So I already wrote that my father's father was tea merchant.
My mother's father, who came up in the conversation over lunch with relatives today, was a blacksmith.
As I heard it, he was chinese man who left his home in his youth and went to Thailand where he worked and got married. Unfortunately for him, his first wife passed on and so he came down to Singapore and married my maternal grandmother. Together they had eight daughters and one son. My mum was number 4.
As I heard it, he was the strong and silent type. He would work at his irons all day, making knifes and other tools. He didn't say much when it came to dinner time. He had a unsmiling face. He never had much to say to the children. But he wasn't unkind to them. He would have them do chores for him and then after that, he would give them a few cents to buy candy. (Things were cheap back then).
As I heard it, one time, some secret society punks came around and tried to extort money from him. He got mad and chased them off with a chopper. My mother and her sisters, kids back then, hid in the upstairs bedrooms and peeked out the window, saw the whole thing. Then he had to go to the then English colonial court where he testified against these hooligans in his own dialect. Back in the 1950's, secret societies were like the mafia and shopkeepers had to pay them "protection money" or get haressed. I thought that was very upstanding of him.
Then one day, he was working in his workshop, hammering out a new tool by the fire, when he suddenly collapsed and died. No one knows why. My mother was about eleven or twelve.
Don't know enough about my maternal grandfather, I wish I knew him. Without him, my mother would not have existed, and neither would I.