Before highrise

An earlier memory... Up till the age of ten I had lived in a house like this in Malaysia... "Zinc-roof house" they call it. The road that led up to it was covered with flattened frogs, because it was really a village. The path that led to the house was unpaved dirt, on rainy days it was just mud. There were two really shaggy looking dogs, one about to die. Flies abundant. Wasps and other insects. Mosquitoes for sure. In the monsoon season huge swarms of black flying ants. Sometimes snakes hide in the gutter and killing it was always a loud affair involving all the neighbors (mostly spectators.) One or two heavy sticks were kept in the house... for snakes and robbers.

The living room was so high we played badminton in it. There was an alter at one end, a typical Chinese altar, all red, with smoking incense standing in ash urns. Sometimes the shuttlecock gets lost among all the paraphernalia of the altar. We preferred the shuttlecocks that had real feathers, not the plastic ones - those are heavy and don't sail as well. I buried hand scrawled notes in the ash urns, I can't remember what I drew or wrote, possibly stick figures saying hello.

My dad's family (him, my mom, my brother, me) lived in one room on the right of the main entrance to the house. To the left (if I remember correctly) the great grandmother's room. Standing right inside the door to that room is an old full-size grandfather's clock, the real kind that worked with a real pendulum. My dad had to adjust it from time to time - though I never figured out what he did. My great grandmother used to eat rats as a tonic food, they said. She had real bound feet, the last generation. When my great grandmother died, the garden with all the flowers in the world was burned. The flowers were as tall as I was. Past the altar on the other side of the living room was the kitchen, and on one side of the kitchen was my aunt's family's room. I don't remember my cousins at all - except that they were older girls. What was the kitchen like? I think there were old fashioned stoves, or maybe gas cylinders. Big burnt woks of course. The bathroom is at the other side of the kitchen - a real wet place, with a big earthen jar filled with water and a couple of plastic scoops.

Have you ever heard rain fall on a zinc roof? It is the most soothing sound in the world. The roof may leak, we place buckets all around the house; but the sound is worth the rainy day.