Women at Work

My grandmothers at work, in Hong Kong (left) and South Africa.

A reflection on International Women’s Day 2026

I recently framed these photos of my grandmothers to display in my office - they are pictured at their respective places of work; my maternal grandmother (right) inside a general store near a train depot in Durban, South Africa, where she ran what the family always has called “the shop,” her children working alongside her before and after school until they were in their 20s. My paternal grandmother (seated, left) ran a clothing boutique inside a hotel in Hong Kong, offering designer and custom-made garments to customers, a view of mountains and the urban landscape outside.

Their occupations — for my dad’s mom, I think a chosen pleasure; for my mother’s mother, an obligation and complication in the age of apartheid — were mere patches in their rich histories. One enjoyed a modern courtship and marriage and managed to have three children during a tumultuous time in Chinese history. This grandmother reportedly rode a bus alone for hours while very pregnant only to give birth to my father on a desk (that tracks) somewhere in Shanghai, where they had lived in more peaceful years and where she had doctors she trusted. I inherited and treasure her raincoat (among other belongings), it fits as though tailored to my measurements and has needed repair only once in the quarter-century I’ve owned it. 

My maternal grandmother was married to my grandfather when she was only 16, and had to relocate from Indonesia to South Africa. I spent more time with this grandmother, who stayed with us when I was a child and teenager. Her experience was not one of mid-century glamour in a cosmopolitan international city, but a world of work, domestic duty and intergenerational trauma which whispers to this day in my relatives’ and my ears. She is pictured in a dress, but that would not have been her daily attire on the job. From this grandmother, I inherited an ability to recognize the delicate degrees of derangement and their common threads. 

Both women were imbued with deep dignity — one seeming to me so rooted in herself and station that she did not need to articulate any certainty or authority; it emanated in reserved presence and rare but genuine affection and that love language of tiger moms, approval. The other tended to dramatize, demonstrating her dignity and worth by whipping it around her (and at times at others) like a regal cloak, whether at a banquet or Burger King. 

I cannot fathom the things my grandmothers endured and survived — the phenomenon of multiple childbirths without modern comforts, for one — and I am lucky that both shared with me their opinions, preferences and idiosyncrasies. The photos are faint evidence of their existence behind closed doors, each earning something…independence, identity; her family’s keep. I like looking up from my work and seeing them posed amid theirs, elegant reminders of how easy in comparison and fulfilling my work is, how individual and intricate legacies are.