Category: Relationships

That Certain Familiarity

BettyLeave a comment

Last night my cousin and I paid a visit to the Chengs, family friends with whom we’ve grown up and whose kids now have kids. Mr. and Mrs. Chengs are an exceptional older Asian couple, meaning they openly show their affection for one another, as though it were the most normal and obvious thing to do. We sat around their dining table, the lazy susan upon which had still not been cleared of their abundant dinner – fried prawns and fish and new year’s cake, all of which seemed to have hardly been touched- and discussed their upcoming trip to Japan. There were eight of us in all, including Geoff – the Cheng’s eldest son, his wife Jenny, her parents and sister, and my cousin and I. Geoff’s one year old baby daughter played with tattered red envelope from some generous relative. A few 1000NTD bills lay about her high chair. We talked about the rising cost of airplane tickets (though the Chengs, having made a sizable fortune from window treatments, could hardly be discouraged from traveling even if tickets were absurdly expensive – though “absurdly” is also relative).

Geoff sat to my right, slouched down low in his chair with his belly stuck out. I tried hard to remember him as a teenager, a shrimpy, scowly boy with a terrible temper. He had softened both emotionally and physically as he grew older and now at thirty-two was a father, married to Jenny, a beautiful petite young woman from the south who, when people first met her and knew that she was engaged to Geoff, made them scratch their heads, “How the hell did he get her?”

She was just a year older than I and had a soft, pleasant smile, a sweet, tuneful voice, and powdery pale skin with the slightest touch of pink – a complexion comparable, I thought, to her baby daughter’s. All of this was emphasized by her dark eyes and thick brows. Her corners of her small, rosebud mouth seemed always to be turned up, so that a soft smile constantly played on her face. On top of this she was well-educated, polite, exceedingly agreeable and fertile; in short, every (Asian) mother’s dream daughter-in-law. She met Geoff shortly after turning twenty-five and put up history’s weakest struggle – after all, Geoff was neither a looker nor very charming – until she gave in to the package that men like Geoff are lucky enough to be borne into and that makes them attractive rather than atrocious marriage prospects: despite his outwardly prickly demeanor, Geoff was a good guy with a steady job working in sales at his father’s company. He came from a tight-knit and wealthy family helmed by pleasant, generous parents.

“Still,” I said, when I saw photos of the happy couple, “The ten is marrying a…five. (I factored in Geoff’s unsightly weight gain which could not be evenly distributed across his small frame) Or a four.”

My aunt said that in Chinese, this was called, “A flower stuck on a pile of horse shit.”

Within a year of their engagement she was pregnant and I was now sitting across from her and her one-year old baby girl. I looked at Geoff and then back at his young wife – Goeff seemed disgruntled, perhaps he was too full – but then again, he always seemed like that. Jenny played happily with her daughter as though all her childhood dreams had been fulfilled.

Geoff’s sister in law was a year older than his wife but, judging by the fact that she’d just returned from a trip with just her mother and now sat in the Cheng’s dining room fussing with the baby, I gathered she was still years away from the life her younger sister lived now. I can’t explain it. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I was exercising my single girl radar – like gaydar but equipped with more assumptions, more judgement – and gathered that she was single and struggling to find a husband like most plain-faced, big-boned girls my age in Taipei and in big cities across Asia where small frames, small faces, and perfect skin tend to be physical requisites for wifely material.

The young woman had a plain name and pimples, to which Geoff’s mother-in-law deemed fit to turn the conversation.

“I just don’t know what to do about her face anymore,” she said, and the girl looked awkwardly down on her plate and shrugged.

“What do you use?” Mrs. Cheng asked. Ten minutes before Mrs. Cheng had come downstairs in a tangerine colored silk vest – not designed exactly to hide her round figure, but certainly made her appear the wealthy and well-fed matriarch of such a clan. My aunt often reminds me that in her youth, Mrs. Cheng was a very great beauty, so much so that when Mr. Cheng first set eyes on her he said to himself, “Now there, she will be my wife.”

Mrs. Cheng was no longer beautiful, but one could hardly call her ugly. She had blown up, for lack of a better phrase, from the nutrients of too many shark’s fin soups, abalone congees and swallow’s nests desserts, but her eyes were bright and her skin shiny and supple. For all the years I’ve known her, she maintained the same haircut – a blunt helmet-like bob, with a row of short, heavy bangs, beneath which  her face grew rounder with each passing year. Mrs. Cheng’s sister had always been her harshest critic and said years ago, when the weight began to creep on, that Mrs. Cheng’s hair was like a bowl and her pale face like white rice that was beginning to overflow. Regardless, Mrs. Cheng carried herself with an enviable grace and confidence and never seemed to stop glowing with the pride borne from having a good husband and from knowing that they had built a good life together.

Geoff’s sister in law pursed her lips. She was thinking of reasons as to why her skin was so bad. “I don’t use many products at all,” she said, “I used to try and cover it up all the time, but it seemed to just make the problem worse. So now I just try to keep it clean and use a little bit of moisturizer.”

“It just takes time,” Mrs. Cheng said assuringly, though one could tell that Mrs. Cheng had never had a bad skin day in her life.

As though reading my thoughts, Mr. Cheng chimed in.

“Mrs. Cheng’s skin has always been perfect,” he said, “She doesn’t use anything. She has always had wonderful skin.”

To emphasize his wonderful opinion of his glowing wife, he reached up to stroke the back of her head. I gave a sidelong glance to my cousin Karen. We both thought, “Hm.”

“It’s true,” Mrs. Cheng said, “I don’t use much. Just this cheap pharmacy brand from Japan,” (here Karen and I exchanged glances again – we knew the brand and it was cheap and we were about to be very impressed until Mrs. Cheng continued), “And one drop of that gold bottle from Chanel. You know that bottle? Just one drop. That’s it!” Later, my aunt would say that the gold bottle cost three hundred dollars and Mrs. Cheng had given her a bottle, claiming that one drop performed skin miracles.

And did it?

“I need about five or six drops,” my aunt had said wryly.

Mr. Cheng leaned forward and nodded at us nodding along to his wife’s words, and I did not know whether to laugh or keep nodding. It was a small thing, this talk about skincare, but this little motion of his, and his affirmation of his wife’s beauty which to him had faded not a whit, was marvelous to me in an anthropological sense.

Later, I asked Mr. Cheng if he planned on retiring anytime soon.

“From the company, yes,” he said, “but not from my charities. My charities still require a lot of work.”

Mr. Cheng’s charities – a hospital, childcare center, senior citizen center and a civic education center, to name but a few – are funded by the alms donated by hundreds of thousands of devout Buddhist Taiwanese citizens to three popular and venerated temples established by Mr. Cheng’s late father in the 1970’s.

“But these centers,” Mr. Cheng said, “were not my father’s vision but my wife’s vision. Everything is her vision. She has so many ideas, so many great and wonderful ideas on how to benefit society, and I, I,” he tapped the brochures he had run upstairs like a young man to retrieve and show me, “I make it my work. I love this work. I cannot stop, not quite yet.”

He looked at the brochures in his hands as I turned to look at his wife. She was plump and happy as the granddaughter she held now in her lap. The baby clapped and smiled. So did she, so full of life and humor. I had secretly accused her senses of being dulled by money and an easy life, but having heard enough stories of her impoverished childhood from my aunt and now attaching these stories to what appeared to be Mr. Cheng’s motivation for adding such legacies to his existing charities, I saw my accusations were unfounded. Mr. Cheng was a devout Buddhist and in his wife he had found his personal Bodhisattva – a woman full of light and who, in her own right, had made the right choice as well.

