Between two worlds: a Chinese American story
My grandfather died on 25 August 2020, Chinese Valentine’s Day. I believe it was peaceful. He had been in hospital in a vegetative state for several months, and had been declining from dementia for three years. He was 95; he had always said he would live to be 100.
Fifth-three days before he died, my grandmother died. She was eating a sweet rice ball at the dinner table and her heart suddenly stopped. Mid-bite, she simply stopped moving. Froze, like a buffering video clip. By the time they got her to the hospital it was too late. She had been in good health. No one had been expecting that she would pass away.
I was alone in New York when I heard about my grandfather’s death. Because of the pandemic, none of the family in the US could travel. We used
WeChat video to attend his funeral. From China, my aunt called us all in on a group conference – my brother in New Jersey, my parents in San Diego,
my cousin in San Jose, my uncle in Indiana. The faces of all these separate individuals in different parts of the US were huddled on to the small screen of her mobile phone, which she held up at the funeral as she cried and prayed.
I set my phone up on a small tripod in the living room of the Brooklyn apartment I’d been subletting for more than a year but never felt quite at home in. It was a summer evening, quite late, after dinner. After the hard pandemic months of March and April, Brooklyn felt warm, festive, alive, with outdoor restaurants packed with relieved diners. To prepare for the funeral, I got dressed and put on makeup. Instead of sitting down, I remained standing in front of the tripod to show my respect. I watched the tiny square within the square – the video of my grandfather was one of the five screens on the call – on which they were laying flowers over his dead body.
* * *
My grandparents, by whom I mean my (yéye: my father’s father) and
(năinai: my father’s mother) lived in Hefei, in Anhui province. Hefei is a sleepy, midsize city, overshadowed by Nanjing to the east and Wuhan to the west. For tourists, it’s most likely a stopover on the way to the famous Yellow Mountain to the south. Growing up, my brother and I had regularly spent long summer holidays at my grandparents’ apartment there, sharing beds with aunts and cousins, splaying out in front of the air conditioners, walking to the internet cafe to play Starcraft and virtual pet games, getting spiced beef jerky and Calbee shrimp chips from the nearby shop and watching soapy Chinese dramas in the evening. To get to the apartment, we buzzed in through a heavy front door and stomped up three floors of cold concrete steps. Outside the building, there was a mulberry tree; occasionally, my grandmother would use the leaves to raise silkworms.
The rest of the time, we were in California. Since I wasn’t physically with my family in China, WeChat, the ubiquitous social media app for Chinese speakers, became the portal through which I could peer to the other side. Our WeChat group is a repository of baby photos, funny videos and chatter between all the relatives. When I scroll far up, there are holiday photos, old conversations between my aunts about my grandparents’ health, small squabbles and gossip about their daily lives.
“At six o’clock this morning, the old princess said she was hungry, and she got up to eat,” they would write of my grandmother. “Good thing the caretaker knows her rules by now.”
“No gas at my house this morning, but luckily I got a dinner invitation from my friend. I brought over strawberries and pickled clover from Chongming Island,” one aunt wrote, sending pictures.
“I like Song Joong-Ki,” a female cousin wrote of a famous pretty boy actor during a conversation about Korean celebrities, and another aunt, 30 years her senior, gravely affirmed, “I also like Song Joong-Ki”, to my cousin’s amusement.
My grandmother, who could read WeChat but never figured out how to type, occasionally entered nonsense letters as she scrolled through. My father would always reply, “Poor Mama. What are you trying to say?”
At my grandmother and my grandfather’s funerals, WeChat was the technology that let us be present at those ceremonies in real time. But it is an imperfect portal: one cannot truly be back. We couldn’t put flowers on the bodies; we couldn’t, as our relatives in China did, go back to the apartment afterwards and lay oranges by my grandparents’ photos. How alienating it was, to be sending our spirits through our screens – rectangles the size of our hands. My grandparents’ deaths still do not feel real. Not really. They were already so far away. My grandmother is still listed in my WeChat contacts, a name that, when I scroll through my phone, makes me startle.
* * *
In Reflections on Exile, Edward Said writes: “Exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical … like death but without death’s ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography.” I had not been forced to be in exile, but in the US, I too was torn from the nourishment of tradition, family and geography. To make up for this, I desperately longed to fill in the gaps of my knowledge about Asia.
