It’s getting hard to make a title nowadays….What I write often has no unifying theme anymore.
Spent an afternoon walking on the streets of Taipei. Nothing interests me anymore. Is it because of jet lag? The lack of companionship? Or the fact I just saw the same stuff merely 6 months ago? On the same subway, looking at the same buildings. Gone is the sense of detachment from the people around me. Perhaps I haven’t changed that much after all.
Yet, hidden from all this is a feeling of separation. The end of this summer will mark the 9th year I am away from this adorable place. I have seen and experienced things that, although individually seems minute, aggregated together has transformed me. I look at the young men in Taiwan and cannot help but feel foreign. Their hairstyle, sense of fashion, and general personality. So different! Trying to imagine myself being fit into their frame, what I would look like if I stayed here and adopted their style, and I find myself in a comedic mood.
I talk to my grandmother after lunch, like two old people reminiscing the past (yes I know, I’m an old man). I sit there and listen to her talk about her grandchildren, my cousins. Those little stories that I have heard a million times about her time in Shanghai. The house she lived in, the life she had. I cannot help but feel a sense of sadness and longing from her. Has the brightest time begun to fade for my dearest grandmother?
She talks about my cousin, her favorite one. The college girl who took her to some Thai buffet a couple days ago. I’d like to think that I’m my grandma’s favorite grandchild, but I smile as I see her eyes light up when she describes that afternoon. I guess being the second favored grandchild is something I can live with 
.
Then our subject turns to my cousin’s brother, that troubled teenager who is on the wrong path. The tensions he has in his family, with his father, my uncle. Grandma talks with surprising peacefulness, yet sadness. Like an overworked worker who comes home at night and has no energy left to deal with the unsatisfactory aspects of life, grandma talks with certain emptiness in her eyes. What can you do?
She continues her peaceful conversation, talking about my 3 cousins and their childhood stories. How my aunt would drive her car and take all 3 children to school. How my grandpa would take one of them to school in the morning, and go pick her up in the afternoon. Suddenly I feel a sense of detachment even from my family. I am that child who grew up in a foreign country, a grandchild that was “the kid from America”. I don’t have much memory of my grandpa, mostly because he never talked to me.
In my memory, he was always that quiet old man who sat in a chair and just looked at you. All the things my grandma talked about him was like describing a distant man who existed in the past. The stories she talked about him, about his interactions with my cousins, all seem so…oh I don’t know how to say it…Distant and unfamiliar.
I look at her, listens to her complain that she is but a person waiting for death. The cooking, daily routines, her sore shoulders and declining stamina. She cannot go travel because she gets tired easily. Lord knows she loves to travel, that 22 year old Shanghai rich girl that never grew up after 60 years. She hates living here doing the same thing day after day. It sucks her of vitality, depletes her energy.
I tell her mama says the same exact thing in my attempt to cheer her up. She smiles and shakes her head. Your mom is young, I am 85 years old! What is left of me? I can only smile and assure her there is plenty left in life for her to explore. Yet it anguishes me to know she feels this way. This is certainly not the way I want my grandma to live her time after so much suffering and hardship.
I think about her life, her family caught in Taiwan’s modern problems. One cousin married late, doesn’t yet have a single child after 5 years. One cousin doesn’t want to marry (rather, his girlfriend refuses to get married. I thought getting married was every girl’s fantasy dream?!). One cousin married an American, such a foreign concept for even my open minded grandma. One cousin has a boyfriend, yet she is approaching 30, and does not seem to have any wedding plans soon. That troubled teenager cousin who is in the army now. God knows what he will make of himself when he has finished serving the army. What does she have? A childless third generation family that seems neither in a hurry to marry nor a hurry to have children. For someone from my grandmother’s generation, there is indeed not much left for her to be happy about.
She continues on to tell me this year’s 端午節 will be her last. 封刀了！以後不煮了! I am happy that she will cook her very last 端午 lunch for me, but at the same time I feel unfortunate. I have rarely experienced those lunch and dinners, as I’ve been away for so long. All those memories from my childhood has begun to fade, and I wish I can eat those same lunch and dinners for years to come. Looks like plans to bring my future wife home and taste my grandma’s amazing Shanghai cooking will not be realized after all. Knowing this will be my last makes me so so sad.
I look at my napping grandma, and I so desperately want to do something that will make her happy. Yet I know whatever I do may not do much. What I can do now is to make her proud, not by making the big bucks, not by getting straight A’s. No, she does not care about those things. Bringing something to look forward to, knowing something good will be happening in the future, the sense of excitement, expectation. Now that’s something would make my grandma happy and cheer her up! Perhaps she’ll consider cooking again after I cheer her up? Just a thought….;)
