摘要：My paternal grandmother and I have never really talked. This isn’t due to any personal acrimony; it’s just the usual generation gap, made all the more difficult as neither of us properly speak the language that the other person is most comfortable with. I live in the world of the English language; my grand- mother’s native tongue is Teochew, though like many Singaporeans of her generation (she’s in her late 90s), she also speaks a muddle of other local languages: fluent enough Cantonese and Malay to carry on extended conversations, a decent command of Mandarin (thanks to several decades of watching TV shows on Channel 8, I suspect) and a smattering of English.
