Blank Doll talks story.

"Your grandfather was a great man."

Not all the men in my family are weak, some of them are ever remarkable. My grandfather has become a legendary character, his soul crossing the chasm that divides the living from the dead to find me. I am informed by memories of him that are not my own but which fills me with a sense of awe anyway.

If I want to know about my grandfather, I have to ask my parents, my uncles and aunties and my grandmother. My grandmother tells me the most about him. Born in Fujian, my grandfather was born to a family of merchants. He was the few from his generation who chose an education, an English one, even though unlike the rest of the scholars who became revolutionaries, he chose to return to the tradition of his family. "Your grandfather was a scholar, he could speak English," my dad used to tell me, I only know what a remarkable thing that is now when I am eighteen.

Dutiful to a fault, he married his First Wife in China through a middle woman and they had children there. They are all grown up today and have children themselves. My grandmother does not like us seeing them even though they come sweep my grandfather's grave every spring. "The eldest son looks exactly like him," my mother would say. I have come to believe I am the first son of the first son of the first son, it is now to my dismay, that I discover my status as Second Wife's first grandson.

Yet he was also a man who believed in love for he married his little cousin whom he had loved since childhood. My grandmother, youngest daughter of her Peranankan merchant family, with whom he exchanged letters while he was in China and she was in her last year at Nanyang Girls. I have read their letters and they smell of people. The words are written long ago, in couplets and proverbs swearing undying love. My grandmother, no stupid girl, replied in couplets and proverbs too. I like to think I can smell the tears on the letters, that I can hear the wistful sighs of longing that must have come with the last fell of the pen. He took my grandmother as his Official Wife in Singapore.

"Your grandfather was a gentleman," my aunt said to me when I carelessly draped a leg over the bedpost, "he never slept like that." So my grandfather was a gentleman. I have only seen him in suits and shirts, his hair combed carefully to a side, his cheekbones so high that make his eyes look dark even when he smiles for pictures. He gave my dad a leather wallet from Aigner when my dad was young and insisted the entire family had their clothes tailored. He would buy only imported jams and honey with a taste for things not found in Singapore then. Twenty five years ago, my grandfather had style before his time. How it must surprise my dad and mummy, to find their son making the same choices his grandfather did so long ago.

My grandfather was also a successful man. Nobody remembers my family now of course, so many could-have-beens, and perhaps we do not merit remembering. Who may remember that my dad used to own a firm next to Creative Technology doing the same things they were doing then, only better? Who may remember that my grandmother ran a commodities business that came from before the Japanese Occupation, that her family was in charge of rice during that period and that she was the first distributor for F and N in Singapore? "Your grandfather was a good friend of OCBC's boss," my grandmother told me the night she showed me her letters, "he helped your grandfather reserve a whole stretch of land." My grandfather never bought the land because he died before he could and my parents never mention the could-have-beens. What is left today is the flat my grandmother lives in. He bought that for her as a gift. The house in which I grew up in had been bought by my grandfather to store rice. The shophouses are no more, taken back by the government. "Your grandfather carried a gun with him when he was young to protect himself," my mother would tell me gravely, my mother, the strong woman in awe of this man.

There are sides to him that make me smile too for it comforts me that my grandfather was also human. "He made the best chicken wings," my mother would say to which my dad would agree, "deep fried chicken wings, better than KFC." When he quarreled with my grandmother, my grandmother who was the strong woman before my mother would chase him out of the house and he would walk all the way to Changi where his factory was. My dad upon hearing it would drive over to pick him up.

My grandfather died at age 72 even though he suffered from gastric. I think he did it for my grandmother, living so long, who wailed and beat him when he died. I do believe she loves nobody else as much as him and when he died, she could but wait to join him. On his death certificate, it lists among the various reasons for his death: colon cancer, gastricitis, pneumonia. I have gastricitis.

The Chinese have it that the third generation will undo the good of the first. I will carry my grandfather's name once more. Travelling across the sea to another place, I will bring with me his spirit whose greatness inspires me with its unassuming strength. Sometimes I wish he had waited for me too, the first grandson of the first son of the wife whom he had loved, then I could tell him that I love him too.

How strange, that I may love a grandfather I have never seen. I wish you were here for me, here to watch me grow up. I want to hear you bless me when I tell you that I have decided to study fashion, I want to hear you praise me when I bring home my straight As, I want to sit at your feet with my head propped against your knee the way Little Aunt used to do when she was young. I want to tell you I love you, and then to hear you tell me that too before you close your eyes and fall asleep.

C'est tout.