Reading Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark for my postcolonial theory class tomorrow. It's beautiful, the language is exceedingly beautiful.

"Before I came to England I used to try to imagine a night that was quite still. I used to try to imagine it with the cracs-cracs going. The verandah long and ghostly - the hammock and three chairs and a table with the telescope on it - and the crac-cracs going all the time. The moon and the darkness and the sound of the trees ... we used to sit on the verandah with the night coming in, huge. And the way it smelt of all flowers."

I was thrown back to my childhood when I read this; to my grandpa's house again. When we stayed over night and the fan creaked in the dark and we shivered in bed even though there was no air-con because the night air was so cool. There were always crickets singing in the garden at night and beside the garden, the sitting room long like a verandah, always open to the air. Then the moonlight would fall into the sitting room and the clock would go tick-tock, tick-tock. It was beautiful and magical, but the darkness always scared me. I never dared to go to the toilet alone because all the lights were turned off in the hallway and the darkness was blinding.

In the morning, we heard the birds chirruping to each other, and we'd wake up and the air would be cool and fresh and clean. The sunlight would fall through the lace curtains of the parlour and the whole room would glow. Then we'd change up and walk out with our grandparents to the coffeeshop. Grandma called it "Molly's place" because her friend used to live in a flat above it. Later on, she told us not to call it "Molly's place" because Molly had died. It was "Jenny's place". We used to giggle when she told us that.

And I used to sit in the rocking chair in the living room while I waited for the others to change out and imagine that I was sitting in some tree in England being blown about by the wind. Too much Enid Blyton. But I loved being there, in the cool freshness of the morning and the birdsong and the smell of grass and the ceramic tiles cool and textured under my bare feet, listening to my cousins and siblings laugh and my grandparents shout to one another.

I miss the house intensely. My mother and her brothers grew up in that house and sometimes I wonder how she stands living in our hdb flat next to the road where the sound of traffic winds itself into a night time lullaby, and the wake up call is the national anthem because of the school next to us.

I miss the old place of my other grandparents too. They lived in one of those condos beside a jungle in Bukit Timah and sometimes if you stared really hard at the grass you could see chickens running around. My Yeye bought a pair of binoculars and we took turns staring out the backyard. I remember the smell of nutmeg oil in the mornings, hot cups of milo, the incense rising from the altar where my Mama prayed to her gods, and sometimes, long melodies of Buddhist chanting that my Yeye played on the TV. I'd lie on the leather sofa and feel its soft coolness, and the sunlight would stream in from the balcony and fall exactly where my head was, and I'd squint and see diamond motes dancing in air.

We sat around the marble table brought from their old house in Ipoh way back when they first made the move from Malaysia to Singapore. First they lived in Chinatown, then they moved to a hdb flat in Commonwealth, then to Bukit Batok, and when my uncles started earning money, they moved to a condo. The table travelled with them. We sat around it with our Chinese tutor from China and repeated after her and wrote sentences and nodded when we thought we understood. I used to fall asleep and she'd tap me on the head and send me to wash my face. My cousins sat with us, a whole generation of children learning Chinese even as our grandparents spoke in Cantonese. There was once when I'd understood what they were saying, but I lost it.

I think I am a profoundly post-colonial subject.