(Hilton Hotel, Vancouver, Canada time)

Okay, I am close to unconsciousness now because we were made to wake around 2 a.m. (Singapore time) when they turned on the lights in the plane and decided it was morning.

To start from the beginning, I watched Hotel Rwanda and cried; Han watched In Good Company and groaned. Then we both watched Lemony Snicket, etc. and smiled over the splendidness of Jude's elusive profile and not so elusive accent, the very cute Liam Aiken, dark, eye-popping sets and costumes. A stewardess addressed us in Korean because that's what she thought we were. Well.

We reached Vancouver after a long, long while, in which we slept fitfully - I attempted to drowse myself with Jay Chou and Jamie Cullum, my mum took those awful sleeping pills.

Neither worked- I discovered Jamie also has a version of Lover, You Should Have Come Over and perked up trying to compare it with Jeff Buckley's; my mum discovered that sleeping pills still make her puke.

The lines to the check-in counter were mazelike, and chock-full of chattering Koreans swinging Disney purchases. And we were interrogated at the counter, as warned earlier [i.e. treated like illegal immigrants] but I don't see what's so surprising about us staying in the U.S. for a long period just for a good holiday. Are they shocked that we had no apparent ulterior motive? Sometimes, I'm positive that's all they see, foreign faces. I shouldn't forget that Singapore is the oasis in that aspect.

That eased off when we met our relatives - my mum's siblings and sister-in-law, although I still felt disoriented due to the fact that they gabble solely in Cantonese. When Han and I interject with some comment, in English/Mandarin, they switch to Chinese for a while but gradually flow back into dialect out of habit. We slowly get used to it and troop into da jiu jiu/first uncle's jeep (license plate is still his Christian name, LUCIUS, making me want to submit it to mugglenet.com). He's got a bald eagle figurine dangling from his rear-view mirror and talks about photographing cygnets.


(Vancouver is strongly suburban and looks a lot like Australia- we're only just realizing that.) As usual, I gape a lot at the houses and flowers. Green paints, multi-coloured tulips, balcony porches, underground garages, a knot of blooming bushes, trailers in nearly every driveway. I find our first truly unique event at the hotel. Our porter has a bright smile and strong hints of a Jamaican accent. (Yes, yes, I didn't listen closely to the Knight Bus shrunken head for nothing.) He gapes at our large suitcases, and jokes with us. "You big strong girls! Help me carry luggage!" He then proceeds to lift our luggage one-handed into the trolley.

It is raining, by the way, at this point in the story.

We visit wai gong in the quiet penthouse apartment - the furniture is slightly different, but just as old-fashioned as I remember. It is very white-walled and bright, with my uncle's photography and wai gong's calligraphy hung up. The big doll still sits staring on the couch. The rest arrive and we amuse ourselves taking photos of the changed scene outside. The balcony, where Han and I stood once, singing our lungs out in gusty weather, will no longer bring the same sight of the remote stores and gloriously large, stroll-worthy supermarket.



We visit wai po at the Forest Lawn Cemetery. People - along the lines of Lurlene McDaniel - always write about how difficult it is to accept a death and the loss of a person's physical presence. I didn't feel that. I expected to see wai gong living by himself. But I did notice the silences, and - unfortunately for the first time - what it would be like to live so entirely alone, what it would be like, all the time, when we weren't there.

Forest Lawn is a beautiful place, exactly how i feel a cemetery should be - at peace, bringing peace. It's roughly located on a hill-top, smooth grassy areas with elegant plaques and stones, bright bouquets spotting the ground- explosions of a warmth of remembrance that, after all, should be sincere, without euphemistic epitaphs. I wanted to stay longer, as did Han, because we felt the strange attraction to all the modest, sweet, monuments, but it was still raining and getting very chilly, and we all have semi-colds now.




We visited er jiu jiu's new, very boxy, very modern apartment and had wai gong's birthday cake there. He is 92. I have two very young-looking-for-their-age grandfathers. From the 12th floor we have an excellent view of most of the neighbourhood e.g. kids in a far-away field learning soccer, as evidenced by the dots that are orange cones, kayaking parties in the lake. The only problem is how much it looks like Singapore. We will never stop arguing about how right globalization is.



It's getting late, so I'll wind up by saying dinner involved about ten times as much food as is good for us, wai gong folding a towel into a very round rabbit and my uncle's several trick math questions that had us scribbling simultaneous equations on napkins and realizing that NA is indeed the right answer. I will have to remember the puzzle about black-and-white hats.