Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Farewell to 2013

This year has been very much one about family connections with the past. The early part of the year was spent clearing my fathers house with my sister. Although a very sad task, looking through old photos brought back memories of our childhood and pictures of my fathers early childhood and his life as a young man were images of his life when the world was a very different place. We also found documents from his farming career including a logbook with all the names of his cows, letters sent to him by family when he was evacuated in the war and the beautiful 21st birthday cards which he had kept for so many years.
In the summer, my sister and I arranged to visit our cousin who is caretaker for a Chinese cabinet containing my grandparents mementos on my mothers side of the family. Dolls, Chinese fans, war memorabilia, poems written by my grandfather and a travel journal written in the 19th century by my grandmothers ancestor were amongst the family treasures there, and brought back childhood memories of being allowed to look through the drawers in the cabinet when we visited our grandparents.
In November my husband and I joined a family trip to visit China and see the ancestral village where his great grandfather had lived before emigrating to Malaysia.We learned a lot about Hakka traditions, saw parts of rural China off the usual tourist track and forged connections with my husbands cousins and family on the trip. 2013 was a year of connections between the present and the past and family ties.

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