Category: Relationships

Taking my Grandpa to the Cerritos Library

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Grandpa reading.

The Cerritos Library employs a small army of vigilant volunteers who patrols the stacks with straight backs and stern expressions that become sterner if its bearer spies a prohibited Starbucks cup or neon bag of Cheetos. They interrupt the quiet yet unfocused studies of various sleepy, glum-faced students and say, “Sir/Miss, you’re not allowed to have that. Please throw it away outside.” It is no wonder the Library, though having been renovated nearly a decade ago, is still pristine. Continue reading “Taking my Grandpa to the Cerritos Library” →

At the Library

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I took my grandfather to the library today, hoping that I could use his driver’s license to get myself a card to what is arguably, one of the best public libraries in Southern California. I had gone in there a few times since we’d moved away, but because the city was no longer my city, I did not feel as tied to it as I once had.

As we walked toward the building, he looked up at the English words and said, “What is it called again, this place?”

“Library,” I said, using the English word.

“Ah yes,” he nodded. The letters made sense again, “Library.” 

The children’s section, where I whiled away many evening hours of my childhood, was still on the left near the entrance, where I remembered it, though this time instead of the facade of a castle at the entrance there was giant glass aquarium filled with an impressive coral arrangement and a half dozen bulgy-eyed dory-fish swimming around, lost in thought. I wondered what it was like to be surrounded by all that information and not have any access to it. I paused before the tank, thinking perhaps grandpa would want to stop and look at the aquarium, something my paternal grandfather would certainly have done, but all old people are not created with equal interests.

There was a small exhibit of Chinese paintings, among them a comical scroll of simple swans painted with a single stroke. They seemed like calligraphic cartoons, and I thought too, that grandpa would take interest in this, but he merely glanced at the paintings, acknowledged that they were Chinese art (as though it were expected the library feature Chinese art at the precise moment he decided to return) and walked ahead.

“Go ask them about the card,” he said, nodding towards the circulation desk.

A young Hispanic girl kindly informed me that as the card would be under my grandfather’s name, he would have to be present each time I wanted to check something out, even if it was for him.

And what if I were to get my own, but as a non-resident?

“It’s one hundred dollars a year,” she said.

I looked around at the marbled floor, the high glass ceilings, the art on display in various glass cases and on the walls. I saw a “Periodicals” section that seemed to have every magazine in the world on display, along with row after row of shiny computers all connected to the world wide web where whatever wasn’t on the shelves could be accessed via a single click. A giant Christmas tree stood at the far end of the library, decked out with expensive looking ornaments and surrounded by beautifully wrapped gifts. Opposite the children’s “wing,” was a reading corner, lavishly done up like some English baron’s living room, replete with a working fireplace, comfy arm chairs, and wood paneled walls. The library had real wood shelves, none of the aluminum fixtures used at most public libraries I’d visited, and the bathrooms rivaled those of any five star hotel. And of course there were the books! The Multimedia! There were multiple copies of the latest bestsellers, which at my town’s library were only available for rent, and a wide array of literary paperbacks, all carefully wrapped in sturdy plastic, though almost all of which seemed brand new. The books were barely touched, as most of the kids didn’t really seem to read anymore, but came to the library in droves anyway, to digest comic books and use the computers. In the corners and along the sides there were sturdy study desks with bright lights and electricity sockets – just like the ones found at any fine university library – and almost all were occupied by students from the local high school (right across the street!) and the community college.

Auguste Renoir Woman Reading 1875-1976

I thought self pityingly of my town’s small library, about the size of a three car garage, with its six outdated computers and a paltry magazine selection that was only possible because of generous donors. New releases were rented out for profit to keep the librarians fed, and I had the feeling the library survived off the failing memories of various seniors, whose forgetfulness meant late fees… it was a sad thought, but probably true. If it ever came down to a battle of resources, my town’s library would not even be David’s toe to the Cerritos Public Library’s Goliath. They had a sculpture garden. We had a rolling cart with out of print (not the kind you collect) books for sale. What our local library had were plenty of children’s books and an impressive selection of DVD’s and audiobooks considering the library’s limited sized, but then again most of the patrons – young children and senior citizens – had limited tastes or simply did not get their reading materials from the library anymore. A good library, one a city found worthy of sustaining, was hard to find.