Every evening they strolled in the park across from their sprawling Taipei home, and every evening Mr. Cheng smiled adoringly at Mrs. Cheng regardless of how bright the lamplights shone. Once, their group of friends asked the men for whom they made so much money and one after another the men answered, “For my children, for my children,” until the question fell upon Mr. Cheng who replied without pause, “For my wife. All for my wife.”

Lovers 
Pal Szinyei Merse Lovers  (1845-1930). Oil on Canvas  

Later that night, Karen and I readied for bed like an old lesbian couple.

“I don’t know if I’m the type of woman to strike a man like that,” I said, “Actually, I know I’m not the type. That just seems so strange to me. The one arrow to the heart sort of thing.”

“Me neither,” Karen said, “It’s written in some people’s lives, but perhaps not ours.” It seemed very one-sided to us, and feeling slightly slighted by fate and/or genetics, we fell asleep, dreaming of one-sided love stories. The kind we seemed to know best.

But in the morning as we relayed the night’s events to my aunt, my aunt shook her head at me. The best and most sustainable romances are not those where the man chases tirelessly, blindly after a beautiful woman who cannot be made happy because she does not see in the man what he sees in her.

“Mrs. Cheng truly was stunning,” my aunt said, “She truly did have her pick of suitors, some of whom were much more handsome and much wealthier than Mr. Cheng.”

“Then why did she settle for Mr. Cheng?” I think even before my aunt replied I knew the answer and that to use the word “settle” (even though there is no true Chinese equivalent for it, “settle” was implied by my tone) was incorrect.

“She did not settle,” my aunt said, “she felt a certain familiarity. They had never met, not ever, but there was something comforting about him as though they’d met before, like they were old friends.”

I thought of that Rihanna song, and that Michael Buble song, and that old lady Fate, who ran in circles from that life to this one and will sprint on to the next and the next. I thought of the people who are destined, one way or other, to meet. When they do, the feeling is just how Mrs. Cheng described: like meeting an old friend, or rereading a favorite tattered book. Like coming home.

The Family Way …or Why I Have a Thick Skin (But Am Crying Inside)

BettyLeave a comment

My aunt busies herself in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, rinsing pots and pans, ready to make soup for dinner, among other dishes. She comes out to wipe the table for what seems like the fourth time in an hour. Something on her mind? Since I’ve arrived I feel as though there’s been some question or statement playing on her lips. My aunt is a straight shooter who considers herself tactful, which means whatever she wants to say will eventually be said, sometimes sooner than you think.

I’m lying on the carpet reading a Taiwanese beauty magazine, aware of enormous discrepancies between the way the models look and the way I look on a day-to-day basis.

“Betty,” my aunt says, wiping vigorously at someone’s sticky fingerprints. Probably my cousin Larry’s. He’s a slob. Not yet thirty but balding, paunchy, bow-legged. He’s got a master’s degree from Purdue, which in French means “lost” because when the French who and who first arrived and saw nothing but cornfields that’s how they felt. Larry has a Master’s degree in Finance or something about as interesting from the University of Lost. Larry works 9 to 6 then comes home, eats dinner, showers, plays video games on his phone or checks stock prices on his computer. Sometimes he will chat with his father, who is like an older, more put together, more religious version of Larry. The elder is in bed by 10PM. They are both about as exciting as vegetarian compost. Larry also has a girlfriend who is much more attractive (not even on a sliding scale), and who is two years older than I am, and who, you can see it in her eyes, is ready to get married. To Larry.

“Hm,” I reply. Interesting liquid eyeliner technique.

“Betty,” my aunt says again, and this time she stops wiping and looks at me, “I’ve been thinking.”

“What?” I look up. I don’t think I will ever perfect this liquid eyeliner technique. For one thing, I do not possess liquid eyeliner.

“I can’t stand it anymore,” she throws the rag down on the table, “You and Karen really need to find boyfriends soon. Neither of you are getting any younger. I worry every night that you two won’t get married.”

I look at her. The eyeliner technique now seems crucial.

“Don’t…worry,” I say.

“But I do!” My aunt picks up the rag again and starts to wipe down the chairs, which are of lacquered wood. Fingerprints show up easily there too, “You know back in my day women your age would not only be married, they’d have one or two kids by now.”

“Well, it’s kind of different now.”

“Yes, I know, but still, time is running out. You are ladies now, not girls. Time to make yourself pretty and concentrate on the few fish still left in the pond.”

Jesus. I look at the magazine filled with pretty young girls with perfect makeup and hair, probably only twenty one or something, with hoards of guys chasing after them. I think about Larry, who most likely does not even know that his girlfriend takes a half hour if not more to apply her makeup and do her hair, or that she even wears makeup or does her hair – he probably thinks she just looks like that…naturally. I think about Larry’s long singledom which I thought for sure might be permanent and then my surprise when he brought home a very pretty girl with absolutely nothing wrong with her except her curious taste in men and remember, Oh, right. Larry has a good education, a decent steady job…and right, and Larry is a man. I look at my aunt, who though with my uncle is hardly a billboard for storybook romance, is still somehow an advertisement for a happily married woman with purpose and a sense of pride and achievement. All good things, completely and utterly fine to have been gained from a strong marriage. And instead of looking at the blank television screen where my reflection would only stare dully back, I reach for the remote and turn it on. HBO. When in need of tuning out, HBO.

A new movie is just about to start – and as the opening credits begin to run with familiar names laughing snowball from hell: “Bride Wars.”

A Short Talk

BettyLeave a comment

The girl, expectedly, was not happy.

“I don’t want to move to the beautiful country,” she spat the Chinese name of America, “You can’t just uproot me and move me halfway across the world without talking to me about it.”

“I’m talking to you now,” her mother said as a matter-of-factly, aware of her use of the singular. Even though her husband sat right next to her, he said nothing. Fine with her. Mothers are expected to deliver the bad news that would change their children’s lives for the better.

The girl was nearly speechless with anger, but she saw on her mother’s face the expression she had come to hate: the one of resolute, immovable decision. In it was etched the selfishness and the stubborn pride she had come to associate with her mother and everything wrong in general with old-fashioned, conservative mothers. It was like a disease, that expression. The girl saw it in the parents of some of her friends as well – the flashing but strangely dead eyes that signalled a challenge almost to their offspring. Fight me, the eyes said, but you will lose. In the future, when the girl’s English improved she learned the phrase “my way or the highway,” and often thought of it when she fought with her mother. As afflictions went, the girl felt her mother had an almost terminal case of it. Saving face, saving face – this was what her mother lived by so that it seemed she had only one face, one expression – her mother seemed like a statue to her then, but oddly, the girl did not see the strength of stone, but weak plaster wanting desperately to represent something it was not. Regardless, the die had been cast by her mother’s stiff hand and her father, though far from a pushover, was only slightly more alive and would not do anything to reverse it.

“We will come back during the summers, unless you need summer school,” her mother continued, “some kids who don’t study hard during the school year need to stay and take extra courses during the summer, but,” the woman looked at her daughter, “hopefully you won’t need it.”

“And dad?” the girl turned to her father. She loved him more than she loved her mother, but she felt a growing rift. In her gut she knew he had very little to do with this decision.

The woman looked at her husband. He leaned forward and rubbed his face. He did not know, precisely, what it was he felt at the moment except that his family seemed very far from him even though they were, at present, sitting right in front of him.

“Your father will stay here and work,” the woman said simply, and as though to reinforce her words she rubbed his back, which instinctively stiffened to her touch. Whether the woman felt this he did not know or care. “Your father works very hard, as you know, and his work is here. He can come visit us whenever he wants, and we will come back for all your breaks. Unless you have summer school.”

The man finally spoke.

“Your mother and I discussed this at length. You’re not doing well here. We think you will do better in the American school system. You have more freedom there.”

