A Letter to Her Helen Liu

Dear grandma, Some days you are a feather floating in the breeze. A giddy smile lifts your wrinkled cheeks, soft chuckles fall from your lips, a childish light brightens your eyes. The smallest things amuse you: a brightly colored flyer in the mail, the rhythmic clicking of a pen, the pale little succulent placed in your room. The house is like your own little wonderland, filled with tiny, endless treasures that delight you to no end. On these days I will lift my head from my laptop to find you turning some small trinket in your hand, grinning to yourself and murmuring words I cannot decipher. Part of me is relieved that you are happy and unburdened, relieved that the shadowy worries that plague your mind have loosened their hold, if only for a little while. Another part of me cannot help but pity. Pity that someone who’s been through eighty-seven years of hardship after hardship is, in the end, reduced to playing with buttons like a five year old child; that someone so strong (you must’ve been) now seems so small.

On these days you point to a peppercorn in the dish we just ate and ask if it’s some sort of bug; on these days you call us over to look at your newspapers, saying you saw us in its blackand-white pictures. You are enraptured by a clueless bliss, a sweetscented fog, your mundane surroundings warped into a delightful utopia. I am not mature enough; I truly do not know if I am happier or sorrier for you. And I am not sure why, but neither of those emotions feel right. Other days you are a branch trembling in the wind. You wander uneasily from room to room, brow creased and hands fidgeting, feet shuffling slow and unsure. Every five minutes you ask me where my father, your son, is; every five minutes I answer

that he is in a meeting, or that he is out shopping, or that he went to go play soccer with his friends. Something seems to confuse you, but you can never name it when I offer to help. Instead you speak vaguely of “when that thing happened” and “when they came over” and “that other person that I saw”; it bothers you for hours. On these days you sometimes leave your bedroom late at night, stumbling out in your pajamas and calling our names. When I go to reassure you, I can see the paranoia dulling your eyes, the tension stiffening your body. You stammer about being afraid of the dark, about not being able to find anyone. I lead you back to your room, turn the lamp on, and offer to stay a while; after a little bit, you thank me and say that you’re fine, that I should go back to sleep.

As I drift off, I imagine waking alone in a dark, deserted house, the only answers to my calls their echoes and the only people I know in this unfamiliar world gone. It must be terrifying. And once, you were the storm itself. Drowning in hate, your mind poisoned by fury, your glare was derisive and your words vicious. You brought hell to our family, through it was no fault of your own. So last December, we took you to your daughter’s house. You spent three months there, forgot about your anger, then came back to live with us.

Only, just today, you asked me once again whether my “true mother” had eaten yet. The way you leaned forward as you lowered your voice to a careful whisper - it was the exact same as it was one year ago, when quarantine first started and your mind began to spiral. The next few months already scare me. Will you sink again into your hatred? How long until we cannot reach you at all? Soon I will be leaving for college - who will calm you down when my father, your son, cannot? You told me once that even if you forgot everyone else, even if you forgot your own son, you would never forget my sister and I.

But I know you only as you have been the past few years, since you came to live with us in America. I associate with you your childish bliss, your uneasy confusion, your hatred towards my mother. It is so hard to wrap my mind around the fact that you are my grandmother - that you were the same person who cared for me when I was a toddler, that you were the same person who took me around Beijing during my fourth grade summer, that you were the same person who helped me knit a lumpy mint-green square of fabric that I still have tucked in my drawer today. And yet my earliest memory is of you and my grandfather leading me down the stairs of a plane, of my parents standing a few dozen meters away, of me wriggling free from your grasp and running the distance to my parents and jumping into their arms. I was only two years old at the time, but I think I remember your smile.

I look through family pictures sometimes, taken some fifteen years ago, when your hair was just beginning to whiten. Who were you, back then, before dementia fogged your mind? Did you find joy in collecting small trinkets? Were you afraid of the dark, or perhaps of loneliness? Maybe, from time to time, did you argue with my mother? Even before then - what was your life like? You grew up amidst war, and your mother died young. At such a young age, how did you cope? You must’ve been so strong. I’ve also heard my father joke about you running wild with your friends during your twenties, bottles of beer in your hands. Is this true? What else did you do with your friends? And how was it like raising my father? He ended up going to China’s top university; you must have taught him well. Were you proud of him? Did you miss him when he immigrated to America? How did it feel when you knew I was born, when you first knew you were a grandmother? If I could push past the fog - who would I find?

There is so much about you that I don’t know. There is so much that I want to ask you. And every day I must remind myself that there is so much more to you than your dementia, even if I may never be able to see it. I think that I can say, regardless of what the future will bring, I’m glad that you’re my grandma. Sincerely, Your granddaughter