My beloved grandma, the woman who raised me during the early parts of my life, the woman who taught me precious & priceless life lessons, the woman who guided me to cook, sew & garden and the woman who I loved ❤️❤️❤️ tremendously from the bottom of my heart had passed away a week plus ago. She was over 90 years of age and is survived by her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, siblings, nieces and nephews and more.
Taken on 20th September 2009. Nearly 11 years ago.
Whenever my grandma’s Cambodian maid live in our house for few days, I will surely be jolted up from my beauty sleep few times per night. Very geram ohh!
You see grandma and the maid share a room with me and my sis. It’s sort of like sardine. Hehehe But that’s not the point. The point is the maid sleep beside our wood wardrobe. And grandma sleep between me and the maid. Every night I will be awaken by the ‘knock knock knock’ noise. This goes on and on few times a night. At first I was okay about it. But not anymore. If she stay with us for 5 straight nights, just calculate how many times we have to wake up!?!
We sent our Indonesian maid back to her agent few months back. Her work ethics were not bad actually though grandma and mom beg to differ. What I found uneasy is her ability to listen to our conversation because this ex-maid of ours understands Hokkien!
What actually prompted my mom to sent her back was she keeps telling grandma about wanting to quit this job (grandma did gave her some hard time; old lady ma).
Okay, so you want to quit your job? We’ll help you realize that. So after 3 years plus working as my grandma’s aid we bade her tata late last year.
Just recently my uncle hired a new maid. She’s a Cambodian and she understands very little English. So grandma has to speak in English (broken). Sometimes she will include some Malay words in it which I doubt the maid understands. Haha
“Ah Ma, even though I see you often the only time I get to eat with you is during CNY” I said.
To which my grandma laughed.
I continued “Ya ma. When I eat you don’t want to eat. You wait for everyone to finish eating. Then you eat.”
According to her she eats last so that she and maid can take the last dishes. The thing is long before we have maid, she still eat last.
*scratch head
I guess some people enjoy eating last? Do you?
I’m almost always the first one to eat. Haha
As you may or may not know, this year sis and I are extremely ‘rajin’ (hardworking). We bake our own Chinese New Year cookies!!! We’ve made 4 in total. Not bad eh?
Well there’s pineapple tarts, oatmeal crispies, margarine cookies and the 4th one which I’m going to share with you is Kuih Kapit aka Love Letter.
It was 3 years ago in 2006 that we last make them. At that time grandma helped us with everything. When I read back my kuih kapit post I was quite lost. At that time things were too messy and I didn’t have time to write a proper recipe.
This time I purposely asked grandma not to come to our house. One is because I know she will definitely help out and we don’t want that. Second is because we want to learn making kuih kapit by ourselves from scratch.