On Tuesday evening, I was working overtime at the office when suddenly I received a phone call from home. My mum had just called me on the weekend, so it was unusual for her to call again so soon. She asked me what I was doing, if I had dinner etc., which was what she always starts off with whenever she calls me. A few minutes into the conversation, she suddenly said, 'Your eldest aunt's husband just passed away yesterday.' (We were talking in Mandarin, and it's a bit less awkward sounding it seems in English). This came as a total shock to me; I knew he had been ill for the past few years and he had to have major liver surgery last year, but there was no indication that he was critically ill. He wasn't the first family member to have passed away in my recent memory, but yet I felt a sadness that I haven't felt previously, and tears started welling up.

When I was a baby, my parents left me under the care of my father's eldest sister as my mother wanted to keep working; I only went back home with my parents in the weekends. Thus, I spent the first two years of my life in that house with my aunt's family, until my sister was born and my mother decided to quit work. There is hardly anything I remember from that period of infancy, but my parents tell me that my aunt's husband was very fond of me when I was staying in his house, and I used to cry whenever my parents came at the weekend to bring me home.

Years later, when I was about 4-6 years old, when my family went to visit this aunt, or when we were all at my grandmother's house, I would insist on staying overnight at my aunt's house... I still have memories from this part of my life, squeezing into bed with my cousins (they were 6-7 years older than me, and as I was my parents' eldest child, I regarded them as older brothers), and digging for toys in the musty dust-filled storeroom. I remember clambering up the shelves in the living room,looking for things I could play with.

After I was past 8 years old or so, my bond to my aunt's family waned... memories from my infancy and early childhood faded as I grew up, and I've hardly spoken to my cousins or their father since then. Still, I continued feeling a strong, unspoken, affinity to my aunt and her family. Whenever my family went to visit their house, I would somehow feel very much at home as every corner carried echoes of my early years. The cabinets which I had climbed up as a child now seemed so very small, yet so comfortingly familiar.

In the past decade, I must have not spoken directly to my aunt's husband except for greeting him (in part because I'm not very fluent in my supposedly native Hokkien language, and because the generation gap is so huge), yet went my mother told me he had passed away, I started crying (I have tears in my eyes as I write this). Maybe it's because he was present in some of the happiest memories of my life, and with his passing I seemed to have lost another link to my childhood.

I have not said anything about what sort of person he was, but on a level it doesn't matter. All my personal reminiscences of him have now regressed beneath the level of my conscious memory, and the emotion I felt at his passing is coming from a little boy who still lurks somewhere within my subconscious. Yet, I have one very vivid memory of him: I must have been 6 or 7, and my family was visiting his house. At that age, he seemed so towering, and he picked him up and swung me around as I squealed and laughed. In that brief moment, I was flying.

I have no other memories of anyone ever doing that to me.