written around junior year of high school

I. Hong Kong; Birthday (0)

When my mother was pregnant, she sought out a fortune teller to choose an auspicious day for my birth. Perhaps she was ill advised—I was born only one day after great-grandfather Tai-gong passed away. Out of respect and for his death there were no celebrations, only grieving.

My mother returned from the hospital on a windy day in early January, coming home to no balloons, no congratulations, and no red envelopes. A few weeks passed, and Ma-ma was the first to break this silence: she came to the house with bags full of pastries and groceries, anxious to see her first granddaughter. And for seven years, this is how Ma-ma showed up to our front door every single morning.

Each time Ma-ma told me the story of great-grandfather she started with this line: “Many years ago, Tai-gong was so rich that he owned a whole street.” Then I would close my eyes, and with no knowledge of the Forties, imagine those days with a sort of fantastical inaccuracy: that the roads were cobblestone and children roamed about the streets playing barefoot. The men wore striped shirts and always slicked their hair back. The women had large raven curls and stern, beautiful faces. In these daydreams, everything is black and white, like the photos in Ma-ma’s drawers of young great-grandfather Tai-gong and young great-grandmother Tai-Po.

“Then the war came.”

Ma-ma explained that when the war came, Tai-Po smeared mud on her face to look ugly. Because girls who were too pretty were taken away by the Japanese.

II. Tokyo; (2)

The first time we moved away from Hong Kong, Ma-ma came with us. It was the first time she had ever been on a plane.

Tokyo was where she first saw snow at fuji-san. There is a photo of her wearing a green and white kimono, in a room with paper sliding doors and floor cushions for chairs.

Tokyo was also where Ma-ma taught me the English words that she had learned in grade school. she knew it all: the ABCs, how to read the settings on the washing machine. Her English words always ended with an invisible exclamation mark after it: Broccoroli! Fried rayce! My granddaughter!

III. Singapore; (3)

In Singapore, Ma-ma woke up early every day to buy fruit from the Cantonese speaking man at the wet market. She was not one to bargain for prices, but some days she heaved home twelve oranges instead of three and told me, as we sat at the kitchen table stuffing our mouths with juicy pockets of goodness, ah mui, gum yut dee cang youw peng youw leng.

Today’s oranges are as cheap as they are sweet.

It was in Singapore that I developed frequent nightmares and a curious habit of falling asleep while rubbing Ma-ma’s earlobes. They were soft and cold. I could feel the vibrations as her tired voice deepened while she told me stories about growing up in with five sisters and a brother. She told me that she had worn beautiful earrings on her wedding day, but the holes closed up long ago and now there was only black dot where the needle had pricked her. Every time she told me this, I examined her earlobes on both sides confirmed that they were indeed still closed.

IV. Hong Kong; (7)

In Hong Kong, Ma-ma waited for me after school every day. I expected to see her under the shade, in front of our home by the double doors. Most days she would bring me grape Hi-chews wrapped in tinfoil, slightly melted from the time she was standing there as she waited for the school bus to pull up into our driveway.

When I came home from school, I asked Ma-ma to braid my hair. Girls at school had their curly blond locks in bouncy pigtails, and I wanted the same thing. My black hair didn’t bounce like that but Ma-ma did her best and fashioned me a low, loose braid. Too much twirling around the corridors and the hairband slid out. When this inevitably happened, she simply sat me down, took a wide toothed comb, and started all over again.

I spent every afternoon with Ma-ma and said goodbye to her after dinner. Once it was time for her to go, I sat on a stool and I watched her slip on her tiny shoes and tuck her reading glasses safely inside her purse. She grasped my hand and and patted my cheek.

And then she was out the door.

The trip from my house to hers goes through many markets and jewelry stands. This is where she would stop on her journey home, loading up on knick knacks and beaded bracelets that she would later excitedly pull out of her purse to show me the next day. Although they were always too big for my skinny wrists, Ma-ma never stopped buying them.

Once, she gave me a brown string bracelet with twelve jade charms, one for each zodiac. They all looked oddly triangular, but if you looked closely, you could see the tail of dragon and the neck of the horse carved onto the bead. This one was my lucky charm; I kept it inside a coin pouch and stuffed it inside my school bag. This was where it stayed, until, to my horror, a boy at school took the liberty of digging through my bag while I was in the bathroom. He held out my lucky charm at an arm’s length, and asked me why I was carrying a bracelet made of teeth.

Tai-Po fell off a chair when she was trying to reach a window one day. My 92 year old great-grandmother landed on her hip and couldn’t go to the bathroom on her own. My great uncle to sent her back into elderly housing.

We all remembered to visit her often. We brought her flowers from the florist just downstairs: usually sunflowers, but sometimes roses, wrapped in a distasteful, cheap plastic. When we handed her the flowers, she took them in her small, claw-like hands and gingerly peeled away the wrapper. She filled up a glass vase with water and planted our flowers inside it.

