My grandma’s going to die soon. Nobody wants to say it, but we all know the day will come. It’s just a matter of time.
Growing up, my family would drive half an hour to my grandma’s house every Saturday, and continued to do so until COVID put an end to such adventures. But I never made a strong effort to connect with her. I would always say my “你好” when arriving, and “再见” when about to leave, but our conversations were nothing more than housewarming courtesies. When we all sat down for dinner, I wouldn’t do anything other than eat my food and leave as fast as I could. My grandma only spoke Chinese, and a dialect that I was less proficient in at that. To me, it was a barrier that seemed too much to overcome. Instead, I spent every visit upstairs in my aunt’s room with my cousin.
My grandpa died over a decade ago. I was seven. Despite visiting every week, I didn’t know anything about him. Even when I found myself in a chapel full of crying relatives and Chinese funeral rituals, I couldn’t resonate with the mood. I knew he liked gray wool berets, going for walks, and buying lottery tickets for the fun of it. Other than that, I had no real connection with him. I couldn’t even read the Chinese characters on his epitaph.
I wish things could’ve been different. Despite living in one of the most Asian cities in the United States, I didn’t try very hard to connect with my culture. To be fair, it wasn’t easy as a child. See, in Chinese culture, closeness means something completely different than it does in Western culture. There’s intimacy as in knowing favorite bands, interests, and favorite dumpling fillings, and then there’s intimacy as in being blood-related and feeling obligated to reprimand every misstep. Naturally, I felt less inclined to talk to relatives who grilled my ass in another language for hours on end, but sometimes I do wish I looked past that. Sometimes I wish my values were more Chinese. Sometimes I wish I didn’t cut out my eldest blood relatives, especially the ones who embodied the Chinese values I so fervently desired; people I had so much to learn from.
Even though I did try to avoid confrontation for the most part, I was always welcomed to my grandma’s house with open arms. Every summer when my parents went to work, that was where I would stay. No matter how boring the days seemed, how hot the lack of proper air conditioning made the house, or how terrible the WiFi was, it always felt comfortable. It was home.
We used to live in that house. I remember my parents, my sister and I all lived in the same room. Three generations, twelve people, one household. Egg and sausage fried rice, warm chicken soup, burning incense in the morning, picking oranges from the tree in the backyard. Tearing pages off of the calendar in the kitchen, playing basketball using paper balls, singing Chinese karaoke songs. I miss those days. Despite the conflicts that arose, and that neo-romantic-era feeling, it was always comfortable.
As I grew older and more independent, I started to stay home alone during summer. Consequently, I became more distanced from my grandma, which didn’t seem like such a bad thing at the time. In fact, I relished in the guilty luxury of 1080p, pizza rolls and iced water.
My grandma’s been trying to talk to me more lately. I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older, or if it’s because she’s dying. She always tells me I’m a good child, even if my parents laugh it off sometimes. I’ve been trying to incorporate her into my life a bit more, too. As I’m very soft-spoken, she always tells me to speak louder, and I make an effort to, in my irresolute Chinese. But even then, she sometimes still says can’t understand me, because of her hearing loss. At times, it feels like a lost cause, and it hurts to know that I can’t fulfill one of my grandma’s dying wishes.
The other day when we were saying goodbye, she looked into my eyes, and I stared into hers. She held me by the arm, as I saw tears beginning to form in the corners of her eyes. That was the moment I realized that she wanted to understand me more, that she didn’t want to die a stranger to her oldest son’s oldest son. But at that moment, I think we both knew it might’ve been a bit too late. Right before we left, with watery eyes and a shaky voice, she told me something in Chinese. It pains me that I can’t remember the exact phrasing, but it was something along the lines of, “come again to play.”
There are so many things I want to know about you, and so many things I want you to know about me. But I can’t help but feel like we’re running out of time.
