by victor li
edited by alloe mak

the only place i’ve ever seen your real name was on your gravestone up the hill beside the venetian in macau three years after you passed away, on the second level of the third wall among thousands of others. there, my hands shook as i lit the incense and placed it carefully in the sand. i told my parents i was tearing up because of the smoke.

i have this memory from when i was in kindergarten where i’m walking through a neighbourhood on the way home from school and the houses tower over me like a fisheye lens. i wear a blue and yellow striped shirt and a bootleg new york yankees beige cap—like in the photo you took of you, me and my brother when you left canada. i walk through one street and then through a catwalk to another and realize that i am lost. i kept walking and walking and walking and i was so scared that i would never find my way home. and then you were there behind me. and you took my hand, and we walked home together.

i don’t remember if that memory was real anymore. i dreamt a lot more when you were still here. i have a hard time seeing you now. i forget how tall you were and how you walked. i remember the purple vest you loved and how you would call my name out. but i cannot see the whole. i realize now that i never did.

after you passed, i listened to this one song by the microphones a lot. it has this line that goes like “they played one chord for fifteen minutes and something in me shifted, and i brought back home belief i could create infinity.” so i started to obsess over this idea of a space where you could live forever between the words. i remember walking underneath the street lights in march before the trees bloomed and after the snow melted, watching my shadow split into multitudes, collecting and combining in endless patterns. there i saw you.

i started writing this short story called tongues because i thought the difference between us could be overcome in narrative. i wrote about how a theoretical character felt disgusted with themselves speaking cantonese because they were acutely aware of the difference between how they pronounced the words and how they were meant to be said. i wrote about a theoretical grandmother who sat at the dinner table and loved to eat waat dan because it was easy on her stomach. i framed everything through sacrifice because it was easy to understand, like sacrificing your son for the future of your grandson, and sacrificing one tongue in pursuit of a better life. i never finished the story.

i think a lot about the bridge over the stream that separated our neighbourhood from the train station and the ducks that lived there. every other week we would wait for my mom to come back from downtown, and on the way back, we fed the ducks with buttends of dempster’s white bread. i remember you best in these transitory spaces, in our stuffy minivan on the way to mcdonalds from a kindergarten recital driving down erin mills parkway, at pearson airport terminal one when you came to visit for two weeks in middle school. always you had a smile. i remember the texture of your hands. despite how much i look, there aren’t any records of these moments. yet when i feel your absence, these are the moments i dream of.

my parents told me you left when i started primary school because canada was too cold and the suburbs were isolating. in this place, you could only ever be a grandmother, so when you were done helping my parents raise me, you went to somewhere where you could be yourself. when i visited you in macau some years later, i was bedridden for days because of the jetlag and the food and the water—like the land itself had rejected me. we missed the ferry that you wanted to take us on to show us your home, to show us yourself. the two of us could only exist as we were in these places of negotiation, in-between moments, in motion.

when i wrote these letters for you, i wrote about everything i’ve held onto since you passed away. i felt like i could write forever, in anger and grief, out of curiosity and reverence. through this, i wanted to find some form of truth, and be able to leave something behind when iI had finished. in the end, i took more with me than what i had when i began.

the image of you, the memory, though patchwork, hole-ridden and incomplete, is something you built for me. i understand now that my desire to immortalize you is an act of self-preservation because my hands have always been guided by yours, guided by the temperament i’ve inherited and the bedrock of you in my blood. i’ve found solace in the fact that i walk the path you set before you even knew i existed.

i always wondered who you were outside of this path you set, outside of the fiction you portrayed and the fiction i perceived. i felt guilty about lacking the truth, guilty that i never learned, and even more ashamed that i will never be able to now. i will always. but this is never what you wanted from me. so i will pray to you instead. i love you.