My Chinese Grandparents

I never knew my Chinese grandparents well. They lived in Queens, my family a five-hour drive north, which in my youth felt like an eternity—a miserable trip we made three times a year on holiday weekends, during which my knees cramped in the backseat and I was haunted by car sickness that meant I couldn’t read or do anything but look at the road ahead for most the of journey there and back.

If geographic distance weren’t enough, the language barrier exacerbated the divide. They never learned more than the most rudimentary English, and I never learned Cantonese. Add in that I was fast-talker and notoriously mumble-y as a grade schooler and we never stood much of a chance.

I knew my grandparents cared about me. Those early years, I recall my pot-bellied grandfather lifting me in the air and spinning around upon our every arrival. I remember my father communicating that my grandmother wanted to watch me play with my wrestling figures, and so I played, and so she watched, making sounds of amazement when it must have seemed appropriate.

My grandmother was a great cook. She made my favorite beef and broccoli and my sister’s favorite spare ribs with big black mushrooms our every visit, and brought home char-siu pork from China Town (when I was small, I remember thinking they’d gone all the way to China for it, so oblivious to geography was I). In one of my earlier memories, I spied a lobster, still crawling around their refrigerator—that fresh—before she decapitated the thing with a cleaver en route to a pot of boiling water.

I remember my grandfather best by his dogs. Ling-Ling, sweet-tempered, gentle. Ginger, the Dobermin Pinscher who growled and barked loudly and I swore would go for my jugular if given the opportunity. The latter dog technically belonged to my uncle, too busy to care for her so she wound up the old man’s by default. He shared a bed with her. Tamed the beast until old age, when I still wouldn’t trust her, but from an adult’s perspective, I probably could have.

I remember my father telling me my grandfather had cried when they had to put that dog to sleep.

A regular question when people learn I’m half Chinese: do I speak the language? I tell them no, just a few words and phrases. No doubt, the one I remember best, spelled phonetically: menji fawn--the command my grandparents repeated time and again to insist their dogs lie down, or lie down and go to sleep.

We visited my grandparents, first in the house where my father had grown up, before they moved to an apartment. My father helped with the move; the rest of us were present, trying to stay out of the way. My grandfather hardly made the move, passing away from complications related to surgery days after they'd transferred their things to the new living space. Then the next move was into senior housing when I was in college. Another move, my grandmother and uncle upstairs and downstairs neighbors. Her the caretaker after complications related to diabetes cost him his foot.

I visited her there twice. Once dropping in for a couple hours of polite, if awkward interaction with no translator, just the two of us when I was in town for an a cappella show. The next time, with my girlfriend, less than a week before I’d propose to her. An early leg of a journey through New York State where I’d introduce her to more of my family and friends than would wind up attending our wedding.

At the apartment, my grandmother showed Heather photographs of my father when he was young, and photographs of me and my sister. In a plan I hadn’t realized was already established, she then directed me to drive her to pick up my uncle and then my aunt before we drove to a Chinese restaurant.

I’m not great behind the wheel in New York traffic. I steered us white-knuckled while my uncle casually navigated us there and back.

Years passed.

Heather and I had a son.

Most people said Riley looked like me, and in particular how I had looked when I was little. Some of Heather’s family suggested he looked more like her.

My father told me that, on seeing photos, his friend had insisted Riley looked like him.

Heather found a photo of my grandmother. She was struck by how much Riley looked like her.

I’d noticed the resemblance before, particularly when Riley wore his sun hat that we insisted he keep on when playing outside beneath the Las Vegas sun. My grandmother always wore hats, too, often as not freebies from tobacco companies or casinos. She was also conscious of keeping the sun out of her eyes and protecting her skin. A bit in their voices well—for my ignorance of my grandmother’s language, and for Riley’s discovery of babbling sounds, it was easy enough for the two to sound alike in my untrained ear.

My grandmother had sent checks via my father to spend on Riley and to deposit in his fledgling college fund. A link to the great-grandson she may or may not meet--even greater distances and language barriers and another generation between them.

As a child, I always thought of my grandparents as impossibly foreign. It’s only in growing older that I’ve come to realize the degree to which each family has its idiosyncrasies, and even if it isn’t a live lobster in every grandmother’s fridge, there’s sure to be some oddity of a memory to go on about.

I think: I’ll onto hold onto such memories.

I think: I’ll pass them on.