I sometimes read essays by people like me, pieces about grandparents and not being able to speak their language, and I have a similar confession to make, that, for similar reasons, I did not love my grandmother. She had Parkinson’s disease, so she often mixed up her Mandarin, Shanghainese and Wenzhounese. She couldn't control her vocal chords and lips very well; each of her words hung like silver fish quivering in mid-air; mist-like and trembling. Even my father couldn’t understand his mother-in-law sometimes. In fact, I think the only person in the whole wide world who loved her in her old age was my mother, and even then, I have a feeling that even she didn’t always love her, that she only began to care for her when my brother and I—her sons had closed the door on their personal lives; it was slow at first, careful, but who did not hear the decisive click of the door settling into its place?
Who was my grandmother and what was she like?
She had flower white hair, eyes that glistened like fresh clams, and silky skin that felt very thin to the touch. She was always slightly hunched over, but her body was rectangular like my brother's, not a stick like mine. When she was on her walker, she inched forward inch by inch. Without her walker, she moved like a wave lapping the shore of a lake.
Before we put my grandmother on new medications that would require her to have a blood test every week, my grandmother was prone to hallucinations from Parkinson’s. When she lived in an apartment on her own, she would say that there was a murderer standing in the doorway of the house across the street. There is no murderer, we would say; we took her out on a walk to look at the house; we said she was having hallucinations. You're all wrong, she wrung her hands in frustration; you are all lying to me. It was a murderer that suffocated people in their bathtubs at night, she could see him through the window at night when none of us were there.
On other days, in the kitchen room of my house, my grandmother would take my hand and tell me to look out the window. There’s a tiger in the woods, and people are sunbathing on the forest floor in my backyard. At some point I had given up trying to reason with her. How many people are sunbathing, I ask. Four, she says. What are they wearing. Not much, she says, blue bathing suits. Are they white, are they American. Yes, they're white. Where is the tiger, I say. She points. I weakly tell her, I do not see the tiger. She smiles and points again, you do not see. My parents enter the room and start shouting. My grandmother cowers in a strange melange of self-righteousness and shame while I listen to the yelling.
But who was Wang Ciliu (that was her name, 王慈流) before her disease, as a child? I have no idea; there is no way of knowing, looking at her sitting on the couch at a nursing home in suburban Massachusetts. I once got her to talk about her childhood and according to her she was very studious. She grew up in a peasant family in Wenzhou and liked to self study. She snuck to school whenever she could, but sometimes she couldn't because she had to take care of the livestock. There was a black bull in particular that she liked, and he had a personality, a boyish glint in his eyes if you looked closely, and if you forgot to tie him to a post before you went to school, he would charge through the village streets faster than anyone could run, and only she could stop him. She was also very beautiful—self-consciously beautiful too. You could see it in the wedding photo she took at the age of fifteen or sixteen where she looked very young and childish next to my handsome grandfather.
It was an arranged marriage between a teenager and a man eleven years older, from what I heard. My grandfather, an engineering professor at Jiaotong University, treated her like a child. Up until his death, my grandmother held a private grudge because she thought he was committing adultery, even when he was bed-ridden with Alzheimer's, with the nurses. But they never argued. If they did, it was on money matters; she always preferred the cheaper things, my grandfather the better things. Even now she likes to clutter her room with sundry artifacts, which have value to her because they were bought cheaply. I went shopping with her at BJ’s once, and we were ambling along the aisles of clothing for sale at the pace of Master Turtle in Kung Fu Panda. She pointed at one dress in utter rapture, with much more alacrity than Master Turtle had when choosing the Golden Warrior. I picked it up and told her it was $30. She shook her head in scorn and searched onwards.
