The Time My Grandmother Mistook Me For Her Husband by Ambi_Dexter_Writes
A personal essay about caregiving in relation to gender, and the unreliability of one’s memories.
First published in Pandan Weekly in July 2024. Content warning: mention of vomit.
From the author:
I was thinking a lot about the supposed infallibility of memory — what does it mean to have something ‘etched in your memory’, as if we had the power to capture a moment in its entirety in our minds for eternity? What does it truly mean to remember? I wanted to try and problematise the permanence of our memory, starting with a memory I constantly revisited as a teenager as an attempt to make sense of my current relationship with my grandmother. This essay was born out of a desire to reconcile with the messiness of our memories in hopes of being able to sit with and appreciate the feelings that we are left with as our memories fade from us with the passing of time.
My friends have always asked me when I became my grandmother’s caregiver.
Truth be told, I can’t really remember. Perhaps I was eight or nine, when I first became conscious of the rift between my maternal grandparents — two of my best friends bickering in the way that old couples do when they wanted to pick on the scabs of wounds left to fester for too long. I remember trying to be a mediator between the two of them. I pleaded amidst gasping wails to stop fighting.
“Can we go out and eat roti canai instead?”
Maybe my caregiving duties began when I learnt how to become my grandparents’ pacifier to dote on when they got angry with each other.
Or perhaps it was when I was ten and alone in after-school care, sitting in my awkward little corner of the classroom, envious of classmates who could head home as soon as the school bell rang. Home for me was just a 20-minute walk away. Yet in the months my grandparents were in Malaysia, I was trapped in school until my parents could pick me up after work. That’s how I learnt to appreciate the beauty of sunsets — they were a sign that my dreadful hours of entrapment in the orange and green school building were almost coming to an end.
Maybe caregiving became a form of repayment for my grandparents’ rescue from the isolation of school when they were in Singapore. I got to walk with them under the scorching late afternoon sun, nagging them to take their vitamins and medications: The weather very hot you know, must drink more water if not very heaty one.
Maybe caregiving was how I clawed my way out of childhood loneliness.
The moment I usually cite as the starting point of my caregiving journey happened just after my grandfather, Gong Gong, had died. It was a brief but unforgettable moment when my grandmother, Por Por, mistook me for her husband. This is how I usually tell the story:
My caregiving journey started when I was 13, I think, when Por Por first mistook me for her husband.
We are seated at the very back of my uncle’s car, the far end of the 8-seater almost like an enclosure for Por Por and me to get lost in our own little world. We had just cremated my grandfather hours prior and were heading out to dinner. My uncle is looking for streetside parking along the nearby Hakka mee coffee shop.
“Look,” Por Por points out. “There’s a lot over there.”
The pitter-patter of raindrops against the roof only amplifies the silence within the car. Everyone is lost in their own thoughts, and my uncle is probably too busy circling the space for a lot to have heard her.
I intertwine my fingers with hers, our chilly hands clasped tightly against each other.
“Eh, you see outside.”
She tugs at my hand and pulls me to her side of the car. Through the small window, I catch a glimpse of people crowded around a car. The police are here to issue samans.
“Later you better pay the parking coupons correctly ah, police here already,” she says. The silence in the car becomes deafening. Clearly, I’m the only one paying attention to her.
“Are you even listening to me, Kheng Siong?” She tugs at my hand, wanting me to inch closer to the window. She points at the police. “Cannot just anyhow park the car, must also look out for mata!”
She turns to face me. I can barely make out her facial features, but her eyes stand out like gemstones glowing in the dark. In them, I don’t see my grandmother, but a widow trapped inside the void of her memory. She cocks her head in confusion, as if wondering why her husband was trying to choke back his tears.
Not knowing how else to respond, I lean in to hug her.
“Por, I’m not Kheng Siong. Kheng Siong isn’t here anymore. I’m your grandson, Ah Yew.”
I think that’s how this caregiving started. As an attempt to ground my grandmother in the present so that I wouldn’t lose her to the echoes of the past.
Looking back, I don’t remember if it was raining. I’m not sure if we ate Hakka mee that night, or if the commotion outside was over double parking. But these were the details I’ve always included, no matter how many times I’ve retold this story. It’s as if I need to prove how memorable this moment was to me. As if my caregiving journey needed an impressionable beginning. As if my caregiving was necessarily a response to some traumatic event in my childhood and not just an innate skill I had discovered at a young age.
I wish that whenever I retell that moment, I mention that we were going to eat bak kut teh instead of Hakka mee.
I probably fixate on Hakka mee out of convenience — there is a pretty good place selling Hakka mee less than a 10-minute drive away from my uncle’s house in Ipoh. Bak kut teh would have been a nicer version of the story; our first dinner after Gong Gong’s funeral would have been in honour of one of his favourite foods rather than a dinner eaten out of convenience.
What we ate for dinner wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since I was too grief-stricken to stomach anything. That night I learnt that grief could also conjure your bile from the depths of your gallbladder, rising up the oesophagus to scald your taste buds with its blazing bitterness just as you reel from the rancid aftertaste of stomach acid.
That’s what this genre of creative nonfiction asks of us, doesn’t it? It demands that we reimagine specific parts of our memories for the sake of dramatising the narrative, instead of simply allowing us to write about the details we remember with the most clarity.
