My Grandmother, the Rock

My mother came into my room one morning while I was lying in bed. It was Saturday, and I was thinking about what I was going to do with my day of freedom. I had decided I would get up in a few minutes, dress, and then go to Peets to drink coffee and read until my eyes crossed and my hands started trembling from too many lattes.

My mother stood in the doorway and waited until I noticed her. I sat up and said, “Good morning! I think I’m going to go to Peets today.”

My mother smiled at me. “What about your homework?”

“That’s what Sunday is for.”

I flopped back onto my pillow and let my mind wander to coffee and books. I thought I might stop by the library to get something to read, so I tried to remember where my library card was.

“Your Auntie Yeming died this morning,” said my mother.

            My head snapped up. My mother was looking at me, waiting to see my reaction. I said, “What?”

Auntie Yeming was my father’s sister. Last year she had developed breast cancer, but she had gotten better. She moved to San Rafael so that her mother and sister – my grandmother and Aunt Rosemary – could care for her while she received treatment. She went through chemo and lost all her hair, but her cancer went into remission and she got better. I hadn’t known that it had come back, and I told my mother so.

             “Neither did I,” she said. “No one told us.” Her last words held a tinge of criticism.

            “How did you find out?” I asked.

            “Uncle Knowland called this morning,” my mother said. I felt a stab of annoyance. In Berkeley we were – aside from the ones she was living with – my aunt’s closest relatives, at least geographically. My Uncle Knowland lived in Minnesota, and he had found out first.

            “Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I swung my feet to the ground, slid off the bed, and stretched. It seemed like the only thing to do. I walked over to my bookcase and sat down in front of it.

            “We’re going to go to San Rafael later,” said my mother. “Aunt Rosemary is very upset.” I noticed she didn’t say anything about my grandmother.

            “Do we have to?” I asked. My mother gave me a warning look.

“Yes,” she said firmly. “We’re going at four, so be ready.” She left the room.

I hated visiting San Rafael. My aunt’s house was a lacy, sterile, suburban nightmare with wall-to-wall carpeting. The walls were plastered with family photos and needlepoint samplers depicting gamboling kittens and dewy eyed puppies. The doormat read “Bless this mess.”

Worse than the house were its inhabitants. My father’s family had never liked my mother or me, though they weren’t upfront about it. We were always invited to my aunt’s house for Chinese New Year, Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and at these gatherings were always treated with courtesy. But there were little things, like snide remarks over dinner and being left out of the loop when my aunt died.

My grandmother was the worst. While the others tried for some modicum of warmth, my grandmother remained cool and distant. She wouldn’t condescend to hug me, and if I talked to her, she would remain as impassive as a statue. In my mind I called her the Rock.

If she spoke to my mother or me at all, she witheringly referred to us as “you people.” My mother once attributed her dislike to the fact that we weren’t Chinese.

“But I’m half,” I said.

“That’s not enough. It’s all or nothing,” my mother told me.

“But Jeremy’s only half,” I countered. Jeremy was my cousin who was half white. “Lola seems to like him.”

“Jeremy speaks Chinese, dear.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!”

“Of course it doesn’t. You know your dad’s family is screwed up.”

So I was reluctant to go to San Rafael. Why would I want to console people who had never shown me true warmth or kindness? I wondered what “very upset” meant for my father’s family. I couldn’t imagine my proper, upright Aunt Rosemary sobbing on the ground, prostrate with grief. A few proper tears were all I could see out of her. I had my doubts that the Rock could cry at all.

*          *          *

I had my own theories about my grandmother’s dislike of my family. I noticed that she rarely spoke English, preferring instead to speak Cantonese or her native Spanish. I was the only one of her grandchildren that didn’t understand at least one of the languages.

She told me once that she had tried to teach me Spanish when I was a toddler, but that I always stubbornly refused to answer unless she spoke to me in English. She said that I reminded her too much of my father. I didn’t realize until later that this was meant to be an insult.

I gleaned, from family lore, that my father had been rather wild and headstrong in his youth. He had been the bad seed, sneaking out at night and playing soccer with the street children. My grandmother often locked him out of the house, so that he would have to sleep on the doorstep when he came home, but this never deterred him from sneaking out again. He was trouble, and my mother and I were trouble by association.

When my grandfather died, I found that my grandmother’s distaste for my family extended to the rest of my relatives. My mother was in Florida for a wedding that weekend, so my father and I went to my grandfather’s funeral alone. At the funeral, my Uncle Lincoln got up to make a speech which, according to the program, was called “Are You Born Again?” I eyed my uncle nervously. My immediate family’s religion (or rather, lack thereof) was yet another of the things that set us apart. As lapsed Catholics, we hadn’t attended church since I was in the third grade and my mother decided that organized religion wasn’t for her.

