Winter Hearts

Distance Up Close

Jenny sat on the floor, packing up a small boxful of all the tiny beanies that she had made in a fit of sheer focus and determination a couple of weekends before. She grouped them into sizes and colours and packed them into resealable bags.

On an impulse, she had invited some regulars from the crafting markets she had started attending as a vendor over the last year. In the group chat that she created she insisted that they come, even if all they wanted to do was sit and work and forgo the small talk. She had ended up spending the evening after massaging her hands and wringing them to relieve the cramping in her fingers.

It had been a rainy Saturday, and they had sat with the windows and balcony doors open until the evening when mosquitoes started wafting in and making their presence felt. They had arrived after lunch while it was still hot, with the clouds rolling in and creating a stifling humidity in the air. She had offered them afternoon tea, though none of them really wanted to do anything but get going on their work. A couple of the ladies arrived with cargo boxes on wheels, and hefted them through her front door with admirable ease.

She was happy that her small home was spacious, if only because she had little clutter and an easy taste in furniture. Her cane sofa lounge with armchairs and flat foam pillows hearkened back to her childhood when on hot afternoons she had lain on them artlessly and watched the slow fan above her spin lazily until homework beckoned and made her roll off them, onto the light green terazzo tiles that seem to decorate everyone's houses then. Rather than being Italian or European, they came off rather Chinese kongsi-housey - tropical and cool.

She had enjoyed school very much, not really excelling at studies, but doing well socially and becoming a bit of a leader. Her half Korean heritage gave her a bit of a leg-up in Sabah, where the mostly Kadazan student population rarely had parents who married outside of their race. There were rarely any mixed kids at school, but those that were, like her, were more approachable than the international students in the next door school. She was both exotic and familiar, which she thought odd, because she only ever saw herself as herself.

The kids were mostly nice about it, probably because they were too young and innocent to pose the sort of envy-laced questions her mother always got from her peers.

Sometimes the kids asked her things out of pure curiosity that she never really thought of herself, like why her father couldn't find a wife for himself in his own community. "Because his wife was not from his community," was her answer, as if it was obvious. It was what she thought they were really asking, logically, and they seemed to accept it without question, as if it was all the answer they needed. For her mother's friends and acquaintances, though, it was never all the answer they needed.

Her mother, a full Korean who left her mother country for Sabah, found herself in a place that was accepting enough, but never quite home for her - and yet when they returned to Korea on rare trips back, she never quite felt at home there either, having chosen not to stay there.

Jenny thought of how her mother had become rather isolated from her austere family, and had in turn become a little withdrawn towards the end of her life, affecting a somewhat cold relationship with Mikhalis and Siana, particularly after their divorce and return to Sabah.

She wished her mother had been more affectionate towards Siana, but they ran out of time before they could warm up to each other. Her mother passed when Siana was barely a teen, and Jenny felt that their tenuous ties with Korea ended there. She had some regrets that Siana was not fluent in Korean, nor very Korean in manners of nature. Whilst she was hardworking and principled, she was free in spirit, and let her passions show.

Now, as she finalised all the things she needed for the today's Sunday bazaar, she made herself a tea as she ruminated over the news she had received from Siana.