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, my brother and I occupied one room; my uncle, his wife and daughter occupied another room; two other aunts occupied the third room, and my grandmother slept in the hall. Looking back, it must have been crowded, but I honestly never felt that way. It was fun.

I remember being so used to sleeping on the floor that when, in my teenage years, I got a bed of my own in my parents' flat, I was genuinely worried that I would roll off the bed in my sleep and crash to the floor!

My grandmother could only speak in Teochew, and she could neither read nor write, so there were really no written records of any kind, and very few photographs. I have no memory of my grandfather, who passed when I was a toddler. So the oral history of my family needed to be collated from the memories of my mum, my aunts and uncles.

As alluded to earlier, the initial mystery to unravel was, why was my grandfather so fluent in English, if he had arrived in Singapore from China? Where could he possibly have learned the language?

My mum's thrilling response was... "I have no idea." A swift dead end. Ha ha!

So the next day, I went to visit my aunts, to unearth more clues.

Having posed the conundrum to my aunts, they nodded wisely, acknowledging, "very good question."

"We don't know".

OK, so we had to activate the final repository of all truth and information - my mum's oldest sister - who had always been the centre of family gatherings. My youngest aunt called her on the phone and put her on speaker. My youngest aunt used to work as a legal secretary for a Senior Counsel. Boy, he would have been proud of her cross-examination. Cutting through assorted tangential tales, she finally unearthed the first revelation.

"Daddy's English was very good because he went to Raffles Institution (RI)," my oldest aunt ultimately explained.

"REALLY??" everyone else exclaimed.

"That explains it," said another aunt.

To which I responded, "NO IT DOESN'T..."

"We all know my grandfather came from China to work in Singapore. If he came from China to work in Singapore, then how could he have been young enough (and free enough) to also study in RI here in Singapore?"

My aunt responded, "Oh, he came to Singapore as a young boy with his father (my great-grandfather), grew up and studied in Singapore, married and then went back to China, and married his 2nd wife there."

"Wait. What?" my mum interjected. "I thought mummy (my grandmother) was the 2nd wife. But she was always in Malaysia and then in Singapore."

"No, no, mummy was the 3rd wife."

"WHAT?!"

We're all discovering things here apparently.

Aaaaaanyway. After much further exclamation and confusion, what we (more or less) landed on was, my great-grandfather brought my grandfather from China to Singapore, when my grandfather was a child. My grandfather grew up here and attended RI, hence picking up the language and his love for all things English. He married a lady here (who no one seems to have ever met, though one aunt claims she used to visit that lady's family as a child. Why? Honestly, who knows).

For unclear reasons, my grandfather then returned to China, where he met a 2nd woman and married her. This is the woman who most of my aunts thought, for most of their lives, was my grandfather's first wife, and whose son even I knew as "Tua Gu", and who my grandfather brought to Singapore when he (presumably for work) decided to return to Singapore, leaving his Chinese wife behind.

In Singapore (again), he met my grandmother, married her, and produced several more children, who are now, this Chinese New Year, fascinatingly more informed about his gloriously colourful life, along with his pathologically curious grandson (me).

Phew! And the discovery is not at an end. My son and I both attended RI. I always knew that my wife's father and her grandfather also attended RI (their family history is rather more completely documented). So now I'm wondering, can I find out more about my forebears? A friend of mine has put me in touch with the RI Museum and Archives, and who knows, maybe I'll find out more!

Whatever I find out, I like to think that my English-loving grandfather would have been pleased to know that his grandson and great-grandson both went to the old alma mater, and that literally my whole family - wife, daughter, son and I - all essentially make our living from the English language. We may not be all that good in many things, but by golly we're pretty decent at this English thing.

He'd also be thrilled, I'm sure, that both his great-grand children actually ended up going to study in possibly one of the most English universities you could imagine. And that he has this one weird grandson who loves to write in English, and that he maintains this thing called a "blog" :D

This wouldn't really be complete without drawing some analogy to modern life.

It's useful to keep in mind where we came from and how we got here. What did we actually do? Why did we do these things, and not those other things? What mistakes did we make, that we can avoid in future? Why did something work or not work then? Would it work (or not work) today?

We call it "knowledge management" or "institutional knowledge".

Perhaps we signed a contract when we had no bargaining power; when we were a small fry, or a startup, and simply had to take what we could get. Sometimes these things come back to bite us. If we have no conception of the past, then we'll forget that it was a risk decision that we consciously took. We'll forget why it was so important to do things that way then.

And while it may have made sense back then, does it still make sense today? What were our assumptions, so that we can test them again? Do we have leverage now to revisit the bargain? Even if we do have leverage, should we choose to use it? One day, the shoe may be on the other foot, and people have long memories.

I remember once having to arrange a meeting between my CEO and the CEO of a much smaller organisation. That guy was essentially asking for an audience with us. Today, his organisation is massively larger - I'm glad we were helpful and gracious then. The reverse has also been true - people or organisations which were much bigger than us, but now need us much more than we need them. What will we do? How will we conduct ourselves?

The point is, history matters. The past isn't necessarily correct. But it gives us context. It gives us assumptions to test. It gives us something to live up to. It gives us something to surpass. It shows us mistakes to avoid, and sometimes, good practices to repeat.

The philosopher George Santayana famously wrote, "Progress, far from consisting of change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute, there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

I'm grateful to have survived this life thus far, and grateful for those who paved the way for me, and on whose shoulders I get to stand. There are many things I have to learn for myself - but it is precisely because there is so much to learn, that I could not possibly learn it all by myself.

This Chinese New Year, I'm grateful to my family for teaching me about where I came from!

Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you. Deuteronomy 32:7

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. Romans 15:4