Blank Doll yells I Am.

There is something delicate about our existence or rather, how we perceive the existence of the things around us. It seems to me that so much of our assumptions on the physical environment- the very assumption that there exists a physical environment- is based on light, electricity and little more. What is vision but what we can see, and what is that but something built on light? What is your sense of touch but a variation of electric signals? It really is hard to justify one's existence when one comes to see how little we base our presumptions on, and how comfortable we are with them. I do not take kindly to the easy way out, that we think and therefore, we are. That certainly explains why we exist, but what of our physical world?

Or maybe I was just a little dehydrated from doing napfa for the freaking third time since I keep failing the same stations. There is something to be said about my physical condition, that no amount of exercise may improve it beyond the limits set by genetics. I was born, it seems, with the body of a Chinese scholar. The pallor of my skin that no amount of sun may stain for long, the single-lidded eyes set a little slant, the flexible limbs, the narrow shoulders, the palms that cannot be roughened. I take after my grandfather I suppose, who was a scholar in the early 1900s. He knew English and wrote Chinese poems to my grandmother, a Hokkien Straits Chinese from a family of rice merchants, who lived across the sea in Singapore while he was in China. He was also a businessman who married his cousin to join their family's fortunes though I like to think that he loved my grandmother. He was also 19 years older than her. If I want to know more about my grandfather, I could ask my mother, my father or my grandmother but all they will do is add on to the sprawling mosaic that is my memory of a man who died before I was born.

My grandmother tells me that my grandfather will return every seventh month of the year as a giant black moth and sure enough, he returns dutifully to my grandmother for the ancestral feast each year. I have never hurt a moth in my life, thinking them all to be a fragment of my grandfather.

Ah, but I digress. My grandfather gives me strength you see, just as my paternal grandmother and my own mother. My family has known powerful women and talented but weak men. I cannot bear to see weak men, snivelling men, petty men, men who rely on women, men who cannot defend their family, men who cannot honour their wives.

But increasingly, I hear the stories of the men. They show me another side. In them, the women are still powerful, my grandmother still chased my grandfather out of the house and he would walk the distance from their home to the factory seventeen miles away, my mother still supports the entire family with her own hands and instructs her husband on the simplest things. But there is some sort of inner endurance that the men possess, it makes up for their weakness I suppose, and I am inclined to be more forgiving.

I love my family so much though they have given me so much pain, taught me anguish. Strength is something that can be cultivated just as pride may be tempered and talent polished. These people, these flawed persons- they have all had a hand in the making of me.

C'est tout.