One day, I asked her why she converted to Christianity, and immediately a stormy look overtook her face. She told me that it happened one day when she was on a pilgrimage to a Buddhist temple on a mountain to pray for something like my mother's success in pharmacy school. There was a stream of people, umbrellas to ward off the sun, digital cameras to capture the scenery, a throng where shoulders bumped into each other incessantly, all on their way to pray for something. Someone shoved her and she fell on her elbow, and she cried for help, but the throng parted like the Red Sea and streamed around her. Sitting amidst this wave of faces, she felt more alone than anyone else she knew, as though she was cast out onto a desolate tundra by an invisible hand to perish. Christians are so much more welcoming, she said, they care about the harmony and peace of the world. Buddhists, on the other hand, pray and ritualize to attain what they want.
I tell her that I have two roommates who are pretty much Buddhist, and she tells me that she has a very great respect for Buddhists. She tells me that when we went to Yunnan, a Buddhist monk took interest in me and would have trained me as a disciple if I had stayed. I think I was six at the time.
As I leave her room, I shower the customary litany of Mandarin blessings on her, and she shouts, almost as if in desperation, “I really do have a great respect for Buddhists!!”
The last time I saw her was when I was going into my senior year, and I stopped by the nursing home with my father to say goodbye for the semester. She was watching a TV adaptation of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in the living room. After pointing out to me which actor was Zhang Fei, which was Guan Yu, Liu Bei, Zhuge Liang and Zhao Yun, she told us to leave; she had become very considerate of our time by then. I insisted, I drove all the way here in thirty minutes, and she was going to drive me out in two? She smiled knowingly, is school starting? School was starting. Was I excited she asked. I said I was nervous. She told me to work hard. I said I wasn’t worried about that. What was I worried about then. I said making friends. She told me not to worry about that. Do you feel like you don’t have many friends. I said, I can’t even explain this to my parents in English, how can I explain it to you. I say, I’m very awkward, I feel like it’s important in college to meet people, but I don’t think I’m very good with people. Don’t worry, she says, all you need is self-confidence. Self-confidence, I repeat. She says, we all thought you were very natural at New Years. What, I said. That New Years, she said. Really, when, I said. At that New Years party. I don’t understand you, I said, then - oh, at the last New Years party, when I did bicycle kicks on the floor in front of everyone, of course, haha you have a better memory than I do. My grandmother remarks in a non sequitur way, your mother really isn’t very good with children. Really, I say, I think mother is very optimistic. She is not as good as your aunt, my grandmother says, who never gave birth to a child of her own. She is too honest. Honest, I say. Then she enters into a long memory to prove her point, one in which my mother, when she was eleven or twelve, had been sent to the police station and everyone was worried about her. She had, in revenge for some offense I did not understand, destroyed other people’s property for a reason I did not understand, and hurt others in ways that I did not understand, perhaps had broken a few bones and a couple pieces of furniture. I recall my mother saying that she did not have a childhood; the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and 70s had imbued in her a hatred that did not dissipate until she gave birth to my brother. I say, haha mother never told me that. She says, that’s because she doesn’t remember. But will she begin to remember, I wonder, when she grows old and starts to see tigers in the woods?
Another old lady in the room stands up and begins walking out of the living room. That’s Ami, my grandmother tells me in Mandarin which means something in between, “she’s very friendly with me" and "she really needs my attention.” Ami is evidently very disappointed. My grandma had been spending too much time with me, and not enough time with Ami. “Ami! Ami!” My grandmother shouts, and Ami ignores her. I help my grandmother stand up and she waddles at a slightly faster pace Ami is waddling away. Ami, she says, if you’re going to leave let us leave together. She wraps Ami’s wrinkled hands in her own wrinkled hands and says, “I can keep you company!” Ami says something in very disgruntled Cantonese that neither I nor my grandmother can understand. “I will go with you!” my grandmother says in Mandarin, and it was then that I saw her eyes glisten like fresh clams. If my grandmother can do this here, I thought, I can do this in college.
In the thirty foot by fifty foot world of the suburban nursing home, she must have had the status of a rockstar. I remember at one point she had a boyfriend there, someone very amiable and old, and he could only speak Cantonese. I sat there watching their conversation, as one person said something in Cantonese and the other said something in Wenzhounese, neither lover revealing an iota of confusion on their faces. It was magic; it was pure fun; it was as if they were communicating something that existed beyond words.