Lessons gleaned from grandmother’s stories

The writer and her late grandmother, Leong Chew Ngan, during an outing.

Mothers Day tribute to late grandma who wove life advice into her tales

This happened at a family dinner 37 years ago, but the details remain as clear as if it had occurred yesterday.

I had asked why a child had to follow the father’s surname.

Shouldn’t this privilege be accorded to the mother who has to endure the discomfort of pregnancy and childbirth and later take on the duties and sacrifices of motherhood? Why should males be given the prerogative, unquestioned and unchallenged?

A heated argument featuring a defiant teenager and a group of dissenting adults ensued.

The only member who did not participate was my grandmother.

But as we were washing up after dinner, she took the opportunity to explain in detail the meaning of some of her favourite proverbs.

Among them were “If you take care of the small things, the big things will take care of themselves” and “You should learn to walk before you can run”.

In her own way, she was telling a then- 15-year-old that she was clearly not qualified to talk about naming babies owing to her zero experience in parenting.

My grandmother, who raised 10 children during the Japanese occupation and communist insurgency, was seldom the scolding type.

Instead, she preferred to tell stories concocted on the fly and with life lessons or dire warnings surreptitiously woven into the plot.

One was of her staying behind in the kitchen while the rest of the family fled to hide from invading Japanese soldiers.

“I was boiling a big pot of milk. I didn’t want to abandon the task as the milk would be wasted.

“Your father and aunts were still babies then and they would surely have starved,” she said.

In this story, she depicted bombs falling from the sky and the only thought running through her mind was how she was going to store the milk in several flasks and carry them in a basket to her children after she was done.

It was not clear if an air strike had ever taken place in Perak during the Japanese occupation but I remember her telling this story while we were baking a cake one afternoon.

Halfway through, a friend came round to ask if we could go cycling. It was only after the cake was safely on the cooling rack did we feel that it was appropriate to head off.

In my younger gullible years, grandma was not averse to using scare tactics in her stories to discourage undesirable habits.

One story told of her friend’s cousin who died under mysterious circumstances a few days after bringing a captured bat home.

Presented as a bedtime story, it dashed the hopes I had of making a pet of a frog that I had brought home earlier.

So spooked was the frog hunter that she promptly returned it to its original home, the drain behind our house, in the dark of the night, guided by a torchlight.

I never got to find out the name of her friend who lost the cousin but no more animals were bothered for the sake of my frivolous amusement.

To drive the message home, grandma’s stories were always filled with dramatic details.

Having seen me leave my days-old baby on the table to grab a diaper, she came up with an unforgettable tale of how she went through the heartbreak of causing her own infant to suffer from irreparable brain damage because of a fall from the very same table.

She had gone upstairs for a forgotten item, not realising the baby could turn on its own.

Strangely, none of my aunts and uncles could remember witnessing such a tragic incident.

Neither were they aware that any of their siblings were mentally challenged.

But, just to be safe, I never left my babies unattended that way after that.

By resorting to logic and reason instead of corporal punishment, my grandmother always succeeded in putting her point across.

Now that I have children of my own, the memory of her storytelling never fails to come flooding back whenever I have a point to make with them.

There is one snag, however. The present generation seems to be smarter than the one before them.

Grandma may no longer be around. But if she was, I am sure she would have an answer and say something along the lines of “Learn to think out of the box” or “In youth we learn, in age we understand”.