Right, I don’t want to spill the awful stories in my extended family, so here’s a bit of a SECRET LOVE AFFAIR story for #MakjangMonday
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    More melo than makjang but ok…

    A young boy was playing next to the train tracks at the turn of the 20th century. He fell off a locomotive and a passing train cut off both his legs. The boy survived and grew up to become a musician. He gave piano lessons to my grandmother and her cousin. My grandmother worked as a pianist for the ballet and got married at 19, but her cousin became a concert pianist. She fell in love with her teacher. He fell in love with her. But her family did not approve of her marrying a disabled man who was 30 years her senior, so they sent her to study music in another continent. When she came back years later he had married someone else and had a large happy family. She married a guy too, they adopted two kids, and he left her. She never married again and nobody knows the real story except the two families and my grandmother. And I never knew that my piano teacher with a hoarse voice and who always smelled of cigarettes had a tragic love life. Until grandma spilled the beans.

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      Real life sometimes can be more interesting than drama.

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      Wow! I can see this made into a drama. Thanks for sharing your beautiful story.

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      I can just see the wistful staring out the window from a train, with piano music playing through the story

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        I think I could turn this into the script for a drama special.

        I already have the music in mind: Chopin’s Nocturnes. But also Beethoven, because she was a big Beethoven fan: Pastoral Symphony, Pathetique Sonata, Piano Concerto No 5 (I refuse to include Moonlight Sonata – it’s been overused in dramas to the point where it’s trite).

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          Ahhh, Chopin’s Nocturnes while the rain drips down the windows as she is carried far away from the man she loves.

          (I agree with you about Moonlight Sonata, which is sad because I do love that song)

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          And a train…you’d need to stand on the tracks and watch the train whip by….though I’m not sure why? Maybe because it all started with a train

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      Aww. So your piano teacher was your grandmother’s first love? I imagined the entire story in black and white. Lovely.

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        Oops I wasn’t clear enough. My grandmother’s cousin is the heroine of the story, and she was also my piano teacher. I just heard the story from my grandmother years later.

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      What a beautiful story. Thanks for sharing.

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      I’m still just fixated on that freak train accident yikes.

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      30 years her senior…that could give pause.
      I hope the second part of her life was filled with happiness with her family, music, and maybe secret love affairs.

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        More like 25 but yeah

        She did. 🙂 She was close with her adopted kids and sort of adopted her piano students too.

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      awwwwwww :'( the word that instantly came in mt mind was regret. I sincerely hope they never regretted and moved on. (not like in kdramas the guy or girl stay celibate for 20 years+ so they be with their first love.)

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    Not sure whom I should tag so I just copied @justme’s list:
    @bammsie, @greenfields, @fatcat007, @neener, @waadmay, @mindy, @estee, @hotcocoagirl, @kimbapnoona, @natzillagorilla, @giegie0384, @cloggie, @hades, @isthatacorner, @rukia, @suriyana-shah, @sweetiepie54, @pbnjelly513, @jenmole, @parkchuna, @fencejumper, @delphy010, @shindy, @ally-le, @earthna, @vivanesca, @leetennant, @chingu, @esther, @coffeprince4eva, @miraalmano, @marybee, @jaelegant, @charlieblue17, @frabbycrabsis, @luzitania, @jules, @crysta, @mollyp, @whoopeeyoo, @babybeast, @silvermists, @esther95, @beesgiggle, @zetteceniza, @dokutokunaneko, @feenah9895, @egads, @noobita, @samurai, @adieunoire, @christina41218, @saya, @festerfaster, @ravennightstar, @adieunoire, @blissfulennaira, @1tea1, @oppafangirl

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      Also tagging those beanie chingus who usually only see silly posts from me or who share a love of music and tragic love stories: @sicarius @bbstl @pakalanapikake @yyishere @ndlessjoie

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        Thank you for including me, @wishfultoki.

        What a lovely, poignant story. Who needs fiction when real life is so … real? Some things you just cannot make up — because there’s nothing new under the sun, and it has already happened somewhere, somewhen.

        PS — One of my great aunties was a concert pianist, too. 😉

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        Thank you, @wishfultoki, I appreciate being tagged to read your family story! And a great one it is. It would be wonderful to hear what a good k-music director could do with the OST 😁

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    Okay. Since we’re talking about grandmothers here’s my story. My grandmother was born in China. She woke up one morning to find that her parents and siblings had died of the Bubonic Plague. They all slept next to each other in a room. She was 14. She followed a bunch of people to Old Malaya in a junk. The journey took several weeks. When she set foot onshore she was sent to work for a rich Chinese family who had migrated from China earlier and owned land and shophouses in Old Malaya. The matriach of the house took a liking to the young orphan, and married her to her son, the Young Master. She ordered my grandmother to unbind her tightly bound feet, which she did. My grandmother’s head was shaven and all the roots of her forehead plucked out until her hairline receded to the middle of the top of her head. Think Manchu and you’ll imagine what she looked like. She bore him 14 children, a few died in childbirth. She was a strong, sweet lady. She died at 88. My grandfather died at 90. I think she loved him a lot. He was a six footer and she was a tiny thing, hardly reaching his elbow.

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      Wow! What a great story, @yyishere YY!

