Zhu Chang Fen

"Nobody ever appreciates artificial flowers as we know they'll be around forever."

--- overheard at a CNY bazaar

It is the late 1980s, a hot and sticky afternoon. The school bell rings relentlessly like a headache-inducing pneumatic drill to mark the end of the school day and we line up in twos at the front of our classroom, large water tumblers slung across a shoulder and oversized bags clung onto our backs, before filing out in an orderly manner. Outside, we are joined by children from other classes and all semblance of order is soon lost as rows of twos merge into one another until a bottleneck forms in the common corridor.

I see my grandfather waiting in the school porch as we edge out slowly step by step. He is there again. He is always there. Always in his blue short-sleeved shirt, black trousers and with a black umbrella in his hand.

Not again, I think. I do enjoy our fifteen minutes walk home from school together but I am now a middle form student and to be frank I am starting to get embarrassed by all this close parenting. After all, I am very well capable of carrying my oversized schoolbag and walking home alone by myself, just like most of my classmates.

I walk up to my grandfather and see some red zhu chang fen sauce around his mouth. There are dark red stains on his blue shirt as well. Oh god this is simply embarrassing, I think. He must have stopped by the coffee shop for a bite on his way to picking me up. Why doesn't he wipe the sauce off with his handkerchief? Someone should offer him a piece of tissue paper.

He is chatting with my classmate's mother as I approach him. "Oooh, that's your grandson," she coos in that condescendingly annoying adult tone in Hokkien. I tug gently at my grandfather's age-spot dotted hand and start to walk away. Let's get out of this place, I think. The mother shouts after my grandfather as I lead him away, "Take care, ah chek [uncle]!"

Later I find out that it was not zhu chang fen sauce splattered around my grandfather's face after all. He had fallen flat on his face on an unforgiving concrete pavement on his way to my school. The dark red stains on his blue shirt were that of his own blood. Needless to say, I felt like the worst grandchild in the world.

My grandfather still continued walking me to and from school most days of the week after that incident but I never felt embarrassed about it again. A few years later when I was in Primary Five, my father asked me to take the school bus to school, which of course drew howls of derision from me initially. My grandfather was getting old, he explained, and he wanted to save him the daily exertion.

It was one of the first times I was consciously aware of making a sacrifice for the sake of someone else. To someone who was handed his own set of house keys at the ripe old age of nine (I was already a latchkey kid before I had even heard of the word, much less understood what it meant), taking a school bus to school packed with lower Primary kids everyday was practically a form of emasculation. Still, I went along with the arrangement in a rather cooperative manner, though I often alighted early across the road, opposite my house, before the school bus made a large detour just so that I could sneak up from behind on my grandfather, who would be waiting for me at the designated stop in front of our house.

After I was posted to a secondary school two bus rides away, I thought the days of our long walks together were effectively over. So it was to my surprise that I saw an old man one morning clad in unmistakable blue shirt and black trousers ambling up the hill, looking lost, as throngs of students were streaming out of classrooms to get to the terraces for flag raising.

I ran up to him just like before, but this time I only felt a sense of guilt instead of public embarrassment. Holding his wrinkled hand, I pointed out my classroom to him with my other hand. He nodded his head dismissively and waved me towards the terraces before turning back downhill towards the bus-stop.

I watched him walk away, his sweat-stained back betraying the effort he had made to reach the top of the hill. Without knowing why, I chased after him and tapped him lightly on his shoulder. I'm going to join the other guys for flag raising now, I signaled, since he is deaf. He nodded his head again and waved me away. Go on, you silly boy, be on your way already. And he turned away again, walking step-by-step to the bottom of the hill and under the giant arch before he disappeared from sight.