Where we come from
Chinese New Year celebrations are a great time to pick up oral history, and this year was an especially investigative one! I'd always heard from my mother that my grandfather was an Anglophile, who had a keen mastery of the English language, and worked for the British colonial administration. But I'd also heard that he had come to Singapore from China. If so, then how did he speak and write English so well, and why did he like English culture so much, to the extent that he even gave English names to all my aunts and uncles, who are all named after various actors and actresses of the time, hence this collection of classic English names across the family - this was a real rarity in that time. It was time to find out. I spent most of my childhood living with my grandparents and aunts and uncles - first, in a leased space above a shophouse in Rangoon Road, and later, in a HDB flat (in what was then named Bedok *New* Town, wow how time has flown!). My parents, m...