      Your paternal great-grandma sounds like quite an interesting person herself. But I’m confused as to why she insisted on your grandma’s Manchu hairdo. Was that the style among wealthy Chinese in Malaya at that time? And whatever happened to grandma’s unbound feet? Wouldn’t the damage have already been done? Or was she young enough that her lotus feet could revert to something approximating normal? My tootsies hurt just thinking about it.

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        Yes, my paternal great-grandma was spoken of with respect by my grandma. She did something quite out of the ordinary those days, ordering the feet to be unbound. But I think it was for practical reasons? They were in a foreign land, rules didn’t apply anymore. She was a servant, marrying into a rich family. She would continue to be a servant, after she married, she would have had to toil for the entire household. The whole extended family lived under one roof. So I think unbound feet would make it easy to work.
        I think it was the Manchu era? Not sure. My grandma was ashamed of her unbound feet. She would call them “big”, “ugly” and speak wistfully of beautiful tiny feet. Hers were the length of an eight-year old’s…my age then, and they were ok, because they were freed early. They looked like a child’s feet. But she limped when she walked, and could never walk fast, she had to hold onto things for support. She had shoes custom-made for her, black ones with a strap in the middle, like a child’s shoes. Her hair was always something that intrigued me, she said if you get married, you’ve got to have the front of your head bald. She was proud of it, unlike her shame at her feet. Her hair never grew back. It stayed like that for the rest of her life.

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          Thank you for sharing that interesting background about your grandma and great-grandma, @yyishere YY. It does seem that great-grandma may well have had a practical reason for discontinuing grandma’s foot binding.

          My first exposure to the practice was in Pearl S. Buck’s novel The Good Earth back in high school. I recall one of the female characters lamenting her big, ugly tootsies.

          As for the reason for the plucked pate, perhaps it was something along this line:
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_shaving#cite_note-1
          The note is in the caption of a portrait of a young Polish aristocrat. Perhaps there was a similar aesthetic regarding the forehead in China?

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      This is freaking movie worthy wtf. Both of these are actually!!!

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      That’s remarkable, that the poor orphan ended up married to the Young Master! It seems like we always hear about youngsters being kept apart. I’d love to know the details of how that happened.

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        I know right. She loved to tell her story to her grandkids. I loved her a lot. I called her Ah Ma, which means Grandma. She was soft all over, and cottony. I loved to touch her. My fingers would sink into her. I was afraid of old people when I was little, but Ah Ma was just different, not scary at all. Unlike Ah Gong, my grandfather. He was so tall, like a giant. He would holler at us kids – there were so many of us, cousins all playing and screaming together during the school holidays. He was very very tall, with piercing eyes and grey hair and a booming voice with a twinkle in his eyes. He would stomp around his house and scare the shit out of us. He kept a coffin tucked away under the house – this was a sprawling house with steps and long posts supporting it so there was a space beneath, the ground floor kind of, except that there was an empty space. So anyway when we played down there, we would whisper ” Ah Gong’s coffin’s over there”, and my heart would jump, I was so creeped out. I never dared to look at it up close. It was just a presence in a dark corner.

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          😲 omg, a coffin beneath the house? Do you know why? Like, he was sure he’d die at any moment – or, like he got a really good deal on an extra long coffin that he just couldn’t pass up? When he died, was it used for him?
          I like the description of your AhMa❤️

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          Your Grandpa reminds me of mine, who was also a 6-footer (and 250 pounds) and very imposing. Beneath the bluster there lurked a creampuff, at least in later years. But when I was a little squirt, I was scared of him.

          I can understand where Ah Gong was coming from with his coffin at the ready. He picked out what he wanted, and his survivors wouldn’t have to do it when they were in mourning. When I was in my 20s, I came across an article about a monastery that supported itself by making plain pine boxes. Or you could order a set of plans and build your own. The coffin could be used as a low bookshelf or coffee table until you needed it. I found the idea very appealing, especially considering how expensive funerals were even then. I haven’t thought about this in a dog’s age. Look what you’ve shaken loose! What can I say? I was a weird kid. 😉

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            He was terrifying. My sister had kind of squashed, flattened edges for ears, and he would come checking our ears at meal times, roaring, “Now who’s got that flattened ear?” And he would bent down from his great great height, and pull back our ears to look. When it was my turn, and I felt that huge hand on my ear, I held my breath. I only exhaled when he lumbered off.

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            @yyishere,

            Verily, the Big People sometimes fail to realize how huge they appear to little squirts. And how loud their voices are.

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      @yyishere you must write a book about this!
      I recently read SNOW FALLING IN SPRING by Moying Li and learned so much about Chinese society in the turbulent 20th century.

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        Really? Chinese history is so rich and textured, and everything you see in those Chinese dramas are true. Men married many wives. Some had families in China, then they sailed to Malaya and married again. My uncle had two wives, and two families. Men who had many wives were looked up to as bei ng real men, capable of providing for many wives and broods of children. Some had four wives. The first wife was the most powerful of all. The other wives, called concubines, had to kowtow to them, and their children too were considered inferior. The first wife would refer to the concubine as The Mistress, never by name. Lots and lots of stories passed down in my family…yeah, I could write a book.

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      These stories are amazing! I feel like someone should be compiling these and publishing them later for posterity. That way, when all these people are long passed and us too, the stories will live on.

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        It’s fascinating, isn’t it? I never thought much about it when I was little but it must have been horrific, a 14 year old girl in a junk, cooped up for lord knows how long at sea, and then to reach land and be shuttled ofg to some strange house.,,poor Ah Ma.

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