All the Grandfathers

by Josephina Hu

“A girl,” I read aloud, “found herself in a strange room, where the ceiling was sky and the walls open air. In the center of the room stood a lone mountain, and its solemn shadow obstructed all to her left. On the right was a forest of flowering trees, and among them, in the distance, an apparition. The girl decided to venture into the forest.” 

“Go study,” my mother said to stop me, but her heart wasn’t in it. Her father had died recently, and she sometimes wept out in our backyard or on the floor of the second-story bathroom when she thought I wasn’t nearby. I had haphazardly moved back home to take care of her, neglecting all my classes an hour’s drive away. We both knew she would not stop me from reading to her, as my voice punctuated the silence in our house and filled it with something other than grief.

There were no other characters in the book. I imagined the girl wandering throughout the day, the sun angled above the horizon. I liked that the story didn’t dawdle, didn’t clarify. Every time I closed my eyes to pin the girl down, her likeness would spring up elsewhere, like dandelions after a drafty day.

*

That year all the grandfathers were dying. No professor would believe it of course, and students, stricken with bereavement, finished exams in actual tears. Then, when the tide ebbed, they put away their learnings and left.

I was one of the first to leave. On the last Monday of January, my mother called to wish me a Happy Chinese New Year and to tell me the news about Gong Gong. I couldn’t fly out to China for his funeral—too little time, too much money—but I promised I would drive back to San Francisco as soon as the quarter ended, two months away. I fell heavily behind on homework and was very picky about food; in short, I was exactly the same both before and after his passing.

Just two weeks after the news, however, I took advantage of a long weekend and booked a last-minute flight to China alone. I took a bullet train to Nanjing to visit his remains, housed in a rectangular box within a small cremation facility a few kilometers away from Fuzimiao Street. The entrance to the facility resembled a desolate market, and like a dutiful tourist, I glanced at the small, overpriced concessions offered at the front desk. The trinkets reminded me of the memorabilia at the bottom of fish tanks in the restaurants I used to frequent with my grandfather when I was young. I purchased a little wooden boat for two hundred yuan, in the hopes that he would sail peacefully to his next life. At least, this is what I prayed for aloud; silently, I wondered to myself how we both ended up here.

As I placed the boat inside the box, I remembered Gong Gong’s smile wrinkles, his gentle berating when I solved elementary math problems incorrectly under his watchful eye. The rest of him I had to reconstruct from places he frequented, others who knew him. I discovered he was quite handsome in his youth; an old, colorless photograph from the now-empty nursing home room told me as much. From his colleagues over scallion pancakes, I found out humor and tranquility radiated from him the same way stress and irritability clouded his wife. And from my mother on the phone, I learned that he was affiliated with the Guomindang, the Nationalist Party of China, prior to the Chinese Communist Revolution. He had had all his wealth taken away from him when his party lost the Chinese Civil War in 1949, and his own father had died in prison during the political purge.

I wondered if I could even understand his experiences had I heard them from his mouth—back when I was too young to grasp their weight. He took each blessing and curse as they went, I thought. In spite of his misfortunes, I was here—two generations and six thousand miles away—paying my respects as a traveler in his native land.

In all my years of knowing him, he had never complained. He only smiled in my presence, even when his children grew up sickly, his community was banned from applying to university, and his wife always overcooked the rice. Gong Gong must have possessed as much patience as the old man who lost his horse from the parables he read to my mother, who in turn read them to me at bedtime.

“A righteous man lived near the border,” I recited under my breath as I bowed. “For no reason, his horse ran off into barbarian territory. Everyone felt sorry for him, but the man said, “Who knows if this will bring good luck?” Months later, his horse returned with another noble horse, and everyone congratulated him. But the man said, “Who knows if this will bring bad luck?” The man’s house grew bountiful because he owned two horses, and his son loved riding the new mount. But one day, the boy fell and broke his leg, and everyone felt sorry for them. But the father said, “Who knows if this will bring good luck?” Days later, barbarians invaded the border, and all able men strung up their bows for the draft. All the border residents were killed in the war, except for the father due to his old age, and his son because of his broken leg. Hence, bad luck brings good luck and good luck brings bad luck. This happens without end, and no one can estimate it. But the father finds peace, for he accepts life as it is.”

I didn’t cry when I first heard about my grandfather’s death, after a decade apart, but I cried then, locking the door to his ashes in a final goodbye.

