“I don’t want to live anymore.”
Well, that’s the English translation. In reality, my grandmother had said: “I want to walk away.” In Chinese, ‘walking away’ is a euphemism for passing away: 《我想走了》(wǒ xiǎng zǒu le).
My mom, dad, sister, and I sat around her awkwardly. What does one say to a confession like that? My mom started crying, and she hurriedly brushed away her tears with the back of her hand. She knew that even at the age of 95, my grandma still has nearly perfect vision.
On the contrary, my sister and I had no tears left to cry. The two of us had seen our grandma for the first time in 10 years merely a week ago. As soon as we sat down next to her, she had pulled out all her jewelry and had started walking us through each piece: her engagement ring, some gifted earrings she never wore, a couple of brooches (she told me that I could wear them to work), and more.
“I’m dying,” she had explained, “And I can’t take anything with me.”
Tears streamed down my cheeks as she pooled the jewelry into my hands. We hadn’t even asked her how her day was yet.
In the present day, my mom clutched my grandma’s hands. “Don’t say that!” she begged. “We need you here with us!” Expressionless, my grandma’s fingers curled over my mom’s.
“You’ve been saying this for the past three years,” my dad chided. He’d long since been numbed to these words. “Your life is still pretty good – just look at Ms. Xia! She lays in bed all day and her sons don’t even take good care of her.”
My mom nodded vigorously in agreement. “Yes, they come home at 9pm every night, and they don’t know how to make anything besides beef soup! Ms. Xia told me that she is very sick of eating beef soup every day.”
My grandmother mulled over these words. “That’s true,” she muttered, “I’ve always said that Ms. Xia’s sons are no good.”
I desperately tried to change the subject, willing to do almost anything to lift the mood. Having only seen my grandmother a handful of times in my life, conversation topics can be hard to come by. Finally, I settled on: “We need you here, grandma! If Lucy and I try to find boyfriends, we need your help!” A little white lie – finding a boyfriend is the last thing that’s on our minds – but it did the job. My grandma chuckled at this, and the storm cloud passed; we could talk about other things – lighter things – things that weren’t about death and its inevitability.
I often wonder what my non-Chinese friends’ reactions would be in moments like this. I imagine them racking their brains and trying to find a way to convince my grandma to live. They would also have to scream sentences with fifth-grade vocabulary into her left ear because she has lost hearing in her right. They would finally get to meet a relative, but they would not know whether this conversation would be their last.
To be quite honest, I had already started crying the first time that I laid eyes on my grandma. Previously, the last time I had seen her was 10 years ago – she could still walk, and she always cooked for the family. I once asked if we could have vegetables for lunch, and my grandmother cooked 10 different kinds of vegetables, all stir-fried. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that what I truly wanted was a raw head of lettuce, and I diligently ate the dishes anyways.
Ten years later, my grandma is now confined to a wheelchair. Her gray hair is pinned up, and her soft cheeks are lined with new wrinkles. While her skin is still supple, there is a new air around her – a new weakness that didn’t exist before – an intangible aspect of aging that can’t be seen through pictures. She was shocked at how much my sister and I had grown: the last time we saw her, we were in middle school and about half of our current height. Seeing her was a physical representation of the passage of time and how we could never get that time back.
Middle schoolers usually don’t think about getting to know people outside of themselves, so this time, I tried to learn as much about my grandma as I could. I peppered her with questions that my dad had to reword. I learned that she grew up in Shanghai in a mansion that housed 20 people, and she is the second eldest out of 7 siblings. She was quite mischievous as a kid, but when asked what she liked to do most, she responded that she liked to listen to music – Beethoven, to be exact.
When the Communists took power, they took all my grandmother’s family’s assets. She was sent to work in the villages and tended to pigs in order to learn the ways of the peasants. It was laborious and demanding work, and she does not look back on those times fondly. There weren’t many jobs that young people could choose from, so my grandma became a teacher. She taught English as a college professor, and she met my grandfather through a mutual friend. Apparently, they were friends for 7 years before they started dating.
It is a great pity that I first learned these rudimentary facts at the age of 22. All my relatives are in China, and while the isolation in America has made the bond between my father, mother, and sister and I incredibly strong, I barely know most of the people I’m related to.
