"What are you planting, Granny?" I asked with some curiosity and apprehension.
The old lady looked up with a smile bigger than any I have seen in recent times, it was as if the whole world had been gloomy as at least this part was crawling out of winter. She finished burying whatever it was and slowly raised her octogenarian body from the dirty ground. She was wearing a gray shirt and gray pants, along with slippers whose colors I could not recall. I realized at that moment, when I was feeling a little nervous, that I have never seen her wearing any other types of clothing for all the years, though really few occasions, I have seen her. It was clothing from some old period of another country that as a whole had been shedding these clothes and wearing the vestments of modernity for more than twenty years.
She walked slowly toward me, but with all the enthusiasm in the world, and gave me a gentle hug.
I repeated my question after she released me. She looked at me with some wonder, then smiled and apologized that since she didn't have her hearing aid on, she couldn't understand what I said. We were outside in this quiet New Jersey neighborhood of many millionaires, and so I didn't want to shout. She was probably planting Japanese squashes because that was what my Mother, her only daughter, was also planting, according to a recent phone call.
She took me inside, all the while saying I didn't have to come all the way here on this chilly day. I said a few things, but I knew she didn't hear me at all. Before I closed the sliding door behind us, I took one last look at the garden. It was not the verdant one I saw the previous summer. Of course, I didn't really see much of it; I remember there were different kinds of Chinese versions of cabbage, beans, squashes, and other things I didn't actually know existed. I knew about the vegetables only because I served as a translator for a girl I brought to my grandmother's for Fourth of July. They both were into gardening, but what was surprising to me was that my Grandmother somehow knew this about the young lady before I said anything and somehow felt the compulsion to show her, something she didn't show even to my uncle, or me, for that matter. Maybe it was just a woman's thing. But in any case, I was touched.
I didn't come to think about that girl. The winter had been harsh and had already given too many opportunities for self-pity and robbed me of much joy with its icy winds and foot-high snow. I came to listen. At least I told myself this.
I opened up my bags of goodies, dimsum I got from Flushing on my way from Connecticut. I called my aunt, my grandmother's daughter-in-law, on what the old lady preferred and could eat, being diabetic. I didn't expect this little woman to eat much, if at all. But I was trying act Chinese, trying to bring a lot of food to show my affection. There is never such a thing as excess in food.
She apologized that she had no tea. Besides me, the whole extended family never drinks tea anyway, but for some reason, when we come here, we end up drinking Lipton, which I dislike. And so there was no disappointment at the announcement. I waited patiently for her to sit down. When she has company she is always walking around, being busy. She's always busy serving people. I get annoyed because I don't like being served, but this time I made an exception to be quiet. At some point she put on her hearing aid, so I could at least have a conversation, of some sort.
After the paper plates had been passed out (all two of them) and takeout chopsticks dispensed too, she finally sat down. I, playing the role of a good Chinese grandson, gave her a piece of stuffed eggplant, purportedly her favorite. She smiled. But she had been smiling all this time. She must have been happy. I tried to notice.
She repeated again that I didn't have to come all this way, and that I should not leave too late. I wasn't sure if she was concerned about my drive or that she had her early-to-bed routine to think about. In any case, I smiled and agreed.
"How are things?" she asked.
"How was that girl? The one who came for Independence Day?"
I didn't say anything, but the disappearance of my smile, the surfacing of that humiliated look that I didn't have to fake, gave her the answer she sought. Her smile, on the other hand, didn't fade, and she simply said, "Don't worry. Everything will be fine." I was touched. I felt for the first time she and I had a connection. She wasn't just an invisible face that had given me immeasurable help and support all these decades, a face I never found a way to connect to, let alone reciprocate love for.
Despite the language barrier, the age barrier, and that we never really talked like this before, and not alone, without the shadow of my Mother, another proof that we were connecting was that we could talk very easily. There was no awkwardness, no uncomfortable silent moments. Of course, she was the one really talking, which was why I came. I wanted her to talk. And I imposed no expectations on the topic or the depth.
She spoke freely about her life. I was told she loved talking about her life, and she did. She mentioned the night the Japanese army was about to arrive and they had to run away to safety in the middle of the night. "All pitch black, no torch or flashlight, the sky only illuminated sporadically when an explosion happened." She was alone with strangers, got temporarily separated from her family. "But I always was alone. I liked it that way."
I couldn't, I thought. For some reason, I felt I always had to be with someone, always needed to be with someone, and that no solitude was really voluntary, for me.
"I wasn't worried about my family. They never worried about me. I remember when I went to school, they didn't care if I actually went to class. They were already happy that my oldest sister was a great student. I didn't really care for school. I preferred hanging out in the fields and fishing."
A Chinese female version of Tom Sawyer, I thought at that moment.
"I had only sisters when I was born. My father got tired of having only girls so the name he gave me meant something like 'link to a boy'!" She said this with a hearty laughter. I thought it was amusing, too. What a crazy world of crazy ideas back then. "And lo and behold, the next child was the first boy!"
I was later told that for this reason, she felt connected most with this boy, her first brother, who now lived in New Zealand. I could put a face to that name now. Surprise! He was family!
"But that also meant they really forgot about me. I was the bridge to something they really wanted. But really, it didn't bother me. I enjoyed the freedom. I took care of a nice garden, and I went fishing every afternoon. School was boring." She repeated this idea again. I thought how odd it was to hear this from a woman who spent a lot of her hard earned pennies on helping his grandchildren go to college in this country.
