let lemons be angry

Favourite things from Malacca.

toilet sign

elisabeth, who likes to peek at me but never talks, but who told her parents that i am her friend

in an art gallery/cafe

random old stuff

my auntie: "why did you take the sign? what did you find interesting about the sign? Is it the two-toned words?"

Actually it was the faded badly-drawn man.

The mum's side of the family doesn't get much airtime on this blog, being smaller and somewhat less dramatically queer. But there are things to know about the family that I have dinner with once a week, and have always felt more comfortable with.

I have an eccentric seven-year-old cousin who has been intelligent from birth. He was born with a frown, and memorized facts about insects as he learned to read. As we were driving peacefully for a lunch in melaka, ten of us packed into an SUV, he turned to his mother with a sublimely enlightened smile and said, "Sometimes I feel like I have been asleep all my life."

My littlest cousin, Elisabeth, has singled me out as the only young girl around other than herself. And so I get long stares and self-conscious avoidance. She only wears pink, but like the females in this family, is hardly sweet. She frowns too, and makes expressive shrieks and murmurings.

This trip was arranged because the brothers and sisters got together and decided that my grandmother needed to see her first and favorite grandson before she died. So they persuaded him to be flown over from canada for a visit. To get to know him, we drove to Melaka. I don't think we could have gotten to know him any other better way, or he us.