[looks around the audience, smiling]

A while ago, I was told a piece of superstition that could pass off as an urban myth at best. I can’t even recall who told this to me, but whoever they were, they were definitely family, and they said — if you see a butterfly in your home, you aren’t allowed to hurt it or chase it out of your flat, because it was most likely the visiting ghost of a departing family member.

I like to think that this particular superstition stemmed from the folktale of the Butterfly Lovers, which features two characters, essentially. The first is Miss Zhu Yingtai, the ninth child of the wealthy Zhu family, who has to disguise herself as a man in order to be a scholar. That’s badass, right? The second is Liang Shanbo, the young man who she meets and befriends over the course of her studies.

And wow, Shan. He’s a big name on campus. He’s on the rowing team, he eats the right amount of protein while cutting down on his carbs, he jogs shirtless around the academy three times a week… but Shan’s also a bit of a himbo. I say this, because Shan’s got no idea that over the three years they’ve spent together, Miss Zhu’s heart has been beating like a mad ox — every time they share they same meal together, or attend the same classes together, seated at the same desk side by side, their elbows just gently grazing the other through the rough cotton of their robes…

She’s in love with him. And Shan’s got no idea! They — they even shared the same bed, apparently. For three years. Do you know how much you can accomplish in that span of time? You can get a Bachelor of Arts, first class honours, submit every essay on time, go to every single spoken word event at the local teahouse and somehow not even notice that the fella next to you, in the very same futon you sleep on, has just been clutching their chest all night, every night next to you just — just breathing but also not breathing, their eyes wide open, taking in the shape of your nose and your jawline in the moonlight, muttering like a madwoman to themselves, [madly] God I love you I love you I love you… Can you tell I’m in love with you?

But our story starts to come to an end when Miss Zhu’s father asks her to come back home. So she does return home, dutifully, effectively ending her life as a scholar altogether. But what throws her for a loop is that Shan also chooses to accompany her for some distance on the trip. And because her fake life with him is finally coming to an end, she turns to him in their sedan and says:

[manly] “Shan? Shan. After you go back, you gotta — you gotta promise to come see me at my place, man. And when you’re there you — you don’t even find me! Instead you find, you find — my sister. Yeah. That’s who you gotta see. And when you see her — you marry her.”

And Shan turns to her, like: [manlier] “Yeah, bro. Sure thing, bro. I’ll do anything for you, bro.”

[pause] It isn’t till they part and meet again, at the Zhu residence as promised, when Shan chances upon this young woman, thinking that what he was looking at, at first, was his sworn brother’s quote-unquote sister. But, perhaps because of the way the sunlight streamed ever so gently into the courtyard that afternoon — Shan’s eyes widen with the realisation: this young woman is his best friend. But not just that. His best friend now also happens to be the love of his life.

But it’s too late. Things are not what they used to be. At this point, Shan has graduated from school, only to become a poor official; he returns to his place of work poor, destitute, but also burdened this time with the knowledge that Miss Zhu is betrothed, to a wealthy merchant, an arrangement set up by her father.

Shan passes away out of grief, because heartbreak — it could kill you, at the time. It was still a terminal condition, back then. You could be steeped in so much sorrow, it’ll take away your life. And when it’s time for Miss Zhu to take part in her wedding procession, she orders her people to walk past Shan’s grave so she can pay her respects. But on the day she’s finally there, the grief is too much for her to bear. She says to herself: Maybe I still want to be with him.

[softly] And then the craziest thing happens. The heavens oblige. There’s a crack of thunder, and Miss Zhu peeks out of the window in her carriage, and sees that Shan’s grave has split wide open. Miss Zhu throws herself from the sedan straight into the pit, because, like I said: love. It could kill you at the time.

But then out from the grave emerges two butterflies, and they’re Miss Zhu and our beloved Shan, forever reunited in their afterlives.

I’m telling you guys this folktale because I actually want to talk to you about my grandfather.

[holds up photo] This is him. Lee Boon Hua. Man doesn’t even have a birthday, because nobody bothered to record his birthdate.

All my life I thought of him as a quiet man, a man who could be stern at times, but mostly made the loudest noise when he was either laughing at a joke, or playing mahjong with his wife and three children: my mom, my uncle Desmond, and my uncle Andrew. All my life I’d wondered why my grandfather’s skin was so dark and so leathery compared to everyone else’s in the family, and my mother told me it was because he made a as a plumber and construction worker. With my grandmother playing the part of the homemaker, my mother’s family was not well off at all, and lived in a one-room flat, the five of them pulling out the same mattress to sleep on every single night.

But life has changed drastically since then. It has improved exponentially. And it is this seemingly unbridgeable journey that one has to make between the past and the present that’s… all I can think about now. Because, instead of a one-room flat, I live in a semi-detached house on Lorong Chuan; my uncle Andrew just sold his house in Lentor so he and his family can move to a condo in Novena. If my grandfather were still alive, he’d probably look at our lives and not recognise a single aspect of it.

[holds up watch] This is the most precious thing I own. My grandfather gifted this to me on one of my birthdays, I can’t remember which one now. I was just a teenager. He put the watch on me and realised that my wrist was even skinner than his.

I remember watching my grandfather go to a corner of this large, Choa Chu Kang flat that he, my grandmother and my uncle Andrew’s family lived in at the time. I remember him hunching his back over the watch, silently unscrewing some of the links in the metal strap, just so it could fit my wrist perfectly. 

[puts it on; obviously, it’s a perfect fit]

He was the first of my four grandparents to pass. In the final year of my grandfather’s life, it was bizarre to see him fall into a silence even deeper than the one he usually possessed, mainly because, well. He had throat cancer. Stage 4. The doctors even replaced his throat with a plastic trach, with a stoma in the very centre — which meant they literally took away his voice. He even fell into this strange habit of just being very still, staring towards an unknown distance, which once prompted my grandmother to burst with anger, in front of all of us, saying — [hotly] “Ta shi bu shi shang nao jin shi ma? Has he lost his mind? Ta zai kan shen me? she kept saying. What is he staring at?”

I remember wanting my grandmother to back off. Couldn’t you see? I wanted to say. His body was here, but his soul was elsewhere. That’s what I believe. I was convinced that he was just practicing, for whatever great flight he’d have to make, a prospect that he knew was coming sooner rather than later. An inevitability.

It was a difficult time for my family when he died. I remember having to study for an Economics exam while I had to keep watch on his coffin overnight. I remember my uncle Desmond begging for forgiveness over his body. I remember my grandmother, after days of refusing to even look in my grandfather’s direction, just bursting into tears, the moment it became clear we had to load him onto the hearse. And I the tongues of flame leaping over his coffin, and the way my mother’s voice broke as she uttered the word: “Father.”