Jasmin Wu
Every summer, we’d visit when the rousing sun caressed blushing buildings and colored the sparkling air with a flushed haze. Early mornings were a mouthful of spunky street food flavors and, despite Grandma’s chidings to eat slower, buzzing numbness from burning our tongues (Grandma included, to both of our amusements) on stuffed sticky rice rolls and steamed red bean buns. After wiping the crumbs from our mouths and hands amidst our giggles, she’d clasp my chubby hand tightly in hers and lead me through the waking city. I’d marvel at how her hands felt, strong and warm, despite the blueprints age and time had etched on her willowy fingers. It was those hands that would scoop me up from beneath my armpits and twirl me around and around, so delightfully and dizzyingly fast and high, so that the city would melt into an ombre of runny hues and giddy laughter. I could reach up and touch the lofty clouds coasting and carving the azure sea above, so luxuriously and pleasurably pastel and lazy. Days spent in Shanghai tasted bubbly and sweet, like fizzy Chinese soda glugged with contented sighs after a long adventure in the bustling marketplace I called paradise. It was perfect.
***
At school, I submerged myself in a sea of introversion. In the beautiful, vast depths of solitude, I could almost tune everyone out. Sounds were muffled there, and stark outlines turned murky. Nevertheless, being a public-school student, I battled the usual vices. Public speaking was odious. As soon as I stiffly waddled to the front of the classroom and stood drooped there, kept hostage by the stern, bespectacled face of my teacher and the threat of a subpar grade, I wilted. My hands quaked, and my voice fluttered and flapped and flopped over a speech that had sounded worthy of TED only in my head. The twenty blank stares of my peers, penciled in with detached boredom and mild second-hand embarrassment, riddled my reddening skin.
My hands never trembled when they were enveloped in Grandma’s. My voice never wavered or stuttered when I asked her why she was always forgetting things, like where she had left her hat and when she had last seen me. Grandma never tee-heed and ha-had at me as if I were a ruddy, ugly newborn baby trying to make out its first words.
***
Outside of school, I was solidly mediocre as well. I started tennis shamefully late in sixth grade. Mama took me out to buy a visor that I was adamant I’d never end up wearing because it was “too big” —when really, I just didn’t like how it broadcasted too much of my pimply forehead for all to see.
Growing up in elementary school, I was never “the athletic kid.” I could always be found flailing about on the side, waving my arms trying to get my teammates to see me—which didn’t make a difference because they still never passed to me. Eventually, I gave up and began counting the number of tiles on the ground and picking at the lint on the wall mats instead.
I proved to myself pretty fast that I was still not “the athletic kid,” even when equipped with a racket for desperately and uselessly swatting at the ball. My dad enrolled me in weekly matches, and I lost every one. My scores averaged 0-6, which makes it seem like I wasn’t trying, but I really was. My dad made it to every game, and he took care to hide so that he wouldn’t distract me while he took notes on how I could improve. I never told him that I recognized his shadow every time behind the mesh window of the curtain because of his telltale glasses. I also never told him how I hated to see his face after I lost match after match and how he would still smile and pat me on the back for good effort. I didn’t want to let him down, but I knew I did. In a perfect life, I would be the one to win 6-0, hugging my beaming father with breathless elation in front of the loser wearing a visor that made her pimply forehead look too big.
The drowned hope of one day being enough to myself and what I perceived to be the world shackled me to the depths of an ocean that I never breached the surface of. Eventually, I developed crippling anxiety before these matches. And after, I spent many nights crying on my bathroom floor, hating myself and battering myself to pieces.
Nonetheless, summers always came with their warm embraces, plucking me from beneath roiling waves and plopping me back in that apartment, a sheltered respite away from myself.
***
Grandma had dementia. It was something I hadn’t understood before. Now, I knew to hate it and fear it. It was something flawed and brute that had sunken its scrawling, bleeding fingernails into my concrete oasis.
Grandma’s dementia was deteriorating.
When I was thirteen years old, Grandma turned to look at me and smiled fondly. “Jun-Jun.”
That was Mama’s name.
“I’m not Jun-Jun, Grandma,” I patted her gently. “I’m your granddaughter.”
“Jun-Jun, put on a coat before you catch a cold.” Grandma patted me back.
There began to be times when she spent all day slumped on a sofa in the living room, smiling at cartoons on TV. Staring at me with vague, general endearment, she’d ask me how school was, even though it was summer.
Slowly, Grandma began to forget me. The woman I once knew seemed to have slipped beneath milky waves, her memory of me lost to the depths behind a wispy, toothy grin. She became bedridden and unable to take my hand to lead me through that wondrous city.
I felt like a little part of me was crumbling away with her, like the acrid ash we released on Tai Mountain the next year. Those moments cut me with their sharp edges. Her presence had always healed my self-inflicted scars with a glance of love and an embrace of acceptance, making my life at moments that elusive perfect. Shanghai would be ugly without her.
***
Spring comes, kissed by candied birdsong and embellished with winking daffodils. Trees expand their arms to the sky, inky watercolor spatters dotted on blue crystal. We’re preparing green mochi for the Qingming Festival when the news arrives.
We book the soonest flight and fly back to Shanghai. Mama’s face is white like the hospital walls. Grandma reaches her papery hands up to cup my cheeks, now flowing with torrents of grief. Grandma tells me it’s okay. She tells me over and over again that it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay—but I can tell from the nurse’s face that it’s not.
Grandma tells me it’s okay, though.
In a moment of clarity, she takes my hand and murmurs, “Wasn’t it beautiful?”
“Yes, Grandma,” I croak, trying not to yell and sob and scream to the universe that yes it was beautiful and why couldn’t it stay that way.
Her ragged breath hitches. “It wasn’t perfect. It rained sometimes. Wasn’t it still fun to laugh at how the rain tickled our noses?”
I choke a sob.
“Remember that time when we were lost?”
I do.
We ended up missing the dragon boat race, only to find the most delicious chicken dumpling shop.
The corners of my mouth lift in bittersweet anguish.
I nod and don’t speak because I know that if I do, I won’t be able to breathe from the salty tears that will smudge my chalky cheeks and won’t ever stop.
She hugs me tightly. She tells me she loves me.
One last time.
The tears come anyway.
***
I watch Grandma slip into the painted sky, her soul fluttering among the cascades and rivulets and wings of moonlight and clouds and stars. She’s gone now. Her ashes are swept up by a cool, gentle breeze on Tai Mountain.
Mama squeezes my hand, and I squeeze it back.
***
It's summer again. There’s the buzz of the cicadas, people quibbling by the street trying to get their air conditioner fixed, and sticky Shanghai humidity. I’m back for summer break after a year of school. I was a starter on the varsity tennis team this year.
Shanghai without Grandma is imperfect.
But, as I walk in the rain towards a certain chicken dumpling shop, I still smile because it’s beautiful.