Shedding Skins
The knife slips, nearly catching my finger. In the reflection of my apartment window, twenty-eight floors up, string lights blur into the same patterns my paternal grandmother's—Ah Ma's—rosary beads made against her windowsill. Each bead caught light differently—some worn smooth from years of prayer, others still catching sharp edges of afternoon sun. Memory moves in spirals, much like the serpentine creature that marks this lunar year, coiling back on itself until I can't distinguish then from now.
As I walk along the streets of Chinatown in Kuala Lumpur in the predawn hours, the clatter of coffee cups and morning conversation from the kopitiam mingles with the mosque's call to prayer drifting between buildings. The scent of burning joss paper catches in my throat—I'm seven again, following Po Po, my maternal grandmother, through the temple courtyard, watching her weathered hands light each sheet with practiced grace, the ash rising like answered prayers into the air. These moments were rare treasures while I lived at my Ah Ma's house, each visit a bridge across the chasm my brother's death had carved through our family.
The weight of that loss lived in the walls of my parents' home, where my brother's absence became a presence too heavy to bear. A few weeks after his death, when I was five, they realized they couldn't carry their grief while caring for me. The day they made the decision, I found my father staring at his empty, untouched bed, lost in a trance that lasted hours. That evening, my mother packed my clothes with shaking hands, each fold precise as origami, as if perfect creases could hold together our fracturing family.
Their pain manifested differently—my father's in sharp words that rose against my uncle and aunt at every gathering, my mother's in a stillness that seemed to swallow her whole. Once a month, they would visit Ah Ma's house, these encounters brief and strained. But it was during Chinese New Year that the tension peaked, when relatives filled the house and my parents couldn't avoid the memories of past celebrations. I learned to read the signs: my father's tightened jaw, my mother's perfectly still hands, the way they looked past me as if seeing a ghost. Every year, they would leave before midnight, before the fireworks and wishes for prosperity, leaving me clutching a red packet heavy with money but light with presence.
No one ever opened the front room of Ah Ma's house. Next to it, a small altar to the Virgin Mary watched over the home that became mine, not because anyone wanted it that way, but because there was nowhere else for me to go. These shophouses in Kuala Lumpur, with their peeling paint and cluttered five-foot ways, remind me of Ah Ma's old house in Singapore - from the outside, time wearing away at the edges, life spilling onto the streets. But behind those neat walls, Ah Ma took me in with the same precise care she applied to everything—not with warmth but with a duty that gradually softened into routine. The Virgin's eyes followed me through my childhood, her blue robes collecting dust that Ah Ma wiped away each morning with ritualistic devotion, perhaps seeing in this daily act of care a way to tend to what remained of her fractured family.
In her kitchen, my hands learned the weight of jicama, the proper pressure to squeeze it dry for perfect popiah. "Not like that," Ah Ma would snap, taking my hands in hers until the motion became muscle memory. Her lessons extended beyond cooking—five days for buah keluak, changing the water daily, each dark nut requiring precise taps of a stone pestle. These instructions, delivered in her clipped Hokkien, became a language of their own, a way of passing down not just recipes but resilience. Sometimes, in the quiet moments between tasks, she would pause, her eyes distant—the same look my mother wore when passing my brother's photographs.
Now, in Petaling Street, these memories mingle with the present. Felt lanterns in deep crimson cluster overhead, their gold-trimmed tassels barely stirring in the afternoon heat. Plastic pineapples, their crimson bodies topped with artificial green leaves, punctuate the sea of red, a modern touch among traditional symbols of prosperity. Flowers—both real and synthetic—spill from buckets and vases, their fuchsia brightness competing with the lanterns' traditional red. The vendors' calls blend Cantonese and Malay, creating a symphony of belonging I hear from the outside. Families weave through the displays, pausing to examine price tags on lanterns marked with bold numbers, while tourists snap photos of mountains of mandarin oranges and paper decorations that transform the familiar streets into a festival wonderland.
At Cheng Kee wonton noodle stall, a family at the next table shifts to make space, their bowls moving aside in silent invitation. Their gesture of concern echoes Ah Ma's prayers—familiar, suffocating, impossible to refuse without causing pain. Each attempt at inclusion reminds me of how carefully I've constructed my solitude, like the shophouses around us—their weathered walls holding generations of similar stories, their exteriors preserved while their interiors adapt to changing lives. Their murmured conversations in mixed tongues float past me, a chorus of connection I've learned to admire from a distance.
Time slows in the coffeeshop's fluorescent glare, the afternoon light refracting through rain-streaked windows, red lanterns casting shadows across crowded tables. The elderly aunty from the family clicks her tongue at my retreat to a corner table, where my single bowl sits centered on the laminate surface. Their children's laughter carries across the space—a sound that catches in my throat like a hook, pulling me toward memories of my brother's voice, of family dinners before grief rewrote our story.
Thunder rolls across the city as I make my way home, the sound deep enough to vibrate through concrete and memory. Sin Sze Si Ya Temple stands bright against gathering clouds, its golden characters illuminating the growing dark. My phone buzzes with messages from my parents—tentative bridges I'm not yet ready to cross. They've learned to live with children-shaped holes in their lives, just as I've learned to carry the weight of their absence. Inside the temple, prayers rise toward rafters that have witnessed generations of similar stories—loss, displacement, return.
The years after my brother's death became a lesson in distances, not just physical but emotional. When Ah Ma passed months after my thirteenth birthday, I returned to my parents' home—a space that had learned to exist without children. We moved around each other like satellites in decaying orbits, each pass bringing us incrementally closer but never quite touching. The emptiness echoed with the same hollow resonance as the parlor after my brother's funeral, spaces where presence becomes defined by absence.
Back in my apartment, the first drops of rain tap against the window. I count the seconds between lightning and thunder, a childhood habit that stuck—one of many inheritances I didn't choose but carry anyway. Po Po believed rain during New Year meant prosperity—"吉人天相" (heaven's blessing), she'd say in Cantonese, each drop a coin of fortune falling like the gold leaf she burned in offering, her faith in abundance as steady as her hands lighting joss paper. Ah Ma would watch the same rain from her courtyard, her hands never still, constantly finding work in worry—as if keeping busy could ward off the storms that had already broken our family apart. Their different ways of reading the same sky taught me that truth, like family, could hold multiple shapes at once.
The knife moves across my cutting board with inherited precision, each vegetable aligned with the edge, like Ah Ma's jars, like her novena candles, like all the ways we try to impose order on chaos. Some rituals, like some wounds, become part of who we are—not healing exactly, but a way of carrying memory in the body. My hands move with the memories of both my grandmothers - Ah Ma with her rosary beads, Po Po folding gold leaf - as I arrange this solitary feast. In these motions, I find both remembrance and prayer—for my brother whose laughter still echoes in unexpected moments, for my parents whose grief carved new channels through our lives, for the courage to bridge the distances we've created, and for the wisdom to understand that some gaps, like the spaces between stars, might be necessary for light to shine through.