Women are inspirational. With the tightrope that we have to walk when balancing career and family priorities, how could we not be? A woman is tenaciousness personified.

Whether man or woman, each of us inspires in our own way. But none can fill the Dragoness robe like my grandmother, who has a few compelling stories to tell.

Through her marriage, my grandmother became Peranakan. This subculture of the Chinese community in South-East Asia observes the customs of the people of the Straits of Malaya. Peranakans, or Straits Born Chinese, have their own patois and food; I grew up on Chinese food with a straits twist.

So, my grandmother cooked such food and did so well that it is a point of inspiration. One of her specialties, Acar, stands out in my memory. Few can surpass her meticulousness in its preparation; besides slicing and sunning vegetables for the dish, she stuffed red hot green chilies with papaya, using her bare hands. Despite the obvious sting her palms would have felt after stuffing just one, she kept going, topping countless jars with the plump, papaya-filled chilies and vegetables. Of course, they made their way into the tummies of my family members fairly quickly.

Jaw-dropping as her cooking skills were, they weren’t the sole reason she wowed others. Her tenaciousness was difficult to beat. A teenager during the Second World War, she made it through the tough era with resilience that few could emulate. She dressed up as a boy to divert the attention of lascivious Japanese soldiers who went around having their ways with the hapless women of Japanese-occupied Singapore. She defended each of her sisters with her insistence that no women were present in the home when there clearly were, a move with life as its cost if the soldiers found her to be lying. An Ann Frank of SouthEast Asia? She comes close, surely. 

That isn’t the reason she holds the Dragoness title. The values she imparted made me what I am today; she taught me that pain was transient when doctors diagnosed me with Pituitary Brain Tumors and had to administer spinal taps. She reminded me I could withstand the treatment and emerge stronger for it, which I did. She was in the hospital daily. 

Then there was her humility. Before she died, she told us to scatter her ashes at sea and asked that her funeral be fuss-free. Nothing grandiose for her; we could feel that she left this world in the comfort of her peace. 

A simple housewife yet a dragoness who transformed. That was my grandmother.