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understand. You’re still a child.”
    When I am a bit older, I don’t know whether her answer is a lament or curse: “Just wait till you get older and have a mother-in-law like mine. Then you will understand. You will understand.” What will I understand? I wonder. Suffering? There are far better things to understand than the inconsolable hardships of life. Constantly sighing and lying and dying – that is what being a Chinese woman means, and I want nothing to do with it.
    They keep all these secrets, and tell them to four-year olds who cannot possibly understand the complicated channels of hatred, but are meant to keep quiet about such things. I do not understand the loneliness and desperation that would drive a person to find their closest confidante in a toddler more interested in collecting Easter Egg foil.
    “Did you know that your grandmother was never the only wife of your grandfather? Did you know your grandfather had two wives at once?”
    “Did you know that your mother was not your father’s first fiancée?”
    “Did you know that your grandfather made your grandmother give away a son?”
    “Did you know that your grandmother had two daughters who died in Cambodia?”
    Words with bones in them, my grandmother calls them. Words to make the other person fall flat on their back and die a curly death, my mother says. The sharp ones, the ones you can use if ever you need a weapon to protect yourself.
    And so I was doomed, early on, to be a word-spreader. To tell these stories that the women of my family made me promise never to tell a soul. Perhaps they told me because they really did want the other camp to hear. Perhaps my word-spreading was the only way they could voice their grievances.
    Or perhaps my word-spreading is also the only way to see that there was once flesh attached to these bones, that there was once something living and breathing, something that inhaled and exhaled; something that slept and woke up every morning with the past effaced, if only for a moment. That there was a good beginning, and in this good beginning the stories would come like slow trickles of truth, like blood coursing through the veins.

M Y grandmother was possessed of healing powers, or so it was claimed by those who knew her back in Cambodia. Five sons, people exclaimed – seven children, all of them so bright! Of course, everyone chose to forget about the first two babies who died, because they were just girls. Back then, with the arrival of each child, she seemed to grow in stature, seemed to loom larger than before, unlike some mothers who turned into wispy-haired waifs after the birth of their third. Children were drawn to her. Wherever she walked, there was always a little one pulling at her trouser leg. “Ma! Ma!” they cried, and they followed her like lambs. She did not shake them off, so they sat at her side while she whirred away on her sewing machine, they crammed into her bed and drenched her clothes with their water-logged dreams. She never told them to piss off, because my grandmother never swore at her children, only at my grandpa.
    “Healing powers my bum,” my grandpa had scoffed when she told him that because of her powers, she was now the mother of two new boys, one aged seven, the other four. “As if you do not have enough children of your own to look after!” When it came down to childrearing, they were her children, he had nothing to do with such prosaic things. Fathers were only there to plant the seeds, it was mothers who did the watering and the fertilising. Of course, the paternal influence would occasionally return to lop off a few leaves for good measure, and smirk for photographs in front of his prize garden, but he made sure to leave immediately afterwards in case the cumquats only glowed orange but were black inside. It was never the pa’s fault if the kids went bad.
    “You don’t understand anything,” my grandmother told him, with a slow sad shake of her head. Least of all did