In the introduction, you talked about the idea of building a grandmother’s unreliable image, can you talk more about it?
In my book, I talked about the idea of building my own understanding of my grandmother. Since I only met my grandmother a few times before the dementia progressed, I never spent a lot of time asking her about her life. As a result, most of what I know comes from stories told by relatives. But the thing about verbal storytelling is that memories change over time and people tell things differently. People tell stories based on who is in the room, where they are and when they are told. There is no objective reality, but emotional truths that people feel and remember when telling stories.
What I know about her now is not necessarily her truth, but my subjective truth about her. With the images in Wa Leng wa Hor, one can see who they are, but I know she is a stubborn and independent patriarch who often feels frivolous in the last few years of her life but still has her own moments of joy.
