Visit to TPCC 1

Haha, I'm going to write about today's visit to Toa Payoh Care Corner – it’s interesting and to a noticeable extent, fruitful, I assure you!

Well, we encountered quite a series of funny and unnecessary problems getting to the CORRECT place (poor Tze Heng spent two and a half hours travelling and took 7 buses in total to get there). Yah, true, we wasted some time, but we kind of enjoy ourselves during the process and I think we arrived at the place at the perfect timing – with the SMU people cleaned up the flats already and the elderly being happy about that.

Seriously, I’m quite proud of my first interview with the elderly! It was with Mdm Ng, a 93-year-old lady who can only speak Teochew, my “grandmother”-tongue (since my mother tongue is Chinese)! Being the only one among our group who was able to understand and communicate in Teochew, I interviewed her with great passion and compassion – you know, a sense of belonging or whatever the thingy is called, in a place that is far far away from my hometown~ Being able to speak 3 languages and understand 1 more may have benefited me, but being capable of communicating only in Teochew has surely impeded Mdm Ng from gaining the full pleasure of chit-chatting with friends. And the sad thing is, she radically refuses to interact with people who speak other languages (I remember her frowning when I discussed, quite quietly with Yawen in English at a time). In aspects other than language, she is quite upright in her life – she does regular exercise and cites her health as the major source of satisfaction; she practices Chinese calligraphy and she even gave me a signature in Chinese characters! She watches TV and reads newspapers; she listens to music and she sings Teochew opera (she boasted that she can sing quite well)! However, I could still detect a sense of loneliness in her eyes despite the disguise of her happy outlook – that spurred from lack of care from children and spouse, and from relatives in general. And I really felt exhilarated when I found that our accompanying had added some spices to her life, which was shown in her shining smile :)

The second interview was quite exciting too! Mdm Lim is a 100-year-old (!!!) lady who can only speak Hokkien. And then the amazing thing happened – I talked to her in Hokkienish Teochew and she talked to me in Teochewish Hokkien and we managed to understand each other! Hooray! The second amazing thing is that her maid is hired by the CARING Singapore government instead of by her sons and daughters! (since when the Sg gov becomes so rich huh?) And the third, also the most, amazing thing is that her maid uses iPhone! Omg! Now the world has changed a lot, I think, hahaha! But seriously, living till 100 years old is not easy and she faces some difficulties in daily life, such as weakening vision and hearing, deteriorating respiratory systems and increasing inconvenience of moving around…