I wrote down everything she said, trying not to let my emotions and thoughts interfere at that moment. But it was difficult. Everything she did was done alone, on her own will. It was difficult because it showed how weak I have been.
"I remember crossing the the water overnight between Macau and Hong Kong illegally at the bottom of a crammed boat. It was disgusting. There was no ventilation and people were vomiting left and right. I was squeezed between strangers who stank of something. Of course, I probably didn't smell like roses either!" And she burst out in laughter. "But really, that was a rough ride, water was choppy. When we finally landed and let us out, I thought what a miracle I survived, short as the trip was!" That was in 1954, and she still remembered. I wondered how I would have fared, I, who complained and got sick with the heat in India.
"Did you have friends in England?"
"Yes. I got bored sometimes. So one day I went to Chinatown in London after finally understanding how the bus system worked. I just sat there and watched people, and at some point. I can't remember the circumstances. Forgive the bad memory of this old woman. I realized there were a lot of Mainland immigrants there that were illiterate and needed help reading letters from and writing letters to loved ones back home. There were agencies that did that, but problem was that at that time Mainland was using simplified characters, which the agencies were unfamiliar with. So I stood up and started helping one, and then quickly word got out that there was this bored solitary lady who would do this service for free! Wow, talk about friends!" and there went another burst of warm laughter.
"Free?"
"Yeah. Why not. Just wanted to help. I just counted myself lucky that I went to school enough times to know how to read and write, but I knew there were others less lucky than me, so I helped them," she smiled. I tried not to think about my own self-pity and its derived guilt. But there was also admiration and pride. Admiration that someone can be so generous. Pride that it wasn't just anyone. These positive feelings deepened when she told me about other people she had helped. That included strangers she met, the Chinese village she had left behind, and of course, her own family, the main reason for her searching pittance of money all over the world.
"I always counted myself lucky. That boat ride from Macau sounded bad, but at least I survived. I knew someone who did the same journey. He survived the trip, but he got crazy. He walked around aimlessly, ended up in the forest, and slid his wrist in solitude." She wasn't laughing then. She told me that it was a distant relative.
The weight of my guilt and admiration at some point squeezed out an inevitable but still superficial question from my lips.
"Weren't you ever lonely?"
She looked at me with some curiosity, not really understanding.
"I had a great family to work for. Twenty-five years of service. They could have treated me badly, deceived me, threw me out to the streets after I was no longer useful as a live-in nanny and caretaker, but they didn't. I never asked for a raise, but they always gave me a raise each year, and helped me buy my first house, and of course, helped me bring you guys over. I was never lonely. The children I helped raise let me stay in this house where I feel most at home."
"I meant, why didn't you get married again?"
I couldn't understand how a woman who was with a husband for a total of six months and who was left with two children to take care of didn't just get remarried. Everyone needed someone. I thought for a moment about the garden again.
She smiled. She said, "That's what my colleagues said! 'Don't you know so-and-so, he's nice. Why not at least try to get to know him?' I would not listen. I just want to say that I was married. On my wedding night, my husband made me make a promise, promise that we would always be together."
Without fading her smile, she continued, "Even though he broke that promise by marrying again in the Philippines, it didn't mean I could break my promise."
Not even when he made his own family there, I thought. I thought about my own anger, my own refusal to forgive.
"I actually met the other wife and her children. I helped those children emigrate to Canada. Nice kids."
She paused for a bit, perhaps to recollect something, not sure.
"I think I made him feel very guilty, though," she said, with a different smile, a little sneaky. "I didn't mean to, however. I wanted to close the chapter by telling him he didn't have to think about me anymore. I wrote him a poem just days before I went to England, knowing I would not return to Asia for a long time."
A poem? My grandmother can write poems?
And she remembered the poem, too, kept in her head.
I had her recite it while I recorded it with my cell phone. I learn later that it was really not a bad poem, quite sophisticated, and that it was about forgiveness, but it also reminded my grandfather the promise broken.
"It didn't matter. We never met each other before the wedding, and we saw each other for just a few months in total. We were too different. We shouldn't be together. Not only because society back then, that old society, forced us together. But also, I always wanted my independence. I told you, I just wanted to take care of a garden and maybe a fish pond. When he said goodbye to me at the airport by saying, 'I might not come back as soon as I did this time.' (This was after already gone for a year.) And I said to him, 'Don't worry. You needn't come back.' And he never did."
I wonder if there wasn't even a slight tinge of bitterness in her. It's hard to imagine, back then, in that world as foreign to me now as a Martian culture would be.
"Furthermore, if I got married, then surely my family would not benefit from me making a new family. I didn't need that. And I wanted my freedom."
I noticed that I have been eating most of the food I had brought with me, and that she hadn't even put a dent in that tiny stuffed eggplant. She said, after taking another little bite, "I left China with ten Hong Kong dollars in my pocket, running away to Macau and the rest of the world. Now I have a house, I have my family in this country, I got to help people in my village to build schools, and I still have money that I don't have any use for."
That was it. I didn't know if there was a moral to the story, but in the thawing heart of mine I tried to make sense out of it. Perhaps life needed not be so complicated, so full of drama, so many self-inflicted heartaches. With ten Hong Kong dollars and a persevering heart full of love for strangers, for community, for family, and most importantly, for oneself, one can go a long, long way. This woman, who still dresses like he was from pre-Communist China, smiled at me and told me how good the stuffed eggplant was. But whatever crazy, moral lesson my heart, thirst for peace, had concocted, it was content to simply connect with this near stranger who connected with me more than just in blood.
