THE WAYS I FIND HER

THE WAYS I FIND HER

The Grandma I hold in absence, love, and grief

How do you lose someone you never had? Or perhaps this assumes that you can lose someone you never had—a selfish declaration of intimacy, of shared lives and love that you rely on in afterthoughts, attempting to disguise the time that becomes unendurable when you are alone. Losing is a privilege. Losing is proof that you’ve shared belonging and reliance with someone. Losing is possessing a second time, but diluted, like when you order a rose-colored drink with ice and the ice melts and you realize liquid has layers.

I never knew my maternal grandmother. She passed away when my mom was still in college, due to a kind of cancer that my family has never told me about. The very few times I think of Grandma, I can’t help imagining my mom losing her. I picture tears on my mom’s persistent, unyielding face, her slightly bulging eyes with light blue contact lenses layered with an innermost transparency that waters and softens their sternness. In this illusory ‘losing’ of a strong, independent mom—someone who always lectures me on self-reliance, who must have relied on Grandma once and learned how not to when Grandma left—I feel as if I’m losing Grandma myself. As if the pain of that loss has permeated into me through the skin I share with my mom, into the blood streaming down from generations that came before.

I find Grandma in her absence. She exists in the conditional sentences of maternal relatives: “If your grandma cooked this, you’d like it even more.” “If your grandma were still here, she would be stricter on you.” When I, under earnest stares, distributed my signed, self-published novel to great-uncles and great-aunts as if dispensing travel pamphlets, one of them said, “If only your grandma could read this.” They said Grandma would be really proud if she saw who I am now, if she knew that I’m going to Brown for a degree in English. Sometimes, spontaneously, my mom looks at me and declares that my eyes and nose are similar to my grandma’s, and I try really hard to imagine them on someone else’s face.

The search for Grandma is foggy and unguided because I can only construct her from myself. What was Grandma like if she— according to my mother’s family—wouldn’t have been able to stand my adolescent temperament, would love my writings, and had eyes just like mine? Supporting evidence keeps coming whenever I see them. She would have tutored me in chemistry, taught me proper table manners, and supported my overseas education: hypothesized promises that can only be realized through who I am. Her existence is embedded in these limited interactions with my maternal relatives, in fragments which I know lead to her life and the lives they shared. But I can’t find an opening into their past because I’m the one who’s supposed to create that entrance, because our lives are too different to be written on the same page. I find Grandma in my maternal family’s absence from my life, in my absence from their lives, in the reliance on them I didn’t ask for or have. She exists in their simple acknowledgment of her to me, as a way of grieving her, as a way of loving me. I find Grandma in this overlap of love and grief.

In Chinese culture, the Qingming Festival— which falls between April 4 and 6—is for remembering the dead. It’s tricky because almost every traditional Chinese festival follows the lunar calendar, and every year I have to look up specific dates in the more commonly used solar one. But Qingming is now just a three day ‘short break,’ officially designated by the government, despite its thousands of years of history. How do you grieve for someone so artificially?

I often forget about Qingming. I always just knew it was in spring. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never really lost the family members we grieved for—the ones my family taught and told me to grieve for. And perhaps I only lost them then, when my family held onto lives that shared my blood yet felt so foreign, relishing invisible embraces while I could not feel the comfort they found in this reiteration of loss. My grief was artificial, like the holiday itself.

During Qingming, or April in general, families clean dead relatives’ tombstones and decorate them with ornaments. It’s called 扫墓, “sǎo mù,” in Mandarin, literally meaning “sweeping tombs.” Bright silk ribbons, usually in red. Golden paper ingots that crease if you press too hard. Fake flowers connected by a thin string of pink petals with uneven coloring and edges that cut the topmost layer of your fingertip but bring no pain. People offer incense and real flower bouquets and baskets, sometimes also homemade food and branded wine, and burn fake, paper money with a face value as high as $1 billion, serving “a kind of inflation up there,” as my econ-major cousin always joked. When I was still in middle school, modern creativity had already led to the invention of paper mansions, iPhones, and luxury cars to burn. When it was still allowed, people ignited strings of loud firecrackers, and the sound of powder exploding filled dusty land and dried rivers, sending into the air ashes of burnt, fabricated wealth.

Everything you need for grieving is sold by the cemetery complex’s gate. Stalls lined up on muddy grounds, owners soliciting attention away from the dead: a packaged handful of incense for approximately 30 RMB, flower bouquets and baskets reaching up to 200 each, a stack of fake money for 20. I remember, when I was young, staring at the ground and seeing mud and dust clinging onto strangers’ clean shoes while my mom and uncle bought overpriced incense, flowers, and decorations. Qingming—this recurring, collective time for grief— was a lesson. I studied everyone’s gestures and faces, listened to vernaculars of Mandarin, trying hard to extract hints of sadness. Until I went abroad and couldn’t make it back in April, I grieved with my family every spring, wandering and searching for a state of loss to enter, lost.

Due to the pandemic, I stayed at home in Beijing to finish my senior year of high school remotely. In April 2021, I had a chance to visit Grandma’s grave again after three years of not seeing it. On our way to the cemetery complex in Tianjin, a city about a two-hour drive from Beijing, I yawned repeatedly, attempted to do some AP Literature readings and failed. My parents, my grandpa, and I gathered with my uncle

who flew back from work in Dalian, my aunt who Ubered from their apartment in Tianjin, and my cousin who was still hungover from an event the previous night. I realized that what losing Grandma felt like to me had always been this strange mixture of present and past—of the ongoingness of our lives and the cessation of hers, of me trying to reconcile such an unerasable divide with the lineage that sustains my unseeable, impalpable tie with her. And only when I see my mom and uncle grieve for their mom, see my grandpa grieve for his wife, do I actually feel the bond between my grandma and me: an absence that defines our relationship by a “lack of,” a void forever tying me to her. I lose Grandma when everyone re-embraces her, for only then can I imagine we shared a pre-existing relationship that I dream of retrieving.

