I have relatively serious ADHD, which shocks everyone because growing up, I presented to everyone that cared as a Good Girl.
I wore a Mao T-shirt that I wore to accept a Humanities Awards, but I went to a private Lutheran school for rich kids, so everyone just assumed it was a phase. It enraged my (beloved) late great-aunt so much, and I loved her so much, that I threw it away.
She was the one that left Singapore at sixteen to go fight the Japanese in China, telling her father go f&ck himself.
She joined the Red Guard, and met her husband, our 姑爺爺, a land-owner’s son so smitten by her that he left his cushy life and quietly followed her from Hunan to Chongqing to Sichuan to Qinghai, which in retrospect probably saved his life.
By both their accounts, she mostly ignored him at first, given she didn’t believe in marriage. Clever woman.
She took various jobs (bank teller, teacher, shopkeeper) and finally denounced Mao when his soldiers uprooted her, her six children, and her husband from their tiny two-bedroom apartment and took her husband to reeducation camp. She kept the kids alive while they broke his leg enough times that he needed all his left shoes to be fitted with a five-inch sole just to be able to walk properly. They were eventually reunited and were deeply in love until the day he died.
The many times I visited/was deposited with them for weeks or months while my parents were otherwise occupied, he was the first one up every morning.
He would take his birds for a walk in the park on one of those big bird frames, meet his friends outside, patiently tend to his chili plants on the windowsill, then come to her room (where I slept at the foot of her bed) and gently wake her with the latest news and whatever he’d gotten us for breakfast that morning.
She would host a rotation of ex-students, friends, and neighbours from their living room, sharing her thoughts on the happenings of the day, capitalism, Maoism, the economy, and give everyone advice. This stopped during COVID, and she passed away shortly after.
Whenever the Singapore set had something going on - when my grandfather had his first stroke, when my uncle had a nervous breakdown after his divorce - she’d send one of her children or grandchildren to get them, and they’d stay with her until she deemed them healthy enough to let go of. She cried every day after her husband died, yes, but she cried the hardest when she talked about felt leaving my grandfather and her mother behind in Singapore when she was sixteen and he was six, her littlest brother, and how happy she was when she saw him again for the first time in 1989. I wrote down everything somewhere in blue ink but I’ve lost it all now. I’m sad about that.
Thinking of the last time I saw her husband in the summer after high school, before my then-boyfriend broke up with me, I tried growing chilis (among other things) this year, and did not get a single flower or fruit.
I chopped it all up today. The barren tomato vines, the enormous carrot tops attached to purple and yellow and orange carrots smaller than my thumb (all organic and heirloom, to be fair, fuck commercial agriculture but also my family would probably starve without it), and shovel soil over it, churn it up as green manure. In the process, I unearthed about ten beetle grubs, mysteriously, and chuck them into the bushes outside. They are probably harmless, but I don’t have mental energy to verify.
I thought about the live frogs hopping around the kitchen before they got cooked in ginger and soy sauce. I thought about how there was double-boiled soup at every meal. I thought about the river fish with fine, Y-shaped bones. I thought about sitting next to her at every meal, every day, and how she would say, don’t worry about dating, don’t worry about boys, you’re pretty enough already. Don’t rush to get married. Go to university. Get your career. Get another career.
But I did rush to get married, didn’t I. I rushed because I wanted to have a baby, because I wanted her to hold my baby and flirt with my husband in the same sly, clever way she would flirt with my dad and then wink at me when I got one of her references and he didn’t. I wanted to unlock that last bit of knowledge we could share.
In a doomed relationship at 26, and I showed her my fiancé, and she nodded, and said, ah, yes, a white boy. Generous, because he was nearing 40. He said the cursory 你好 but hadn’t the decorum to call her 姑婆 as instructed, didn’t ask about her health, didn’t ask what she’d served for dinner, and I always resented him for it. He said that she was a very cute old lady.
Cute.
I was relieved after he broke up with me, because I thought, he really just couldn’t have flirted back. It wasn’t in his DNA. You can’t make anyone be something they are not. Either they follow you from one side of China to the other, or they take you on a romantic vacation to Legoland (he was into Legos, I was not).
The Chinese New Year after he broke up with me and I got a 2x pay raise, as my mother wrung her hands anxiously at the horrific news, she said, Tell me about your American job. Show me your apartment, that you share with two other girls. You found it on Facebook? Tell me about Facebook. Where are you going on vacation? When will you come visit?
I never did. I say that life got in the way, but the truth is, I couldn’t bring myself to go back to China.
I sent her children RMB 1000 for the funeral when she died.
I should've asked you questions
I should've asked you how to be
Asked you to write it down for me
Should've kept every grocery store receipt
Because every scrap of you would be taken from me
Watched as you signed your name Marjorie
All your closets of backlogged dreams
And how you left them all to me