Thread by @zedecksiew

My grandmother often rode on the North Malayan train alone, when she was twelve, buying goods & supplies for her family.

She did it because her ticket cost 23 cents. (It would've cost 46 cents for her father.)

Other passengers often jokingly threatened her with abduction. 1/?

"We'll grab you and sell you!" they'd say.

"I'll *grab* you and sell *you*!" she'd reply.

She remembers a kindly train conductor, an Indian gentleman with a massive mustache. "Girl you tell me who is threatening you, I'll come whack them." 2/?

She'd travel into town with a pocket full of exact change, and travel back home with bundles of sundries. Kindly aunties and uncles would help her load and unload her cargo, car to platform.

My grandmother travelled alone, because it was what the family could afford. 3/?

And because daughters were expendable.

My grandmother freely acknowledges this. Her brothers were never left unattended, so young. They got to go to school. (She'd ask her brother what class was like, and he'd tell her. That is how my grandmother got an education.) 4/?

My grandmother has gone to church for most of her life.

She once told me it was a Christian missionary who'd told her father:

"You should cherish your daughters as much as yours sons." 5/?

My grandmother remembers a grand-aunt telling her mother:

"You should drown an unwanted daughter in urine."

Her mother replied: "No no, I wouldn't, it is too cruel."

My grandmother's family was poor. One of her sisters was sold to a childless couple. 6/?

They only reconnected in the 2000s, after a lot of sleuthing on the part of my aunts and uncles.

"Your Poh Poh remembered her lost sister after all these years," my father told me. 7/?

When I think about my grandmother I think about these things.

How they are not so long ago. I am in my 30s; my grandmother is 95.

A half-century ago, daughters were bought and sold. A century ago, a woman's life might have been measured by a chamberpot. 8/?

Chinese families today -urban, middle-class; smartphones, smart cars, sons who know how to pair wines with entrees-

But when an older generation quizzes daughters-in-law about grandchildren?

For me, such questions now come with the smell of metal coins and latrines. 9/?

Last night, at Reunion, my grandmother told me again about her trips on the North Malayan train alone, and said:

"As a little girl, Poh Poh was very brave, hor?"

And I clumsily tried to tell her: "Poh Poh you are still brave now." 10/10

(My grandmother's name is Chew Choon Hee.

She told us some of these stories in 2018. I don't speak Hakka; typically my dad translates; these particular stories my mum and @chincarok translated.

When I speak with my grandma alone, like at Reunion, we speak Bahasa.)

@chincarok (@chincarok pointed out how my grandma's stories subtly shifted -bits she emphasised; how animated she was; how lurid / shocking the details were- depending on whether women translated, or men.

which was also instructive, re: what women learn not to say in patriarchy's earshot)