In Continuum.

My mother's family has seven children, with my mother being the fifth child in the family. My grandmother was a friendly old woman who looked somewhat Japanese, but then my perception of her might have been influenced by the fact that she could speak fluent Japanese. My grandfather was a sort of tyrant in the family, a man who used to have considerable wealth until he gambled everything away. My mother spoke of cupboards stashed full of money in the past, and then everything went downhill from there when my grandfather became addicted to gambling. So the family became engaged in a knitting business that brought the whole family together. Everybody had a part to play, and living under the same roof caused much troubles and turmoil within the family, particularly between my third aunt and my second uncle, who used to throw fruit knives at each other because of a dispute over the television channel. 

My first aunt isn't very popular in the family, she's usually the person missing from family gatherings because of how 'busy' she claims herself to be at work. The last I heard, she was an insurance agent that sells any forms of insurance possible, and we all know how irritating insurance salespeople can be. The way they force insurance policies down your throat can be rather frustrating, and it's not like family members are spared in the great scheme of things. She never had enough time for anything, and the dislike towards her became even more elevated when my grandmother died, and she refused to take too much responsibilities regarding the funeral arrangements. I remember her husband being a cameraman or part of the backstage crew at a local television network in Taiwan, and he always look dead drunk somehow even if he was just smoking on a cigarette. They have three daughters I think, one of them born without a left arm - some birth defect, if I am not wrong. But they were all very beautiful looking girls, at least from the last time I saw them at all. I vaguely remember taking a picture with them when I was younger, but then it's lost somewhere in the photo albums now, and I just cannot be bothered.

I've never been a fan of my second uncle either, but he is very well respected in the family, being the eldest son and all. He has this uncanny resemblance to Donny Oswald, but with a pompous personality that I never admired that much. He has this one daughter, and she is everything to him to an extent that she has the ability to do anything in the world at the age of five. I remember that other time at my grandmother's birthday gathering when I brought a book there to read. It was an English-language book, and he has always prided himself in the fact that he's fluent in Mandarin, Japanese, English, amongst other languages. So he assumed that his daughter had the same mental capacities, and told me that his five year old daughter could finish the book in a faster time than myself. Still, some credit must be given to him for being the big brother, the guy that has the most responsibilities in the family on some level, a sort of leader of the pack I suppose. He's now in Canada, living with his daughter and wife. It has been a while since we've met, but I remember a phone call he gave to my family a dozen years ago when he was looking for my mother. So that's that, about him.

The second aunt changed her name by the time she was twenty-one because she hated her original one. Either way, she was the fashionable one of the family, the person who needed to be at the leading end of the family's fashion trend. There's always that somebody in your family who places a lot of importance in the way that they look, and she is certainly that individual. Warm, enthusiastic, and often a little too friendly, my second aunt is a person with a big heart. She owns a boutique in Taipei which I have visited rather often, and I remember the tank of fish underneath the counter that I used to play with all the time. My cousins, her sons, are a pair of hyperactive boys that had a passion for destroying things. Put the two in the same room for fifteen minutes and they are going to start a fight for the most trivial reasons, and for some reason both of them wanted me to be sided with them because I was supposed to be "cool". The big brother grew out of his teenage angst, spent the majority of his time doing sketches and drawings as part of his school work, while his brother remained the adolescent of the family. My second aunt also has a passion for dancing, and she does so with her husband on a weekly basis, her husband who is also a professional dance instructor who specializes in a variety of moves. 

My third aunt is the closest to my family, probably because of the fact that she doesn't have children of her own, and shared a house with my family while we still stayed in Taiwan. She is my second mother in a way, the woman that took care of me while my mother was away trying to set up a business with my father. She lived just across the hall with her husband up on the second floor, and they are both salespeople for the company called Amway. Basically every protect in her family, and my own, comes from that company. Everything from pots and pans, to toothbrushes, toothpastes, water filters, utensils, body foam, shampoo, hand soap, my mother's cosmetics, my mother's skin care set, detergents, dish sponges, vitamin pills, everything. She is still very much into the business, her husband isn't anymore. Her husband is one of the most respectable man I have ever met, the smartest person I have ever known in my life. It is hard to summarize him into a few sentences, but let's just say that he can swallow a Rubik's cube and then shit it out with all the six sides completed, if he wants to. They have a dog now, they treat him like their son for the most part. They are living happily in Taiwan, and we visit them often when we get back. 

My mother has a younger sister, my fourth aunt. She is the forgetful one of the family, with the uncanny ability to go to school without bringing her schoolbag. She looks somewhat like an indigenous singer famous in Taiwan, and she is probably the most western-influenced person of the family. She loves Hollywood movies, loves American TV-series (Great fan of Sex and the City and Nip/Tuck), and has a taste in music that is pretty well versed I must say. She is married to a workaholic lawyer husband, the kind of man you'd consider to be a nerd in Singapore. He has an explosive temper, which is the root of a lot of arguments within his household most of the time. He is an exam machine, he ace everything that he does and the kind of person you'd be jealous of academically. But his marriage has been on the edge for quite some time, and burying himself in his computer isn't helping anything at all. They have two children, a boy and a girl, with the former being in a state of permanent malnutrition. He is two years younger than me and he seems like he could be ten years younger. Short and skinny, with glasses too heavy for his nose and he used to have a mouth full of bad teeth. His sister is a little more normal I'd say, but the temper from the father is in her. 

The youngest member of the family is my second uncle, the somewhat rebellious one of the family who was interested in the arts. He refused to study very well in school last time, wanted so desperately to enter an arts institution to study ballet. He finally landed himself a role in Cats when the Broadway musical came to Taiwan for the very first time more than ten years ago, and I was there to see him perform with my family. He had a wife, a nice person whom I liked immensely, until they divorced each other and she took away a big part of his money. The last time I met him, he was working for a major healthcare agency in Taiwan, earning him the big bucks and enjoying his life to a certain degree without the restrains of a wife. I remember him doing the moonwalk for the rest of the family in the past, and I remember staring at him in awe. Really cool guy, really cool.

So that's a brief outline of my mother's side of the family, not that anybody cares really. I guess I just want to have it written down somewhere, or typed out rather. I guess I just wanted a reason, an excuse to remember who they are and what they mean to me in life, because I know that I am beginning to forget anybody else outside of my parents. It's a little sad, on my part, to learn that a big part of what an ordinary family enjoys has been taken away from me, ever since I moved overseas to Singapore. I mean, most of us have cousins they know well, nephews and nieces, grandparents to hear stories from and stuff like that. I've been away from all the other family members for too long to experience any of those. So for the little remaining memories that I have right now, perhaps this is a good reason to record them down somewhere, before everything vanishes with the sands of time, eventually, like everything else.