I want to learn about everything you’ve gone through in life. I want to know what it was like to live in China, and Vietnam, and New Jersey, and then California. I want to learn more about your trip over the Pacific. I want to hear your insights on life. I wish I could ask you if you were afraid of dying. But the barricade of masculine emotion and traditional values of stoicism, combined with the fact that my Chinese is terrible, makes it so difficult.
Admittedly, I’m a bit thanatophobic. I know that it might be shallow to fear death, but the concept of disappearing for eternity is petrifying. It seems like it’s coming so soon, and even though I’ve almost exhausted twenty-five percent of my life expectancy, I feel like I’ve been on this Earth for only a few moments.
I’m so scared to grow old. I’m scared to be old. I’m scared that one day I will no longer possess the traits of youth, and at that point will life feel like it’s over? How old is too old to wish my life was like the movies? At what age does believing in my teenage dream become immature? At what age do I have to stop admiring Lara Jean? At what age do I have to give up Taylor Swift for The Beatles? Will it be at thirty? At forty? At fifty? I get a bit lightheaded even thinking about making it that far.
Life is just so fragile. A few seconds with my eyes off the road, a canister of pills, a blade to my wrist; everything can be lost in an instant. What if that car made it through the intersection a second later? What if I was biking just a little bit faster? I flinch at the thought of retaining a perfect track record for almost a century. Hell, I was almost expelled in elementary school. It seems so easy to ruin everything. It seems so easy to commit a felony. It seems so easy to fuck up and die. More than I’d like to admit, these thoughts keep me up at night.
I’m scared of all the life I might miss. Will I see my grandchildren get married? Will I see my grandchildren graduate college? Will I see my grandchildren graduate high school? What if I pull a Van Gogh, and my writing takes flight and my dreams become reality after I die? I think I would want my blog link etched onto my gravestone, but what’s the point of creating something that outlives me if I won’t be alive to see its impact? Does it even matter, if in the end we all die alone?
Billie Eilish’s music videos will only gain more and more views. How high might the numbers go? When will we see our first quadrillion? Are ‘timeless’ and ‘infinity’ synonymous? When will the internet die? When is the next groundbreaking, generation-defining technological advancement? What happens when the sun dies? Will we still be living in this solar system? What happens to the people who are alive then? Five, four, three, two, one, and then everything’s gone?
Do I intentionally disconnect with people whom I feel will depart from my life in the near future? Would I rather have people drift away so I suffer less loss? Would I rather be alone, and mourn nobody, or watch my loved ones die around me? What happens if I get to that point in time where all my friends begin dying? When I attend a funeral, will I ask myself when mine will be?
When the doctor gives me two weeks to live will I be afraid to sleep? What will I do with my remaining time? Will it be all laughs and jokes, or will it be weeks of fear and paranoia? When I’m on my deathbed, will it feel like I have lived a life of meaning? Will I feel fulfilled, or will I fear that there was still so much life I hadn’t lived? Will I beg, longing for more chances, while at death’s door?
Maybe what I fear is impermanence, that what I have now is not what I’ll have forever. That one day we’ll all go back to where we once started—everyone as strangers and everyone alone in the eternal abyss. That I’ll dedicate shards of my heart to people or places that eventually fade into the distance. That nobody stays. That nothing lasts forever, and anything can be lost in the blink of an eye. That I could receive a phone call at any second, ambulance sirens in Anaheim, and a sinking sensation that lasts a lifetime.
What happens to that house when those who bought it are dead? What happens to the thirty years of history? Will anything be left to remind me of the time my grandparents, my aunts, and my uncles fled the Vietnam war and reached the United States in 1977? Or when they landed in New Jersey, barely making subsistence despite taking every job opportunity available? Or when they traveled the entire United States without a plane ticket, and planted stake in California, the land of opportunity?
When my grandma dies, will my home lose its soul? Our culture, our humble beginnings, our family values, building everything from nothing, does that die with her? Bamboo backscratchers, glass turntables, marble countertops, leather sofas, orange trees, do those die with her?
Sold on December 17, 1992. It haunts me that one day it’ll be on the market again. My home will become just another house, and along with the people, it will become a memory too.