We crossed a labyrinth of graves and offerings and trees to arrive at Grandma’s grave. It was easy to get lost. Grandma’s tombstone, which I cannot recall exactly, was black marble with golden engravings of her name, birthdate, and death date. Also engraved in white were the names of my grandpa, my parents, my uncle and aunt, and my cousin and I, relationships listed: “husband Yu Huabei,” “daughter Yu Yan,” “granddaughter Wang Siqi.” I couldn’t take my eyes off of my name. It was something to fill her absence in my life. The only concrete proof that maybe I could lose her, because I did have her. It reminded me of my longing for her—a longing I had subconsciously ignored—sustaining it, finally, with something to dwell on. I finally felt justified to lose, felt worthy of the grief that was supposed to be in me all along.

We cleaned the whole grave with wipes. The coldness of alcohol wrapped around my hand and my grandma’s tombstone. I watched white cotton cloth caress the rigid edges and surfaces, leaving the stone bright and clear like a glaze of melted sugar, the cloth full of brown marks the shape of our hands. When we left for another year and my family came back without my cousin or me, the dust would have returned. Every past Qingming, when I visited that same square of land, I’d always questioned whether it meant anything—whether it meant anything to Grandma if we only returned every 365 days to offer her a temporary glance at our lives. I’d questioned how much intimacy this national ritual of grieving could preserve. We continued cleaning in silence.

The tombstone was set on a podium, with four lions standing on its corners. We wiped them and tied red ribbons around each lion’s neck. We tied one around the top part of the gravestone as well. My mom fixed every bowknot we made. She spread flowers she had gotten yesterday online—knowing the ones sold by the cemetery gate would be too stale and expensive—on the platform in front of the gravestone. My dad and uncle used their cigarette lighters to ignite the incense; we stuck them on the censer and gathered in a row.

“Mom, we are here to visit you,” my mom said. “We are all doing well, Wang Siqi is going to college this fall, and Yu Hanbo is almost a junior now—it’s crazy how fast life gets, right?” She paused for a second and told my cousin and me to talk to Grandma. My cousin went first: “Grandma, we are all doing great. I transferred to Columbia, admission was probably easier due to COVID—didn’t have super high grades,” he laughed, and my uncle laughed too, adding that “this kid” had founded a company. “Yes, we hosted an Economics panel at Peking University yesterday,” my cousin continued, “sorry neither of us got your chemistry professor genes, not even the STEM genes in general.” We all laughed.

I didn’t know what to say to Grandma. Or more precisely, I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say. I told her I got into Brown, told her I was graduating high school soon, told her not to worry about me. Repetitive, vague, incomplete things. The same longing I felt when seeing my name engraved under hers grew stronger when I called out “grandma” to a block of stone. It was a word that never came out of my mouth except in circumstances like this. A word that I’ve heard many, many people speak in different languages, a word that shouldn’t feel or be this special. I felt as if I were actually calling her, like she would respond to me and see who I was through her own eyes, instead of me trying hard to recap an absence of three years, an absence of a lifetime, of her lifetime. How could I tell her who I was? I visit her grave every several years and try compressing my time into a fleeting moment—her life stays still, caught by stone, dust, air; mine rushes by, too fast to capture. and typing, so my cousin took me to a bonesetter. We lay on our stomachs with Chinese medicine plasters on our backs, and my cousin told me about this potential girlfriend he had. That night I went home and finished the AP Lit reading; a friend asked me what I did that day and I replied “扫墓,” and we went on to discuss AP Physics.

I lose Grandma in her peripheral existence in my actual, normal life, but somehow to me she exists in many ways, beyond life’s basic operations. Sometimes I do something and wonder if, several decades ago, she did the same thing. I see my mom and wonder what she was like as a daughter, see my grandpa and wonder what he was like as a husband. When I occasionally can get lunch with members of my big maternal family, I wonder what Grandma was like as a sister. My imagination of her and the kind of love I feel from her—even though I never really knew my grandma—has influenced me throughout my life. It’s an influence that exists because of her absence: one slowly gathered through the years from the grief and remembrance my family practices over and over again. Her life and her absence are so closely knitted into my mom’s, my grandpa’s, my great-aunts’ lives and theirs so tightly connected with mine— it’s impossible to separate this cloth of lives into individual threads. I never wholly have her, but I also never lose her completely. She is embedded within me; she is part of what I’m part of.

I have been wrong—losing is not a specific state you enter and exit. It is an ongoing process, a gift of lineage that’s passed on through generations, a state of life that proceeds with yours and ones after you. Qingming is not just a national event for mourning, but also a way to pass down loss. During the many spring mornings when I struggled to accept my family’s grief, I was slowly learning that it is more important to feel and embrace Grandma’s absence than to make sense of it. That it is more important to remember than to understand. That, perhaps, losing someone is a way of holding onto them, while having them a way of letting go. And maybe I have had Grandma—in the many ways I find her absent, in the many ways I find her there, in the many ways I find her.

Grandma had never felt so close and so far. I didn’t know what to say because I wanted her to actually know me, and I knew she never would. Because everyone had been telling me how proud she would feel and how much she would love me. How do you lose someone you never had? I hold and lose Grandma in these longings, in the almost uncontrollable craving to be loved by her, a love I assume to have with or without her presence. Losing someone you never had is trying to bestow yourself with something nonexistent. It’s grieving in an imagined space and embracing an invisible kind of love.

At that moment, I hoped so badly to feel that love. At that moment, I felt the same heartbreak, as if I were to lose that love I’d never had.

KATHY WANG B’25 is thinking of her grandma.