A moment that changed me: I found a photo of my grandmother with a mysterious woman
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I suspected there was something more than friendship at work – but what? My mother was so outraged by my questions she wouldn’t even talk about it. About a decade ago, my po po (maternal grandmother) entered aged care. As Mum and I sorted through her belongings, I found a sepia photograph, hidden inside an almanac, of my grandmother and a woman I had never seen before. Po Po didn’t like to be photographed and rarely smiled in photos but, in this one, she looked happy. There was also an intimate air to their pose.
![[Jane Yang with her mother and daughter]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6481b931b807623f4c5a666535b703d9b310012b/3_209_1387_1387/master/1387.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
I asked my mother about this woman, wondering if she was one of my grandmother’s lost friends. In the aftermath of the Vietnam war, many of them had fled the country in refugee boats but had not survived the journey. Mum said the woman had been the tenant of a spare room in their house and, for years, she and my grandmother had been inseparable. Then, one day, when my mum was about 11, the woman announced that she had met a man and would be going to live with him. My mum didn’t recall all the details, but she did remember my grandmother accusing the woman of “betrayal”. Afterwards, they never saw each other again.
Was Po Po in love with her tenant? On an impulse, I asked my mum this taboo question. She slammed the almanac shut and snatched it out of my hands. Even the suggestion was seen as an insult to my grandmother’s name. I didn’t pursue it, but the question proved to be a chisel, slowly prising open the vault containing all the unmentionable topics that had arisen between my mother and me over the years. If I could not know my grandmother better, I decided that at least I wanted to know more about my mother and her life. I started asking about her youth. Did she read romance novels, like me? When did she first fall in love? Initially, my efforts were fruitless. Then, little by little, she began to confide in me. She was addicted to romance novels. At 19, she fell head over heels for a tall, handsome architect. He claimed to love her, too, but they lost touch when he fled the Vietnam war.
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