If my grandfather wasn’t there with me, I’d have paid the 100 dollars. 

But he was there in all his frugality and I told him the price.

“That’s steep,” he said.

“But look at this place, Grandpa. You’ll just have to come with me once a week or so.”

He nodded with his faux grim expression, as though I were twisting his arm, but I could tell he didn’t mind.

“I can’t remember the last time I was here,” he said, as the girl started typing in my grandfather’s information.

“Cousin Wendy’s wedding,” I said, “She got married upstairs somewhere, in that nice bright room.”

“Oh that’s right.”

The girl finished typing and told grandpa he’d have to stand up to take an ID photo for the card.

“Wow that is hi-tech,” I said.

She laughed. With the resources at stake, it made sense.

Grandpa stood up and stared at the small camera mounted in the wall next to the circulation desk.

“Step back,” the woman said, and I repeated this to him in Chinese.

He stepped back as directed and gazed into the little lens. Just before she took the photo, he removed the blue baseball cap he was wearing. He smiled, though slightly too late. The photo came out as his photos usually do: him looking mildly stunned, as though processing some revelation. In this case it may have been, “What the hell am I doing at the library at 3 in the afternoon?”

The card came out and the girl smiled as she handed it to grandpa.

“It’s a good photograph,” she said, “Very handsome.”

He smiled and said thank you as he took it. With this wonderful key, we went off to look for books.

Odd Philosophy

Betty1 Comment

A few days before Thanksgiving my mother and I began taking walks together in the morning. At first it was a way for us to start talking again, not that we were angry with each other, but because Grandma’s passing on top of our already disparate schedules had made our once nightly talks impossible. She often came home from class or badminton or dinner with my grandfather with little time left to get her classroom affairs in order never mind an hour to talk with me. There were students to Skype with and new teaching techniques to learn, also via Skype. And of course, there was the obligatory time spent with her husband, who has long groused about (but is still secretly quite proud of) his wife’s teaching career.

My mother is a busy woman, and I like walking. So we walk.

Claude Monet Woman with Parasol, 1875

On our last few walks however, it seems whatever I had wanted to say to my mother and whatever she wanted to impart to me during these rare quiet mother-daughter moments has been said, which means there are longer silences as we meander through our quiet, leafy neighborhood. Having discussed our entire family at length (our favorite subject being her husband, my father) we now gaze admiringly at our neighbor’s well-manicured lawns and window treatments, their Christmas decorations and their choice of flora, of which my mother, with her proud green thumb, is the ultimate critic.

I have always seen my mother as an emotionally intelligent person. She possesses an uncanny ability to place herself in others’ shoes, which makes her a talented imitator and performer. A fortuneteller once told her that she would have made a great actress, the kind the spotlight couldn’t get enough of, but that she was blessed to not have to work so hard. Instead, my mother teaches Chinese to students young and old and she teaches about life to me and whomever else can recognize a good life teacher when they see one.

My mother is wise when it comes to relationships – it takes an emotional quotient near genius to stay married to my father for so long – and possesses an interesting and enviable blend of blithe disregard for what others think. I would not say necessarily, that she is a complex woman, especially not after what I am about to write, but the fact that what follows comes from the woman who has also written the handbook of the heart which I carry to and through all my relationships, makes her a most complex figure.

This morning, after we’d been walking for ten minutes  in complete silence, my mother asked, “Grace (referring to my friend Grace, who currently resides in Miami), did she leave already?”

“Yes,” I said, “She left yesterday.” 

“I have been thinking,” my mother said, nodding to herself “That every day, many people fly here and there. So many flights take off every day.”

I stopped and looked back at her, wondering if she would say anything more, but that was it. She had arrived at a conclusion and she shared it with me.

Whether my mother notices my strange stares is questionable, but she has a habit of walking with her eyes up in the air, a soft, relaxed expression on her face. Perhaps these walks is when she lets her mind, as her feet do, wander.

Much of what she says is a result of mental autopilot – the stuff we are compelled to say when the weather is particularly nice and the road seems more peaceful than usual. She has been saying much of it for years, if not to me, then silently to herself when she used to walk alone:

“The weather is perfect today!” (As ninety-nine percent of the time the weather is, in Southern California).

