins). So what’s the alternative?
Digital scrapbooking. It will be paperless (I will be doing my part in not killing trees for my hobby), and will help to preserve old photographs. It will also be easy to share, especially online – once a scrapbook is ready and uploaded online, I just need to send an email to family members with email access.
In my own way, I have dabbled with digital scrapbooking, but in a very simple, almost primitive way. During my early website days, I’d created a mini site celebrating the family’s Chinese medicine shop, and scanned the two anniversary photo albums to put on that site. A few years later, I discovered software to create online photo galleries and have set up an online photo site which is home to various photo albums, including one for old family photos that I put up for my cousins after an older cousin passed on last year.
All these efforts to date are just digital photo albums, the way my mother’s “scrapbooks” of our baby photos are just photo albums, but they have been leading me to this moment. Mother is no longer able to further her skills to make actual scrapbooks, but I will take over and plan to learn digital scrapbooking skills to help me create digital memories of our family history for our future generations.
Now, where to begin?
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Posted on 21 June 2009 @ 15:03 in Family
When father was a young boy, he had one day bumped into a man who had slapped him on the side of his head. This is what my mother told me years later by way of explaining how father had been hard of hearing all my life. From this bit of information, I can imagine father must’ve been playing and running, and running without looking where he was going so that he bumped into the man, and the bump must’ve been hard enough for the man to probably think “what a naughty boy!” and to give him the slap as a result.
One of my memories of father is of him in the evenings, after his shower, cleaning his ears. I remember he was hard of hearing in both ears but one ear (probably the one on the side where the adult had slapped him) was worse that the other. But he would clean both ears as apparently, he could hear better after a good cleaning.
In the early 1980s, we managed to persuade him to consult an ENT specialist to see if anything could be done for the less damaged ear. I remember the specialist sitting in front of father, and putting one hand near one of his ears, asking “Can you hear?” as he clicked his fingers.
Even then, I found myself thinking “If my father could hear, he wouldn’t be here to consult you.” Father thought the same, but answered the stupid question and waited to hear the doctor’s suggestion.
We can operate on you …
Will it help me hear better?
We’re not sure …
Of course, father did not agree to the operation. He also refused to see another ENT specialist or do anything more about his ears. A few years later, we tried again to persuade him to do something about his increasingly bad hearing. This time, we had a recommendation to see a hearing aid specialist. This time, too, we gave father another reason why he should see this specialist – his grandson, CS. Didn’t he want to hear his grandson’s voice? That persuaded him.
The hearing aid specialist had better “bedside manners” than the ENT specialist which warmed father to him. Instead of an operation, he suggested testing father’s ears with a machine in his office. The machine measured father’s level of deafness and determined that his left ear could be fitted with a hearing aid. Measurements were taken for the earpiece. A week or so later, I went with father to try on the hearing aid. During the fitting, the telephone in the office rang. Father asked what was that noise. It turned out in the years since his hearing worsened, the standard telephone ringtone had changed and father had never heard the new ringtone before that day.
In the 20-odd years since that first hearing aid, father had gone through a few (it’s still a gadget, and like all gadgets, prone to wear and tear over time). This was the last one he used before he left us.
He had a spare earpiece, which he would keep in the jar of “Super Dri-Aid™” to keep moisture out of the earpiece and tube.
In father’s later years, instead of cleaning his ears after his shower every evening, he would clean the earpiece he’d worn for the day, and swap it with the one in the jar to wear for the following day.
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Posted on 19 June 2009 @ 22:35 in Family
This is the Japanese gentleman mentioned in this post.
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Posted on 28 April 2009 @ 23:25 in Family, Memories
As the patriarch of the shop, he never turned anyone away who needed a meal or a temporary roof over their heads. But his generosity extended beyond the neighbourhood and was remembered by a particular young man from over the seas.
One day in the mid 1980s (I don’t have the exact date but it would have been before I went to study in England because we were still living in the family’s Chinese medicine shop), an elderly Asian man walked into our shop. He turned out to be Japanese, but with the help of a pen and piece of paper, and the fact that written Japanese was similar enough to Chinese for my parents to understand him, he wrote out the purpose of his visit.
During the Japanese Occupation, he’d been with the military patrol and assigned to our neighbourhood. Everytime he was on duty, my grandfather would invite him to eat in the shop. He never forgot my grandfather and many years later, on a visit to Malaysia, he found his way to the old neighbourhood and the shop. By then, grandfather had been dead more than 20 years, but this elderly man and my parents continued to keep in touch, mainly through annual greeting cards. Even after we moved from the neighbourhood, the annual exchange of cards continued.
One day sometime in the early 1990s, out of the blue, a taxi drove up to the gate of our new home in the suburbs. It was the ex Japanese soldier, this time armed with the new address that he gave the taxi driver who managed to find the house.
The annual exchange of cards continued after that second visit, but after a few years, they stopped. And four years ago, in 2005, my father left us. I wonder where this ex-Japanese soldier is now. He was much older than my father so perhaps he, too, had gone to the other side.
Note – there are many holes in this story, including the dates of his two visits, and particularly his name. I will need to look through my diaries for the information, but for now, the need to tell this particular story is strong so the details will have to wait. There is also a picture of him with my father in the shop, which I cannot find for now; all this will be added later on.
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Posted on 3 April 2009 @ 14:39 in Family, Health
Mother turned 83 on Monday. I’d promised her ice cream, but then remembered she was having quite a bad cough so I brought her a slice of White Chocolate Macadamia cake from Secret Recipe. I did tell her I would still get her ice cream when she has recovered from the cough.
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I was preparing to send Darren a text message when I noticed father’s number is still listed in the contact list. So is my niece WY’s. It’s been a few years since they left us, and I haven’t deleted their numbers from my handphone yet. It’s not like I expect to hear from them (!). Maybe it’s my way of remembering them? But a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think of them, especially WY. It’s interesting that I should think of them together today of all days – today, 3 April, is sandwiched between the two dates when they left us, WY on 31 March 2006 and father on 15 April 2005.
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The three of us (sister, brother and I) have just gone through some health scares. My brother was the last to get a review of his situation (I just received a text message from him about the results, and it’s good).
All three of us cleared our respective health hurdles. Mine has the most lingering effect. The latest set of bone density test results showed a deterioration in my hips, a loss of 8% over 2 years, which is more than what is allowed for someone my age.
My rheumatologist thinks it’s due to a combination of my use of prednisolone for my lupus and the fact that I just passed menopause. She said bone loss will be most noticeable between 3 to 5 years of menopause. To combat the deterioration, she’s put me on Fosamax, which has been proven to help build bone mass. It’s just one tablet a week, but must be taken on the same day every week, first thing in the morning, and no food or lying down for 30 minutes after that.
I also think the bone loss is due to my lack of mobility (read: exercise). To combat that, I have started (well, resumed, since I’ve done this before) a mild form of regular exercise, which I need to be regular about!
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