The girl leaned back. What a robot. She was disgusted, but mostly she was sad. She had not the words to describe this sadness, not at that age when one’s world is small and narrow, but only that whatever family life she had was slowly being chipped away and deemed unimportant.

“We need to think about your future,” the man said, “Education comes first.”

Of course it does. But this freedom her father referred to. Did he know his wife at all?

She was barely fourteen, had not yet begun to develop an appetite for the world but still, she knew a thing or two about freedom and how certain environments could help expand or limit already limited freedom. At least in Taipei she could go out on her own, could walk around the city or hide out in cafes and bookstores. She’d gone to the US before to visit cousins who liked her enough but were clearly different. They spoke such rapid English, for one thing, and didn’t understand half of the words she used in Chinese, but what’s more, they relied on their parents to take them anywhere. This took some getting used to. She had done the requisite visits to Disneyland, Sea World, all fun places but inaccessible without a car. And what of her beloved hiding spots? Would she find new ones in the new world? She could not even begin to imagine life in California and she did not want to.

“Get yourself ready,” her mother said, “tell your friends you will come back and that they can come visit us anytime.”

She would not say anything to her friends, the girl decided. It was much easier to disappear off the face of the earth and let everyone wonder.

The girl did not cry when her mother stood up to go. Her father stayed behind with her on the couch. She was silent and sat staring out the window – the sky had gone dark since they’d first sat down, and it felt like years ago when really, the whole disruption of her present life had taken less than fifteen minutes. She thought it had begun to rain but turned to find that her father had turned the TV on to the weather channel. It was raining elsewhere, not in Taipei. But it didn’t matter. The weather in Taipei would not affect the girl at all, not in a few months, and after a moment her father got up and left too.

Red Lanterns

BettyLeave a comment

Last night my aunt pulled two red paper lanterns out of a plastic shopping bag. My cousin and I were sprawled on the couch, she watching “Moneyball” on HBO and I reading a British Vogue I had rented from a small magazine rental shop around the corner. It was more economical to rent foreign magazines for 1USD a week rather than buy the latest issue for 20USD. We both turned to look at my aunt as she pulled the lanterns open with a loud “Braaaap.”

“When’d you get those?” My cousin asked.

“Yesterday,” my aunt said, inspecting the lanterns for any rips. “I watched a news story about lobby decoration.”

My cousin turned to give me a smirk that said, “There she goes again” but my aunt did not see.

“I don’t think the firecrackers are enough. I want to hang these from the lights. The lobby will seem more festive.”

A week ago, my friends and I had come home to find the small Christmas wreath my aunt had hung in the lobby replaced by a giant strand of bright red firecrackers. Merely decorative, of course, to signal the impending Lunar New Year. It was a nice touch, a bit of vibrancy in our otherwise spare and understated lobby. If one can call it even that. Other buildings had doormen, twenty-four hour surveillance systems, sitting areas for guests to wait in and accompanying association fees, but our building was tall and narrow, one unit per floor, the living areas of which were maximized by doing away with all frivolities one associates with “fancy” buildings.  One walked in and in two steps was in front of the elevator. There was no ceremony, no association fees.

My aunt rearranged the tangle tassels that hung below the lanterns and tied gold string to the hooks.

“I’m going down to hang them now,” she said, and dumbly, we nodded.

“I’ll need your help,” she said, “I’m not tall enough.”

Of course not. My aunt is barely 5’1″. I lept up while Karen remained seated, her eyes glued to Brad Pitt’s aging but still handsome face. He looked frustrated.

“I’ll come help you,” I said, and it was my aunt’s turn to give her daughter a smirk.

“Of course you will, Karen will just sit here with her legs crossed like a queen. How useful.”

My cousin protested half-heartedly, “Well it’s not like you need two of us.”

I laughed and grabbed one of the lanterns, “She has to work overtime, all the time,” I said, “I’ll help you hang these up.”

My aunt picked up a little foot stool from her entrance way, the one we sat on to put on our shoes.

“This should be tall enough,” she said.

It wasn’t. I could barely reach the top of the light casing and was feeling oddly…imperiled. The stool shifted a bit with my every breath and I wondered if I would break my neck trying to hang these cheap paper lanterns to liven up our lobby in which no one ever spent more than two minutes, which was how long the elevator usually took to go all the way down. My aunt must have felt my unspoken alarm and after watching a few more of my futile attempts asked me to step down.

“We need a step ladder,” I said, out of breath. I realized how out of shape I was.

“I think we have one on the 8th floor,” my aunt said, “In the stairwell. I’ll go check.”

I waited in the lobby, wondering if I should have gone to get the stepladder instead. The elevator stopped at the 7th floor and the 8th was accessible only by stairs which were dark and dusty. We stored things we didn’t often use in the stairwell, but still it was no place for a woman of my aunt’s age to go poking around. Last I checked there were plenty of heavy things leftover from our building’s remodeling that could topple over and cause serious injury. The minutes dragged by as I waited for my aunt to return. Perhaps the stepladder was very heavy and she could not move it, or perhaps she would fall and clatter with it down the stairs. My aunt was getting older, but not so old that she couldn’t carry a stepladder, but still – it didn’t feel right, even if just an hour earlier at dinner we had shared a good laugh about just how hardy she was.

“When I was pregnant with your cousin Larry your grandpa asked me to hang a picture up in the stairwell of the old house.”

“When you were pregnant?” I said? “How pregnant?”

“Six or seven months,” my aunt said.

“That’s messed up.”

“Yes, well, your grandpa would rather have me get up on the high chair than his beloved son.”

“I would have gotten in a fight with grandpa,” Karen said.

“I would have told my husband to go up there in my place,” I said, giving my uncle a look. He did not seem to be paying attention to our conversation and was instead, looking at his watch wondering when us women would stop jabbering and head home. He liked to be in bed by 9PM.

“You were seven months pregnant!” we both said.

My aunt shrugged, no big deal. She was the definition of hardy. She could do whatever her husband couldn’t or wouldn’t and more too, like take initiative and put up Chinese New Year decorations in an otherwise mausoleum like lobby. But still, my cousin Larry was nearly thirty now and she shouldn’t be the one fetching step ladders from dark stairwells. I watched the elevator stay on the 7th floor and was just about to run up when it slowly began its descent. I felt like a useless twenty-seven year old who could barely stretch without losing her breath.

The elevator doors slid open and my aunt came out with the ricketiest looking stepladder I had ever seen. It wasn’t even a stepladder, but a wooden painter’s ladder, hand-made, it seemed, by a blind carpenter who had a very rudimentary idea of what ladders looked like and who had only the shittiest bits of wood, the rustiest screws, and the oldest, crustiest bits of rope to work with.

“That looks… decrepit,” I said, “I doubt it can hold my weight.” I suddenly regretted eating the green tea ice cream and the donut I had for dessert.

My aunt waved impatiently at my consternation, “Nonsense, if it can hold all those construction workers it can definitely support you.”

I thought about the wiry Taiwanese construction workers I’d often passed by on the streets, none of whom seemed to weigh more than half of what I weighed. They were always perched lightly upon these same rickety ladders like chimpanzees, working as carefree as though the ladders were extension of their own bodies. I was not so skilled. I studied the ladder and wondered how it even stayed standing – it was haphazardly slapped together with just a single bolt on either side of the “rungs” and with a simple dirty grey rope in between to hold the two sides together.

“You have to lean on it to stabilize it,” my aunt instructed.

I hesitated, and before I could step up my aunt said, “It’s okay, I’ll go up.”

Whoa whoa whoa, auntie, calm down. Sure, she was not pregnant, but she was nearing sixty and I was…not about to let my aunt climb up the world’s oldest hand-made ladder and let her fall and break her hip. Where had my courage gone? I was, at one point in my life, obsessed with climbing trees and doing cartwheels and swimming in icy cold rivers. Now, I was fearful of breaking my neck in the entrance of my home which was just a stone’s throw away from the hospital.