“We are so lucky to live here. It is just like a big park.” (It is, hence our city’s name).

“Look at those trees just beginning to change. Those colors are gorgeous!” (Despite not liking the fall, my mother has endless compliments for it).

But my mother does not just gush. She is not without her knives – razor sharp (often racist, always obvious) observations and judgements that slash through any canvas.

If a fat person is walking our way: “Oh ho, a fat person.”

If an Asian  person walks our way (and in a slightly subdued voice): “Asian,” then a rapid succession of guesses at what kind of Asian until they walk close enough to clarify: “Oh, so they were Korean/Chinese/Japanese.” 

And a rare but occasional sight, a fat Asian person, “How could an Asian person be so fat?” 

If we walk by a particularly beautiful front yard: “This yard is beautiful.”

If the yard has been neglected: “This yard is hard to look at.”

Her expression will be the same one she dons when I emerge from my room wearing heels that are too high or with my hair down, which she won’t shy away from saying makes me look “wild.” If the owner of said yard were to peer out from their kitchen window at precisely the same moment two Asian women are walking by, they would see the younger woman walking a few steps ahead, bemusedly waiting for her mother to catch up with her, and the older woman standing with arms behind her back, neck slightly outstretched and eyes furrowed, lips pursed into a frown – judging, judging. My mother, should their eyes meet, would smile and nod politely though be thinking, “Fix your yard. It is an embarrassment.”

Then she will continue walking slowly towards me and thank goodness the houses are all set quite a ways back from the road, because my mother does not (or does not care to) know how to whisper. She will administer the clincher: “I’ll bet they are Asian.”

And here I will give her my own disapproving look, but she will smile at me and keep on walking.

Also, this morning, a blonde woman leading a blonde horse and an aged German Shepherd walked our way. The horse’s hooves clopped as my mother began her narrative. This is probably what the Caucasians dislike about us: Asians who speak Asian in front of them, but at a time like this I would prefer the Caucasians not understand my mother.

“A horse,” she said.

“Yep,” I said.

“It’s blonde.”

“Yep.”

“Just like the woman.”

When the woman came closer, we both smiled and said good morning, noticing that the woman was in fact quite pretty, with bright blue eyes and a clear complexion. She wore no makeup and had her hair in a loose ponytail. She carried herself with the easy elegance that comes with having the kind of money that allows you not only to own a horse but also know how to ride it correctly, and despite being in her mid forties (though in truth with Caucasian women it is not uncommon for Asians to over guess their age), kept a trim figure. As soon as she was out of earshot (or at least to our backs), my mother and I turned to each other to voice the obvious things we were both thinking.

“She was really pretty,” I said, “Very elegant.”

“Yes,” my mother agreed.

A few moments later, I had stopped to pick up some pine cones, planning to paint them gold and silver for holiday decorations. My mother, seeing the trouble I was having trying to hold them all, offered to help.

From my bunch of about ten, she took exactly one.

I waited for her to take a few more, but she seemed lost in thought. Processing. 

“If I were white,” she finally said, “I would only marry a white person.” 

Clutching the pine cones to my chest, I was reminded of my grandmother’s stay in the ICU and her reaction to seeing a black nurse and black respiratory therapist working at the same time. She assumed that they, both being African American, must be married. Surely this sort of prejudice wasn’t genetic? Surely my mother had a more… sophisticated reason for saying something like this?

“Why?” I asked, though it may have been more appropriate to say, “What the -” followed by an expletive. I was aware that my fingers were beginning to cramp.

Perhaps my mother was thinking of all the Asians we had walked by in the last few days, probably all on their way back to houses set behind neglected yards. Whatever the thought, she merely responded, almost wistfully, “There are so few white people left.”

I looked at her, the pine cones poking my hands and wrists, and marveled at her strange opinions. In the Park, statistically speaking, we Asians were still very much a minority. But despite her role as an educator, my mother has never been one to cite statistics (and god help you if you choose to believe any statistics she does cite. They all fall, invariably, under one kind: unreliable). Rather, she views the world at a driveway’s length and calls it as she sees it, not necessarily (or ever, really) as it is. Political correctness and tact figure not at all. At first I worried about this. But then I thought about her world, parts of which are also my world: the Chinese school, the large Chinese family, the mostly Chinese badminton club with a handful of white people, and the yearly two or three week long trips to China and Taiwan.

