Today, June 9th, is the memorial of my grandmother’s passing. Out of all the personal stories I’ve told of my family, my grandmother is the one I’ve avoided the most - mainly because she is perhaps the most conflicted, tormented, and controversial personality of them all, one whose multi-layers I’m still trying to peel two decades after her last breath.

My grandmother was not a “nice” person. In fact, those who knew her casually would say that her demeanors were quite abrasive and tactless. Some would even go so far as to call her the “B” word. Most of her life, she felt less than others because her education stopped at the 8th grade - and that hurtful resentment still seethes through every word that she recorded in barely legible scribbles with smeared blue ink.

But in all those hours that I spent with her while she patiently taught me how to knit, I learned how at the age of 13, she lost her father to the senseless cruelty of the French troops, and her home commandeered into a French headquarter. Three months after living as refugees in the jungle, she watch her mother give birth to her baby sister, who would not survive the poor living conditions.

I learned that at the age of 18, after their house was once against burned to the ground by the Communist forces, she bravely coordinated a cunning heist to break into the property to steal what valuables she could to sell and support her family.  The brass and gold she smuggled out of that house helped pay for her brothers’ education, and set the foundation for their and their descendants’ success.

But despite her laborious back serving as the bedrock of several future empires, my grandmother always felt that she was “stupid,” and she dragged this festering wound in her heart to the grave. I saw the burden she refused to release trapped behind her torturous eyes, as she exhaled her last agonizing breath. 

I learned that as the only girl in the family, just like her immensely talented and woefully underrated mother, she was responsible for taking care of all her brothers, while having zero access to the education they were afforded. But she was fiercely loyal to her family to a fault - so much so that she would stop short at nothing, even some ethically questionable tactics, to protect her mother, brothers, and children.

She was a heroine to some, and a villainess to others.

And I wonder, if people only knew of the heavy cross she bore, of the wars she fought at home in addition to the raging war outside, would they have still expected her to be “nice?”