Story

Just found this in my dusty archives xD Anyway, this is written back in 14/5/13. Almost 2 years now.

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It was the morning after breakfast and dropping off my siblings to school. We were about to pass by the road where the old factory that my late grandma used to work in. I never knew its presence till just now when mum started telling me another story of hers in the wake of the passing of grandma 2 weeks ago.

Back when grandma was 14 years old, let's see...that's 1952. Her mother brought her to work in this factory. It was related to alcoholic stuff, not sure whether manufacturing it or just making those beer bottles. One day the owner's wife had her eye on grandma and intended to take her in to her own house to serve as a maid. Seems like a pretty good deal rather than working in a factory at such a tender age. So grandma took the job and her mum, of course agreed to it.

Grandma served the owner's wife until she's around 17. Meantime she made friends with those aunties who cooked for the family and was really fond of my grandma. Until grandma was 17, these kind-hearted aunties gave her and her mum a word of advice to leave here. Those cooking aunties had worked there long enough to know that the young masters of the house had bad intentions towards young girls.

That's how they were introduced to the place where grandpa worked. Thus my grandma became a cooking lady in that company where she cooked for the staffs there. Mum rephrased grandpa's words, 

"can i make friends with you?"

He started the story when he was 16.

That was the age when he arrived Malacca with a rattan bag filled with only 2 sets of shirts, all the way from China. His wage per month during that time was RM10. Well of course during that time things were much cheaper than they are today, so RM10 seems decent for a labour worker. 

Yes grandpa started off as a labour worker, moving stocks and inventories manually, barefooted, on tar road. He said tar road back then were much softer than it is today and it hurts the legs.

On the topic of marrying my grandma, grandpa mentioned that a lot of his friends were against the idea of the owner of a big company marrying a cooking lady when there were a bunch of daughters of big bosses wanting to marry him. Little did those people realized the awesome-ness of grandma x) This is probably another way of grandpa to show off his amazing skills of judgement of people but nevertheless grandma was really an amazing woman so I give grandpa kudos for that.

55 years of ties as husband and wife. It's definitely a lethal effect for grandpa when grandma abruptly left all of us. It's like we've lost the backbone and our whole system came crushing down. Everyone was vulnerable yet we had to gather all our strength and be our strongest. I just hope we could sail through this storm safely.