 I happily went along with this decision, abandoning Sunday morning services in favor of Sunday morning cartoons. Although I had been baptized and confessed, and had received communion, Catholicism had never really stuck, and I slipped it off as easily as I would a too-large dress. My father’s faith had dissipated long ago, for reasons unknown, and I can only assume that this was another reason he was regarded as the black sheep of the family.

The rest of his relatives, on the other hand, were pious Born Again Christians. They attended mass regularly and went to Sunday School and Bible study groups. At family dinners they would gather us into a circle to hold hands, bow our heads, and pray before we ate.

My family’s agnosticism had always been a sore point for my father’s family, and watching my Uncle Lincoln mount the podium steps to speak, I had the feeling that it was about to be brought up again.

“Thirty years ago my father became a Born Again Christian. It was this faith that gave him comfort in his last hours,” boomed my uncle. He reminded me of evangelicals I had seen on TV, preaching hellfire and damnation.

While my uncle prattled on, I scuffed my feet against the floor and looked around the church. Most of the other churchgoers were staring off into space, and some were even nodding off. A few were listening, most notably my grandmother, who was gazing at him with rapt attention.

 “No one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born again,” preached my uncle. “I do not grieve my father’s passing because he is born again. I know that he will go to heaven, and I know I will see him again because I am born again. My wife and my four children will see him, because they are born again.”

I sat up. I could see where this was going. But surely he wouldn’t be so hardhearted as to leave us out?

“My sister Yeming will see him,” continued my uncle. “My brother Knowland, his wife, and their three children will see him. My sister Rosemary, her husband, and their two children will see him, for they are born again.”

He’s not going to do it, I told myself. He wouldn’t snub us in front of all these people, just because we’re not “born again.” I looked around the room, searching to see if someone had realized what was going on, to see if anyone shared my outrage. I only saw my grandmother, gazing at my uncle, hanging on to his words.

My uncle opened his mouth to speak again, and I breathed a sigh of relief. We were next.

“If you meet my father again in heaven,” said my uncle, “Do you know what he will ask you? He will ask you, ‘Are you born again?’”

It was like a slap across the face. I left the church trembling with anger and shame.

*          *          *

I didn’t expect my Aunt Yeming’s death to leave a gaping hole in my life. We had been close, but it was the kind of closeness that disappears with age, as the kid grows up and grows apart.

She had been my favorite aunt when I was younger. She was bright, smart, funny, and more affectionate than the rest of my family put together, but eventually the geographical distance between us broke whatever bond we had had.

Yet after my mother broke the news, I spent the rest of the day drifting around the house in a listless daze. I wasn’t sad. I just felt empty.

I pulled my books out of my bookshelf, seeking something to cheer me up, something to take my mind off things, something that would tell me how I was supposed to feel. I thought that I should feel something. It worried me that I didn’t.

I tried reading, but the all the books I opened seemed wrong somehow. I couldn’t escape into a book as I usually did when I was upset. Even my favorite passages from my favorite books couldn’t stir me from my feeling of detachment. I found that, in a time of death, words were a poor substitute for life.

Instead of reading I just sat and thought. And, naturally I suppose, my mind drifted to thoughts of my Aunt Yeming, and the jewelry box she made me when I first met her.

*          *          *

A fashion designer by trade, my Aunt Yeming had a studio in the back of her apartment filled with bolts of fabric, drawers of beads, and spools of ribbon. I was three years old when she first brought me here and told me she was going to make me something.

Excited by the prospect, I raced around the room, opening drawers and pulling bolts of fabric off the shelves. I grabbed beads, flowers, cloth, ribbons – anything that struck my fancy – and rushed back to dump it all in front of my aunt.

“Well, what do you want to make with this?” she asked me.

I surveyed my pile of goods gravely before replying, “A jewelry box.”

My aunt nodded her approval and began pulling out supplies: scissors, thread, a sewing machine, and lastly, a small cardboard box.

As my aunt stitched away, attaching silk to cardboard, and lace to silk, I stood by on tip-toe at the edge of her work table, and chirped out commands in my high-pitched three year old voice.

The result was an absolute horror, a silk monstrosity adorned with ribbons and fake pink roses, but it was what I wanted, so that was what my aunt gave me.

At the end of the visit I packed the jewelry box securely away in my suitcase to bring home. I gave it a place of honor on my dresser; a favorite gift from a favorite aunt.

