5th uncle is an excellent chef. Since I was a little girl, I’ve always enjoyed his cooking. He didn’t cook often but whenever he found the time, I am always a big fan. I especially love the soups he made, and he often made my favourite kinds. Until now, whenever we visit, he would make it a point to make one of my favourites – pickled vegetable soup. Whenever we gather for Chinese New Year, he would also cook his specialty - delicious curry chicken.

He takes pain and pride in his cooking and he often enjoys seeing others savouring his food. He is always generous and there is always plenty for everybody and we eat to our heart’s content while he just looks on and smiles whenever we compliment him or make yummy noises. I think he finds satisfaction in the simplest of ways.

Last night we visited him in the hospital’s ICU. He had just undergone a heart surgery and wasn’t in very stable condition. As I stood there and watched him lying still in bed with wires connecting him to machines, I felt a pang of pain. He looked so frail despite his size. He could barely move and his breath was laboured even with the oxygen mask.

Life is so fragile. I never thought I would see him like this. I could never have imagined. The uncle who is always bubbly and often laughed infectiously and heartily, always filling our stomachs. I pray for his speedy recovery.

I was a sickly child and visited the family clinic too often. So frequent were the visits that the nurses became friends with Mom and sometimes when I got really sick, I even got to cut queue just by saying it’s an “emergency”.

I was very susceptible to flu, running high fevers and mild bronchitis complications. On top of that, I was also a “windy” kid whose stomach bloated, causing a great deal of difficulty in my breathing. We tried many ways to get the excessive wind out of me – taking western medication, drinking awfully bitter Chinese herbal soups, rubbing warm oils and Vicks on the tummy and placing lightly heated leaves on my abdomen to encourage “air disposal” (farting). I don’t know what kind of leaves those were, Mom bought them from an Indian shop.

Once, I was having the full works of a fever and coughs. I coughed so badly that sometimes it made me throw up. One such time that I vomited, there was blood. Needless to say it worried my parents sick. I was taken yet again to the clinic and this time the doctor advised that I should be brought to the hospital for a thorough check. I don’t remember much of what happened at the hospital except that tests were done to check if I had contracted the dengue fever. While laying weak on the hospital bed with my parents standing beside me, I meekly told Mom I wanted a colour TV in the hospital room if I had to stay. What a terrible TV addict!

Whenever I got sick, I had to be fed porridge, bread or mee suah. With not much appetite for food, I just swallowed them obediently and quickly went back to bed. Since I got sick so often, I had to eat quite a bit of such “sick food”. Till now, these foods remain to be “sick food” on my list and you won’t find me eating them willingly.

Grandma was worried that I was always sick and so one day she consulted a medium to seek some answers. Apparently, the medium said our deceased ancestors loved me very much and often stroked my forehead. And I got sick because of that. So Grandma prayed to our ancestors and told them if they loved me, they should stop touching me!

Anyway, when I started being more active in sports at the age of 9, my illnesses were lessened and I got much fitter. It came to a point where I was hardly ever sick, despite going through physically gruelling training regimes on a daily basis. I certainly think that it has helped me be a much healthier person from the little sick duckling that I was. Or was it that the ancestors took Grandma’s pleading to heart and stopped touching me?

At the age of 10-ish, I never knew much about Christmas other than it is a time where beautiful lights are lit to decorate the streets and shops, presents are given, and the delightful appearance of Santa Clause with his goody bag. In Grandma’s home, we never celebrated Christmas as none of us are Christians. So everything remained quiet and it’s just an ordinary day. Sometimes, instead of staying home, Mom would take me to JB since it’s the school holidays.

While in JB, the Christmas spirit is much felt as we roamed into Singapore and there were more hype going around. Even when not in Singapore, Mom and Aunty Winnie would find kids’ Christmas parties for Vicky and I to attend in JB itself. We’ve attended a few of them and the one I remember is the one in Holiday Inn hotel. There was a Santa and a bunch of us kids, all dressed in pretty frocks. Our parents sat far back and waited while we had games and food.

At the party, we received a gift each as well as some party masks, hats and props to make our time more lively and colourful. We played games and after that sat around Santa obediently as we sang Christmas Carols. There was also time allocated for each to sit on Santa’s lap for a photo.

As I got older, the Christmas parties faded away. Nothing much happened around Christmas anymore. It was just another holiday. Then during my teenage years, when we moved out of Grandma’s house, we started putting up a decorated Christmas tree every Christmas just to enjoy the glow of flickering lights. It wasn’t a big tree, just a 4-feet tall one. For the thrill of it, we would also buy presents and stack them under the tree.

That’s how Christmas was for us. Now, we don’t put up the tree anymore at Christmas time. The nice shiny ornaments and blinking lights would be too much attraction to my three cats.

