I can now shave perfectly without a mirror.

I hate it when people tell me what I should be like, especially if the person thinks they have the right to say something just because they’re older than me. No I don’t need a better sense of direction, no I don’t know what that word defenestrate is, no I don’t care who won the Battle of Antietam. I spend enough energy trying to improve myself in ways which I deem are important now or in the future, I don’t need someone else telling me to improve myself in ways they think are important. Unless I have a solid, well founded respect for someone, I don’t give a fuck what they think people should be like.

My grandmother told me two stories I hadn’t heard until yesterday. I’m not sure how much truth there is in them, although it’s difficult to imagine my grandmother embellishing anything.

My father was supposed to meet my grandmother for lunch one school day when he was about 15. He never showed up, but called her instead, half an hour past the meeting time. It turns out that three guys had approached him on his way to see her, demanding that he give them his ring, his watch, and his necklace. When he refused, they dragged him to a garage to beat him. Having practiced Shaolin Kung Fu with a private master for years, he fought all three and won.

Around the age of 17, my father and his friends were out having a late night snack at a restaurant where people cook their own food on skewers. In the middle of the meal, a few triad members came to the table, and knowing that they were too young to smoke, asked for cigarettes as an excuse to cause trouble. When they couldn’t provide any, the triad members told everyone to give them their money and jewellery. Everyone complied, and put their belongings on the table. At the right opportunity, my father grabbed one of the gang members arms and held him in a prone position, with a skewer to his chest. My father told his friends to get their stuff from the table, and demanded that the gang members give his friends taxi fare home. When my grandmother found out, she sent my dad to study in Canada, worried that the gang members would take revenge.

I had the chance to visit my paternal grandmother yesterday, whom I haven’t seen in more than a decade. Her face is more sunken now, although she still has the same strength and vitality I’ve always known her to have. Even though she’s 82, she still heads down to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange every day to buy and sell stocks. It’s what she does to keep herself occupied while everyone else is at work, and to earn a little spending/medical money. Even when I called her up before visiting, she was very down-to-business, and never bothered with formalities or small talk.

She’s had a hard, though successful life. Born in Hong Kong, she was the third wife of my grandfather, who died early, but not before gambling most of the family fortune away. Had he not done so the family would have been filthy rich, although I really doubt this would have been a good thing, for myself at least. She has no education, taught herself to read well enough to get by, and was left to raise her seven children by herself. There was enough money left to hire a servant to help her, a woman who lived with the family for more than four decades before succumbing to diabetes, and did all the cooking and cleaning, and was even a wet nurse to my father at one point.

My grandmother earned enough to send most of her kids to study in Canada, and had the guts to bring them there herself to look for appropriate schools, unable even to read most of the airport signs. Now my uncles and aunts have had great careers, and I believe are doing better than she could have imagined. I still wear the jade necklace she gave me more than ten years ago, and have taken it off less than a half dozen times. I usually send her the first paycheck that I earn from any job I take. She has everything she needs now, so there was nothing I could have given her, although I was considering some nice ginseng until I found out that the quality of the ginseng she buys costs more than $1000 CAD a pound.

She told me to find a girl who isn’t white (I don’t think she’s racist, she just wants to look out for my best interests and believes that Chinese girls treat their guys better), although she seemed happy for me when she found out that I was dating a Caucasian girl. The most important thing, she told me, is to find a girl who loves me more than I love her, hee hee.

I can’t tell if she loves me or is proud of me from her body language. She acts like a very strong person and hides her emotions well, so doesn’t even come to greet me at the door when I first walk in. I have a great respect for her, and hope that she’ll end up respecting me as well.

It’s always a delight to hear an older Chinese person say something in English without accent. However, hearing an older Caucasian person speak Cantonese without accent it’s completely fucking scary cause it’s like OMG THEY ARE INFILTRATING AND THEY KNOW WHAT WE ARE SAYING QUICK PRETEND LIKE YOU DON’T NOTICE AND SAY THEY HAVE NICE TEETH. I use the word “older” because nowadays it’s not uncommon for people to speak more than one language fluently, whereas at my parents age the education for such things wasn’t the norm.