The Stories of My Grandparents (from my Mother's side)

I do not have many memories of the grandparents from my mother's side. All I know and I have learnt from my mom about them is just that my grandmother was a migrant from the land of China - probably Hong Kong since my Mother learnt Cantonese instead of Mandarin in her childhood - brought by her parents who tried to settle and reside among the locals in Java island in early 1920s. Meanwhile, my grandfather was a local who lived in West Java in a region called Cianjur.

However, I do not know how they met, or the story of how they got married. All I know is just that my grandmother was the only child of a migrant family from China, married to a local man from Cianjur, West Java, Indonesia. They somehow gave birth to 10 children, what a big family, 3 daughters, 7 sons, and my mother is the 4th child and the first daughter of them all. Anyway, my grandfather died before 1965 and left behind a wife and 10 children, and 6 of them were still under 10 years old. After that, the death of my grandfather whom I never met had turned my grandmother into a person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. How did I know that my grandmother had Narcissistic Personality Disorder? How did I learnt and conclude that?

Around 4-5 years ago (2015-2016), my mother managed to visit her family which settled in Jakarta - the family who exiled her almost 30 years ago for the sin I never knew she had done. She visited the places where she used to live, gathered the information from the people she used to know such neighbor and cousins, she tracked down where her family about, my aunties and my uncles. She did not managed to visit them all, only few of them, she found out some of her younger sibling already dead, the uncles whom I never met as well. However, my mom just managed to stay in touch with the daughter of her older brother, which makes her as my cousin, and her initial is B. My younger sister, J, then befriended with her. From B, my younger sister learnt that my grandmother always got involved in the process of every marriage of her children.

B’s mother is the ex-wife of the first marriage with my uncle, my uncle is the eldest of the sibling in my mother’s family, my mother taught me to call him as uncle T. B’s mother and uncle T got married, had 2 children, cousin B and her younger sibling, but years after that, they got divorced, and the reason why uncle T divorced B’s mother just because my grandmother had few rows with her and my grandmother’s growing resentment toward her daughter in law and just like that, she asked her son to divorce her and asked him to marry someone else which my grandmother like more. And not long after uncle T’s second marriage, they got children, the second wife had rows again with my grandmother, uncle T and his second wife, got divorced again, he remarried again not long after that. The worst is, it is not only happened to my uncle T, but also happened to other children as well, including my mother.

My grandmother was a very controlling parent to her children: once she disliked her in laws, she would ask his children to divorce with the daughter or son in law only because she believed she had the right to ask anything to happen. She kind of raised her children in fear and taught her children only obedience, and if one of the children refused to listen, she would have played victim and told them they will suffer in the future because they rejected her decision.

She was the law of the family; everyone has to agree with everything she said - such a horrid family to grow up in. My mother somehow adopted my grandmother's NPD traits, though she is not as bad as my grandmother, and now I understand why she became a toxic parent as I grew into an adult. My mother's first marriage, before she met my father, was also broken by her family. My grandmother and her brothers forced her to divorce her husband - I will tell this one in the next story - turning my mom into another monster parent.

That is all the background of the story of my maternal grandparents I have learnt so far. My grandmother herself died a long time ago, a few years after I was born which was around the 1990s since I was born in 1989. My mother figured it out years later when I was 5 years old, when she was visiting one of her older brothers, but no one was willing to tell her where she was buried. Such a horrible family to grew with.

-NEXT: STORY 2: SITTI NURBAYA; A Story of An Arranged Marriage Turn Into A Broken Family-