Look, we tell our audiences. I’ve sold you this precious memory of mine as a compelling story. Will you do me a favour and remember it for me, too?
Humour me for a minute. Imagine that I was female — that I was my grandmother’s granddaughter. I doubt I would look too far different from how I am now, or that my style of caring for my grandmother would change.
Now go back and relive my memory of the night my grandfather got cremated. Assume that I responded the exact same way as a granddaughter as I did being a grandson.
Tell me: how differently did you engage with my memory this time? Did my story become any less compelling by virtue of the change in my gender?
Caregiving, society teaches us, is inherently feminine. In an interview with BRINK Asia in 2019, then Head of Advocacy, Research, and Communications at AWARE (the Association of Women for Action and Research) Shailey Hingorani talked about how women, who are traditionally expected to take on caregiving roles, are hindered by their caregiving duties as they have to fight both the gender pay gap at their day jobs and the additional hours of unpaid caregiving work at home. More importantly, she writes, “[Singaporean society] need[s] to start a conversation around what role men can play in caregiving. Until this happens, women will not be able to participate in the [labour] force on an equal footing.”
There’s much to be said about how we have socialised ourselves to see caregiving as the sole responsibility for women, and how in places like Singapore we have an entire economy of female migrant domestic workers employed to take on the caregiving labour we’ve had to outsource to cope with our fast pace of life. While I echo Hingorani’s call for a conversation around men’s participation in caregiving responsibilities, I wonder if we could also examine the difference between the optics of male and female caregivers.
In 2022, both my parents came down with COVID-19 at the same time. It was a hectic week off from National Service looking after them, whilst Por Por was miraculously COVID-free but anxious over the virus lingering in our house. After confinement week was over and everyone was COVID-free, I wrote an IG post just to document some feelings. To my surprise, I received some compliments for looking after my COVID-stricken parents, and somehow these comments from well-meaning friends and family just didn’t sit right with me.
I’m one of those writers who can’t escape from a Jungian waking dream, possibly as a coping mechanism in place of the therapy my friends insist that I need.
In my dreams, I often imagine how my IG post would have been received if I were raised female. I think I would have had the same photo and caption, because I was so overwhelmed with the lack of food options in the fridge that I simply wanted to document the solace of being able to marinate cucumbers for dinner. I doubt I would have received the same comments from concerned friends and family praising me for weathering through this adversity.
In my waking dreams, my caregiving would have been nothing more than a social expectation that I am expected to live up to; in real life, my caregiving is a tumultuous experience I get praised for with a gold star on my collar.
If I were raised female, I would have been made to inherit the responsibility to care for my elders, just as my mother and grandmother did. There might not have been any space for me to consider if I wanted to take on these responsibilities. Forced caregiving would have been a family heirloom I would have to contend with by virtue of my womanhood, passed down from mother to daughter for many generations to come.
Maybe it would have been easier to look after my grandmother. If I were female, Por Por might not have mistaken me for her husband that night we were in the car. There wouldn’t have been traces of my grandfather that she could latch on to in an attempt to hide in the past.
Or maybe she would have resented me and my growing up for being a sore reminder of the passing of time, that her widowhood aged together with the unsalvageable loneliness rooted inside of her.
After all, we never truly know what we want to remember, until the memory becomes something that the passing of time forces us to forget.
Dexter Lok (he/they) is a Southeast Asian creative writer and multimedia journalist based in Singapore who turns to the written word to make sense of this messy, acrimonious world. He finds solace in sniffing onions, garlic and other fresh aromatics on a morning trip to the market. He is interested in exploring the complexities of kinship, queer culture and anti-capitalism. He goes by the alias Ambi_Dexter_Writes.
Portfolio: bit.ly/Ambi-Dexter-Writes Instagram: @ambi_dexter_writes
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This was so incredibly beautiful…. My own grandmother is starting to lose what she knows of the present, and relives mostly what she remembers of the past.
This essay took me on a journey I’m committing to memory, fragile as that vessel may be 🥹
This is such a thoughtful (and heart-crushing piece). It's interesting that there seems so much distance in it. The actual memory that the title is referring to - The Time My Grandmother Mistook Me For Her Husband - is embedded within the essay and its jumping off point, but further than that, it examines how the story's being told. But for all the 'distance', I don't actually feel *emotionally* distant from the piece. The line "Look, we tell our audiences. I’ve sold you this precious memory of mine as a compelling story. Will you do me a favour and remember it for me, too?" pierces you straight through, like the persona that's telling the memory is resentful in the telling even if they recognize the memory needs to be told. And the last line? "After all, we never truly know what we want to remember, until the memory becomes something that the passing of time forces us to forget." It's a perfect ending of the essay. There's such a hunger to remember everything, but we know that we can't. So we tell stories, knowing that even that will be incomplete, and that something may be lost in the retelling.
The thoughts on male vs. female caregiving were interesting too. In the part where the essay prompted me to stop and imagine what my reaction would be if the memory was written in the perspective of a granddaughter instead of a grandson, the thought that popped in my head was: "Then the caregiving would've been inevitable." It'd be an expectation, and I imagine that sharing struggles about it may be met with more disapproval or pity rather than encouragement or praise. (Though that's just my musing. Maybe the persona's social circles or the world in general is kinder than that.)
Anyway, lovely piece! :)