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I prodded my folks for some old stories over dinner. There are still missing pieces, but I’m still trying to get over being ashamed of, well, not doing this earlier.

As usual there were elements of poverty (who wasn’t poor back then, especially compared to the opulence we surround ourselves in now) but it was really more about the joy of simple living (and simply being alive, for my grandfolks who survived the war) than anything else.

Grandma came from a pretty decent family — her grandfather was a doctor and ran a pharmacy (a Chinese herbal one), so he could afford to have her and her half-brother to school. Absent from the picture were her father, an opium addict, and her mother. I have a feeling that her unwillingness to talk about them is in pretty direct relation to the magnitude of the unpleasantness they brought about to her as a child.

On the other hand, she spoke a bit more about her grandparents. The Yip household had a small farm (like everyone else) and they kept a few pigs and chickens and ducks, not unlike folks who live in the country today. Back then, white rice was considered supreme (before we figured out that it’s pretty much completely devoid of nutrients other than sugar) and the husk, along with the leaves and trunks of yam plants, is cooked and fed to pigs. Grandma says her grandma would patiently chop up the yam plants and cook the pig feed, sitting on a stool by the stove as her feet were bound.

But they left that behind when the Japanese came. “First they bombed us,” she said, the tone of her voice remarkably easy, “then they themselves came a few years later.” She was in the equivalent of grade nine at the time. “Grandmother would sit and weep all day when grandfather was off to work. My uncle wouldn’t stand by it, so they figured we had to get some place safer.”

The whole family, she and her parents and her father’s siblings and all her cousins, arrived in Canton with little more than the shirts on their backs. One of her aunts was a nurse and probably got a job fairly quickly, so they could rent a little spot to cram together to live. She said over and over that they were quite lucky; I can only guess that many of her friends were the objects of the comparison.

As it turns out, their landlord was a bloke who worked in the government (the Japanese government), in a department that dealt with rationing of food. The landlord had his own car and chauffeur; while the landlord was home the chauffeur would sit outside the building and banter with my grandma’s aunts while she hung out on the steps, reading, or cleaning. “I was pretty neurotic about cleanliness,” she said, smiling sheepishly. (She still is.) “I was either reading or wiping the floor.” “Like, mopping?” “No silly, we didn’t have mops. Just scraps of cloth.”

Perhaps due to the bantering of the chauffeur, her half-brother, barely having just finished primary school, got a job being a labourer for the docks. My grandma was asked to submit a resume as well. When the landlord saw it, he complimented her on her letters and gave her a job as a scribe. “Officials and secretaries,” she said, “had pretty messy writing. We had to copy them legibly when the documents had to be sent to other departments.” Together they earned quite the payroll for their family: in addition to their wages, they were given extra rice and oil each month.

I remembered that she had an older sister as well — I remember because the sight of my grandma crying at the news of her death is forever burnt into my mind — so I asked whether she worked as well. She said she married early, was doing pretty well, and by then has had several kids. I steered her back to the stories of Canton.

My grandma loves eating yams. It was a peasant’s food and was plentiful even during wartimes (well, as plentiful as you can get in the wartimes). When she was given rice for lunch, she would go and trade with her neighbours for yams. Later her aunt would yell at her: “Stupid girl, trading our good rice for cheap yams! At least ask for more yams!” My grandma was obviously not very shrewd at commerce.

Having work was good, but while food was not a major worry there were other things to consider. Clothing, for one. She and her half-brother had two sets of work clothes each. Which means laundry had to be done everyday. “Nothing like the luxury of washing machines,” she said. “I’m pretty happy now… don’t have to scrub shirts by hand anymore.” Makes me feel pretty bad about my own attitude toward chores, really. Damn.

Next: when grandma met grandpa.