Growing up, Ma was always telling stories.

Some appeared while we were helping prepare dinner. Others surfaced on long car rides or during family gatherings, usually prompted by something small—a familiar place, an old photograph or a question that unlocked a memory none of us had heard before. They were never told as though they were important. To Ma, they were simply pieces of life.

Like many children, I listened without ever imagining those stories might one day disappear.

As the years passed, our own children came to know Ma in a very different way. To them, she was simply 阿嬤—the person who always welcomed them with warmth, worried whether they had enough to eat and filled every family gathering with quiet laughter. They knew the grandmother who loved them deeply.

What they did not know was the girl she had once been.

They did not know about the father who waited outside a newspaper office through the night because he could not bear to wait until morning to learn whether his eldest daughter had passed an important examination. They did not know about the basketball player who represented her school, the university student who quietly changed the course of her studies after listening to her parents' advice, or the young woman whose life would become intertwined with a gentle banker who kept finding reasons to knock on her family's front door.

I realised that, like so many families, we knew the ending of Ma's story without ever knowing its beginning.

That realisation became the start of this book.

One day I sat down beside Ma with a recorder between us. My children listened too. I asked the simplest question I could think of.

“Ma, tell me how it all began.”

What followed surprised me.

Not because Ma's life was filled with dramatic events, but because of the way she remembered it. Whenever I asked about one of her achievements, she almost always began by talking about someone else. She spoke about her father before she spoke about herself. She remembered her mother's generosity, her teachers' encouragement, her teammates, her colleagues and, of course, my father. Even the stories that belonged to her were told through the kindness of the people who had shaped her life.

I realised that this was more than a collection of memories.

It was a window into the kind of person Ma had always been.

As I listened, I also came to appreciate something else. Ma's life unfolded during a remarkable period of Taiwan's history. She was born in 1943 and grew up as the country changed around her in ways that would shape an entire generation. Those changes form the backdrop to her story, and where they help explain her experiences, we have gently woven them into these pages. But this is not a history book.

It is the story of one life.

One family.

And the quiet choices that echo across generations.

The chapters that follow are not arranged in the order our conversations happened. Memories rarely arrive that way. Instead, they have been gathered into the stories Ma was really telling—stories about family, friendship, love, resilience and the values that guided her throughout her life. Every effort has been made to preserve her voice, her humour and her way of seeing the world, while shaping those memories into a narrative that future generations can read and enjoy.

There is an old saying that when an elder dies, a library burns to the ground.

I have often thought about that while working on this memoir.

Every family carries a library of stories. Most are never written down. They live only in memory until, quietly and without anyone noticing, they disappear.

This book is our family's way of keeping that library open.

One day, perhaps many years from now, a great-grandchild or even a great-great-grandchild may pick up this memoir having never met the woman we call Ma and Ah-Ma. My hope is that by the time they reach the final page, they will feel as though they have sat beside her, listened to her laugh, and come to know not only what she did, but who she was.

Every story has to begin somewhere.

For Ma, it began with a father waiting patiently outside a newspaper office before dawn.