Two deep lines interrupt the roundness of your cheeks, hugging either side of your nose to frame the lips that taught me how to speak a different kind of English. A loving kind, where the simple words - grandma, granddaughter, and I love you very much - were our most used phrases, inked eternal on ripped-out legal notepads that traveled into my waiting hands across Taiwan strait. I have your round, flat nose. I miss you and I look at myself to search for your lines on my face; youth does not indulge me and keeps them still faint, cheeks hollow.
Only the future revisits the past. When I grow old I want my face to look just like yours. But I dread the time when I will have to look in the mirror to find you. So if I reach out to the glass, please take my hand. It is a bittersweet reminder to carry the face that loves me the most.
How does a child of poverty answer “what did you want to be when you grow up?” Decisively, when they get the chance. You are the second daughter of nine and the eldest of five surviving. Rarely are you asked the question to which you would have responded teacher, everytime. You lived out your dream in that one job that you had cleaning classrooms, then one you had while your third son had dropped out of high school and got involved with things he shouldn’t have gotten involved with. And you lived it writing multiplication tests for your grandchildren on the back of paper menus, graphite laying softly into cha chaan teng tablecloths. 23 x 9. 36 x 4. 58 x 8. The pencil passes from my hand to yours. It hovers over my answers, breathing onto them, making sure they are correct. Because math was never my strong suit, but somehow the tangled mess of numbers fell nicely in place for you, yielding to your gentle wrath. The pitter patter of phone numbers falling like raindrops meeting the ocean. You like numbers because they keep on going, giving you more words to say. And I like them because I like the sound of your voice.
When they used to ask me what I want to be when I grow up, I said singer, then car designer, and then writer. I still do not have a satisfactory answer. It never quite mattered to me whether I woke up old and grey to a desk crammed full of manuscripts, or retired rich, famous, and early. These alternate lives, they live well-fed in the cage of my imagination. They are satisfied. They are content. Instead I dream a bigger dream and that is when I grow up, I want to be like you. To take the smaller half of the mooncake and offer away the last bite; the kindness of your wrinkled tissue, aged imperfectly like your own papery skin – how it dried my face only for it to become wet once again. I dream that me and the color pink will finally make our peace, maybe when I am older it will finally suit me just like it did your softness.