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.
“Remember you used to go to Long Black all the time?” deesee asked the other evening when three of us met up for a “beamfest”.
Yes, I remember, and yes, I used to go to Long Black all the time. It was a cafe in SS2 – well, not just a cafe, but a cafe offering free wi-fi to customers. It also offered awesome all-day breakfasts. What more could a “young” wi-fi “warrior” ask for.
Those were the days. Actually not so long ago, maybe just 5 or 6 years back. But Long Black wasn’t open for long, altho I don’t think it was closed out by other wi-fi competition. When it closed, wi-fi was still quite a novelty, not commonly available like how it is now.
I have such fond memories of Long Black. I didn’t even have a laptop then, only a 16MB AlphaSmart Dana wireless, the reason for my being in Long Black a lot. Especially during November, the glorious NaNo month, I would be there, writing away, and then going online to update my word count. Ha! Those were the days.
These days, you can find wi-fi anywhere in Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya. Most shopping malls offer free wi-fi, and those that don’t, there’s always a Mcdonald’s or Starbucks, even an Old Town White Coffee shop where you can fire up your netbook or notebook and go online. Most times, you don’t even have to ask for the password to get on.
Ah, those were the days. And here’s a picture of my Dana on the table at Long Black. Trust me, it is Long Black, even tho’ the picture is too close-up to see the rest of the place.
Oh, that “beamfest”? That’s another relic from the not-too-distant past, when PDA (mostly Palm PDA) owners used to meet up to beam apps to one another’s PDA. This recent one was attended by just three – deesee, tehoais and me – altho’ there were no Palm PDAs in sight and we weren’t beaming anything between us.
It’s one thing to get into a routine – in this case, taking my weekly Fosamax dose every Wednesday morning, and having done so without fail for the past 15 weeks – and another to miss one and then to forget to take it the next morning.
I’d woken with a pounding pain behind my left eye on Wednesday morning and it was a choice of gritting my teeth and taking the Fosamax tablet (and probably throwing it up almost immediately) or foregoing the Fosamax tablet in favour of two Ponstans for the pounding pain. After looking up the instructions (“If you miss a dose, just take one FOSAMAX PLUS™ on the morning after you remember.”), I decided to do as instructed and downed two Ponstans.
Almost 40 hours later, I’m in the kitchen and opening my meds drawer for my lupus meds. As the drawer slides open, I see the Fosamax box. Oh shoot, I forgot to take the Fosamax dose this morning.
The instructions didn’t say anything about taking the tablet two mornings after I’m supposed to take it, but I decided to do so anyway. After all, it’s another five days to the next dose, so I should be alright. It’s better than not taking the tablet at all. Anyway, that’s my reasoning.
I found myself wide awake at 4:30 this morning, and decided to get up and take the dose, just in case I went back to sleep and forget later on.
After taking the dose, I’m supposed to sit or stand for 30 minutes, and of course, I’m sitting in front of my computer. For some reason, a song from my long-ago teenaged years started to play in my head and wouldn’t stop playing. So, now I have a craving for “Fried Rice Paradise” – not to eat but to listen to, and not just in my head.
Hey, maybe it’s on YouTube. And yes, it is! A 2007 version from a stage musical that Dick Lee wrote around the song in the early 1990s. The original version was first featured in his debut album, Life Story, released in 1974. The version here is from the “President Star Charity 2007″.
Dick Lee is a Singaporean who started his musical career in 1971 at the age of 15. These days, he’s better known as a Singapore Idol judge, but in his hey day, he played the piano, produced his own albums and wore make-up. And yes, I have a vinyl copy of Life Story.
This line is from the Don McLean song “American Pie” and refers to the death of Buddy Holly in the 50s.
In 1980, the same line came to mind when I first heard that John Lennon had been shot dead.
This morning, it came to mind again when I read that Michael Jackson had died. This time, the line is more personal as Michael and I are the same age and I first started listening to him at the start of his career with the Jackson 5. So for me, and the other music lovers around my age, 25 June 2009 is the day the music died for us.
I went through my vinyl record collection and found a Jackson 5 EP, probably their very first as it’s titled “Diana Ross presents The Jackson 5″, the same title as their first album released in 1969.
This EP features four songs – “I Want You Back” and “Can You Remember” on Side 1 and “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” and “ABC” on Side 2.
Earlier today, I went out and managed to get a copy of the 25th Anniversary edition of the Thriller CD. It was the second last copy at Movie Magic, a shop at the 1 Utama shopping complex; an elderly couple bought the last copy. I overhead the old lady saying something about all his songs so I suggested they get the Essential Michael Jackson but actually, they wanted his music videos, so the Thriller CD was the right choice as it includes a special DVD featuring “Thriller”, “Beat It” and “Billie Jean”, as well as his performance of “Billie Jean” for the Motown 25th anniversary celebration.
I also bought a Jackson 5 compilation and at the last moment, decided to get the Essential Michael Jackson, too. I played the latter on the drive home, and was unprepared for the tears that came when I heard “Got to be There”, his first solo single, although not his first #1 hit (that honour went to “Ben”). I’d completely forgotten about this song, and when I heard it after more than 30 years, I was struck by what an angelic voice he had. I cried for the boy that Michael Jackson was.
All through today, the CNN website’s front page has been showing a revolving Michael Jackon memorial banner with different pictures. This is the one I like best. This is the Michael Jackson I remember best.
25 June 2009 – the day the music died for many in my generation. Farewell, Michael Jackson.
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.