Over the years my Aunt Yeming sent me presents she had made herself. Sometimes it would be a velvet scrunchie for Christmas, other times a flowered headband or a sequined barrette for my birthday.

As I got older, I outgrew my aunt’s style, and put aside the childish lace and ribbons in favor of cotton and denim. I threw out my dresses and my pink striped bedspread. I painted over my rose colored walls, and shipped my dolls off to Goodwill.

But no matter what other childhood trinkets I discarded or sold, I hung on to the jewelry box. It survived many garage sales and purges, and remained in my room as a relic of the old times. The box retained its place of honor on my dresser, and whenever my aunt sent me a present, I would set it safely inside.

*          *          *

Maybe it was my imagination, but when our car pulled up in front of my Aunt Rosemary’s house the street seemed unnaturally quiet. Typical neighborhood noises – the whirr of fans, the chirp of birds, the chatter of sportscasters on TV – were absent from the air. The sunlight had the harsh, glaring edge that I associate with end of August days, that sad, sort of half-golden light that signals the close of summer.

It was as though the whole neighborhood was holding its breath, but whether out of respect for my aunt’s death or in anticipation of whatever was to come I didn’t know. The slam of our car doors breaking the stillness seemed unbearably wrong.

I was holding my breath too as we made our way up my aunt’s walk. I half expected to be turned away, deemed, as we were, unworthy to be let in on the inner workings of the family circle.

The front door was ajar, and from the porch I could see straight through the screen door to the living room. There was no one around. My mother rang the doorbell, and after a few moments my Aunt Rosemary appeared. I couldn’t see her clearly through the screen, but her voice sounded tired when she said hello.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

My mother explained that we had heard the news, and that we were here for whatever they needed us for. My aunt nodded, then slowly swung open the screen door and ushered us inside. As my parents stood talking to my aunt in the entryway, I wandered through the house, wondering where my cousins and uncle were.

I found my grandmother in the den.

She was lying on the couch, chin tucked into her chest, her eyes closed. I hesitated at the doorway, wondering whether I should go in, or make my escape to the kitchen, the backyard, my cousin’s room – anywhere but there. Before I could make a decision she opened her eyes.

I froze. Surreally, as if in a slow-motion picture, my grandmother rose off the couch and advanced toward me.

Before I could move – say no!, pull away – she grasped me in her arms and began sobbing. I patted her back awkwardly, not knowing what to do with this weeping mess that was so at odds with the unemotional grandmother I knew. Over her shoulder I could see that the couch was strewn with tissues – evidence that she had been crying long before we had arrived.

She turned her head into my shoulder and said something to me. Her words were muffled and I had to strain to hear what she was saying:

“Mandy, your Auntie Yeming is gone. But she’s in a better place, she’s in heaven, she’s in a better place.”

She said it over and over like a mantra, as if the words gave her something to hold on to, an anchor in the midst of her grief. Gone, gone, she’s gone. Standing in the middle of the den, sobbing onto my shoulder, my grandmother repeated it until her voice gave out.

I had always imagined my grandmother as some towering giant, unshakeable, unapproachable, unassailable. But, enveloped in her arms, I found she was just as small as I was.

*          *          *

The next time I see my grandmother I’m sure she’ll pretend none of this ever happened. It’s her way, after all, to conceal her emotions behind a stoic facade. I don’t call her the Rock for nothing.

This is how it will happen:

It will be Thanksgiving, perhaps, or maybe Christmas. My parents and I will arrive, half an hour late, in a whirlwind of cold air, shed coats, kisses, and shouts hello! We’ll circle the room gossiping and shaking hands. People will ask us why we were late. “Traffic,” we’ll say.

When we reach my grandmother, my father will mutter an awkward hello and quickly depart for another part of the house. My mother will kiss her cheek, say “Hi, mami,” and move on to find other relatives, leaving us alone.

“Where have you been?” my grandmother will demand.  I’ll shrug, and reply with our standard “Traffic” response.

“Hmmph.”

Then I’ll hesitate, wondering whether I should walk away or stay and try to talk. We’ve been through this so many times. I say hello and am met with the blankness of a stone wall. I talk, and it’s like talking to a statue. I’ve been snubbed and scorned so many times. Why should this be any different? It would be easier and less painful for the both of us if I just walked away. We’ve gone seventeen years without building a meaningful relationship; we’d hardly notice if we passed up the opportunity to form one now.

But then I’ll look at my grandmother and I will hear gone, gone, she’s gone, and I’ll know then that I will stay.