L-R: My mother, Jenny; Matthew; me; my grandmother, Caroline
In casual conversation, when I refer to my family, I will refer to my mother and grandmother as my parents - and it’s true - I have my mom and my grandma, and they are indeed my parents. Growing up, that was my norm. My mother left my father when I was a newborn and we went to live with my grandmother. Many houses and apartments and states later, I finally left for good after grad school and I was in my own apartment, starting out my adult life.
My grandmother was a strong woman. She sent her kids (my mom and her two twin brothers) off to Libya and then the United States so they could have the best education they could, while she tended to her husband who was dying of leukemia. She was a nurse by trade. She gave birth to my mother at home essentially by herself (she told me that my grandfather, an obstetrician/gynecologist, was in the other room getting his bag and gear together to help my grandmother give birth when he returned to find her holding my mother in her arms).
She flew around the world after my grandfather died and settled down in Connecticut. She worked hard as a nurse’s aide (where she learned how to smoke, incidentally - the nurses there taught my grandma how to smoke by offering her pot first) to put my uncles through private school and eventually college.
She took care of me and although she was my grandmother, she was another mother to me in every sense of the word. When I was being mistreated in a daycare center, she marched in and pulled me out - I’d been put inside a closet because I refused to eat from the same communal bowl of rice soup they tried to feed us all out of. From that point on, Grandma stayed at home to take care of me - working from home, sewing and knitting beautiful garments to sell in upscale boutiques in Manhattan.
Everything I learned about being Chinese I learned from her. She did not bind her feet as a child, so I learned to talk back and refuse to be treated in a subsevient manner. She did not allow herself to be subjected to a loveless, arranged marriage, so I learned to fall in love and let my heart guide me. She treated the least of our society with the most of her heart, so I learned to seek out justice and be grateful for what I have and give back what I can. She spoke loudly and with conviction, so I learned how to be a loudmouth and badass, too. Occasionally - only very occasionally - she cried. Whenever she did, I cried too. As my uncle died a year ago, she sat quietly in her wheelchair and from time to time reached out to touch his toes. I remember what it was like to touch Matthew’s toes for the first time, to fully embrace his newness and the beginning of life. I can only fathom what heartache she felt when she sat there and touched his toes for the last time at the end of his life.
We shared so much together over the course of my lifetime. She taught me how to knit when I was six or seven years old. My cousin and I used to go with Grandma on walks, and before she broke her leg, she was fast - to the point where Jennifer and I didn’t want to go on walks with her because we were not walking - we were running to keep up! At 11 o’clock every weekday morning, she watched The Price is Right. Over the years, she watched Bob Barker’s hair change slowly from black to white - and imagine my surprise when in her final days she and my mom agreed that Drew Carey was not a bad replacement for Bob Barker!
Grandma was most famous for her cooking - everything she learned about cooking came from a lifetime of adapting and testing and figuring out what tastes worked best using cribbed, lesser, American ingredients. A few years ago when visiting my grandmother, I followed Grandma with a notebook and pen, writing down every exact step and amount she used to make her famous sticky rice stuffing. As I madly scribbled, she would say, “Ai ya! Get out of my way! I don’t know what amount, I just know how to make!” Every year after that for Chinese New Year and now for Thanksgiving, I try to recreate my grandmother’s stuffing. I always fail, but I try.
Josh and I once went out to lunch with Grandma and my mom at a small strip-mall dim sum restaurant in West Hartford - it was a pathetic experience, culinary-speaking. I think we had to ask the staff for chopsticks. The food was bad, and the greatest outrage, which Josh likes to kid - is that they used the wrong kind of wrapper for mu shu pork! My mom, grandma and I were all quite miffed - and Grandma said so, loudly and in Chinese. My mom tried to shush her. “Ma, they can understand you!”
“Good! They have deceived us!” I don’t think I have laughed so loudly at someone else’s misfortune, to trick my grandmother with food.
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One of the greatest compliments she ever gave me was when we were back home when my uncle died. Josh and I were wrangling a busy and nosy baby who wanted to get into anything and everything. From time to time, I would nurse him as needed. She asked me questions about what it was like to nurse Matthew, and we talked and shared moments together - from mother to mother. She told me that I was a good mother, that I was very caring and that I was doing well by him. And then later on, on the day my uncle died as we sat next to him, Josh was busy with Matthew in the waiting room and had laid him down to nap on the sofa and he himself laid down on the carpet to close his eyes. There they were - father and son - united in sleep. Mom pushed Grandma toward the waiting room and they both peered in and saw the two of them in the darkened room and Grandma smiled and told my mom what a good father he was to Matthew.
I miss her so much. She died two weeks ago and life has gone on. The sun rises and the sun sets. I am slightly aghast that nothing has changed and everything has changed all at once.
My grandmother was always very proud of me and what I’ve accomplished. What I would give to tell her how proud I was of her and her strength and fortitude and what she has accomplished. I would thank her for being, as I’ve often referred to her, the meanest old man I knew, for having high standards to achieve, for being a wonderful role model of what a strong Chinese woman is, for being a pioneer in a country that never once appreciated her beauty or strength.
Happy Mother’s Day to everyone who is a mother, who has a mother or grandmother, who is about to become a mother, or who loves a mother.
