3 February 1992: the day my world came to an end. Life was tough enough for an overweight, Asian geek but it was about to get a lot worse; I received the call from Melbourne telling me that my grandfather had died in his sleep. I may have been young but I wasn't stupid. I could see the writing on the wall. My parents had already separated. Without the presence of the family patriarch, they would not be forced to maintain the image of unity. They would be free to indulge in their life re-engineering projects, notwithstanding their two dependents. Us kids would just have to shut up and put up.

Want to move in with someone else but come back every two days for a free meal? Go ahead. If the kids complain, tell them that they've been turned against you.

Want to renovate the house? Get the kids to help. If they don't, accuse them of siding for the ex.

Want to take them on a poxy holiday but they told you 'no'? Tell them they're being manipulative.

They're unhappy because they're selfish and ungrateful, not because they're only getting half a parenthood, half a childhood, half of half of what you got.

Other kids rave about their parents' divorce. They tell you that they get 2 sets of gifts. That's true, but the rub is that you get 2 sets of crap gifts, because: "Mum/Dad can't possibly afford what you want. (Why are you being so unreasonable? Dad/Mum told you to complain, did they?)"

I knew it would get bad when he died, but I didn't know it would get that bad.

I visit his plaque at the Springvale Necropolis 16 years later. Staying with Yuriko in Clayton, I chance upon how close it was while looking in the Melways for suburbs to visit. Springvale, Box Hill, Doncaster, Dandenong. Turns out that I have an intimate albeit unwanted knowledge of Melbourne's far eastern suburbs generated from years of spending my school holidays being dragged from place to place searching for the latest stupid restaurant to go to after church.

Do I regret spending time with my grandparents? No. My grandparents were the epitome of old-world dignity that I have only recently re-discovered an aspiration for. Do I regret going to Melbourne? Yes, Doncaster is the middle of nowhere with no transport except rides from adults who aren't going to take you anywhere interesting anyway. We should have flown his ass down instead of driving all the way up just to show how filial we were.

Chinese Pentecostals don't enshrine their dead like their Buddhist counterparts do. The Church of Christ sees death as a celebration. "Rejoice! He's gone to live happy and whole with God." We gave him a rousing  musical send-off and that was it. My family washed their hands so cleanly of him that they don't even know where he is. Most cultures see holding on to the past as a bad thing but severing the ancestral links causes the Confucian hierarchy to collapse. The past is what gives us identity and structure; perhaps the very thing my parents were trying to escape.

3rd February 1992: I am too busy bracing myself for the excruciating end of the world. 24th August 2008: I cry my freaking eyes out.

(With apologies to Messrs Snoop and Pharell)

To the players getting margin calls:
Suffer in your jocks, suffer in your jocks, suffer in your jocks.

When your credit cards done hit the wall:
Gotta pawn your rocks, sell off all your stocks, buy from Reject Shop.

If your bank got you by the balls:
Get ready to be mocked, ready to be mocked, ready to be mocked.

'Cause you said you'd make a load,
Now you gotta sell your home,
And I'm the one that ownz,
'Cause I paid off all my loans.

Now throw those gang signs up. Or maybe 'For Sale' signs. Mwa ha ha.

"They're just in it for the money."

With those words, Marc snapped me out of my 'why the hell didn't I subdivide and develop' stupor.

When you build upon a property, you have the opportunity to make an individual thing of beauty. Sandstone. Limestone. Ceiling roses on high ceilings. Stately, not necessarily large, but still grand. Look around the up-and-coming suburbs and all you'll see are neo-tuscan rendered trash-pieces, more like angular trailers than houses.

This generation of would-be property tycoons are failing miserably to fashion homes of substance. Keep the costs low and the margin high. God forbid you over-capitalise. Begs the question why they're developing if they're so worried about margin in the first place. They probably don't think about that in the crass rush against other middle-class to feed off the middle class.

Now I know why I didn't subdivide and develop like the other go-getters out there; because I would have exchanged one sturdy edifice on a full estate for half a community title', and two 'homettes' - less 'built' than 'extruded' - all so that I could feign despair over merlot and pud thai how much capital gains tax I was paying this financial year.

I am so glad that I chose the path I consider less contemptible. Denying I had sold a vision of independence for off-the-plan box homes and pieces of silver would have killed me.

If you can read this and you don't know what bourgeois means, it means you.