I loved hearing stories about China. Whenever I learned about Chinese history in school, I would go home and ask my parents. “No, that’s not how it was, this is how it was,” they would say. In contrast to what my textbooks said, my parents shared happy stories of the Cultural Revolution – of friends made on the farms, about the brilliance and charisma of my oldest auntwho had a posse of young admirers, about how the Chinese Communist party rewarded my with medals and pensions for their military service. During my summer vacations, my cousins joked that my paid for my dinners with his wallet from the CCP. And whenever I went back to Hefei, it was to a family that told me this was where I came from, where I would always be welcome and would always have a place.
In December 2018, a year and a half before my grandparents passed away, I went to China to collect my family’s oral histories. Like many children of immigrants, I had an uneasy feeling of being born out of formlessness, occupying an invisible space in a country that never filled in where exactly I was supposed to fit. I wanted to articulate my family’s past, make sense of where we had come from, where I had come from. This was a duty I felt all the more responsible for because of my role in the family as the “writer”.
But for a long time I delayed making the trip – because it would be timeconsuming, because it would be emotionally exhausting, because my Chinese was not good enough, because I did not know the right questions to ask. Yet my grandparents were getting older and older, and China changed more rapidly by the day. Finally, I knew I couldn’t keep putting it off. I bought my ticket and went.
I landed in Shanghai and took a high-speed train to Hefei. Before I left, I read an article on how the US-China trade war was affecting the price of soy. When I arrived in Hefei it was evening, and I was just in time for my 䑌䑌’s 90th birthday dinner. I walked out of the enormous, near-empty train station to meet my uncle’s car, and we drove to a family restaurant on a quiet street. When we brought out the cake, 䑌䑌’s great-granddaughter, my little niece, offered her a plastic yellow crown with lights and helped her blow out the candles.
My grandfather wasn’t present at the dinner table. Before I arrived, I had harboured some hope – not knowing the full extent of his dementia – that I could talk to him still, excavate his memories. But by the time I arrived, it was already too late. Mentally, he was long gone.
* * *
His name was Qian Feng, Qian as in “money”, the family name I have inherited. He was born in 1925, in the year of the bull, on an impoverished farm in Jiangsu where they wove cotton and herded cows. He had six siblings and no formal education. Because he was always hungry, at the age of 15 he ran away to join the Chinese Communist party army, where he knew he’d be fed. He fought against the Japanese in the second world war, and was deaf in one ear because of a war wound. In the army, he learned how to write. From his illiterate, uneducated background, he became a professional writer, producing novels, stories and essays. This, a classic story of proletariat triumph, is one of the great origin myths of my family.
With my grandmother, he had five children. The first was born in 1953. Three of their children harboured ambitions to become writers; instead, those three went on to study medicine. Two, including my father, emigrated to the US. And then there was me, his granddaughter, born in a suburb of Los Angeles in a democratic country, in a completely different place and time, in the affluent, bourgeois west – and I wanted to be a writer as well.
In my memory was always alone in his room, playing cards. In the afternoons he played go; in the evening, mahjong. Before dinner, he always clapped his hands and said, in English, “HALLO HALLO EAT”. The other English word he knew was “MONSTER”. I remember the green jacket he wore in his photos from his first visit to LA. One day, in the winter, when I was two or three years old and living in Hefei, I watched him walk out with a plastic bag to fill with snow for us to play with. From the balcony overhead, I could see the footsteps trailing behind him, and the green jacket.
In the Hefei apartment, I spent several days paging through old photos. My as a soldier in black-and-white, and then, in full colour, swinging in a hammock in the US, grinning over a deck of pinup cards on the carpet, sitting on the front step of a very American porch. The pictures of him when he was younger filled me with a sense of loss. The family joke had always been how robust he was, how healthy despite his age and all his drinking and smoking. He could walk for miles, his back never drooping.
Instead of talking to him, I looked through what was left of his writings. I found two essays, including an autobiographical piece he wrote when he was 86, titled My Legacy, which looked back on his life. “From the time my memory begins, my most enduring impression is of my father lying sick in his bed,” he began. “I constantly brewed herbal medicine for him, drained the dregs, washed out the jars. One night, my mother woke me suddenly. My father had already been carried outside and his body placed on to a wooden board. His head faced north, at his side was a burning dusk-yellow rushlight, and my mother was wailing, exhorting us children to quickly call out to our father, to not let him go … ”
At the end of the essay, he reflected: “From 1940, when I enlisted in the New Fourth Army, until now, history has leapt 70 years.”
I saw how much I had never even known to ask. The essay showed how quick his mind was, his sharp awareness of the history he was living through. I looked for his other writings. He had published four volumes of fiction and countless articles in journals and newspapers. But during the chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, his books had gone out of print. Our family had lost their copies. I asked my relatives to help me find them, and even enlisted Chinese friends to help me search, but novels by Qian Feng weren’t listed in the used books databases, and I still haven’t found them.
