monkey nonsense

i have 3 grandmas. and 1 grandpa (my other grandpa died before my parents were even married).

i think i call my mom’s dad that taiwanese phrase for maternal grandpa, ah-gong. i say i think because i’m not sure. my cousins (my mom’s brother’s kids) also call him the same word which means someone is not calling him by the correct name!!! (bah! it might be my family). my ah-gong knows all these random facts. i think my love for random history/facts comes from him. he always has these chinese brain teasers he asks whenever we’re in the car driving somewhere. and i never know the answer because i can’t even understand what the question is! whenever he comes to visit, we always go to some historic place and even though he barely knows any english, he’ll always be walking around like he’s reading the information. then he’ll ask me about something and how to say it in english. then walk around the place a few more times, muttering the word to himself so he can remember. one time we went to see the presidents’ bust museum in williamsburg, va. he went up to each president and then got really excited in front of eisenhower. he kept mumbling eisenhower over and over as we walked through the rest of the busts. here’s a good picture of him with eisenhower. look how happy he is!

my ah-ma is cool. she loves playing video games with my grandpa. when i was a kid and still taking piano lessons, she used to urgently call from the basement while practicing. i would always rush down… what emergency?!!?!!? she’d just be asking me to help her beat a certain stage of Banana or Lode Runner!! if i was able to help her beat the level, she’d shower me with compliments like “oh, i have such a smart granddaughter!” i loved how video games meant i was smart my favorite picture of my ah-ma is this old picture of her and someone dressed up as winnie the pooh at some amusement park. it was probably when i was a baby because i can’t remember ever going. but she’s standing next to pooh with this big smile on her face, like she’s laughing. and she doesn’t know a word of english! hehehehehehe. i’ll try to get a copy of that picture some time. here’s a close second:

i call my dad’s “step”mom (er.. grandpa had a couple of wives) grandma… i don’t think i call her by anything chinese. my dad and all his siblings call her “mommy” to avoid confusion with “ma”. i think she came to the US and started living here awhile ago so she can actually understand english. she reminds me of some of my aunts (the loud ones! :-P) because they all share the same head! er… i guess i meant face with that, but actually… their head shapes are all quite round.

i call my dad’s mom the chinese word for maternal grandma, po-po. everyone who hears me refer to my po-po always gets confused. my po-po is quite old. almost 90 years old. the last time i saw her was when i went back to taiwan in 2001. she was still quite active… walking around with us in the city and taking us to her retirement home in the mountains. we even went to one of the local mountain parks outside taipei with her. i remember her living with us when i was a kid (in VA, then in the temporarily apartment we lived in until our house in MD was complete, and finally in MD). we still refer to the room in our house that she lived in with us as po-po’s room, even though she hasn’t lived there in almost 20 years. my po-po was the one who introduced me to card games like solitare, that mountain-add-up-to-13, and that 9-cards-3-by-3-grid game and introducted me to the tv shows dynasty, dallas, and the price is right! when i got older, i wondered if she didn’t have a crush on bob barker :-P. i remember trying to draw a picture of my grandma when i was a kid… the picture used to hang in our kitchen and was this random blob with purple hair and glasses, standing next to a floating piece of bacon and a lopsided egg… i was quite the artist! i also remember when my sister and i were helping her prepare for the citizenship test. my sister drew this awesome (accurate, no purple hair here!) picture of my grandma in front of a flag and wrote the pledge of alliegence at the bottom. (i think i helped by watching her as she drew.) she didn’t end up staying in the US; she preferred taiwan more. on my last trip to taiwan, my po-po was telling this story about when i was a kid… she and i were sitting at some table drawing or writing or something when one of the papers fell on the floor. she asked me to go pick it up for her. apparently, i took my sweaty foot and stomped on the piece of paper so it would stick and then held my foot up to her so that she could pick the paper off my foot. i like to think it was ingenuity… but yeaaaa… kind of wish my po-po had better memories of me. no picture of po-po i’ll try to get one of her. i particularly like the picture of her young hanging in my family’s hallway. she was so pretty.

i wish i had gotten to go to taiwan more often to spend time with all of them