I thought too, of other worlds and of the times my mother visited them – how when going through her photos of her first ten country tour to Europe I had asked where several of the photographs were taken and she answered earnestly, “Oh it’s written on the back.” I flipped each photograph over to find “Europe” written in my mother’s educated hand.

I don’t think it is worth my worry. More often than not, our bubbles protect us by keeping us away from others, and on top of that, my mother has that magical quality where even the most cutting remark can seem painless and in the recipient’s best interest. She is like a surgeon, sometimes. 

And of course, there is her garden, the less tended to aspects of which are behind and to the sides of our house. Though, and I would never tell my mother, our front yard, I think, screams to any passersby who care to note: “Chinese people live here.”   

Alone on Thanksgiving

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Unexpectedly, a small army of my mother’s badminton friends banded together to buy several lavish flower arrangements for my grandmother’s memorial service and for my mother. A massive pot of stunning purple and violet orchids were delivered to the chapel and a few days later, a young Hispanic man showed up at our door with two smaller but no less gorgeous arrangements for our home. Together, they cost a pretty penny and my mother was grateful.

“I ought to do something for them,” she said, “They really didn’t need to spend so much money and send so many flowers.”

It was decided that to show our thanks, she would buy them little candies and I would bake cookies to put together in pretty gift bags.

I baked an assortment of holiday spiced cookies: molasses gingerbread, cinnamon oatmeal lacies and pumpkin spiced walnut cookies and give each contributor a dozen or so to share with their family. I kept the oven on for what seemed like two days straight to bake enough for seventeen people, and when everything was packaged and wrapped, my mother was delighted in the overall effect.

So were the friends at the badminton club.

She came home on the evening after all the gifts had been delivered and I asked her how it went.

“Oh they were all so happy,” she said, “especially Ju Pei.”

“Who’s Ju Pei?”

“Don’t you remember the woman with the daughter that doesn’t like her?”

I did. I had very nearly written a novella about her.

“She loved the cookies,” my mother said, then her eyes got wide, “and she ate the whole dozen right in front of me.”

I stared at my mother. My cookies are known to be larger than the average sized cookie – whatever that means – and I always end up making ten or so less than the recipe calls for because of this.

“She ate all twelve in one sitting?”

“In less than thirty minutes,” my mother said.

My mother had presented her the gift bag upon her arrival at the club and Ju Pei was there, forty-five minutes earlier than when her lesson was scheduled to start. She often did that, as she disliked being alone in her house and passed most of the afternoon at the badminton club.

“She was so happy when I handed her the bag, and even happier when she saw the cookies. We started talking and she just reached in, eating one after another. By the time her lesson was starting, the bag was empty.”

“Didn’t she feel sick?”

My mother shook her head, her expression as surprised as mine, “No, not at all. She just kept on saying how delicious they were and how lucky I was to have a nice talented daughter who took the time to bake things for her friends.”

“Wow,” I said, “Well, that’s really nice of her. I guess I can make more for her next time, since she liked them so much.”

“Yes…” my mother said slowly, “Though she plays so much badminton to maintain her sixty pound weight loss…so I’m not sure if you should make her quite so many cookies.”

After her lesson Ju Pei came to chat with my mother again, asking if my mother and her husband were free to have dinner with her on Thanksgiving.

“I was thinking,” Ju Pei began, “I’d like to take you and your husband out to dinner on Thanksgiving. To Capital Seafood in Irvine. We’ll have lobster and crab! You can bring your daughter too.”

“That’s very nice,” my mother said, and trying to phrase the obvious as gingerly as possible, “but we spend Thanksgiving with our family.”

Ju Pei’s expression, my mother said, could not be described as crestfallen, but discouraged was certainly apt.

“Who the hell invites someone to dinner on Thanksgiving?” I asked, incredulous.

“Well she didn’t know that we made a big to-do about it, because she never celebrates with her daughter.” 

“Why not?”

“She says her daughter never asks her to dinner at her house, never mind Thanksgiving.”

“That’s really a pity,” I said, feeling terrible for the woman. I thought ahead to all the faces I looked forward to seeing on Thanksgiving and how warm my aunt’s house felt, no matter how cold it was outside, no matter that we had just lost our grandmother. I imagined the woman eating alone at the Seafood Restaurant, a glistening, sautéed lobster on the table before her.

