Eulogy for a Grandmother
2001
I shall earn my board and lodging and you shall give me nothing but – your regard… |
“First of all I’d like to thank Aunt Helen for asking me to speak today. In doing so, she’s made me collect my thoughts about our grandmother in a way that I wouldn’t have done otherwise, and this has been a good thing.
“When I first started to think about Nai Nai, I couldn’t imagine what I’d have to say. When I tried to picture her going about her life before her health declined, the images that sprang to mind were all in sober colors – the hospital green bedrooms of her house; that huge, dusty brown car that she used to drive; even the persimmons from the tree behind her house were a very dull sort of orange color.
“And those memories are all from my teenage years. I can’t remember actually spending any time with her before then. Up to then, she was mainly a faraway, kindly grandmother who dutifully sent presents for birthdays and Christmas – something well-intentioned but always a little off, and always accompanied by a greeting card to which she’d added a few words.
“Her words and script were neat and tidy – “To My Dear Granddaughter… Congratulations!” almost as standardized as the Hallmark inscription itself – and for all the impact her words had on me as a child, they might as well have been in Chinese.
“I reflected some more, and recalled a phone call when I was about ten. Someone had sent her a photo of me, and apparently my teeth looked rather crooked – even more crooked than they actually are. She spent most of the conversation fretting about whether I needed braces, and for the next couple of years, whatever occasional contact we had, my teeth were a disproportionate point of concern. If there was a lesson learned from this, it was probably to send as few photos as possible and to censor topics that were likely to be misconstrued or blown out of proportion.
“At this point, I was ready to call up Auntie Helen and back out of doing this when I remembered some letters Nai Nai had sent to me when I lived in China. I found them in a box and started to re-read them over the past few days. There were about a dozen, the first couple in English, and the rest, as my Chinese improved, in Chinese. Like her English script, the characters of her first few letters were carefully printed to make them easier for me to read.
“In some ways the letters were incredibly satisfying. They became the first use of my Chinese that had a real-life application. But in another way they were somewhat frustrating. She had so little news to report. For all the effort that went into the writing and deciphering on my end, her wishes and queries about my health and wellbeing seemed, to a twenty-two-year-old, almost as exasperating as her earlier worries about my teeth.
“When I first started to think about Nai Nai, I couldn’t imagine what I’d have to say. When I tried to picture her going about her life before her health declined, the images that sprang to mind were all in sober colors – the hospital green bedrooms of her house; that huge, dusty brown car that she used to drive; even the persimmons from the tree behind her house were a very dull sort of orange color.
“And those memories are all from my teenage years. I can’t remember actually spending any time with her before then. Up to then, she was mainly a faraway, kindly grandmother who dutifully sent presents for birthdays and Christmas – something well-intentioned but always a little off, and always accompanied by a greeting card to which she’d added a few words.
“Her words and script were neat and tidy – “To My Dear Granddaughter… Congratulations!” almost as standardized as the Hallmark inscription itself – and for all the impact her words had on me as a child, they might as well have been in Chinese.
“I reflected some more, and recalled a phone call when I was about ten. Someone had sent her a photo of me, and apparently my teeth looked rather crooked – even more crooked than they actually are. She spent most of the conversation fretting about whether I needed braces, and for the next couple of years, whatever occasional contact we had, my teeth were a disproportionate point of concern. If there was a lesson learned from this, it was probably to send as few photos as possible and to censor topics that were likely to be misconstrued or blown out of proportion.
“At this point, I was ready to call up Auntie Helen and back out of doing this when I remembered some letters Nai Nai had sent to me when I lived in China. I found them in a box and started to re-read them over the past few days. There were about a dozen, the first couple in English, and the rest, as my Chinese improved, in Chinese. Like her English script, the characters of her first few letters were carefully printed to make them easier for me to read.
“In some ways the letters were incredibly satisfying. They became the first use of my Chinese that had a real-life application. But in another way they were somewhat frustrating. She had so little news to report. For all the effort that went into the writing and deciphering on my end, her wishes and queries about my health and wellbeing seemed, to a twenty-two-year-old, almost as exasperating as her earlier worries about my teeth.
“Then one bright day, it occurred to me to divert her to a larger topic – her own life in China.
