GM lived a very long life indeed. AFAIK she didn’t have a proper birth certificate, record-keeping in rural areas of colonial Malaya being slightly hit-and-miss a century ago, but we used to celebrate her birthday on Christmas Eve - she’d have turned 100 this year! She saw such enormous changes in the world, used to tell me so many stories about her life and for much of my early childhood she was my main carer as my parents had to move to the capital city for work.
Her parents were illiterate rubber-tappers, her early years living in an attap-roofed hut in the rubber estate with no electricity or running water. There used to be snakes nesting in the attap leaves and a secondary reason for the mosquito nets was so that snakes wouldn’t drop onto you in bed. The rubber-tappers went out before dawn when the air was cooler and damper. They’d set off in a group and then branch out to their designated areas, banging gongs/bells/pots to hopefully scare off the tigers which had learned that humans were a helpless and tasty snack. She didn’t go to school (only her brothers were allowed some education) so was illiterate her whole life and only spoke her family dialect fluently. During WWII, ethnic Chinese people were especially persecuted by the Japanese occupiers, and women suffered particularly (you can guess how). GM and female friends/family were hidden indoors or even in the jungle, when they had to move about would cover their heads and swathe themselves in big sarongs, hoping to be mistaken as elderly Malay women.
Towards the end of the war when she was around 18, she had an arranged marriage to my grandad (from a good but impoverished Peranakan family, had a gammy leg due to surviving polio) in Georgetown, which must have seemed like an sophisticated bustling metropolis to GM. She had to learn Malay and other dialects of Chinese to speak to the people around her. She gave birth to 9 babies, of whom 8 survived. They grew up in near-poverty on my grandad’s civil service clerk wages, the older children having to help care for the younger ones, and all scrapping for enough food. My mum and all her siblings show the unmistakable tiny-boned bowleggedness of childhood malnutrition. GD was a naturally gifted musician who could play numerous instruments who supplemented his income by playing in a nightclub band - the older kids including my mum were roped in to play in the band.
Meanwhile, Malaysia gained independence and everybody stopped singing “God Save the King/Queen” and The Beatles took over the world and men went to the Moon . When I was born in the 1970s, Malaysia was still a third world country. When I lived with them as a tiny child, they’d moved out of old Georgetown into a modern mid-century suburb, renting a small terrace house with another family. My younger unmarried aunts and uncles still lived at home so it was a crowded little place. Despite the modern ideal of the area, in fact there were cows, goats and chickens roaming the suburban streets, just beyond the estate was the dense mountainous jungle of the island’s interior. The cities were developing rapidly though - I remember us having to teach GM how to use an escalator, this scary newfangled thing, in a newfangled place called a shopping centre!
GD died of cancer when I was 3, by which time most of the family had dispersed across the country (and the world - some to the UK, Australia, Canada to become nurses etc, back when Commonwealth citizens were still considered British). GM never had a home of her own after that, moving between her children’s houses for grandchild-care. But this meant she got to travel around a lot and spent many months at a time in the West, got to see seasons and eat pies and roasts and picked up a remarkable understanding of English. The family would club together for GM’s airfare, which had to be the cheapest possible - this usually meant Aeroflot to London, transiting in Moscow. We’d take her to the airport, scope around for a kindly-looking fellow passenger and beg for them to guide her through to London! GM was still a frequent visitor to the UK when I moved here as a student, also came to my graduations, wedding, and many times when DDs were little. All without being able to read and not really speaking English! Although she adored DH and would gabble in broken English at him for hours 
And she just about grasped the Internet age, with my mum’s laptop we used to talk to her over Skype and later FaceTime. She even had a mobile phone for some years, until she became too deaf to hear us shouting at her.
Until 2019, she was still stubbornly hobbling around Georgetown, shopping in the markets, cooking her amazing old recipes, doing all the rituals for the numerous religious festivals which were so important to her. Then, she developed dementia perhaps due to some combination of the deafness and several mini-strokes (and possibly lockdown) and went very rapidly downhill. My mum has often expressed regret that we didn’t learn as many of the stories, recipes and traditions that we should have - it almost took everybody by surprise when GM suddenly “wasn’t there” anymore.