Personal History

As the earth completes another ellipse around the sun for me, I make it a point to put fingers to a keyboard (though there is a renewed resurgence of “pen to paper” due to a newly acquired Lamy pen and a stack of Campus notebooks). Birthdays in general have never mattered to me, but I do track and keep stock of my life in terms of prime-numbered years (and there is an abundance of them in the 40s). This year has been particularly introspective as I find myself contemplating my relationship with my family, fatherhood and the drive for personal ambition/ fulfilment.

And so like any other compulsive list-maker, this year I jotted down a bunch of things I’d like to accomplish. And I’m happy to report that I already have a head start towards one of these goals - capturing and preserving my family’s history.

We all grow up hearing stories about our parents and their childhoods and the broader family dynamics. And over time some of these details become fuzzy and others take on a more enhanced almost mythic quality (my mom is still epicly pissed about something an aunt said during my parents’ wedding ceremony// we all have that one aunt). Our children only hear a fraction of these stories. And we really don’t know what our descendants would think of us a couple of generations down the road. Would they appreciate that their great grandfather left his village home at the age of 14 to go study in a city school as a scholarship student? Or that their great grandmother named her pet dog after a neighboring country’s prime minister? Or that their grandfather used to love writing these insanely long emails to his colleagues?

And so I took an entire day off in early April and booked a podcasting studio in Singapore and decided to record in-depth one-on-one interviews with my mother and father. My brief to them - get into as much detail as possible; remember: these are stories we are trying to record and preserve for the next generation.

And they did not disappoint. The cameras rolled for over three hours (with short breaks in between). By the end of it we were just getting out of their teen years. Their first jobs, meeting each other, getting married and having yours truly (still their most significant achievement// I kid, I kid) were still in the distant future. They shared stories I was very familiar with. But they also shared stories I had never heard before (I wasn’t aware for example that my mom was bullied by some neighborhood kids because of her incredibly long hair).

It felt fantastic to record these interviews. The idea is to do a recording session every time my parents visit Singapore. Next week we are planning another long day of recording. At the moment we are covering their lives chronologically - but at some point I’d like to mix things up and pull in my wife and son as well and record a group discussion. Once all the recordings are in place - we will package them together and figure out a way to safely store them for easy retrieval online (YT private videos, perhaps).

Back to working on the rest of my (fairly long) list.