i was massaging my grandma's feet last night, and she was telling me about the war. i have a damn cool grandma (: the lady knows how to clean GUNS okay! during the Japanese Occupation, no work, no money, no food.. NO HAPPY. so she and her mom and sister went to clean guns for the soldiers. 50 cents for a day's work. but they didn't work for the money.. workers were given 1 kg of rice and 'huang dou'(yellow beans), so she worked for food to feed her family.
she was around 13 when the war started. omg, so sad lah. 12, 13 years old and you say toodles (i actually typed 'sayonara' until i realised it wasn't politically correct for a post like this (heh, i love these brackets within brackets)) to the rest of your childhood. the first day the bombs dropped, exams had just begun. but nobody went back the next day. (no school no exams mah! go back for what?!) no lah. it was the bombs. i wouldn't be all let's-go-kill-the-idiots-who-pichat-my-school, but its still, you knoww, MY SCHOOL. bomb do what?
at night they went back to sleep in the kampong (near some kampong mailu, i dunno. something like that; i've never heard of the place), but they had stuff on standby. two sets of clothes, a few biscuits and a weetle bit of money. sometimes the jap soldiers would bang down the door, looking for trouble and uh.. female company. (she would have been about 13,14. plus, her mother was young- you knoww, nubile dainty little things... ) so they'd run out the back door with their on-standby stuff, down the pig-path, to hide in the tall grass field behind. her granny would stay behind and tell them big scary men there weren't any pretty young things for them.
(ooh. i know this is uncalled for, but can you imagine: dingy hut, old granny, so smelly.. and fei xiang and the Carabet people suddenly pop up and start their song/dance thing. THERE'S YOUR PRETTY YOUNG THINGS! heh)
okay okay. i complain about having to wake up early. shucks man, drunken soldier with ONE thing on his mind ( coughs-yeah, we ALL know what thaaat is) and pointy bayonet is SO not the ideal alarm clock. and the planes that flew over in the middle of the night, spraying bombs. then they'd run into their self-made bomb shelter made of mud, and watch the 'rain'. apparently its just like TV. damn, i can't imagine a 13 year old going through all that hell :(