Some notes from my journal, from that visit to China:
* * *
After her birthday dinner, I spent three days interviewing my grandmother. Because she spoke in a thick dialect, my aunt had to be there to translate into standard Mandarin for me. In the evenings the three of us piled into the old, familiar bedroom across the only bathroom in the apartment, my grandmother grumbling about her hearing aids while I fiddled with the microphone. Together, we tried to cobble together some understanding of her history.
My was born to a landowning family in Jiangsu. Her surname was Shi, which means “stone”, a stubborn word that suited her personality. In 1944, when she was not yet 16, she renounced her class and joined the army in service of the Communist party’s cause. She had dry, sturdy hands that raised three generations of children. My cousins, relying on her long after they’d left home, would often leave their children, her great-grandchildren, in her care. She was fiery and straightforward, unpretentious to the core. On the other side of the ocean, my father often laughed at how you couldn’t trust to buy any clothes. One summer, in middle school, I grabbed a cigarette from her when she was playing mahjong and told her not to smoke. She laughed at me and pulled another cigarette from the packet.
On the last day of our interviews, after I turned off the microphone, she put a hand on my wrist and started talking again. She said that in her life, she had just been an ordinary person. Not extraordinary at anything. And with a personality like a boy’s. But she’d always tried to help others. Whether she had money or not, if there was something she could do, she did it. So even though she was just a low-level cadre in the civil system, people liked her. They all came to give her greetings at New Year. She was known for being diligent at work. She wasn’t selfish. That was how she’d lived her life.
After she died, I shared the recordings of my interviews in the family WeChat group. My uncle, who had been in Indiana and was also unable to physically attend the funeral, thanked me. “I cried hearing her voice again,” he said.
Later, he pointed out how basic my questions had been. “That interview – you don’t understand Chinese history at all, though!”
He probably didn’t realise how this hurt me, but oh, it hurt. It was another reminder of how I didn’t really “belong” with the people on the other side of the WeChat group. I had tried my best to keep up with the Chinese world, but time spent in one world was time spent away from my other one.
* * *
After I interviewed my family, I stayed in China for a month to travel around by myself for the first time. I’d gone sightseeing in the past – to the Three Gorges, to Yellow Mountain, Mount Emei, Jiuzhaigou, Xi’an – but always with family who had planned everything, bought the tickets and figured out the routes. As an adult, I had travelled alone in several foreign countries in which I’d felt confident figuring things out independently, but I still felt a sense of unease in China, like a child who doesn’t know how to take the train by herself – and this was the feeling I wanted to overcome.
I welcomed in the new year with a friend in Nanjing. Alone, I travelled through Hangzhou and Suzhou. These days, the logistical hurdles for a tourist visiting China are complex and ever-changing. For one, everyone uses Alipay. If you have Alipay, the whole world of modern China is spread out at your feet: train tickets, taxis, bike shares, late-night food delivery. But it’s very difficult to register for Alipay as a mere tourist, and it’s getting harder and harder to use cash. I had to get around this difficulty by using my mother’s smartphone, which is linked to her Alipay account. Because it was her identity, with her name listed, and not mine, I couldn’t use the account to buy train tickets, which have names printed. At the station, I had to line up at a separate window to get my paper tickets, instead of just scanning a code with my phone. I was acutely aware of how outside the system I was.
Once, a friend asked me: “How good are you at passing?” – that is, passing as Chinese-Chinese, not Chinese American. I wanted to pass, but like the many Asian Americans who, like me, have tried to go back to the motherland and find a place there, I could never “pass” for long.
The China I know the best is my grandparents’ China. It’s an old China, with rusty bicycles and motorcycle fumes, sweaty street vendors and dusty convenience stores where, as children, we took ice-cream from the coolers. Trains were slow, and everything could be haggled over. While travelling around by myself as an adult in the new China, I couldn’t escape the feeling that much of what I was experiencing was a novelty. I paid for groceries via QR code. In Hangzhou, I ordered by pointing at the food other people were eating. I was reminded that, despite my family connection, China was a separate world to me, and I was a tourist like so many other expats in the country.
While travelling alone, I wasn’t sure what my purpose was. I spent a lot of time in Airbnbs doing my freelance work. I had a research gig combing through recent media portrayals of China in the US to create a summary for an academic institution. I trawled through white papers describing Chinese student spies and ominous articles predicting a second cold war – abstract, alarming concepts that seemed far removed from the gentle patter of my family WeChat. The articles I read seemed to have no connection to the ordinary lives going on around me.