“No,” I said, “I’ll do it. I’ve seen the workers use these ladders and I know how it works.”

Sometimes, lying out loud makes it easier to believe. I climbed the ladder as solidly as I could, feeling the ominous creaking of old wood pressing into rusty screws and realized I wouldn’t just break my neck but also possibly endure the pain of a trillion splinters.

“Steady?” my aunt asked.

Not really, but I nodded and my aunt handed me a lantern and a push pin, which, after much difficulty I pressed into the wood of the light casing.

Gingerly, I hung the lantern up and willed the push pin to hold. It did.

“Okay,” I said.

“Next one,” my aunt said.

Up again, a long, stressful reach and applied pressure to the small head of the pushpin. Another red lantern up. I climbed down from the step ladder one last time and breathed a huge sigh of relief.

The tassels of one of the lanterns was tangled again, but it was low enough for me to adjust it from the ground.

“Now it looks like Chinese New Year,” my aunt said, gazing at our work.

Welcome home. 

It was a simple enough job, and though the minutes up on the step ladder felt interminable, had taken altogether less than ten minutes. I looked at the red lanterns swaying slightly from what, I wasn’t sure – the door was closed and I could feel no draft, but perhaps they were just happy to be out and about, on display for all of ten tenants to enjoy. It did look good, those two simple lanterns in a beige marbled lobby.

My aunt folded the ladder and made to haul it back upstairs.

I grabbed it from her, “I’ll take it back up,” I said. Her work was done, at least for tonight.

The Return

BettyLeave a comment

In two, no – three days, I will see this view again though less sunny and less filtered (I am challenging myself to both take more photos and to use less filters, except for on Instagram, in which case filters are the only way to go.)

My aunt sunning the blankets on the balcony, at the start of 2010. 

For now, my brain is mush. (Partly, this is a result of my last trip to Vegas. “Balls to the walls!” my cousin instructed, and I nodded in heady assent, thinking it necessary to buy my first – and likely last – set of shot glasses from the most opulent Walgreen’s I’d ever set foot in. It wasn’t until the next morning when I realized it was actually just the balls of my feet that went to the walls while the rest of me wanted nothing more than to slide to the floor. Hello, 2013, ye harbinger of my late twenties!)

My closet has been gutted so its innards now lay strewn about the bed and carpet. Collared shirts, wool sweaters, short and long skirts, pants that may or may not fit lay anxiously on my duvet, wondering if they’ll make the cut. I always overpack when I go to Taipei because I always think I’ll transform into the best version of myself – stylish and purposeful, places to go, people to see – but without fail I turn into a creature who spends entire days in pajamas lounging around her aunt’s sixth floor living room without purpose, without agenda. Before my cousin Karen was my partner in sloth, but now she works like any respectable, able brain and bodied, twenty-seven year old. So Mondays through Fridays I sloth alone.

On more ambitious days I stroll around the well-maintained track at the nearby middle school while uniformed students with sallow faces and greasy hair keep their heads bent low in fluorescent lighted classrooms. Sometimes I go to the department store and touch things, accept samples from pale, slender girls around my age who think I could probably benefit a whole lot by using the same beauty products they do. Why are all the American girls so big boned? I shrug; I wish I knew.

In the afternoons my aunt cooks dinner while I watch. She tells me stories; I put down my book and sit down on a small stool, staring at the ties of her gingham apron and listen. The afternoon sun shines softly down on my aunt’s short hair – only a few strands of which are grey – and there is something bucolic about the scene except we are on the sixth floor of a building in a bustling city. Outside, far below the balcony a car horn honks. A cellphone rings with a Taiwanese pop song.

My uncle comes home from the office, puts his frayed nylon laptop bag on the low mahogany cabinet behind the couch and goes to wash up. The slender cat jumps atop the bag. He will likely stay there until his dinner.

We humans take our seats around the rectangular dining table upon which my aunt has assembled the night’s simple dishes. Always white and brown rice with two or three vegetable stir fries. A pan-fried fish with scallions and soy sauce. The fat, older cat paws our knees and hoists himself up on the empty chair to get a taste. That is the fat cat at his most productive. If they make it home in time for dinner (which since 2010 has been rare), my cousins talk about their day. A pretty fresh faced female anchor reports the same news that was reported in the morning.

At night the city comes alive and I find a reason to change out of my pajamas just as my uncle changes into his.

“He will sleep at nine even if the Empress of China herself were to call at 9:15,” my aunt has said drily for her entire marriage.

Sometimes my cousin Karen and I revisit the same department stores, though now they are bursting at the seams. The young, sallow-faced high school and college students and office workers are now fresh-faced and energized. They milk the night, or the few precious hours left of it. I see the lights of a million billboards and shop windows, smell the exhaust of thousands of scooters, cabs and buses, hear the chattering of a million souls packed into two square kilometres, perhaps less. I see, smell and hear precisely what I miss most about Taipei when I am in Orange County.

Sometimes, I stay in my pajamas and we watch an American movie or TV show with Chinese subtitles. Or a Chinese show with Chinese subtitles. We discuss her coworkers and her friends. The night is long, but so is the next day, and at 12 or 1AM Karen is fast asleep. Taipei does not; this energy wakes us all the next morning, and the next and the next.

Sometimes, in between all of this, I write.

For now, two massive, aspirational suitcases wait to be filled, just as I do, though with different nourishment.

Marbles

BettyLeave a comment

As I write this, my Taiwanese grandmother arranges and rearranges the contents of two Samsonite suitcases in my brother’s room, where she has slept for the past month. She is leaving tomorrow on a two-thirty China Airlines flight. My father will take her to the airport at around 11:30AM and I will go to my grandfather’s house as usual. I will not make a big deal of saying goodbye, nor will she; we will see each other in less than two weeks, when I return to Taiwan for Chinese New Year.

She visited two years ago, also around the holidays, a little over a year after my grandfather passed away. Her hair was still black then, though after a month her roots started to show and I learned that holy cow, all her hair was white. 

That was the year I finally graduated from college and my brother from business school and my grandmother from the dark cloud of fresh widowhood. We were all about to embark on new chapters, and though my grandmother was still a widow, she was also only fifty-five years old with several decades ahead of her. My mother had invited her to stay with us almost immediately after my grandfather died, asking her to come at the beginning of November and stay through the New Year, but that first year my grandmother shook her head. It was too soon.

The next year my mother brought it up again.

“We will help Betty move back home from school, and you’ll experience the rowdiness of an American Christmas.”

My Taiwanese grandmother agreed and flew across the world alone for the first time in twenty-two years. No well-dressed old man at her side. I didn’t tiptoe around her. None of us did. My grandfather’s death, at the age of one-hundred, was hardly a surprise and from the look of things – the easy way my grandmother fell into our lifestyle and the warm welcome she received from my mother’s side of the family and my parents’ friends – my grandmother had more or less “moved on.”

She laughed and shopped and ate with much gusto, and though now my memories from that time have blurred, I do remember her having a pretty good time overall. I think it was fresh for her, to be back on American soil and to be with us, an oddly American extension of the family she knew forward and back in Taiwan. In our quiet American suburb with no sidewalks or street lamps, we seemed very far from the sights and smells of Taipei city, most of which I’m sure at the time, reminded her of her late husband. We were Chinese, but in some ways so decidedly American – and my grandmother was game for all of it. She ate at our fatty American restaurants and toured our expansive American universities and shopped in the endless stretches of American malls and shopping centers. At the time however, I was too busy wondering about my own future to consider seeing our America through her eyes. I regret not looking more closely – I think I could have learned a thing or two.