In the elevator down from my grandmother’s room, my dad told my sister and I an old Chinese proverb: 《多一次少一次》(duō yī cì shǎo yī cì). It’s a proverb for the elderly, and it directly translates to ‘one more time, one less time’. Every time you see an elderly person is also one less time with them. It’s a sobering thought.
My parents always claim that visiting China never feels like a complete vacation – every visit feels like a homecoming of sorts. Presents need to be prepared for relatives, and it is a complicated question of who to buy for and what to get them. There is a rich culture around the red pocket (giving money in a red envelope), but it’s more of a competition of sorts than plain gift giving. It is a mind game to guess how much money is given to you, and if your relative gives you more money than you give them, then you have done the unspeakable. This happened with one of our family friends, and it plagued my parents for the rest of the trip. When my mother first revealed the sin to us, she started her sentence with: “I have some very bad news.”
Luckily, given our age, my sister and I have been wholly ignorant to the drama of red pockets. For us, trips to China can be summarized in two key aspects: language and food.
It’s a great joy to be surrounded by Mandarin whenever one sets foot in China. I read every subway sign, restaurant sign, and newspaper headline hungrily. In just a week, my Mandarin improved exponentially.
China is very collectivist, and thus, there are many rules. In hotels, there is always a printed list of 10 rules at the reception. Some businesses will even have their morals and values painted on the walls. Every public space has a speaker bellowing rules and warnings: watch your step, don’t dawdle, keep moving, etc., etc. In almost every place, it seemed like there was someone telling you what to do.
The best part about knowing a foreign language is being able to listen in on conversations. At the beginning of the trip, my sister and I would speak in rapid English to each other in taxis. This would prompt our taxi drivers to ask my father where we are from. Thus ensued a conversation about America: what life is like, what Americans are like, politics, and more.
Once, a taxi driver asked my father how the American government works. My dad launched into an explanation about checks and balances and the three branches of American government. In response, the taxi driver merely shook his head. “Then where is the centralized power?” he asked.
My dad blinked. “There is none.”
“What?” The taxi driver chuckled. “Impossible. There’s no way.”
The two of them argued for a bit, both vainly trying to convince the other, but the taxi driver simply couldn’t fathom a country operating without a central power.
After that, my sister and I made sure to sit in taxis in silence.
I had another memorable conversation with a waitress in Beijing. She liked the fact that my sister and I came from America, and she asked us many questions. At one point during the dinner, she nudged me and asked me whether I thought one of the other waiters was cute. I laughed and shook my head.
She grinned at this. “Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked.
I shook my head again and parroted the question back to her: “Do you?”
She frowned. “No, no one likes me.”
“I’m sure that’s not true!” I objected. In an effort to cheer her up, I added: “And you don’t need a boyfriend, anyways!”
She blinked, confused. “Why?”
I hesitated. In a culture that strongly believes that every woman needs a man, I had to idea how to convince her otherwise.
One of the things that surprised me most was how important food is in Chinese culture. The topic of food came up quite frequently, and I think it amounted to about 50% of the conversations that my relatives had. There is usually much discussion about how the food you’re eating is, comparisons of food across different provinces, where to find the best kinds of certain foods, and more. My parents even go so far to say that I shouldn’t marry someone that doesn’t like the same food as me.
Food is a common form of affection. Whenever my sister and I come back from college, my dad stocks the house with all our favorite kinds of snacks. Whenever we leave for college, we are sent with boxes of food to ensure that we never go hungry. It can be as simple as cutting a family member an apple at the end of the day or buying two crates of mangoes just because someone likes them: the preparation and gifting of food convey an affection that words could never describe. When we had dinner with one of my aunts, she didn’t say much else to us besides pointing us to specific dishes to try. Despite the lack of conversation, her love was incredibly tangible.
One of the best foods that we tried on the trip was the Asian carp. In Hangzhou, carp is steamed and covered in a thick, brown sauce that is both sour and sweet. The dish is dubbed “vinegar fish.” My sister and I have eaten fish ever since we were very little, bones and all, so plucking the spindly bones from the meat is usually a simple task. However, carp is a different beast: I’m not sure why carps need so many bones, but every bite took a full minute to debone in my mouth. The flavor was delicious, but the actual eating was quite taxing.
