What 20 years of working with jade taught me about the changing Singaporean family

New: You can now listen to articles.

This audio is generated by an AI tool.

When I began working with jade more than 20 years ago, I was drawn to it mainly as a jewellery designer. 

Its soft lustre and subtle variations in colour offered possibilities I wanted to explore, particularly in pairing it with gold and diamonds to create contemporary heirlooms with an old soul. 

My grandmother understood jade very differently. She owned several jade bangles and believed they were valuable. 

When I began building my jewellery company in 2009, she offered them to me to sell. 

It was a generous gesture, but I could not use them. My company works only with Type A jadeite, which is untreated, and her bangles did not meet that standard.

We found another meaningful purpose for them instead, incorporating the pieces into our educational workshops as samples for customers to understand the different treatments and qualities of jadeite.

For my grandmother, the technical classification of the bangles was beside the point. 

She belonged to a generation for whom jade represented security. Jade pieces equated to wealth that could be worn on the body and, when necessary, sold to buy something useful.

Asking me to sell her bangles was one of my grandmother’s clearest expressions of love.

To her, their value ultimately lay in what they could do for her granddaughter. 

In Singapore, conversations about inheritance tend to centre on property, savings and how assets should be divided.

Yet families pass down much more than financial wealth. We inherit objects, expectations and ideas about what is valuable.

WHEN GENERATIONS DISAGREE

Many women who came through our doors spoke about their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers. 

Some wanted a bangle because they remembered one on the wrist of a woman who had raised them. 

Some inherited pieces they would never have chosen for themselves but could not bear to part with. Others wanted the jade reset into something they could actually wear.

The differences became especially apparent when several generations visited us together.

Traditionally, some of the most prized jadeite has been associated with rich, saturated green. 

Yet those were seldom the stones that attracted me. I found myself drawn to pale greens, icy whites, greys, blues and lavenders, and began centring some of my designs around them.

Younger customers responded immediately to these colours, but their mothers and grandmothers not so much.

If a piece was pale or lavender, an older woman might ask how it could possibly be jade.

On the surface, these disagreements appeared to be matters of personal taste. 

Over time, I came to see them as something larger: disagreements about how value itself should be determined.

For many in the older generation, value needed to be recognisable. 

A desirable piece of jade possessed qualities that relatives and the wider community could pick out immediately, including that saturated green hue.

When jewellery also functioned as security, private preference could not be its only measure of worth. Its value had to be legible to other people too. 

The younger women I met were more willing to trust their own eyes. 

They might appreciate what jade had represented to their grandmothers without feeling obliged to reproduce their grandmothers' taste.

I saw the same tension with brides. Many wanted jade that differed markedly from what their mothers or mothers-in-law would have selected.

Their disagreements on pieces were not necessarily a rejection of tradition but often an attempt by younger women to find their own place within it. 

I realised this change in perspective was a reflection of a broader change in where women sit within a Singapore family. 

Marriage is no longer the only occasion on which a woman acquires something intended to last.

Many women bought jewellery without waiting for a wedding, birthday or older relative to give it to them.

As more women have their own incomes and the ability to buy valuable objects for themselves, they also have greater freedom to decide what those objects should mean.

Women brought inherited jewellery to us hoping to preserve the stone while changing its setting. 

This isn’t an indication that younger Singaporeans do not care about inherited items. In fact, it’s the opposite: they often care intensely about what they are inheriting and want to know where it came from and what it meant. 

What has changed is their willingness to accept inheritance without interpretation.

They increasingly expect some authorship over what they carry forward.

WHAT WE INHERIT BEYOND MATERIAL SECURITY

Singapore has changed extraordinarily quickly within a few generations. 

Many of us have grandparents whose lives were shaped by scarcity and parents whose priorities were security and social mobility. 

The generation that followed inherited many of the benefits of that material progress.

With greater security, however, comes another question: not simply what we can preserve, but what is worth preserving and why.

But for those meanings to remain alive, the object does not necessarily have to remain unchanged.

A stone can be reset. A bangle can give way to a pendant. A colour once dismissed as unconventional can become the shade a granddaughter associates with her own family.

Eventually, I understood that working with an inherited material also meant participating in its evolution.

And what one generation passes down need not be preserved in precisely the form in which it was received. 

My grandmother helped me understand this, although perhaps not in the way either of us expected.

To her, the bangles she offered me were valuable because they could be sold to help me. To me, their greatest value now lies in the story of that offer. 

Neither understanding is less real. 

One generation sought to provide security. The next, having inherited more of it, has greater freedom to search for memory, identity and meaning.

Traditions do not endure simply because the next generation is instructed to preserve them. 

They endure when people continue to find themselves within them. 

Choo Yilin founded her eponymous fine jewellery brand specialising in jade in 2009.

If you have an experience to share or know someone who wishes to contribute to this series, write to voices [at] mediacorp.com.sg (voices[at]mediacorp[dot]com[dot]sg) with your full name, address and phone number.