I do remember her being surprised by my anger. She watched in silent awe as I argued constantly with my father and snapped at my mother and rolled my eyes at my brother. At one point she conceded that yes, my father was very difficult, but then later she told my mother she was surprised I had such a temper. Where did this impatience and disrespect come from? Was I not the same sweet and happy-go-lucky pre-teen she played marbles with for hours some twelve, thirteen years ago? Did she wonder? I wondered. I was so ill at ease and even two years later, at the edge of another open door, she seems to still have caught me in a lurch.

I often wonder where the rift began. If I am looking for some sort of emotional origin story I would say it happened at the end of their visit that year I was thirteen and in middle school. I was struggling not to grow up, knowing that becoming a “young adult” was inevitable but still fighting it with every neuron. I went to classes, wore the damn forest green uniform with the horribly unflattering pleated navy shorts and tube socks, and then came home and left it all at the door. My awkwardness (which I didn’t even realize at the time as awkwardness) my abilities, and my status as a middle schooler. I had friends, some of whom I’m still friends with to this day, but for the most part I was distracted. Some things aren’t worth explaining. I doubt I’m the only person who would rather middle school never occurred. My grandmother came from Taiwan that winter with my polished grandfather on her arm, bearing suitcases and suitcases filled with gifts and foodstuffs, and with her sharp, hearty laugh and my grandfather’s enviable vitality (he was around ninety years old by then), filled our house with smiles and good cheer.

I played marbles with her nearly every day after school, not a real version (whatever that is), but one I made up and constantly revised the rules to. With my brother we played cards, and sometimes my grandfather would join too and my brother and I would howl with laughter when grandma challenged grandfather to War, winning us twenty dollar bills for each high hand. At Christmas she won multiple gifts at Bingo and I think, I think, around that time we must have gone to Las Vegas too, where her luck followed her and gave us more quarters than necessary to play in the arcades. It is at times like this I wish I had a better memory, or at least had the good sense to keep a proper diary. But I can only share with you the vague description of warmth that only a grandmother in winter could provide. I was thirteen and that winter stands out as one of the happiest because the surrounding days seem so bleak in comparison. I was never bullied in middle school. I had good friends. I think I liked most of my teachers. But my god I so looked forward to going home and being with my grandmother that winter break.

We took a family photo that year. In it, I wear my middle school uniform and my brother with his awkward high school haircut and glasses. My mother and father looking years younger than they do now, standing around my grandfather who sits squarely in the middle with my grandmother leaning on his shoulder. She wore a tailored suit that day with large, square shoulders, and had her hair clipped in a low, elegant ponytail. Her bangs are curled and piled high up on her narrow face and she is thin, with slightly hollowed cheeks but full lips. Here eyes are bright and though I never thought of her as such, there is something powerful about her. She married the old man, made him happy, which made her happy. Some people are built that way. You could cut the rest of us away and see a perfectly happy man and wife, but you look at the young girl’s smile and can see that at that moment, she’s the happiest one in the photograph.

All good things…you know how it goes. I came home from school one day in early January and they were gone. It shouldn’t have been so dramatic – I’m certain we said goodbye, and I was going to see them in a few months when I went to Taiwan in the summer – but it was so sudden. Perhaps it was all just poorly timed. Perhaps my grandparents left on the same day I started school again; always a sad day when you’re a kid. But I don’t remember those details; mostly I remember how the house went from six noisy people to four, all suddenly subdued. The guests were gone. The lights and ornaments were put away, the tree hacked into thirds and dumped at the end of the driveway. The guest room was now dark and empty, void of my grandmother’s creams and my grandfather’s colorful ties, even the bed seemed bare now that the sumptuous emerald green comforter reserved expressly for my grandfather had been rolled up and zipped away.

I remember walking down the hall from the guest room back to my own room, but stopping outside my parents room where a nuclear family photo hung, taken when I was six. We had gone to a portrait studio one hot summer day in Taiwan, my brother came directly from school and had no suit to wear or rent. My mother gazes lovingly at the camera, while my father and brother have varying dim looks – men never really photograph well – and I am standing at the center, wearing a frilly white dress, a small white flower between my fingers. I am smirking, smug because I don’t know anything about anything. But looking at it then I felt two people missing. They were never in that photograph to begin with, but now I felt four was such a small, quiet number. Not at all a whole family.

I cried to myself that night, wondering what the heck was wrong with me and feeling, rightly so, like a baby. I missed my fun, young grandmother and the steady, smiling albeit stoic presence of my quiet grandfather. I missed the dull clink of poorly aimed marbles and the laughter that they brought to our cold house. My parents, if they noticed my dull mood, said nothing. My brother, if he missed them as much as I did, was most likely more reasonable and told himself to be patient. But I think then I was on the cusp of something. I was changing, growing, hardening somehow. It’s not fair but it makes sense. My grandmother left that winter and along with her left my childhood. I don’t think I ever felt that light or loose again. There were more fun winter breaks and summers and regular days ahead – I have hundreds of photographs to attest to the fun that came later, with and without my grandmother – but never to that extent, never at that funny awkward age when you are able, when you come home from school, to leave the rest at the door.

I closed the bucket of marbles that winter and never opened them again. A few years later my mother took a few handfuls for her plants and I dropped the rest off at the salvation army.

Whatever happened between that memory and the next of spending time with my grandmother in Taiwan doesn’t matter. The pebble had already cracked the windshield and it wasn’t her doing or my doing, but just life in general. Suddenly I was in high school. She picked me up for lunch and I noticed that I had nothing to say. It was around that time too, that I began to scrutinize the relationships around me and ask questions. I was looking for answers, motives. I wasn’t yet a “writer” in that indulgent self-labeling way, but I was certainly judgmental enough. I was also trying to divine the future – my own, mostly – by learning from others’ pasts. It struck me as odd that she had married my grandfather. He was very old and she was very young. Around that time too, I began to listen more closely when the women talked and she was out of the room. My cousin was developing in the same way and late at night when the rest of the house was asleep we lay awake and dissected people’s pasts. What made them the way they were? But it was all just part of life, wasn’t it? My grandfather was aging finally, in real time, and my grandmother was most likely discovering the downside of marrying someone fifty years her senior. Her attitude never wavered, but I’m sure my grandfather’s life, or whatever was left of it, hung heavily over her head.

It wasn’t disrespect I felt for her, but if emotions could smell, it was the faint whiff of pity. She became a strong, fun woman I looked up to to someone whose welfare seemed to depend on the whims of a weakening ninety-year old man. But that is unfair, and has nothing to do with how she has always treated me: nothing but love, hands on, undiluted. There was no blood between us but whatever ran was much thicker. And yet. I felt as though I had evolved beyond her. Though of course I was doing just the opposite. I was self destructively closing myself up to the warmth in her that had always been there, for me, my cousins, all of us.

I did it to myself. I closed myself off from her specifically, holding an inexplicable and unreasonable grudge. I blame that winter break when with her, I had too much fun. She made me feel I would need no one else but her and perhaps a deck of cards and a bucket of marbles. And then just like that she left. You can’t play those games by yourself.

Now she is leaving again and I am well prepared. She is struggling with four Glad containers of oatmeal cookies she asked me to bake (“Less sugar, more raisins, please.”) and though I am happy that I will have the bathroom to myself again and that I won’t have to worry about what she’d like to do or eat or where she’d like to go tomorrow (not that she ever, EVER has any demands in regards to any of those things), I feel an imminent sadness for when she leaves. It is silly, believe me. I will see her in less than two weeks’ time, on her turf too. But this time it’s regret, the kind that comes when you’re old enough to feel the kind of nagging responsibility you owe to your aging relatives. Was I less cold to her? Did I make spend enough time with her? Did I make her feel welcome? Does she know I love her?