Whenever my family comes back to China, my mom and dad’s sides of the family will host a big dinner to welcome us home. We will meet our extended family at a restaurant, and dozens of dishes are preordered and sent in. Perhaps one of the greatest technological feats in China is the spinning table: a giant, circular table with a glass cover that automatically rotates slowly. The glass cover is loaded with food, ensuring that every person has access to every dish. Sometimes, I would have to stop talking and focus my attention on whatever dish I wanted next, because if I looked away for even a second, it would already be halfway across the table.
I think one of the most endearing forms of affection that I witnessed was my uncle holding the glass cover down as I hurriedly made a roast duck roll. Roast duck is a delicacy in China, and it’s eaten with cucumber, onion, and hoisin sauce wrapped in rice paper. The assembly of a roast duck roll takes more than the half second that each dish spends at your seat. As I quickly compiled the ingredients into the rice paper, I looked up and noticed my uncle’s hands clamped down on the glass cover, patiently waiting for me without a word. This happened many times throughout the night: whenever someone reached over to grab a couple pieces from a dish, someone around the table would stop the glass cover for them. I think it’s the act of paying careful, silent attention without asking for anything in return that I find so endearing.
During that same dinner, my sister and I got to meet my mother’s extended family. They are from a smaller city called Shangqiu, in the Henan province. While my father’s side of the family ate dinner in respectful silence with only brief mentions of what to eat, my mother’s side of the family was loud and boisterous. Dinner was frequently interrupted with performances from members of the family: my aunt sang an old Beijing ballad, one of my uncles recited 120 Chinese foods in one and a half minutes (apparently this is a popular goal to obtain?), one of my aunts did a dance, and the same uncle that recited the Chinese foods sang a Chinese opera song in which he repeated a specific Chinese word throughout the song, and the goal was to count how many times he said it (I lost track, but I think it was around 40).
At the very end of the dinner, one of my aunts plucked the dangly earrings from her ears and placed them in my sister’s hands, as she had not had time to buy gifts. “I cried last night out of excitement about seeing the both of you,” she admitted. Tears sprang to her eyes, and we hugged her tightly. To be honest, I had no recollection that she even existed last night.
It amazed me that people that had only met us a couple of times could love us just as if we had spent our entire lives together, and in such great magnitudes.
Another important task that we had to complete during this trip was to visit my grandfather’s ancestral home. In Hangzhou, there is an apartment complex that used to be a block inhabited by the Cheng family. Once a powerful family that earned its wealth through the Silk Road, this ancestral site has since been bulldozed over. As my family looked onwards to what used to be the home of generations of ancestors, I waited to feel a wave of nostalgia or a deep sense of belonging. Nothing came, and I creepily took pictures of strangers in their apartments.
A similar phenomenon happened when we went to clean the graves of my grandparents. My mother’s father died when I was very little, and the last time that I met my grandmother was in middle school.
At the entrance of the graveyard, peasants sold what seemed like funeral merch from carts. There were flowers, papers, statutes, and more, all for a very cheap price.
After my aunt wiped down my grandparent’s shared gravestone, she took out a reem of square yellow paper. She explained that the burning of the papers signifies sending money to the afterlife, but the amount of paper is not correlated with the amount of money sent. My aunt had brought a little too much paper, but she didn’t want to have to take any back home, either. Thus, we began burning great wads of paper at the base of the gravestone. As the paper caught light, papery embers floated up into the sky, getting caught in hair and clothing. The smell of something burning was thick, and I sidestepped away from the fumes. I went to brush the debris out of my hair, but my uncle said to keep it – apparently, the embers were a symbol of good luck.
As the paper burned, my aunt instructed us to say whatever we wanted to our grandparents. My mother spoke as she turned the burning papers with a stick: “Mom and Dad, I think of you all the time. And whenever I do, I look at the picture that I keep of you in my wallet.”
I was too embarrassed to say anything aloud, but I also felt unworthy of silently communicating to my grandparents. Could I ask people that I had only met a handful of times to watch over me? Was I deserving of their protection? I could not honor them while they were alive, so how could I honor them when they were no longer with us?
I wasn’t sure exactly what to say, but I silently wished them wealth and happiness, and if they wanted, to watch over me as well. But no worries if not, I quickly thought.