In the evenings I stayed in my room and read manga. I had hardly anyone to see. Most of the time I was on my own. * * *
A year after my interviews, I did see my one more time. Over Christmas 2019, I found myself in China again. This time, my parents, brother, and I were paying a quick family visit before returning to the US. 䈞䈞’s dementia was worse. I asked after his novels, but still didn’t get my hands on any. My
ate at a new hotpot restaurant with us in Hefei. In Shanghai, I dyed my hair blue. Three months after we returned home, the US locked down for the pandemic.
“徿੍ᄢ,” my father said in the WeChat group after my grandfather’s memorial was over. (“Still want to cry.”)
Also: “忀੍ਕਫ਼.” (“This is human life.”)
* * *
In a eulogy written after my grandfather’s death, my aunt wrote: “Father, you always wished for one of us to become a great writer. Your granddaughter is at this moment working towards that goal.” When I read it, my first reaction was resentment, that they would use my dreams of being a writer to appease my grandfather’s spirit. That after his death, the pressure on me would only increase. The pressure to honour his memory, and my grandmother’s.
I had been trying to live in two worlds: spending time in China, improving my Mandarin, learning what I could of Chinese history, of my grandparents’ pasts. Then there was my
American life. Classes, jobs, money, rent, Netflix, friends, growing older. What country, what story, what character, what experience can I claim? Do I wantto tell the story of my grandparents, or do I feel that, to do justice to them, I haveto?
In an essay titled No Reconciliation Allowed, Said revisits the varied landscape of his childhood. He was born in Jerusalem, spent his childhood as a refugee in Egypt, was educated in elite English-language schools, before building his career in the US. “Why, I remember asking myself, could I not have had a simple background … ?” he asks, “… all Egyptian, or all something else, and not have had to face the daily rigours of questions that led back to words that seemed to lack a stable origin?”
I will go back to China to visit my grandparents’ graves. Meanwhile, the old apartment in Hefei has been sold. When my brother and I were children, there were so many people who gathered in that apartment. Now the generations have scattered. My aunts grow greyer every year, and my cousin’s children, mostly strangers to me, will soon be teenagers. My three oldest cousins are married, and some have moved to other cities or emigrated to the US. Before, Hefei felt like the core of the family and we, the ones in the US, were the outliers, the moons in orbit around the planet. Now we are all dispersed.
I wonder what life will be left for me in China in the future. I’ve long nursed vague plans of moving back to China to live for a few years, to get to know it better and solidify my place there. But with each year that passes in the US, such a move gets harder and harder to make. I wonder at what point I will have to choose – or if, with the passage of time, a choice was already made for me.
In her novel Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Marilyn Chin, whose family moved to the US from Hong Kong, writes: “Deep in her heart, she knew that each step backward would only mean regret – the vector goes in only one direction, the homing geese must find their new nest, the 10,000 diasporas will never coagulate – there was no way back to the Middle Kingdom.”
* * *
Since March 2020, the pandemic has forced us into our homes. At the time of writing, more than 575,000 Americans have died of Covid-19. As borders have closed, I became more and more trapped in the fact of my Americanness. In the country where I was born, I watched years of inflammatory news headlines and anti-China rhetoric explode into anti-Asian violence. In the WeChat group, worried relatives talked of US Covid death tolls and stories of street attacks.
While Americans have been told to stay indoors, life in China has been near-normal for some time. In October, my oldest aunt, an insatiable adventurer, went on vacation to Everest. While she was there she piled a few stones on top of each other, a miniature Tibetan altar. She sent us a picture via WeChat. “So their souls may rest in peace,” she said in the group. Another aunt replied: “You are at the spot closest to heaven, and closest to Mom and Dad.”
Since my grandparents passed, their children have filled the WeChat group with messages to them. They address my grandparents’ spirits directly, sometimes with heartfelt messages of longing, sometimes with regret, sometimes diary entries with news, complaints and gossip. For the parts where my Chinese wasn’t up to it, there was in-app machine translation available, its innocent English, though fraught with errors, achieving a kind of poetry.
One day in September, late in the summer after my grandparents passed, my aunts wrote an ordinary series of messages. The English translations are full of optimistic mistakes. In one, I, the “little granddaughter”, have published a “book” – in reality, just an article – and in another, a grandchild has bought a “villa with a pool” – in reality, a small house in Arkansas. It had been a difficult year for our family, and even the cockroaches, one of my aunts wrote, were bullies.
Here’s how WeChat translated my aunts’ messages into English:
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.