“The first lines of her next letter started my heart racing. She mentioned the name of the village where she was born. The simple revelation that her maiden name was Tang brought home how little I knew about her. Then came some details about her parents – the fact that she was an only child, orphaned at a young age. She used a phrase to describe her family, which seemed wonderfully evocative: they had “the wind in their sleeves”. I was told that it was a euphemism for being honest and uncorrupted – and by extension a euphemism for being poor. Another phrase informed me that they were scholars, impoverished but learned. It was like the opening of Jane Eyre in Chinese!
“But from these first few poignant details, the story became increasingly broad brush, and at the bottom of a single page, her autobiography comes to an abrupt halt, raising more questions than it answers.
“A few letters later, she cryptically addressed me as “My dear niece”. A note quickly followed apologizing for the error and explaining that she had got in the habit of writing “niece” when as a young girl she used to write letters to her mother’s brother. For a fleeting second, I caught another glimpse of the orphan making her own way, and I wished I could know more.
“I had hoped for an account of life in Shanghai in the ’30s as colorful and nostalgic as the popular reputation of the city. But she refused to bend my ear with glamorous tales of Shanghai or high-placed people she might have known. She simply said that she and our grandfather were people of humble backgrounds who didn’t know how to live it up.
“I wanted stories about war-torn China, but she would only say how grateful she was that the whole family escaped China alive. If there are gaps in her story, I can better appreciate now why that might have been. Of course, she would never have wished to raise a family during a war, and having done so, being able to watch her children’s lives progress and to look on benignly at grandchildren who were happy and well would have been meaningful pleasures.
“As I’ve re-read her letters over the week, I’m struck most obviously by the vigor of her calligraphy, especially in her later letters. Viewed all together, there’s a clear progression. Her handwriting literally becomes more freely formed and I see now that, to a certain extent, so did her thoughts.
“At some point, she stopped printing legibly for my sake. In fact, she probably wasn’t writing purely for my sake, but just enjoying being able to express herself in her native language. And the grandmotherly concerns take on an ease and vividness in Chinese that they did not in English.
“And yet, though she was clearly more comfortable writing in Chinese, you have no sense that she pined to be in China. There are no regrets or complaints. In one letter she talks about how much she loves living in Palo Alto – the mild climate, the convenience of the stores. She speaks with pride about her ability to manage the house on her own, and the pleasure of driving herself around – that big brown car again. What could be more quintessentially American than the self-sufficiency of one’s own motor vehicle?
“In fact, there’s one letter where her handwriting and thoughts are particularly fluid and brisk and she literally transforms herself into that car. The aches and pains of aging, which actually are not frequent in her letters, are humorously compared to a car ever in need of repairs. She had come a long way from that village “fragrant” with learning.
“As I was writing this, it occurred to me that I was doing exactly what she had done – trying to piece together a life out of incomplete scraps, trying to maintain connectedness with very little input. If she got things wrong, or if I have, it’s not out of a lack of respect or appreciation or love.
“Nai Nai’s life was indeed quite a journey, one that we grandchildren can only dimly imagine – but hopefully one that we can understand, with our hearts in the right places.”
“But from these first few poignant details, the story became increasingly broad brush, and at the bottom of a single page, her autobiography comes to an abrupt halt, raising more questions than it answers.
“A few letters later, she cryptically addressed me as “My dear niece”. A note quickly followed apologizing for the error and explaining that she had got in the habit of writing “niece” when as a young girl she used to write letters to her mother’s brother. For a fleeting second, I caught another glimpse of the orphan making her own way, and I wished I could know more.
“I had hoped for an account of life in Shanghai in the ’30s as colorful and nostalgic as the popular reputation of the city. But she refused to bend my ear with glamorous tales of Shanghai or high-placed people she might have known. She simply said that she and our grandfather were people of humble backgrounds who didn’t know how to live it up.
“I wanted stories about war-torn China, but she would only say how grateful she was that the whole family escaped China alive. If there are gaps in her story, I can better appreciate now why that might have been. Of course, she would never have wished to raise a family during a war, and having done so, being able to watch her children’s lives progress and to look on benignly at grandchildren who were happy and well would have been meaningful pleasures.
“As I’ve re-read her letters over the week, I’m struck most obviously by the vigor of her calligraphy, especially in her later letters. Viewed all together, there’s a clear progression. Her handwriting literally becomes more freely formed and I see now that, to a certain extent, so did her thoughts.
