‘Wait for Me’

“Yeye, I’m coming home in two months! Are you excited?” I exaggerate each syllable in a high-pitched voice to ensure every word I speak is clear.

My 92-year-old grandfather, on the other side of the video call, does not respond. “Did you hear me, Jiang Benfa?” Looking for signs of excitement in his eyes, I repeat my words, saying his given name to get his attention. I wait and wait until finally he mumbles two Chinese words:

“gao xing,” meaning “happy.”

I had not visited my family in China since 2017, when soon after my wedding, I’d left to earn my master’s degree in the United States. Four years had passed since the last time I’d seen my grandpa in person. At the time, he was still walking briskly without any assistance and staying up to date with current affairs via TV and newspapers. Things changed completely when Alzheimer’s hit him in 2020. Now, over a year into the disease, his symptoms have worsened so rapidly that he’s almost lost his ability to communicate. I know it’s only a matter of time before he cannot even recognize me, his only grandchild.

Growing up, I lived with my grandparents in Dalian, a beautiful coastal city in northeast China, until I left home for college. Yeye (Chinese for “Grandpa”), a gregarious, loving, and patient man, had made me the apple of his eye since my birth 34 years ago.

He took me to school on a bicycle every day from the time I was 4 years old until I was 7.

Well into his 60s then, my grandpa struggled to pedal his way up the hilly roads of our hometown by the sea with me sitting on the little shelf of the bike’s rear rack.

Every time we arrived at a particular long and steep uphill road, I would jump off the bike and cheer for him while he, out of breath and sweating profusely, tried his hardest to walk the bike uphill. One day, when we came to that road, I blurted out the new idiom I had recently learned at school, “Hey, Grandpa, where there’s a will, there’s a way! You got this!” He burst out laughing and began trying even harder to climb to the top of the hill. Ever since then, we’ve called that hill the “where there’s a will, there’s a way” road.

Another time, when I was 4, I went to my kindergarten with a handkerchief attached to my blouse by a safety pin. When I got home,

Yeye was terrified to find that the pin and the handkerchief were gone. Concerned that I had swallowed the pin, he took me to the hospital to get an ultrasound. Sure enough, the pin was in my colon. I still have no idea how I swallowed it. The sharp point was not clasped, which sounded scary to my grandparents, yet the doctor said it might eventually come out through my stool. Hearing this, Yeye started using sticks to poke around my stool every day until a few days later, he jumped to his feet yelling “I found it, I found it!” He was like a kid discovering some treasure from antiquity.

As these memories flooded back, it devastated me to see my grandpa, who could not bear me suffering in any pain or danger, now trapped in his own illness and forgetting what he cherished most — me and our shared recollection.

Before I hung up, to let him know I was coming home, I shouted, “Yeye, wait for me!”

My endearing grandpa was not able to wait long enough to see me before he passed away a couple of weeks after my last video call with him in November 2021. But I did make it back to have his ashes buried on a tranquil mountain where the roads to his tomb are quite steep. Once again, I saw myself, my grandpa’s only grandchild, grinning and waving to him, shouting, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Zaiyi Jiang is a project manager at the University of Michigan Youth Policy Lab. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.