This is family. Sitting around complete strangers who all wear the same wrinkles, as if bearing their mother's stories in the folds of their skin. The same story flickers across each face as each recalls a story, his story, her story, their story.

I walked into my Lau Dua Kong's (my grandmother's oldest brother) house and gawked at the number of relatives that have successfully evaded my knowledge. I mean, since when did my Grandmother's 9 siblings have children and grandchildren of their own?

I gingerly stepped in, and word got round that I was doing a school project on my family history, and before I knew it everyone was sitting around the tea-stained table shouting out their stories for my western Macbook to pick up. All in teochew. I would've fallen asleep during the three hour session had it not been so emotionally charged with laughter.

Laughter that fell in tears.

And at some point, when they laughed the hardest, my great-grandfather's ghost rose from behind my left shoulder. He thanked me for rousing the memory of him in his children again, that he might once again live in their togetherness.

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For the Chinese, eating is both material and cultural. We feed our hungry ghosts before we may feed ourselves. Anestors are ravenous, and can die of neglect. Our fathers' children are also ourselves. The self is paltry, phatasmagoric; it leaks and slips away. It is the family, parents, siblings, cousins, that signify the meaning of the self, and beyond the family, the extended community.

This is the meaning of blood - to give, because you cannot eat unless the family is also eating... Oh Asia, that nets its chidlren in ties of blood so binding that they cut the spirit.

Exerpts from 'Among the White Moon Faces' by Shirley Lim