I tell people I am fluent in Chinese. I can carry on a perfectly normal conversation with a mainlander for twenty minutes or so, but soon after, it becomes painfully obvious that it is not my first language. This is frequently pointed out to me by my relatives in China who also make sure to liken my capacity for writing and reading to that of a sophisticated high-schooler. These limitations rarely present themselves when I am in the US, but as one might imagine, they become readily apparent in the motherland.
Today I found a further limitation. My mother and I had woken early from a restless night after having taken the new high speed railway from Shanghai to Beijing in order to arrive on time to visit my grandfather—my maternal grandmother's third husband—who had been in the hospital on dialysis for the past year or so. As crass as this is going to sound, I know how to be comforting in English. I can speak on several different registers, switch readily between them, and add modifiers to produce a spectrum of tones. Standing in front of my grandfather, I found that my choices had become severely limited. For the first few minutes, I stood at his bedside, watching his eyes that seemed to plead for me to say something, anything, at all. Before I could oblige, my grandmother helped me, asking if I had remembered that winter many years ago when I visited Beijing and asked to sled on the frozen lake. My grandfather rented a sled for me and pulled me across the ice—it was one of the most beautiful winters I have ever experienced—we must have been out there for hours. That was ten years ago, when the inner rings of Beijing still had run down buildings, half-built skyscrapers as monuments to empty pockets and a lack of investors. Now some square meters in the fourth ring sell for up to one-hundred and thirty thousand RMB each, but that is another matter for another time. Of course I remembered—it was a memory that stuck. For the sake of my loving to hear myself explain phenomena, well, here goes; there are moments, frames within any given scene of our lives, from our past, that become imprinted so heavily, that they replay, repeating within daydreams, idle thoughts, reminiscence in the dark of night, constituting an active visceral conscious recollection. We can say that these memories are special, but truly, who knows how we choose these moments. Anyway, this was one of them. As I stood in silence, nodding at my grandmother's words while gazing half-sheepishly, half-longingly at my ailing grandfather, I could only come up several questions that I would utter a minute or so later—“are the days getting better?” and “does it hurt?” were met with “a little” and “not much.” As my grandmother beckoned me to sit, she told me how handsome I had gotten and began to tell us stories of her life during the era of Mao, as she is wont to do, while my grandfather smiled and watched. Those stories are perhaps for another day, but in-between each segment, she never failed to ask me if I remembered that day on the lake, one winter many years ago, when my grandfather took me sledding, pulling me firmly and steadily across the perfect ice.
Yes, of course.
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