I tried, but could have tried harder. I tried, but could have tried harder. I tried, but could have tried harder. I don’t know, but I hope she does.

Museums

BettyLeave a comment

Mothers, aunts and grandmothers are simple people. I took them to the Getty Center in Los Angeles today, an attempt to play tour guide and to get my poor grandmother, a visitor from Taiwan, out of the confines of our small town. So far, she’s taken multiple trips to Costco, Target, and the Desert Hills Premium Outlets where she and even more aggressive women from China (with deeper wallets) nearly cleared out the Coach factory story. We failed miserably two years ago to show her any culture and decided this time to take her to some museums and whatnot.

A few days ago they had such a marvelous time at the Huntington Gardens that I suggested they might like to see the Getty as well. My aunt was overjoyed and reshuffled her appointments before I could retract my suggestion and before I knew it it had turned into a day trip of sorts, the kind where grandmother feels compelled to move all her Tai-Chi videos from her camera to her computer to make room for the thousands of photos she might take at the Getty and Aunt Yang comes prepared with thermos full of hot water and a nylon sack filled with nuts and oranges. 
I suppose I encouraged this. At the Huntington Gardens I had come alive when I came across Hopper’s “The Long Leg,” a part of the Huntington Art Gallery’s permanent exhibit, and told them everything I knew about Hopper (which I’m proud to say isn’t little), and then got in the habit of talking about the rest of the art in general (I did take half a European Art History Survey course at Berkeley, don’t you know, which makes me nearly an expert) and ended up playing docent. My aunt and grandmother thought it marvelous and thought it the best museum tour they had ever taken because well, it was given by me. 
“You know you are the most marvelous young person I have ever met,” my aunt said to me over and over again, “You must know how special you are to be willing to spend so much time with us old people, and to drive us here and there and to explain the art to us! This Hopper fellow! The Long Leg! I will try very hard to remember it. You have educated me today, made me less of a savage.” 
My mother, not so easily impressed, pointed at a sculture of Pandora and said, “So she must be holding a box of soap and is about to bathe.” 
It was quite a busy day at the Getty. We arrived around 11:30AM and at 12:30PM joined a forty-five minute garden tour led by an enthusiastic woman named Debbie who spoke much more and more loudly than the average docent, but who was quite good, and kept her whole group of about twenty people whose ages ranged from 12 – 77 enrapt at what she had to say. I have now forgotten the names of most of the plants and trees she pointed out, but will forever remember the sight and smell of a low, long leaved shrub called “society garlic.” 
The day was sparkling clear with just the faintest layer of smog hanging over Downtown, and everywhere we looked it was just miles and miles of Los Angeles in all its spread out splendor. There! West Hollywood and UCLA; there! that tall cluster, Downtown LA, and over there, Santa Monica, sitting before the deep crystal blue of the Pacific and of course the long undulating hump of Catalina Island. And before all that there were the Getty’s own beautiful gardens. The older women walked, more often in silence than chattering, as I thought they would, with their heads either bent low or looking up, hands held lightly behind their backs. They wondered about the various plants and the stones and the logistics of construction. 
“How did they get all these heavy stones up here?” my mother asked over and over again. 
“Machines,” I said. 
Photo by Very Highbrow on Instagram. 
An hour or so later she asked again and I wondered if she had forgotten that the center was built in the early 90’s and that it was not one of those eerie mysteries such as Stonehenge or Easter Island, but I had to admit the building itself had an ageless quality about it. My grandmother busied herself photographing everything that caught her eye, from the buildings to the tiniest succulents that looked up at all who walked by, to indolent, confused poodles who sat sunning themselves on the pale pink tile stones. Young children squealed about, running up the wide flat steps, swinging from the handrails, and then rolling down the wide expanse of lawns. We saw young couples on well-intentioned “let’s do something cultural” dates, young people dragged there by their parents and young college students back for winter break trying to place what they’d learned in their very first art history survey courses. We saw elderly couples wearing comfortable shoes, sweater vests and blazers who in their retirement rediscovered the leisure necessary to truly enjoy art and who made up the bulk of the guided tours. From them I made a mental note to enjoy my old age. We heard German, French, Italian, Korean, and of course Chinese being spoken around every bend, and marveled at various sculptures and the shape of Robert Irwin’s Zen. 
According to the docent this is a puzzle to tickle the garden goer’s 6th sense: spirituality. 
After the garden we went to see the art, though we skipped the current exhibition of Renaissance art. Not my favorite. I took them straight past the most crowded room where Van Gogh’s Irises were being photographed into oblivion and into a darker room in the corner, where light seemed almost unwelcome. There, we saw Degas’ “The Star,” and Lautrec’s “The Model Resting.” 
The Star or Dancer Taking a Bow, Edgar Degas 1877
                
The Model Resting Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 1889
Both paintings gave me something to think about. I love the first but was drawn like a magnet to the latter, for reasons I can’t quite place. 
We left at an hour or so before sundown. Emerging from the West Pavilion we were met with the following view. 
Photo by Very Highbrow on Instagram. 
 Taking the tram back down to the parking structure my mother, aunt and grandmother looked tired from walking and squinting at both the sun and the tiny details of a hundred paintings, but they were happy. 
“What a wonderful day you’ve given us,” my aunt cooed, and I could only nod in assent. Not because I gave them anything, but because there were places like this, filled with beautiful art and surrounded by glorious sun-kissed vistas to which I could bring them. 

Peeping Toms

BettyLeave a comment

My mother is like a child, though not in a bad way. I marvel at her ability to marvel at the things I take for granted or give little to no thought at all – and push away thoughts of Alzheimer’s to the nether regions of my brain, hoping never to have to retrieve them – and wonder what the switches in her mind look like and who is running them. Happy, mischievous little elves, those switch operators. 

“Look here!” they say, “Look there! Bet you never noticed that before.” 

And obediently my mother will turn and look. Her eyes will grow wide and she will look at me with the kind of earnest surprise that only earnest surprise can generate. Her long index finger will point, and she will ask me something or other, the most obvious question. A restating of the facts themselves, but with a question mark at the end. 

My reaction is always a slackening of the lower jaw and the wrinkling of the top left corner of my nose – a physical embodiment of incredulity. 

“Mother,” I will inevitably say, “nothing has changed. It has always been like this.”    

Last night  she walked into my room and noticed that the louvers on my shuttered windows were open. Let me provide some history. Those windows have been on the south side of my room since the beginning of the house itself. The owners before us outfitted them with shutters that open towards the inside. On a sunny day, the idea was, the girl in the room could open the shutters and enjoy the flowers blooming in the side yard and smell the clean scent of freshly washed laundry sunning on the clotheslines. Such was the function of the side yard: a drying place for clean clothes, a sunning place for pretty white rose bushes or other flowers the lady of the house preferred. 

That elderly couple moved away some twenty years ago and sold their beloved one story house to a young Chinese couple with two young children. The Chinese man was quite fastidious – he was partly by nature and partly by upbringing and training punctual and organized, kept documents in files labeled by date and kept his clothes neatly hung or folded in the closet. He was not obsessive compulsive by any means, but he liked things neat and believed that everything had its place. He was raised in an orderly, tasteful house that blended spare Chinese elegance (his mother) with spots overflowing with shiny English knickknacks (his father). Despite this difference in aesthetic tastes, both parents were punctual and neat. It is odd then, that he married a woman who arrived an hour late to their first blind date and would, for the rest of their married lives, cause him to arrive at least ten minutes late and with high blood pressure to any functions they attended together. This woman was not organized by nature or by training, though to sustain the marriage she tried. She was also by nature a hoarder and this tendency extended to her love of flora. 

