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November 17, 2005
all alone with my memories
i love my grandmother. she came to the US when i was little. that in and of itself was a story. Both my grandmother and grandfather were caught up in the Vietnam War. My grandmother was in one of the last helicopters to leave Saigon. As she got to the evacuation point in Guam, she knew enough to grab the CB and ask anyone on the line to help her find her son, my dad, who was already living here. All she knew was his English name. This part is still fuzzy to me, but word somehow did get to my father, who was able to get her and bring her here to live with us, based on that one call.
there are many stories like that about my grandmother. sometimes she was larger than life. as long as i can remember, she was a social butterfly, going here and there, hanging out all the time. when she wasn't watching me and my sister, she was headed out to hang out with friends. when i was in high school, she had more of a social life than i did. when i was at church, i'd look around for her, and she would be right in the middle of the crowd, chatting away. i know my dad didn't really care for that aspect of her, but he inherited a little of it, and so did i.
And when she used to cook, man she could cook up a storm! Sticky rice dishes, fish cakes, taro root cake, she made them all. And after I went off to college and would come back only occasionally, she would ask when I'd be back and make sure to make my favorite dishes. She'd also make extra so she could pack it and send it back with me. Even later on, when she lost much of her enthusiasm for cooking, she still tried to make dishes that we all liked. Of course, by that point, she started making the same thing almost every night. I remember that even when she stopped cooking, she knew I liked taro root cake, so she asked a family friend to make it and bring it over so I could have it when I came by the house.
There are those memories. Then there are her idiosyncrasies that I look back on with fondness now. Things that annoyed me so much now seem endearing. Like when I used to study in my room upstairs. I'd hear her slippers on the stairs. Swish swish swish. Then the sound would come right to the edge of my doorway and just stop. She would just stand there and stare at me. Not in a bad way, obviously, but at that time I didn't understand that she was just observing me and what I would do. When I was in a mood, I used to take my foot and close the door in her face. I'd then here a "Hmpf!" and a swish swish swish off to somewhere else. Maybe this isn't a memory that others can understand but its something that i can think back on and smile at its silliness.
Or like when my parents would go out and leave my grandmother and us kids alone. We were paranoid to begin with, but my grandmother was even more so. There was one time when she thought she heard something, so we all went to my parents room, and barricaded ourselves in with some of my parents' heavy suitcases. And I had my trusty little league aluminum bat, just in case. It was funny when my dad came home and tried to open the door to his room. Ok, maybe it wasn't funny then, but its funny now.
But she was one sharp cookie. Keep in mind that she barely spoke 20 words of English, yet once she got here, she managed to figure out how to travel between here and all over the entire Bay Area, by bus, BART, or whatever. When I was a kid, she'd take me out to San Francisco Chinatown to pick up groceries (this was before the heyday of 99 Ranch supermarkets). And she knew exactly where to go. Even when people driving her got lost taking her places, she'd know and tell them how to get there. Considering she couldn't read street signs or really ask for directions, that's pretty good.
I guess I'm a little sad as I'm writing this. Partly from the memories that mix in with my grief, but also, I feel like I should be able to do this with my family. We should sit down and just talk about my grandma and the memories we have of her. I just don't know that I can, given how Chinese my family is. As much as I enjoy this medium, its a poor substitute.
Posted by spoof747 at November 17, 2005 11:37 AM