98 ½ years old.
A long and full life. Born in the year of the pig.
7 children
15 grandchildren
15 great-grandchildren (and maybe more - I probably undercounted).
Loved me so so much.
Took care of me in the ways she could.
So gentle, kind.
A beautiful woman, inside and out. A very distinct face. Showed me a beautiful kind of love.
Full of wisdom.
A sharp mind that stayed so even as her last days approached. She could always sense when something was wrong.
She loved mahjong. After retirement, she would spend hours playing it each day. Then return to house in mid-afternoon to check on the soup.
She had a marvelous talent for cooking. She made me wonderful meals whenever I visited. When she could no longer stand, she would cook sitting down.
A few months before she went to the nursing home, she made me Buddha’s delight –- her signature dish –- one last time. Never in my life have I felt so loved.
She loved all fish, any fish. She ate so much of it growing up, and never lost this love.
She loved going to eat dim sum. She would go with gong-gong every day. On more than a few occasions I went with her.
She always wore traditional flowered clothing. She wore a jade bracelet. A few years ago it cracked in two.
When I was younger she would walk down the ruins of St. Paul, one hand wrapped around her cane, the other hand wrapped around my own.
She was married for over 50 years. She helped gong-gong build houses and fix stoves. She mixed cement in wheelbarrows.
She did exercises on the front porch of her house every morning, even in old age. Arm circles, stretches, stuff of the like.
When she was younger, she had a long, braided ponytail. When my mom was a baby, she cut it off and put it inside a suitcase.
She hung on her bedroom wall a silly picture of an amusement I had drawn as a kid.
Sometimes when we went to the buffett, she would slip rolls of bread, toothpicks, and napkins inside of her purse. My cousin told me she would also go to the restaurant bathrooms, and roll up their toilet paper into a roll of her own that she had brought.
You see, she lived through the Japanese war, when things were scarce. When there wasn’t enough food to eat. Her older sister and dad starved to death.
She was no stranger to tragedy and sadness.
She lost multiple children in infancy. She had to give one more to an orphanage, because she was too poor.
Her younger sister moved to Vietnam with her mother. She rarely saw them after, if at all.
She was very close with her younger brother. He lived over in Hong Kong, and would always come to visit.
He eventually became very depressed. One day, he committed suicide. But no one had the heart to tell her.
So for all these years, she lived with the sadness that her brother had forgotten about her.
She grew up by the sea. Her father sold preserved fish. The family was very poor.
People looked down on her, including her own mother-in-law.
She didn’t have the chance to go to school, but yet she was so so smart.
She learned to read newspapers, with the help of gong-gong.
She never encouraged her own children to study. But by the time I came around, she had realized the value of an education.
Each time I saw or talked to her, she encouraged me to study hard, without fail.
She helped me get into college. I wrote my application essay about her.
During old age, she lived next door to her youngest son’s family, in four rooms on the lower floor.
When I was young, she would gift me tins of cream crackers. I didn’t know then that these were gifts that other had previously given to her.
When I was older, she would give me some money to spend, telling me to buy some nice clothes for myself.
When I came to visit her at the nursing home, she would offer me tissues and toothpicks and coffee candies out of her purse. Her seemingly-bottomless purse.
As she aged, her body started to fail.
She needed a cane, then a wheelchair. She moved to a nursing home on Coloane, going in and out of the hospital.
She outlived all of her friends and neighbors. She watched so many of them pass away.
She often said that she didn’t want to live anymore. She was in so much pain.
She often wondered why she was still here. Why she had to suffer so much.
She would sometimes feel bitter, and who could blame her.
I was never able to speak her language.
But I called her every morning when I was younger, dialing her lengthy number in to the landline in the kitchen.
I still remember it. 011-853-28-336-044.
The phone would ring many times before she picked up. By then walking was difficult for her.
Once she picked up, I would say a few phrases and questions that my mom had made me memorize.
"Good morning."
"Did you eat yet?"
"Did you go to the market?"
"I love you."
She would say a bunch of things, almost all of which I couldn’t understand. But her tone was so gentle and loving that it didn’t matter.
To ask for mom, she would say
"Mommy lah."
And she would say that she loved me so much. And excitedly enquire as to when I was going to come see her again. And to study hard, of course.
She traveled around China with gong-gong in the 1980s, a well-earned trip after so many years of hard work.
Gong-gong died in 2007, at the age of 90. She became a widow afterwards, with a picture of gong-gong upon her wall.
Life has given me distractions, and I didn’t always show her as much love as I could have, especially as I got older and went to college.
The last time I saw her was in August 2019, before COVID.
She died alone, without any family by her side, because the city was under strict quarantine.
My poor, poor grandmom.
But I hope she knew how much we all loved her, how she had made our lives so much fuller and more tender, how she always encouraged me so much, that her life was not lived without meaning. So much meaning.
I don’t want to ever forget her. I write these recollections so that time will not steal them away.
I will honor her legacy. I will remember her, take care of myself and live well, because that’s what she would have wanted. Because there will never be another one like her.
She was cremated last Tuesday. Her remains will be put next to gong-gong’s, within that hilly cemetery.
A bittersweet day, because I know she is suffering no more, and that she is with God.
But thinking back on the love I have lost, and how she died so alone makes me sad.