When husband and wife moved to their new home formerly occupied by the tasteful elderly couple of Anglo-Saxon descent, the woman immediately set about filling the back and side yards with her hodgepodge of greenery. What had once been a nice, orderly aisle reserved for clean laundry and a few carefully pruned rose bushes was now overrun with pots large and small filled with odd plants of eastern origin, none of which the daughter, whose windows faced this side yard, found aesthetically pleasing. Her mother liked weird spiky plants whose arms looked like crab legs or were wide and flat like ugly green belts. She was loathe to part with any plant and her female relatives took advantage of this, and over the years, added to her mother’s unsightly collection by bringing over their own ugly houseplants that were on the verge of death. 

“Here,” they said to the girl’s mother, “I no longer know what to do with this plant. Perhaps you can nurse it back to health and make it bloom again.” 

Potted Plants,  Paul Cezanne 1890 

It may come as a surprise to some, but a dying ugly plant does not look too much different from a thriving ugly plant. But when one is a plant hoarder, a plant is a plant. The girl’s mother also liked orchids, but these she kept hidden in a green house that sat on the hill, at the back. Instead of complain to her mother, the girl decided at a young age to keep the shutters closed but the louvers open to let in sunlight. She found the light itself pleasing, and did not think about the mess her mother had made of the side yard. At night, it did not matter. Everything was dark, and as the side windows faced the side yard, through which no one ever walked but her mother, the girl did not bother to close the louvers. Ever.

For some twenty years, it can be said, the girl’s mother would come into her bedroom at the end of the night and chat with the girl, telling her stories and doling out the advice only a mother is able to provide. The girl’s bed is positioned directly underneath the shutters, the louvers cast downward at whomever should sit or lie in the bed. They have always been positioned so, and even when the house cleaners come and wipe at the dust and alter the angle of the tilt, the girl will always, always re-position the louvers just so. See, unlike her father, the girl is more than fastidious, she is particular. Especially in regards to the position of the louvers.

They are never closed. The girl believes this takes away from the room’s dimensions. Makes it seem more narrow than it is. So there you have it, the essential point of that history: the louvers are never closed.

Back to last night. I looked up from the book I was reading and stared at her, wondering what in the world she was talking about.

“Your windows are open!” she said again, “You must close them at night!”

“Whatever for?” there was audible alarm in my voice, though my mother failed to notice and instead turned to me with alarm written over her face, as though she couldn’t believe I didn’t know what dangers lurked outside the windows of our small, quiet town.

“It’s not safe! Someone could peek inside and see you!”

“Mother, these windows face the side yard, which is not even connected to the road.”

She waved her hand at me, “You don’t understand. It’s not safe. There could be a bad man out there.”

“No mother, there are only hideous plants.”

She smiled and sat down in her usual spot on the edge of my bed, then proceeded to tell me about the peeping tom that had plagued her and her sister when they were young ladies in their teens.

“Your aunt Joannie and I shared a room and one night I felt someone looking at us, and when I looked to the window, there was a peeping tom! Leering at us right from the window! I screamed and then of course he ran off, but see, there are so many strange people out there.”

I nodded slowly, amused by both the story and my mother’s imitation of her younger self, a personality which emerges constantly and uncannily in her person’s current version. She is, despite her poor memory, someone I would deem ‘ageless.’ And yet in spite of her poor memory something about my south windows prompted a scene of her younger self. We all have those moments, I suppose.

“If I lived in a bad neighborhood in a big city, I’d keep the windows shuttered,” I assured her, “but here…” -I looked up between the louvers and scanned the darkened windows, half expecting to see a pair of bright, leery eyes, but was met with only the faint reflection of my bedside lamp – “I don’t think we need to worry about it.”

“Even so,” my mother said, “even so. You can never be too careful.” But she made no movements to close the louvers.

We chatted some more and she rose to leave, though not before taking one last look outside the windows. She saw nothing, I’m sure – it was a darker night than usual, the moon was off somewhere being bashful – but instead smiled to herself, thinking not of the peeping tom that had frightened her so many years ago but of all her darling odd plants, spiky leaves and waxy arms reaching out or hanging from the old clothesline. They stand in the dark in messy, uneven clusters like poorly conditioned soldiers of a decrepit army. Perhaps they protect me when I sleep.

Baby Steps 2

BettyLeave a comment

Now, I’m having lunch with grandpa three days a week and I don’t bring a camera or even a notebook with me. The time is still not right, and there may be a chance it will never be “right.” It takes only a day or two to become accustomed to standing over my grandmother’s stove, stir frying peas and slender green onions from her garden. Slicing navel oranges for dessert. He watches TV as I cook, and when everything is ready (it usually takes fifteen minutes or less to assemble everything), I say, “Let’s eat!” and he shuffles over to take his seat.

Lunch is a quiet affair, the only sound being the TV’s, and my occasional question. “Do you like this? Can you bite this? Do you want more?” It’s alright. Yes. No. Sometimes, I ask him questions about the past and he answers tersely, with a word or two, not angrily or sullenly, just matter-of-factly. Though sometimes he will say dismissively, “You don’t understand.” I don’t. But don’t is different from “will never.” And it’s okay. I let him dismiss me because we are on different planes. There must be much on his mind, both their past and his future, though the latter is slowly taking priority. More than ever he refers to the house as “my father’s house” or “Kwang-tien’s House.” He is wondering about place, his place. About “home” and life and living. 

But I am patient. I lean towards the positive, as, pleasantly apparent sometimes, does he. After lunch on Monday we took a walk in the park, the first time since the previous Wednesday my grandpa has left the house on a weekday. The clouds from the morning rain had parted and it was surprisingly warm outdoors. There was sun. My grandpa agreed easily to the walk and I hid my surprise, pretending that this was his usual routine. Better to fake it till he makes it so. Nearing the park’s cul-de-sac, we spied an old man in a wheelchair, using his toes to shuffle himself forward.

“That’s old man Zhang,” my grandpa said, nodding towards the diminutive figure, “he lives with his daughter. His legs are no good and he can’t hardly see, but his ears are very sharp.”

In a rare demonstration of his social abilities, grandpa nodded towards Old Man Zhang. “Let’s go say hello.”

We crossed the street and Grandpa called to him. The man slowly turned the wheelchair around with the tips of his toes, and I was surprised to see how healthy and pleasant he looked. His eyes, though cloudy with cataracts, glistened and his complexion was unmarred by liver spots. Aside from his obvious handicap, he seemed to be in good health, and in good spirits. He nodded at me and said hello.

“Taking in some sun?” Grandpa asked him.

“Yes, yes,” Zhang said, “I haven’t left the house for days.” It feels very nice out here.”

 “The rain,” grandpa said, “now it’s stopped.”

“”Yes, yes, finally,” Zhang said. “Very nice indeed.” 

The conversation was short as it usually is with two elderly men who do not know each other very well. 

 “Well, we’re just taking a walk,” grandpa said, and Zhang nodded kindly for us to continue on our way.

“They came to your grandma’s funeral,” he told me as soon as we were out of ear shot.

“That’s nice, but I don’t remember seeing anyone in a wheelchair.”

“Not him, don’t be ridiculous,” grandpa said, exasperated, “He can’t go anywhere in that state.”

“What’s wrong with his legs?”

Grandpa looked at me like I was stupid, “He’s old! That’s what happens when you get old. Your legs fail and you can’t walk. A lot of old people are rolling around in wheelchairs.”

I pointed to grandpa’s legs, “But you walk just fine.”

He scoffed, “That’s because I’m not old.”

I laughed. I really was that stupid. “Oh of course you’re not,” I said quickly, “Far from it.”

The sun was still shining and the air was oddly balmy. We had walked one lap around the entire park. Grandpa said he could walk a few more just around the playground.

