Fragments of Gong Gong

A file of old newspaper clippings complicates the portrait of a grandfather I thought I knew

- Carmen Sin

In childhood, everything makes sense.

There was nothing off-key about my grandfather's absence from the big Sunday lunch. The adults agreed he was a threat to my grandmother's appetite. Therefore: exile. Therefore: he took his soup at a private table in the same flat.

The way I saw it, my mother's father was not many things, but a few bad ones. Tan Swee Teck was a former cop and philanderer who turned deserter in 1965, when he, too, declared independence, begging off from his family for seven years.

If his charge sheet held intrigue, I was, in the tweenage tradition, immune to it.

In an abuse of free will, I had, aged nine or 10, suddenly decided my body was unseemly and the new girth to my thighs not yet observed under the pinafores of my peers - obliged me to scrutinise all bodies religiously.

In the old man, I saw the worst of it: a weeping mouth, liable to drool, and hands, lousy with veins. His eyes were the chilliest of all.

Wet and inexplicably blue, they expressed nothing, made no petition for love or pity, and even in his final act, when he got dementia and had to be spoon-fed by his children, asked no questions.

He died of pneumonia in 2012, aged 85 a commonplace that could not provoke my interest.

Then, this Chinese New Year, my mother let slip that in her father's drawer of last effects were two clippings of The Straits Times.

They were lost now, after 13 years, but had something to do with the Hock Lee bus riots, she said, recalling an interview accents implying heroics.

Probably, I had heard of them before and promptly forgot. Improbably, I was now working for The Straits Times, with a new and intimate stake in its archive.