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我对笔记本前边上着网，某人突然进我的房间。那时我以为那是我的弟弟，可是看了清楚那些人，他其实是我的奶奶。

一句话没说，该说的没说到，我只能说一句，微笑得说，“奶奶。” 一二年没看见她，她瘦得很。我们的团圆饭和伯伯的家一起吃，但那二十分的时刻，是一个最静的团圆饭。

Corrected by Ding wtf:

我在笔记本前上着网，突然某人进入了我的房间。那时我以为是我的弟弟，可是看了清楚那个人，原来她是我的奶奶。

一句话没说，该说的没说到，我只能微笑地，说了一句：“奶奶。” 一两年没看见她，她瘦了很多。我们和伯伯一家人一起吃饭，但在那二十分钟内享用的，是一个最静的团圆饭。

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Alright I can’t do it anymore, thought I could write a lengthy entry entirely in Chinese but looks like I still have ways to go – maybe after one more year of studies I should come back and try my hand at writing again?

Anyway I’ve just had a rather sad reunion dinner – my grandma together with my dad’s younger bro dropped by around 6pm yesterday to feast on my parents’ cooking. There was this tensely awkward atmosphere lingering about and it’s easily understood if you’re a member of my family – I’ll skip the epic long family background (and I don’t intend to wash our dirty linens in public), but let’s just say my uncle isn’t a very likeable person, and my mum had a fall out with my grandma.

This is the very grandma that took care of me in the first 12 years of my life – and after not seeing her for maybe a year or two as she’s currently residing in Singapore with my uncle, there was a drastic change in her appearance that kicked me off guard: she was thin, no longer her plump self, and with her newly wrought out outlook, dare I say it, she looked weak and pathetic. Her words and actions are slower now, she’s hunching more than before – she’s retiring slowly into her old age.

I grappled with this blatant fact of mortality, filled with a sudden grief and sadness I know not how to explain, and I honestly don’t quite know what to talk to her about. The reunion dinner we had was filled with pauses and long silences interjected only by sounds of us chewing and slurping and munching – and our only main topic was about the food my parents cooked. A stark comparison if compared to the picture-perfect image of a large family boisterously laughing and eating away.

My dad cooked my grandma her favourite dish – steamed chicken – and she said she hadn’t been eating it for a very long time, which was strange because how hard could it be to cook such a dish? A minuscule corner of my heart suspected neglect and abuse on the part of my uncle – and later on when my mum gave her some HK drama DVDs because Singapore normally screens Mandarin shows, she said in Cantonese, “But they have DVD player wor.. I don’t have..”, signifying that my grandma and my unc probably don’t watch television in the same room.

I really wanted to get a cheap DVD player for her there and then.

Later on this puddle of bleak forlornness burrowed deeper into a pond when my grandma started giving out gold rings and necklaces to my family as inheritance – she told my parents that she didn’t have a place to keep them, but we all know very well what she meant was that she wanted to give them to us before she passes away.

That just about broke my heart.

When she came up to my room earlier, she was looking around at it slowly and deliberately, as if filled with nostalgia, because this very room was originally hers. I smiled, looked at her – my words were drowned away by this stampede of unknown grief. I didn’t know what were the right words to say, nor what to do.

I was never really programmed with ways to handle this incredibly new yet depressing situation.