We talked for an hour at most. She clutched my hand tightly when she spoke. Every time we left, my dad handed Tai-Po a red envelope filled with far too much money for a 92-year-old woman—with a heartbroken look of pain, guilt, and sympathy in his scrunched eyebrows as he patted her on the arm. Her voice trembled as she whispered thank you in his ear and told him with conviction that evil nurses were stealing from her room at night. O seung fan uk kei, she said.

I want to go home.

On the way home from the elderly care center, my dad always told us the same stories. He said, Tai-Po used to walk ten kilometers to pick him up from school every day. She did odd jobs in the neighbor’s garden, tending to the flower pots. I think he liked to remember how it was before it all changed.

When Tai-Po didn’t get better, Ma-ma became more frantic and worried, taking urgent phone calls from her sisters in the midst of the night. One night when I overheard these phone calls, I wished in my head that Tai-Po would just be taken away so that Ma-ma could finally get a good night’s sleep.

In March, Tai-Po was really taken. We were on a ski trip in Japan when my dad announced one night that Tai-Po had gotten a cold and passed away.

The funeral was in April. It wasn’t like the funerals I was used to seeing in movies: instead of black, we dressed in white. My pants were itchy, uncomfortable, and slightly see-through. A ringing laughter came from my two younger cousins, who were running around playing tag in the back room. Their parents tried to shush them, but they didn’t understand. The room was so, so cold.

I looked for Ma-ma and found her in the room behind the shrine. She was folding paper sycees and throwing them into the fire, so that Tai Po could have money to spend in the afterlife. Ma-ma folded with expert speed, her wrinkled fingers whizzed over the paper: a mechanized routine, efficient.

Third Great Aunt cried out in agony when they brought the glass coffin into the room. They held her as she sobbed, keeping her frail bones together so that she would not shatter into a pile of floordust.

Ma-ma was quiet the whole time. She did nothing.

V. Taipei; Birthday (14)

Just before my fourteenth birthday, my dad left to go visit Ma-ma because she wasn’t feeling well. He was sorry to miss the celebration—we had planned to go to the bike park and then get all dressed up to eat dinner at my favorite sushi restaurant. My brother had even taken the bus to the other side of town to get the chocolate cheesecake that he knew I liked.

On the car ride to dinner my mom’s phone rang. There were static noises and the sound of the phone passing back and forth on the other end. Then I heard my grandpa’s booming voice in the distance and the phone being shoved into unwilling hands.

Ah mui gum yut sang yut!

It is Ah mui’s birthday today!

Ma-ma finally clasped her hand around the phone, and I feared the uncertainty on the other end of the line. All I heard were mumbling noises and an old, sick voice that I didn’t recognize.

It then occurred to me that if Ma-ma—who once knew the phone numbers, zodiacs, and star signs of every person in the family—had forgotten my birthday, something was very wrong.

That year, I spent a lot of my time after school googling ‘Ways to cure elderly depression’ when I should have been taking notes on the War of 1812.

That year, Ma-ma moved to a hospital with a uniform. She wore drab, loose, plaid pants that had to be rolled at the waistline to keep from falling off her tiny hips, and a dark blue coat that was so unlike the fuzzy pink bedazzled sweaters she used to love. Her nose, that the nurses never properly washed, became shiny with oil.

Every time I visited her, I thought of clever new tactics to make her smile. I asked her to peel oranges for me, but the nurses cut her nails so short in fear that she would scratch herself in her sleep.

I ripped out pieces of paper from my notebook so that she could write down some math problems and characters. But once I set the piece of paper in front of her, she mumbled uncontrollably and folded the paper, quickly, in half, then quarters, until the paper I put in front of her was just a useless wrinkled wad.

Sometimes my tactics worked, but more often, they didn’t. So, each visit I looked forward to staying for just an hour and then leaving. I pretended I wanted to stay for longer, but once I walked her back into the room and the nurse locked the door shut, I scurried as fast as I could towards the elevator because I just wanted to go home.

Most days, Ma-ma is not herself. She hangs up the phone after just a few words, saying that she is too tired. Even though I know for a fact she slept all day.

I worry that she forgets how old I am and when my birthday is. She no longer buys me beaded bracelets—maybe because she thinks I have gotten too old and forgotten about them, but more likely because she has. Her hand trembles when she puts the pills to her mouth and spills water onto her neck every time she drinks.

But these are not the stories I will tell my children, years later. Some years later we will visit Ma-ma in her home and we will bring her flowers. On the way home, I will tell my children the happy stories of how she waited for me after school and bought me bracelets that I still keep in a shoebox at the back of my closet.

Ma-ma was taken away when I was fourteen years old. Sometimes she comes back, but only for a while. She comes back in phone calls—snippets of her voice sound familiar. She comes back when she tells me to eat more meat and rice; when she says my name in broken English with pronunciation that she learned in elementary school. She comes back when she musters up all her strength to argue with deaf grandpa Ye-ye, as fiercely as her weak voice will let her, trying to tell the old stubborn man something he pretends not to hear. She is back when I touch her ears and they still feel soft and wrinkly and cold. She is back in these short bursts. It is these fleeting moments that I hold onto, to save for the day she does not return.