“I don’t know what you do as a mother, as a woman to end up like that,” my mother shook her head, “but I sure hope I’m not doing it now.”

I kissed my mother on the cheek, knowing that it wasn’t a so much a difference in action as it was in souls. The woman wasn’t a bad person – she had just been ill-advised and then, it seems, too narrow-minded and nearsighted. Impulsive too, perhaps. But from what my mother told me the woman was beginning to change.  She was definitely someone worth studying, but perhaps not right now. My mother and I had Thanksgiving with our family to think about.

Mahjong

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The Art of Playing Mahjong
The Art of Playing Mahjong

A few years ago I visited my grandparents at the same time an old friend of theirs, Grandma Dai, was visiting. She and her husband, a short man with spectacles and a shiny head shaped like a cod liver oil pill, were my grandparents’ longtime mahjong buddies. When they were all in relatively good health, Grandpa Dai would drive to grandma’s house, where an aluminum card table and four folding chairs would already be set up in the garage, along with a small TV dinner table where they would put nuts, an ashtray, and thermoses of tea. They would crack the garage door just enough so that the fumes from their many cigarettes would have somewhere to go, and the game would commence, stretching from the late morning until late evening.

It was an unspoken agreement my grandparents had with their children: either call before you visit, or simply drive on by when you noticed an unfamiliar car parked before a partially open garage door. My grandparents lived in a curious sort of denial: they didn’t smoke if we didn’t see it. They didn’t play mahjong for hours and hours if we didn’t see it. On occasion however, if my brother and I or any of my cousins happened to be in the vicinity, we would drop by anyway and what could my grandpa do but open the garage door fully to let us in? (For some reason, most of my family prefers to use the garage door as their home’s main entrance, leaving the front door for “company” and trick-o’-treaters.) The garage door would raise slowly, creakily, and an impressive amount of acrid second hand smoke would waft out. Even by the time the door was fully raised, much of it still lingered, casting a carcinogenic haze around the mahjong table and its players. A single 60 watt bulb lit the garage, hanging bleakly over the shiny white tiles. It was a depressing sight, and looking back, I wonder why they didn’t just play in the backyard where the sun was shining, the air was fresh, and they would be surrounded by my grandmother’s fragrant fruit trees.

On one such impromptu visit, I recall seeing my grandfather standing imposingly at the front of the garage door, several feet away from the recently vacated mahjong table, his hands behind his back, an impatient expression on his face. I had never played mahjong at the time, but I remember how the table looked: the long flat clear green plastic bars standing against a stout army of green-backed white tiles still unplayed. A small pile of used tiles sat in the middle: there was no mistake that we had interrupted them in the middle of an epic game. He bid us hello, and through the haze we saw Grandpa and Grandma Dai sitting at the table but in process of pushing themselves away. Grandma and Grandma Dai’s hair seemed to blend in with the smoke. Each had a small pile of pennies in front of them, small stakes for a game whose tiles are based on ancient Chinese currency, and on the tv tray next to them I spied the small lacquered guitar-shaped ashtray, a kitschy relic from God knows where, filled with smoking butts, some of which still burned like incense.

“Hello, children,” Grandma Dai would say, and we would say hello and nod politely, stiffly, for we knew that smoking was wrong and caused diseases and we could sense my grandparents’ discomfort that we had seen this relatively reckless side of them.

Sometime before I went to college or perhaps when I was in college Grandpa and Grandma Dai stopped coming around, and my grandparents gave up smoking. We no longer saw Grandpa Dai’s car in the driveway and the garage door was either completely open or completely closed. The Mahjong table stood folded next to the refrigerator in the garage, alongside the plastic drawers where my grandma stored her “special” shoes for going out. Over the years the smell of smoke, which had permeated the wooden walls of the garage, dissipated and was replaced by the smell of laundry, footsteps, and dust.

My grandparents still played the occasional game of mahjong, with whom I know not, but as the years stretched on, occasional petered out to never. I suppose hours and hours of the same game can get exhausting, but on some level mahjong, along with smoking and whatever other things they enjoyed in their younger years, seemed to them a thing of the past, intrinsically tied to their younger years (“younger” is also relative. I am talking about their seventies). When I visited and happened to see the mahjong table, I would ask about Grandpa and Grandma Dai, and my grandparents would say, “They are doing well, I think.” Then a few years back, before I saw Grandma Dai again, the story changed to “Not too well, Grandma Dai is sick.”

