With loved ones and chosen family around me, it was like a ritual in itself: a way to honour Papa's life and death through shared rememberings and grief, unorthodox maybe and untraditional, but that's always been us anyway. Our relationship and history, the dynamics and people involved, it was always complicated, sometimes traumatic, always confusing, but that's just been the way of it. Sometimes I think I’ve been ‘early-grieving’ my father since I was thirteen. With a 60-year age gap between us, mortality was always a common theme—in the end, I got 35 years with him.

When Papa found out Ma was pregnant with me, he wasn’t keen. He had three nearly-grown sons already, he was married to another woman, plus he was almost sixty. Affairs, second, even third families were common but condemned in the crowded city he called home. Born and bred Hong Konger SC Lam loved his hometown. He was a Hong Kong boy and always would be, Kowloon, specifically—no matter where else in the world he would go.

My mother has a lot of stories she doesn’t know how to tell. She buried them in forgotten soil and lost the words to unearth them again.

She’ll rewrite herself again.

My father’s stories always lied just behind his tongue. Now he’s opening up, telling me ghostsongs and lovestories around his old fishing town.

Me? I am a deep-sea fisherwoman, but I do not catch fish.

you climb the spackled steps laid into the rockface and are met with wings, orange stardust on black. is this an ancestor? you think of that meme, ‘confused anime guy with butterfly’ but it’s the version where he’s filipino and the butterfly is definitely a dead relative.

tabi tabi po.

The woman who lived at the crossroads could tell people’s fortunes by chewing betel leaves and reading the saliva-coated pulp she spat back into their palms. It was a reworking of an ancient ritual, a skill passed on from the foremothers of her hometown, renowned healers in the mountains to the north. The world gets smaller, ineng, she would say. We adapt to carry on the old ways.