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he understand how lucky he was. Two streets down from my grandmother’s house, and close to the New Market, there was a mother whose two boys lay moaning in bed, drowning in hot and cold flushes. These boys were friends with my grandmother’s own boys. This mother came to visit my grandmother, bedraggled with grief. “My boys,” she cried, “my boys! Aiyoh, Sister, I need your help! My boys!” They were sick again, but they had always been sickly since they were small. Perhaps it was the air, or the inauspiciousness of their birthdates, but my grandfather suspected they were just spoilt. With every little sniffle attended to, no wonder they liked to slouch around feigning illness.
    “Ah Gim, don’t worry,” reassured my grandmother, with a little pat on her friend’s hand. “They will get better, they always do.” But from the look in the woman’s eyes, she could sense that this time it was worse, this time there seemed to be no redemption.
    “The sickness,” cried Ah Gim, “they both have the sickness!” The sickness was the smallpox epidemic, for which later every schoolchild had to have their skin scraped with the edge of a knife dipped in ointment. To this day, my mother still bears the scars of the operation on her arm, but Ah Gim’s two boys had caught the disease before the immunisation. “I need your help!” cried Ah Gim. “We need to trick the demons into not taking my sons! Aiihh, this is all my fault, for loving them too much and for making it so bleeding obvious!”
    There were dour-faced demons everywhere, and these demons were bent on breaking the bond between mothers and their children. These demons were also gods that needed to be appeased – or deceived if that did not work. Oh, they were insatiable, and to deceive these demons, mothers would try to confuse them, forcing their own children to call them “Aunt” instead of “Ma”. “From now on, I am your auntie,” Ah Gim commanded, standing in front of her two boys. “From now on you must call me Aunt. Do you understand?”
    Her poor pale-faced children blinked up at her from their beds. “Don’t give me that confused look, stupid squids, this is for your own good.” Then she turned her face with her chin thrust up high towards the firmament, or wherever she thought the demons were floating. What, me tormented? You’ve got to be kidding. I’m just the aunt, these are not my kids, take them if you want, I don’t want them. In fact, if you take them, you’d be doing me a favour, I’m sick of looking after these phlegmy princes anyhow.
    But the children could not be orphans, either, because to be an orphan was to be the saddest kind of soul in the world, for without a beginning, the ending was bound to be swift. So this is how my grandmother came to be standing by the foot of their mattress on the floor, looking down at the two boys. They looked terrible.
    “Look here, you two. You remember Auntie Huyen Thai?” demanded Ah Gim. The boys stared up at my grandmother, wide-eyed from their illness. Their faces were splotched with angry pink.
    “If you don’t remember Auntie Thai, then you’d better remember her now, because she is now your mother and you have to call her Ma. Not me. Do you understand?”
    The youngest boy’s eyes flickered open in panic. Poor kid, my grandmother thought. His sick mind wasn’t up to these genealogical gymnastics.
    “Call her Ma,” commanded their real ma. “She has special powers and will make you better.”
    My grandmother wanted to open her mouth and protest, but then she saw the look in the other woman’s eyes and remained silent.
    “She has five sons, born one after the other, and all of them healthy and good …” Ah Gim choked a little on the end of this sentence, because she was looking at her own two boys, “and I have you two sick worms! Sick and useless and causing me nothing but a constricted heart!” She clutched her chest with closed fists, as if trying to hold her