She had some sort of intestinal thing, my grandparents couldn’t say exactly, but each time I mentioned her grandma would shake her head and say, “She hasn’t got long.”

Then that day a few years ago, I was at grandma’s house when Grandma and Grandpa Dai suddenly dropped by for a visit. She came walking in through the garage door and I was surprised to observe that she was much thinner than when I’d last seen her. All the silver that had been in her short, curly hair back in their mahjong days had disappeared. Her entire mane had become a pure, clean white, as though her sickness and its subsequent “cure” had shocked her. Her complexion was clear, free from sunspots and though at that moment her body radiated fatigue and frailness, her eyes seemed bright. Whatever disease she had, she had fought it and now had energy to stay and chat a while to chat with grandma, whose health at the time was still quite robust.

When the Dai’s left, I turned to grandma and said, “She looks quite good, and she’s lost some weight.” Grandma huffed and shook her head in the way she does when it’s clear there are too many things I don’t understand, “She’s too thin, and she is weak. She hasn’t got long.”

That was many years ago.

Last Sunday November 11 at my grandmother’s funeral, I spotted Grandma Dai’s white mane from a mile away. She walked slowly on her granddaughter’s arm towards the chapel where two long lines of grandchildren stood all in black to welcome attendees. As her figure grew closer I saw that she wore a single black glove on her right hand and oval spectacles fitted with transition lenses. Aside from the mournful expression on her face, she appeared to be in good health. She had maintained her slender frame despite having shrunk a few inches since we last met and walked more steadily than my grandmother could in the last two years. Grandpa Dai was just a few steps behind, also in good health. They both moved, at least it seemed to me, without pain or shortness of breath, without walkers or canes, apparatuses that had become necessary in my grandmother’s last year. When they saw my grandfather, now an old widower, grandma Dai broke out into silent, heaving sobs. He patted her on the back and told her to buck up.

“My old half is in a better place,” he said.

After the service my family stood in a line, facing those who had attended and thanked each guest. They made a long line that wrapped around the chapel to view the body for a final time and when it was Grandma Dai’s turn, she crumpled again, grasping each of her departed friend’s children and burying her face into lapels and black cardigans. From where I stood near the end of the line, I could see her white hair disappearing into the arms of first my uncle, then my aunt, then my other uncle and my mother. She made her way slowly down the line until the casket was in view again just beyond her small figure.

Soon she was standing before me, the frail woman my grandmother had so many years ago, said with utmost certainty would not make it. She cried with hearty gasps of air into clear, healthy lungs. I thanked her for coming and she grasped my hands, putting the gloved hand on top of mine, an odd combination of paper and cloth. Grandpa Dai nodded with a sad smile. She let go of my hand and I watched them go, certain that they had more than a few years ahead of them. I looked back at the casket, my grandma’s own salt and pepper hair just visible atop the cherry wood edge. I wished her spirit patience. She would have her old mahjong gang back to play at a celestial table with heavenly cigarettes whose fumes would form clouds – that was certain as Mahjong’s prevailing East wind – but she would have to wait.

How to Pass Time in the Hospital

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For most of the time now, grandmother sleeps, in a body that she hardly seems to recognize. Her mouth is filled with canker sores. The scab on her upper lip, a result of her fall nearly three weeks ago, still has not healed – a paradoxical side effect of the oxygen mask she needs to keep her alive. She has lost weight and I was startled last night to feel how thin her calves had become, how loose the skin. But still, I repeated loudly what the nurses had said to me two weeks ago, “Grandma, all the nurses say you have excellent firm skin for someone your age.” We think she is sleeping, but we know too, that when you sleep all day, it is always a half sleep, never deep.

Before, when she still had energy to speak she lifted the oxygen mask just long enough to look at my mother and say, “How did it come to this?” 