“At some point, she stopped printing legibly for my sake. In fact, she probably wasn’t writing purely for my sake, but just enjoying being able to express herself in her native language. And the grandmotherly concerns take on an ease and vividness in Chinese that they did not in English.
“And yet, though she was clearly more comfortable writing in Chinese, you have no sense that she pined to be in China. There are no regrets or complaints. In one letter she talks about how much she loves living in Palo Alto – the mild climate, the convenience of the stores. She speaks with pride about her ability to manage the house on her own, and the pleasure of driving herself around – that big brown car again. What could be more quintessentially American than the self-sufficiency of one’s own motor vehicle?
“In fact, there’s one letter where her handwriting and thoughts are particularly fluid and brisk and she literally transforms herself into that car. The aches and pains of aging, which actually are not frequent in her letters, are humorously compared to a car ever in need of repairs. She had come a long way from that village “fragrant” with learning.
“As I was writing this, it occurred to me that I was doing exactly what she had done – trying to piece together a life out of incomplete scraps, trying to maintain connectedness with very little input. If she got things wrong, or if I have, it’s not out of a lack of respect or appreciation or love.
“Nai Nai’s life was indeed quite a journey, one that we grandchildren can only dimly imagine – but hopefully one that we can understand, with our hearts in the right places.”
2016
Within hours of delivering my eulogy for my grandmother, I was on the receiving end of some shocking allegations.
Our grandfather was terribly jealous. He believed our grandmother had a lover. He might have had the interloper bumped off – this wouldn’t have been that hard in the Shanghai or Hong Kong of the time. Auntie “Roni” – as their eldest daughter May was known to us – might not have been his child.
Such intrigue! Here were the Bronte-esque passions, the stuff of stories, that I had hoped my grandmother would have revealed in her letters so many years earlier.
But now it was too late. There was no one to ask. More than twenty of us Huangs – Zing Wei’s children, children-in-law and grandchildren – were gathered round three tables for lunch. Ye Ye and Auntie Roni were long dead, yet this was the only family reunion we had ever had. Such conversations as we now undertook were more about trying to make connections among those of us living, not delving into what was past.
The only other scrap from the day was that a woman named Mary, perhaps in her sixties, who nobody knew, turned up and expressed affection for Nai Nai. Nai Nai had introduced her to her husband and had been a good “auntie”.
So much for the mild, friendless lady my grandmother had seemed to be.
What follows is what I have pieced together in the intervening years. I’ll start with Nai Nai’s own words – the letters with the decorous turn of phrase and credible calligraphy – markers of a certain level of cultivation – and we will try to understand how the young nurse seen in her twenties in one of the circle photos on the home page came to be educated, to be a nurse, and to be the wife of Han Liang.
In more ways than I could possibly have known when I cited the novel in 2001, this story turns out to have its fair share of Jane Eyre details, earning Nai Nai our regard.
Our grandfather was terribly jealous. He believed our grandmother had a lover. He might have had the interloper bumped off – this wouldn’t have been that hard in the Shanghai or Hong Kong of the time. Auntie “Roni” – as their eldest daughter May was known to us – might not have been his child.
Such intrigue! Here were the Bronte-esque passions, the stuff of stories, that I had hoped my grandmother would have revealed in her letters so many years earlier.
But now it was too late. There was no one to ask. More than twenty of us Huangs – Zing Wei’s children, children-in-law and grandchildren – were gathered round three tables for lunch. Ye Ye and Auntie Roni were long dead, yet this was the only family reunion we had ever had. Such conversations as we now undertook were more about trying to make connections among those of us living, not delving into what was past.
The only other scrap from the day was that a woman named Mary, perhaps in her sixties, who nobody knew, turned up and expressed affection for Nai Nai. Nai Nai had introduced her to her husband and had been a good “auntie”.
So much for the mild, friendless lady my grandmother had seemed to be.
What follows is what I have pieced together in the intervening years. I’ll start with Nai Nai’s own words – the letters with the decorous turn of phrase and credible calligraphy – markers of a certain level of cultivation – and we will try to understand how the young nurse seen in her twenties in one of the circle photos on the home page came to be educated, to be a nurse, and to be the wife of Han Liang.
In more ways than I could possibly have known when I cited the novel in 2001, this story turns out to have its fair share of Jane Eyre details, earning Nai Nai our regard.