(My Grandaunt and her three kids w/ my Grandma and Grandpa)And it also means hearing about my mother's love life when she was my age. Apparently, my mother was quite the flirt back then with a few boys after her, and one in particular who was very smitten except she didn't plan to stay in Vietnam forever. And when I heard all this, I was pretty stunned, in a You mean my mother was young once and had boyfriends? kind of way. My mother and I have never talked about dating or boys; as far as I know, my parents had sex once and that was it, End of Story. It's really weird to think about your parent's lives when they were your age, going through a lot of the things you're going through now, and the rest of their life before you came along, in that they actually had one.
And then when I was talking to my mother on the phone yesterday, she was telling me about how my great-grandfather was very rich and had a lot of property back then but he sold it all for opium, which he and my great-grandmother got addicted to and died from. So that was a Whoaaa really? moment for me. That and how my great-grandfather is from "Dai Ma," which is a Chinese way of saying first wife, though the whole multiple wives thing, usually 2-3, wasn't surprising as it wasn't the first time I'd heard of it happening in my family. But then I also realized that those aunts and cousins whom I'm not so fond of on my mother's side are actually kinda half-relatives, which I took some slight glee in, but not that it matters to me at all, I'm used to half-relatives, such is a side effect of multiple wives during the olden days. Some day I really have to draw out my family tree.
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