As my aunt threw more paper into the fire, the flames grew so tall that I feared we all may burn with it. I think we had to have burned around two packs of paper – if any environmentalists are reading this, please accept my apologies.
At a gravestone nearby, a dozen or so family members had shown up to pay their respects. It must have been a recent death, because as they bowed their heads in unison, one of them began to cry. My mother’s speech to her parents was overpowered by great wails that rang through the air; wails that seemed to settle on everything like the paper embers. There were moans and screams and tears, and suddenly, it felt as if they were paying their respects a lot better than we were. My mother also seemed to sense this, and she started crying as well. My uncle laughed at this. “It’s not a competition,” he chided.
The cries from the other family were ceaseless, and we decided to leave. On the way out, I noticed that some gravestones had small statues, flowerpots, a pot for burning paper, and other add-ons. A sign emblazoned on the entrance notified that you could buy them all in the lobby. You could also pay for someone to clean the grave for you year-round, and for an extra fee, they’d leave a bouquet of flowers every single time.
I had never given much thought to graveyard capitalism, but I gained some firsthand experience that day. My grandparents’ gravestone merely had two stone lion statues, but now, they could buy whatever they wanted in the afterlife.
One of the most amazing things about being a child of immigrants are the ancestral stories that come with it. My family tree is vibrant, and it’s filled with grandiose stories that seem otherworldly.
Take, for instance, my grandmother: at the ripe old age of 8 and having nothing to eat at home due to the Cultural Revolution, she was sent to work as a Chinese opera singer. My grandmother was the third eldest out of five siblings, and my mother frequently recalls the day when a neighbor found the hungry children to be so pitiful that he donated a burnt 馒头 (mán tou: a steamed bun). The children set the singular 馒头 on the table and waited for their mother to come home so that they could all share it.
The day before the try outs for the local opera troupe, my great-grandmother knitted my grandmother a pair of slippers. She didn’t have enough fabric, and every step in those tiny slippers was painful. Still, my grandmother hobbled over to the theater, and she landed the job. She spent her life singing and traveling the country, never receiving more than a middle school education. Nonetheless, she raised two successful daughters, and I believe that the family’s artistry begins with her.
My grandfather was a neurosurgeon in Shangqiu. He was the only one in the city, and peasants flocked to his door at all hours of the day in need of help. Having no money to pay him back, the villagers would bring dogs, cats, chickens, food, and more – anything they could give to show their appreciation. Once, my grandfather saved a villager’s young son, and on my grandfather’s birthday, the villager instructed his son to kneel at my grandfather’s feet. For years up until my grandfather’s death, the son would do the same and kneel at my grandfather's feet whenever his birthday arrived.
My grandfather’s father was not so kind. He was a fortune teller, and he liked to eat turtles and snakes. He was also a misogynist, and he beat my great-grandmother for having an opinion and for failing to give birth to a son. My grandfather has said that the only good thing that came out of that man was the fact that he sent my grandfather to fight for the Communists instead of the Nationalists – somehow, he had managed to predict the winner. Before enlisting in the army, my grandfather had nothing else to eat but tree bark.
My great-grandfather later cheated on my great-grandmother with another woman who finally gave birth to a son. The two of them traveled a lot, and he put his son under the care of my great-grandmother. Without batting an eye, she raised him as one of her own. Later, when my great-grandfather and his mistress returned home, the son refused to recognize them as his parents. “You’re my real mother,” he asserted to my great-grandmother. My great-grandmother slapped him for this; and she instructed him to greet his father and his mistress.
Generations later, my great-grandmother is still hailed as the matriarch of my mother’s side of the family. My aunt always says that we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors: my grandmother stands on the shoulders of my great-grandmother, my mother stands on the shoulders of her mother, and thus, I stand on hers. With each generation, we achieve even greater heights, and each becomes better than the last.
The stories that are passed down remind us of our privilege with time and with people: we are nothing without our ancestors, and I take great pride in the fact that the blood of every family member runs underneath my skin as well.
At the end of dinner, one of my aunts looked my sister and I in the eye and declared: “Never forget that even though you are American, you are Chinese at your core.”
Our trip to China transcended so much more than just language and food. My sister and I got to better understand our family history, and thus, better understand ourselves as well. These are stories that I hope to keep passing down, so that we may never forget where and whom we come from.
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