Wena Poon's "The Move"

Extracted from "The Move", a short story by Wena Poon in her maiden collection "Lions in Winter":

"Are you sad, Ma?" asked Florence. "After all these years?"

The old lady did not expect the question.

She thought about it for a while. No, no. they were just relocating from one housing estate to another. They were getting a new flat. How could this be sadness? Sadness was war, was famine. Sadness was seeing your father-in-law in China lose all his rice fields when the Communists took over. Sadness was watching your father crawl home after being bayoneted by Japanese troops in 1942. Sadness was watching your pregnant mother contract malarial fever in occupied Singapore, not having any drugs to allay her fever. Sadness was waking up in the darkness finding her not in her bed, going out to the rubber plantation to search for her, fearing, as she had threatened, that she would take a cold bath in the nearby pond. Sadness was finding her drowned pregnant form by moonlight, and knowing that you had to be the one to run home to wake your father and tell him the news. Sadness for ever after was the funerals of mothers that her friends and cousins lost, for which she could never attend, because they reminded her of how she lost hers.

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As I typed out the text, the words, like the first time I read them, flickered and shone from some far away place. The depth of Wena's heart perhaps. Do you have them resonating in your heart too?