It seems like half a year ago that the doctor deemed her well enough to commence physical therapy, but in truth it was just last week, when she showed signs of improvement and when her body was still hers. When we visited that week, we found two towels stuffed into the sides of her bed. We pondered these towels until evening after dinner she grabbed one between both hands, held it shoulder width apart, and began to twist and twirl them through the air in a choppy figure eight. It was an oddly elegant motion, and my grandmother performed it with a similar albeit shaky elegance, eyes closed and lips pursed. At times it appeared as though she were chanting. Even this tiny movement caused her to wheeze and I wondered about its effectiveness. My grandmother’s arms are strong, much more so than her legs which have undoubtedly been weakened further after two weeks of bed rest, but I suppose at this point you strengthen what you have and pray the rest will follow.

At the very least, the exercise helped pass the time. If you are a bed-ridden patient in the hospital, there is plenty of time. Twenty-four hours a day for fifteen days and counting, every hour blends seamlessly with the rest because in the hospital room with its darkened windows, one really cannot rely on the sun. My aunt, uncles and mother, my grandmother’s four children, take turns spending the night with her, given a break only occasionally by me, the unemployed grandchild with nothing but time and a stack of unread magazines. When the lights go out and my grandmother tries to sleep (though it is rare that she sleeps for an hour straight), I take out my CD player (a relic, nowadays) and listen to an audiobook. My aunt often asks me not to go – I am too young, I need my rest, etc. etc. but I stare at her sixty-year old face and say, “Yi-Mah, I’m twenty-six, it’s nothing to me.” And of course a few all nighters here and there are nothing, but she and I both know that if my grandma’s status were to suddenly take a turn for the worst, it had better be one of her own children than me, a grandchild with hardly any history. In the grand scheme of things, my life is but a tender, green branch, near the top of a towering oak tree.

Morning arrives and my grandmother stirs in her monstrous mechanical bed, not because she is well rested but because she is exhausted and tossing and turning is the only thing she can do to pass the night. I look at the clock; it is 6AM and neither of us has had any sleep. Between the beeping of her oxygen monitor and other patients’ IV drips and nurses who, so accustomed to their nocturnal lifestyles, forget to lower their voices in the hallway and the hourly visits of the Respiratory Therapist and the Nurse’s Assistant and the Nurse to administer one or two of my grandmother’s dozen steroid-based medications via the painful IV in the thin skin of her hand (re-positioned every two days to prevent infection) or the respirator or through the mouth, rest is clearly the only thing not administered to a patient in a hospital bed.

But still, the sun is just beginning to show itself and despite my brain crying for sleep and the danger of driving home in this exhausted state, I find myself striding out of the hospital’s sliding glass doors, slamming my car door and weaving in and out of traffic, racing home to my own bedroom which is free of other patients, free of fluorescent lights and free of commodes and bedpans and IVs. Anything but the confines of that small, dim space, to which my grandma is chained both by the oxygen tube that keeps her alive and by the weakness of her legs. Anything but that dim space in which she will remain until God or Zithromax and her seemingly impotent cocktail of corticosteroids are finally able to oust the stubborn phlegm in her lungs, though today it is clear that God is waiting because the drugs have failed.

To call myself a prisoner when I am free to leave at any time is to rub my grandmother’s present eternity in her face. But in truth I am trying to contrast a portrait of youth, myself, who knows nothing of patience and the most patient of patients, the etymology of which I am only beginning to grasp.

Movement

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Firstly, thank you to those who have sent kind words and thoughts to my family. They are greatly appreciated.

As I write this, my grandmother’s lungs slowly fill with water. She has now been in the hospital for fifteen days, mostly lying down in a bed that is more flexible than she. To move her up or down for meals, we move the bed with the push of buttons conveniently labeled with enormous arrows. And while her arms are still quite strong, it is getting harder for her to push herself up. Occasionally she will sit up with a sudden, startling swing of her legs to the left side of the bed and point at the bedside commode*.

“Move it here,” she will say, “I’d like to sit for a while.”

At first I wondered why she would prefer the hard plastic seat of the commode to the soft mattress, but I thought to my own preferences when dining out, how I prefer chairs to banquets, tables to booths. Squashy seats take away any strength you might employ in your core, the muscles of which enable you to sit up straight and feel dignified, part of regular society. Sometimes she just wants to sit up in bed, but most of the time, if she has made it this far, she wants to sit on the commode. Not use it, just sit on it.

