I was grateful Father had recalled some memories for me. It didn’t escape me that he brought up Mother. It was a kind gesture that Father would not have given me before.

Father took Leo with him to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee, and fatigue hit me hard. I fell asleep on the couch and awoke an hour later with a large blanket cocooning me. Father had sent me a text, telling me he took Leo for a drive in my car to see Auntie Choo Neo at a coffee shop in Chinatown called Raw Sugar.

I felt well rested and wandered into the kitchen, snacking on baos from a pastry box on the counter. Then I decided to venture down to the basement to see if Father had kept anything from the past. He had gotten rid of many things in his move across the country and there were only a handful of boxes in the furnace room. One box had some old files; another was stuffed with a lifetime supply of work gloves and coveralls, things Father hadn’t used since he retired. A third box was filled with Christmas decorations. Another held gardening tools and seeds.

The last box I opened, however, had three photo albums. Inside were pictures of Mother and Father early in their marriage, before I was born. I saw their bell-bottoms, their hairstyles—my father’s Elvis pompadour, my mother’s flipped-out ends—and smiled. I found my parents’ wedding photo: Father in his suit and Mother in a rented dress, posing with family. There was Auntie Choo Neo, thinner but with the same tight smile. Her son, Winston, a little boy at the time, was standing in front of her holding a toy. I flipped through the pictures, saw the smiles and the embraces, and marvelled at how young and beautiful everyone looked. One photo at the end of the last album caught my eye. It was the same photo I had seen in my house a few weeks ago, of a young Po Po standing with Mother in an airport. This must have been taken when Mother was leaving Brunei. I pulled back the cellophane sheet and took out the picture. This photo didn’t have a faded border like the photo in my house, and there was no writing on the back.

I heard keys jingling in the front door, so I placed the picture back in the album and closed the box. There was nothing else here that belonged to Mother or the past. I ran upstairs, not wanting Father to know I had been snooping through his things.

I came home from Father’s house motivated to see what I could find out about my mother on my own. It was clear that I was not going to get anywhere with Father, Bea, or Auntie Choo Neo. I strapped Leo onto me in the baby carrier and brought my computer to the kitchen island. As I swayed my hips, I typed “Swee Hua” into the search engine.