A matter of what our families give to us, in the intangible forms of, "assets", translated…

After the death of my stepbrother, my mother and I quickly set up the paperwork for disinheriting anything, fearing, that we may, end up with a whole lot of extra debts up our asses.  But, there are, always some things, that the paperwork can't, make us, disinherit, the secrets of the childhood years, among, one of the, hardest to disinherit.

Born in Taipei, grown in Sanchong, I'd inherited that scent of nostalgia from my elders: my father's etched in rolling wheat waves of Shandong, Chen's trekking across the shores with the willows on the banks of Zhejiang and Hangzhou, naturally, there's, also that grand garden estate of my mother's home back in Jakarta too.

My very first memories are related to them, and, what's interesting was, even though, my father and older uncle and aunts all lived together in that big house, but, had their, separate thoughts that they were, calculating on.

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how the household are split up, by secrets of the families...illustration found online

My late father loved that he'd viewed Uncle Chen as an older brother, but, he'd kept waiting on the timing to be right, to buy up half of the apartment, to split up the household with him, so he could, fix up a bride-to-be boudoir for me; while Uncle Chen had always took me to the park to play chess with his older friends, and to visit the home he and my father shared from before when I was young, to have that feel of having an offspring, and he'd, stuffed my hands with the treats, and, he was also the one, who'd, disclosed to me first, that my older stepbrother wasn't related to me by blood, which had, exceeded my level of understanding of the matter when I was younger; as my older stepbrother went to the toilets, he'd called me along, so we can, make that, "X" in the toilet together, then, we'd, played the video games, beat the levels, and, he'd invited me plan along on his thought of, escaping home; while my mother taught me the words in Indonesian, and the two of us, mother and son, planned things out, in language that my father and older uncle couldn't understand, and we'd felt, that we were, superior to them.

There are, multiple sides to everyone we encounter, that, was what I'd, come to understand when I'm grown, and only love, is able, to make us take off these masks we put on in front of one another.  That feeling of being loved so deeply, and hated so deeply, are all in my mind, I can't, disown, it's something, that I must, inherit, of my self, my heritage, my, inheritance.

And so, this boy grows up, and learned about his own family, and understood, that nothing IS as the surfaces showed, that there are, a ton of thing going on deep down, underneath (like those quickly moving feet of that duck underwater that we can't see???), that sometimes, things are just, not as we perceived, and because  of how young we were, we didn't have any clues of the goings on in our adult counterparts' lives, but as we are older, we'd, learned, of the inner workings of our own, separate, families.


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