Gustave Caillebotte The Park On the Caillebotte Property at Yerres, 1875 Oil on Canvas

 “Good,” I said. I eyed the changed landscape of the playground that had once been filled with a seesaw, monkey bars and a small jungle gym, but now had only a swing set with four swings. It would do. “I’ll be on the swings.”

“You do that,” he said, and for the next half hour it was just the two of us at the park, doing things we used to do all the time when we were younger. 

Baby Steps

BettyLeave a comment

Initially, I sought to spend every other weekday afternoon with my grandfather to make good on a suggestion I’d made the evening my grandmother was hospitalized. I had just had dinner with a friend in town from Switzerland – she was a flight attendant – and, having heard from my mother that she was headed to the hospital, I thought, “Well, I’m heading back from Long Beach, so I’ll stop by grandpa’s house to keep him company.”

My grandfather is a tortured introvert. He can keep to himself forever and he very nearly would if it weren’t for the constant flow of sons and daughters and grandchildren visiting him, even long before grandma fell ill. She was the social one whose voice could always be heard, not necessarily telling stories, but doling out advice on how best to fry a fish, knead the dough for a green onion pancake, pinch the seams of the perfect dumpling – my grandfather would sit in either of two spots: his chair at the table, slightly tilted left so he could watch the tv as well, or a heavy mahogany chair with his back to the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. The latter was his TV chair, though it faced the wall ajacent to the TV rather than the TV itself. Only recently I asked grandpa if his neck had any issues, from spending hours twisted in one direction. He looked at me blankly and shook his head. The neck was fine.

That October evening, my entire family was still ten years younger. I was driving away from a friend I’d made in another country, my head brimming with the plans we made to travel in the near future. She, as a flight attendant, could request destinations a few months in advance and had yet to see Asia, where I planned to be in less than three month’s time. Our lives felt fuller from the conversation alone, conducted over a small cafe table near my grandfather’s house. I had just dropped her off at the hotel when my mother called me.

“It doesn’t look good,” she said, and I shook my head in the dark, silently accusing my mother of jumping as she usually did to the worst conclusions. Grandma being in the hospital was nothing new. She would be out again in a few days’ time.

Still, this time was heavier – not final, just heavier – the result of accumulated fear and anxiety and of course, facts. The fact that grandma had been falling more than usual, had more difficulty breathing than usual. Throughout all this my grandfather sort of faded into the background of our worried brains. He was okay for now, tough as nails, the stoic, the stone. I dialed his number as I drove past the dark freeway on ramp. It was 9PM – on a normal evening grandpa and grandma would be winding down, watching one last Chinese variety show or news broadcast before turning in – but tonight he answered the phone as though he’d been standing by it all evening.

“Hello?”

“Hi Lao Ye,” I said, “It’s Betty.”

“Oh Betty,” he said. It was not unusual for me to detect disappointment in his voice when his wife was at the hospital and someone not at the hospital with her called.

“I’m just passing through,” I said, “Can I stop by?”

“Sure sure.” He hung up in his usual way, before I could say goodbye. It didn’t matter, I would see him soon.

I drove as my grandfather most likely slept that night and the many nights after that: fitfully, building upon the worry my mother had transferred to me over the phone, and wondering how he felt right now. He’d been the one to find her so many times, more than once covered in blood in the middle of the night, her head cracked open, her eyes swollen and cheeks bruised. I thought about the last time I saw grandma without a nasty bruise or scar on her face…I couldn’t remember. As an octogenarian with poor lung function and an inflammatory diet (high in fat, salt and sugar), she healed slowly if at all. She would pass away with the mother of all scabs on her upper lip, but at the moment, the scab was still small.

I parked across the street from the familiar house in which I’d lived until I was six, when we moved to the Park and my parents asked my mother’s parents to move in. My grandpa, a tortured believer in self-reliance who despises handouts to this day refers to the house, at least to me as, “your father’s house.” It is my father’s house, as many things belong to many people, though in name only. I rang the doorbell and almost instantaneously a voice called out, “Ah Jun?”

“Yep, it’s me, Grandpa.”

The garage door rolled up and my grandfather stood in the narrow doorway, one hand on the door frame, the other on the large white garage door control.

“Come in then,” he said.

We sat staring at each other for a while. The TV was off, though it buzzed faintly with cathodes still cooling and as usual there was only the long fluorescent light on over the tiled, built-in dinner table – anywhere else I would describe the light as a harsh, but that particular light over that particular table I have come to associate with my grandparents brightly lit faces, looking at me over the steam of a hundred delicious dishes. But tonight the table was bare except for napkins and reading glasses, and my grandfather’s insulated tea mug. We chatted about what, I forget now, and suddenly, I began to cry.

“What? What?” grandpa asked, looking horrified. Had I stopped by to sob uselessly?

“Grandma,” I choked, then could say nothing more.

He sighed and told me not to cry, “This is just how it is when you get old,” he said, as he’s said a million times before.

I nodded, though inside I disagreed. I did not think that old age had to be this way, filled with falls and hospitalizations and the fear and uncertainty all these things generated. My old age would not – and, looking at my grandfather that evening, I hoped his wouldn’t either.

I stopped crying then, convincing myself that partly, I was just tired from driving and for making those very ambitious plans with my Swiss friend. It was 9:30PM and grandpa did not seem to be tired at all. We began to speak again, though this time about other things, about the past – a favorite subject with old people, no? I started asking questions to pass the time, to get him talking, and that evening, he talked for much longer and with much more energy than I’d ever heard or seen him. We talked about the early days of his marriage, about running away from the communists on foot, with nothing but the clothes on his back, the various friends he’d made and the one or two he miraculously reconnected with decades later in the United States. He told me about the barbarism back then though barbarism is my word. He was thirteen when he witnessed his first decapitation.

“You saw someone murdered?” I said, my eyes wide with horror.

“Not just one!” he said almost indignant, “Dozens! I saw them decapitated right before my eyes.”

He made a motion with his hands, thrusting ten fingers upward, “The blood like this in the air. And the body,” one hand fell limply at the wrist, “just like that.”

“What did you feel? Were you terrified?”

And, so odd to me, he cocked his head to one side and pursed his lips as though he were trying to retrieve the feeling that had accompanied the observation.

“I don’t remember what I felt,” he said, “That’s just how it was in those days. Lives were not of much value.”

By then I had pulled out a small notebook and had filled nearly five pages with spotty notes. I wanted to listen, but knew I would forget – and looking up I saw the clock. My hand was tired from writing, and I still had to drive home. Though grandpa looked as though he could talk forever.

“I have so many stories,” he said, “You don’t even know.”

Vincent Van Gogh Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear 1889

 “I’d like to hear them,” I flipped the pages in my notebook, wondering if this was how biographies are written. “You know, Grandpa, if you don’t mind, I’d like to video tape you next time you tell me stories. I could write them down and share them with the rest of the kids. They’d like that.”

Secretly, I could tell that he too, would like it very much. He was introverted, sure, but at some point (around the decade your mortality rises to look you in the eye) a man wants to share what he knows, wants to be heard. My grandpa was on some strange raconteur’s high that night, and he did not disagree to my idea.

“I have so many stories,” he said again.

I stood up and nodded, “And I’d like to record them.”

We bid each other good night and I wondered if he had gone to bed with his old stories swimming around his head, or if, as I think is the case now, he heard nothing but the overwhelming silence of the empty spot next to him.

———————–

A few weeks later, driving grandpa to the hospital on the same day grandma would later pass away, I asked grandpa if he remembered my suggestion.

“I do,” he said, “but not now. With your grandma in the hospital like this, it is hard for me to say anything. The feeling is not right.”

“Okay,” I said and didn’t bring it up again.