*

“The girl,” I read aloud, “entered the forest which was abloom with cherry blossoms. The flowers on each limb looked like fingers waving in the mild spring air. Petals lined the dirt path towards the apparition, but as she approached, the figure evaporated. She continued wandering, following the ghost’s vestiges, and soon the rows of pink blossoms thinned and gave way. Through the clearing, the girl found an imperial summer palace on a shallow lake. Verdant lily pads lay on the tranquil surface, and the girl walked through the water, a brief respite from the unbearable heat.

“The apparition once again appeared in the distance, and the girl chased after it, running through the palace into a field of floating lanterns. The orange lights were like fireflies against the twilight sky, and the warm hues blended beautifully with the autumn leaves. But the ghost led her away again, and she flew after it to a tall winter pagoda covered by snowfall. Shivering, she walked under a steady darkness, her footprints sinking with each step, small ice crystals falling in little white stars that caught in her hair. Then the horizon began to lighten, and the barren trees turned slowly from white to pink once again—”

“This girl has been walking forever,” my mother interrupted from the kitchen, “only to end up back where she started.”

“It’s almost over,” I promised, raising my hand to show her the slimness of the remaining pages. My mother squinted from across the kitchen counter to see, as I sat comfortably crisscrossed on the upholstered couch in the living room, the book open like a fan.

“Hmph,” she replied. “Fix your posture. You’re slouching.” Despite her impatience, she was paying close attention; I could tell from the way the intervals of chops on the cutting board slowed. The familiar and comforting smell of green onion, chopstick-beaten eggs, and sliced tomatoes wafted over, and I breathed in deeply.

“The girl,” I continued, “had traversed through the mountain’s looming shadow, only to find herself back in the field of cherry blossoms. Somehow, she knew the apparition would not appear again in places she had already descried. The girl had seen everything within the room’s walls and realized there was only one other path: up the mountain.”

My mother’s chopping ceased. She rinsed the ceramic knife and unloaded her preparations into the wok, which reacted with a fiery roar. When the sound subsided, she took off her apron and lowered herself onto the couch beside me to rest. I rose and went to the kitchen, finding the stir-fried tomato and scrambled eggs dish resting on the stove—I was happy to verify by sight the dish I had smelled. Scooping two rice bowls, I quickly brought them and some utensils over. My mother patted the spot on the couch I had just vacated in invitation.

Since Gong Gong’s passing, we had spent meals across from—not next to—each other, the dining table’s length magnified by the brevity of our conversations. Who could blame us? We didn’t have much to say to each other. It was the first time either of us had seen death; words felt futile, all platitudes. In the days following my return, she avoided spending too much time in the same room as me. Now, our shoulders touched as our eyes traced the same lines.

“Keep reading,” my mother said, as she lined up a large soup spoon with the perfect bite. “If you stop, I’ll eat this and leave none for you.”

I laughed but quickly continued. The threat wasn’t idle.

“The girl climbed using etchings in the stone, grasping depressions and protrusions as she fought the rising vertigo. The sun began to set once again, and her body merged with the mountain’s shadow, which wavered, anticipating new quarry. She climbed quickly, her final movement pushing her over the summit.

“On top of the mountain was…nothing. The clouded moon in the sky provided a dim light in an otherwise nebulous expanse. Below, the summer palace was now a palace of vines, the lanterns had extinguished, the pagoda’s tiers had crumbled under the weight of the snow, and the cherry blossoms where she had first seen the apparition had long since wilted. When the girl looked down at her own hands, she found that they were wrinkled with age.

“Are you there?” the woman cried, hoping the apparition would return. “What do I have left? Is it just me here?”

“The woman waited, but the apparition did not appear again. In a faint whisper, the wind lifted a few of her words in echo: ‘You…have…me.’”

I peeled to the next page. It was blank. My mother took the book from my hands, examined it herself front to back, then slowly clasped it shut.

“Strange,” my mother said eventually. “All the pages are blank.”

I reached for the book, certain that she was mistaken, but it was true—the story I had just read aloud was gone. No printed text, not even a title.

When I met her gaze, I saw that her eyes were red.

“I’m not sure what any of this means,” I told my mother.

“I’m not sure what it means either,” my mother said, “but I know how it is.”

 

Josephina Hu is an aspiring fiction writer who studied creative writing at Stanford University. She was born in Nanjing, China and grew up in the Bay Area, California. She is currently working at a technology startup in New York City.