Grandma enjoyed music very much. During the afternoons, she always listened to Chinese Opera music. Then, in the early evenings before dawn, she played more upbeat and modern songs by that time's standard. Later in the nights, she preferred ballads from her oldies collection.

Joyce and I often would get together in the evenings after having done our homework. That was the time the more "modern" hits came on at home. I didn't know the title of the songs then and I still don't know now except for a few like Funky Town, Careless Whisper and You're My Heart, You're My Soul.

We couldn't catch the lyrics of most songs but we belted them out heartfully anyway. It's not like anyone listened to us, so we were most confident in our "performances". But now, having known some lyrics to those songs, I laugh at how we improvised them. We used to sing "You're My Heart, You're My Soul" as "Yamaha, Yamaso". What do a 7-year old and a 9-year old know about heart and soul?

We not only sang the songs, we also danced gleefully to them. The dance steps, corny! But back then we felt like queens on a stage with a stadium full of spectators. I especially loved to wear a particular dress which had something like apron-strings to tie at the back of the dress. I would hold the apron-strings in each hand and twirl and wrap while I danced. I must've looked so darn silly.

Now, I'm just the opposite. I wouldn't dare belt out a tune and I now also know that I'm not great at dancing.

Around the age of seven, my cousin Joyce and I loved watching TVB serials that Grandma rented from the video store. One of the more famous drama we were hooked on was "Siu Loong Lui" which I think translates to "Little Dragon Girl". But I can't vouch for that name, it's just my own interpretation. It starred a young Andy Lau as an apprentice to a lady kung-fu master.

Joyce and I were always fascinated with the period drama's dressing. The ladies wore long flowy dresses and had nice hair accessories.

On one of those days that we spent locked up in Grandma's room playing, we found some adult clothes - long flowy dresses that we suspect belonged to our aunts. We quickly tried them on and pretended to be the characters we watched on TV. We both had rather short hair at that time and to copy the hairstyles of the characters, we wrapped towels on our heads like how we would wrap up after a hair wash. The dangling towels on our shoulders were supposed to represent the long hair we didn't have.

And so we went on secretly "dressing" up almost everytime we got together to play. One day, while we were all dressed up, we heard one of our aunts calling for Joyce. She had a phone call. She took off the outfit and towel and went downstairs while I remained dressed in them and waited upstairs. She didn't come back for a long while and I was getting restless.

I went to the top of the stairs to peek what's taking her so long. I sat myself down, back leaning on the wall. I had one leg extended outwards while the other crossed over it. I thought I looked quite stylish. I don't know what I was doing but somehow I lost balance and was soon tumbling down the stairs!

While I was rolling downwards, my thoughts weren't on how I painful it was bumping down the edges of the staircase. But rather it was a sense of panic that others will see me dressed up ridiculously in that dress and towel on the head!

As my fall came to a halt at the landing of the staircase, I sat up and saw my aunt staring at me in disbelief. She didn't utter a word, not even to ask if I was alright. I think she was more shocked with what I was wearing than my fall. I didn't feel much pain but felt a hot flush across my face and without a word, ran all the way back up to the room. I don't think we played dressing up again after that incident.

I was born 29 years ago, 2 days back. My mom called my dad from the hospital and told him she’s in labour. He didn’t believe her. I don’t blame him because it was April Fool’s day. Frustrated, my mom called again but this time she got the doctor to tell him instead, and he came straight to the hospital. According to my parents, I was a tiny baby with no hair. I was so small that Dad called me “kitten”.

Anyway, a year later, on my 1st birthday, my parents invited friends to a lunch party at home. They waited and waited but no one showed up for the party. My parents had to call everyone and explain that it’s not a joke. So the lunch party was turned into a dinner party instead.

Since then I’ve had a few more pranks pulled on me on my birthdays. When I was 15, my classmate Lydia gave me a nicely wrapped present. When I opened it, I found it to be full of pencil ashes with no gift inside. She later gave me my real present. There was another time when a few friends gave me a huge present. I unwrapped it and found another layer of wrapping with newspapers. As it turned out, the gift was a small sized item but wrapped with so many layers of newspapers to make it into a huge box.

The biggest prank was just a few years back when a few of my colleagues teamed up to trick me. One of them bought me breakfast and insisted I sat with her in the pantry to eat. Then, someone else came in to say that she didn’t see my car at its usual spot when she came to work. I got a little worried and went to the basement to check. True enough, it wasn’t there! I went round looking and finally found it parked somewhere else. When I turned around, I saw all my colleagues standing there, laughing and then singing me a birthday song. They planned it so well…someone sneaked into my bag to take my car key while I was having breakfast and moved my car.

All being said, I’m not always the one to get conned. Once in school, we decided to trick our Home Science teacher. We switched class with another group who also happened to attend their Home Science class. When the teacher walked into class, he was quite surprised and confused. When we yelled out “April Fool”, he didn’t seem very pleased. I guess he didn’t find it funny at all.

Such good old days.