So whomever is at her side will stand behind the commode with arms outstretched in case she falls backwards and wait as she lifts herself up and off the bed, stands for several shaky seconds on her soft legs and turns around inch by inch, the bulk of her weight supported by her strong arms pressing down on the mattress until finally, her bottom is aligned with the top of the commode. With a heroic exhalation, she sits herself down. Panting. This has been for the past two weeks, my grandmother’s main source of exercise and movement, as well as the maximum distance traveled: less than a foot, from bedside to commode.

For all of us with clean, clear lungs and strong, straight legs that can take us from here to there, and even for those of us in physical states similar to hers, my grandmother is a paragon of patience and endurance. A single night in the hospital has me crawling for fresh air, release, sunlight, and did I mention fresh air? The room is like a vault of stale, overused air, far from sterile and filled with the smells of a million different medications, over-boiled hospital food, and of course, other patients plus all that they emit. It is perpetually dim, even near the window, which hospital administration thought necessary to coat with a darkening agent, as though sunlight was the last thing recovering patients needed. As such the interior is brightened only by the  light of two fluorescent bulbs, one deemed “room light” and the other “reading.”

The Improvised Field Hospital     Jean Frederic Bazille, 1865 Oil on Canvas

There is a cheap grey cabinet where patients and family members can store their things, upon the doors of which hang plastic dry erase boards where at every change of shift an energetic nurse comes in with a marker and rigorously erases the last nurses name and writes her own. The board is a bare bones overview of every patient’s “needs,”: the name of the doctor, an elusive man named Hsu; the patient’s diet preferences which in my grandmother’s case is an unappetizing category called “mechanical soft,” and laughably, the “activity for the day,” which is more or less nothing, though hospitals prefer the term “bed rest.” Beneath it all is a row of yellow smiley faces, though not all smiling: they represent a range of emotions: a smile, a grimace, a frown, and a cartoonish scowl meant to signify extreme pain. This is the pain scale – and every patient has a “pain goal,” ranging from 0 to 10, though understandably, a 0 is written on every patient’s board.

To the side, there is a height-adjustable table with difficult wheels, for meals, and a single, vomit-colored chair for visitors. These cramped quarters are meant to accommodate two patients. In the past, before enormous hospital beds and giant breathing machines were invented, this might have been a semi-comfortable set up, but now the machines take up more than seventy percent of the space, forcing nurses and family members to do an awkward dance each time the patient needs something. A dingy yellow curtain divides the room in half, though only by sight, leaving everything else that ought to be blocked (light, sounds, smells) from the other side and the outside, utterly available to torment you and your neighbor. Due to the lack of space, the curtain almost always drapes over something: the vomit colored chair or the commode or the table where your food is placed. You wonder if the hospital ever launders that yellow curtain which is probably as old as the hospital itself and when you arrive at the conclusion, “Probably not,” shake the thought away because it is the wise thing to do.

Most awkward of all, as though privacy and the rest that might result from such privacy were, along with sunlight, unnecessary for full or at least partial recovery, is the fact that even if the room next door is empty, they will always fill the spare bed in your room first before using the empty room next door.

Thus for the past two weeks my grandmother has had a half dozen roommates whose faces she has never seen and some whose voices she has never heard but whose presence and sicknesses can be felt because they are less than three feet away. In years past my grandmother was always the first to leave. She was the one whose health rebounded quickly, astounding doctors and nurses alike. When she left, usually in a wheel chair, they would pat her on the back and say, “Don’t come back,” and she would nod happily, “Of course not.” But now the other patients have come and gone, come and gone, and my grandmother remains.

*For days I called it the “bedpan,” until a frustrated nurse corrected me. “This is the bedpan,” she said, holding up a plastic bedpan, “And this,” she pointed at the aluminum frame that held a plastic toilet seat which sat over a plastic tub for waste, “Is the bedside commode.” I stood there with my GRE textbook and said dumbly, “Thank you.” 

My Mother’s Nightmares

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My father left the other day for a two week trip to Asia, not for business, but for fun with retired friends. He is the leader/tour guide, meticulously planning their itinerary from departure to return, in charge of booking all plane tickets and hotels and even drafting a list of must-eat restaurants in each destination: Taipei, Macau, Shanghai, and some province I’m not sure of.   Continue reading “My Mother’s Nightmares” →