Ama

921 words

My parents and I have come to visit my grandmother. We live in Houston, TX, and she in Taipei, Taiwan, so this is no small occasion. After an 18-hour, $1000-per-person transoceanic flight, my mom and dad are tired and want to rest. I, on the other hand, am strangely awake.

First I put my suitcase in what will be my room for the next two weeks. (It actually belongs to my cousin, who I call Ge ge, or big brother, but he is currently serving his required 22 months in the Taiwanese military.) Then I pad down the stairs and through the living room into my grandmother’s bedroom.

She’s asleep, lying in the middle of her queen-sized mattress, swallowed up by a big flowery comforter. (Everyone else, including me, sleeps on stiff bamboo mats with only a few thin sheets.) A fan rotates back and forth on its stand, blowing cool humid air across the soft skin of my grandmother’s forehead. I sit in one of the big wooden chairs in the hallway and look in on her through the door.

Sometimes she doesn’t know who we are.

She’ll ask, “Ni shi shei?” Who are you?

“Ama, wo shi Maggie.” Grandma, I am Maggie. She looks confused, so I try again. “Ego de nu er.” Ego’s daughter.

She relaxes, recognizing her youngest daughter’s name, and nods. “You are Maggie?” she asks in her crumbly English.

“Duei, wo shi Maggie.” Yes, I am Maggie.

Other times, I can see in her eyes that she doesn’t want to ask. She’s scared, maybe. Embarrassed, more likely. She realizes she’s missing something. She has all the pieces, she just can’t put them together.

Most of the time we just smile at each other, for lack of anything to say. Really, there’s so much I’d like to tell her, so much more I want to ask. But I can’t, because I don’t know how. I don’t know the words. This is one of my failings, in respect to her. This one is the root of all the others.

Born to a Caucasian American father and a Taiwanese mother, I grew up without a “first” language. I learned and spoke English and Mandarin Chinese simultaneously. But when I began attending preschool, all those funny-sounding syllables and their annoyingly impossible tones fell right out of my head.

As I hold my grandmother’s soft, wrinkled hand, I know I would give anything to get them back.

I’m afraid to be alone with her. How silly that sounds, to be afraid of your own grandmother. But I am. Because if she speaks to me, there is about a fifty-fifty chance that I won’t have the foggiest idea what she is saying. No, more like eighty-twenty. Against me.

And she knows this. It’s almost funny, actually, that even when she’s not sure who I am, she remembers enough to recall that with me, with this strange, somewhat Western-looking young girl, she must speak slowly and only in Mandarin. (Communicating in Chinese may be hard, but in Taiwanese? Impossible.) Her instinctive recognition of my limitations is a double-edged sword: it is a sign that her presence of mind, while muddied, remains intact, but it is also a reminder of my own inability to use my mother’s native tongue.

So I have lived my whole life with the unspeakable pain of not being able to communicate with my own family. With my own grandmother. And while I am trying to learn, time is quickly running out.

I know that she isn’t well. I can only hope she isn’t in pain, but after many health scares, including a stroke which rendered the left side of her body temporarily immobile, I am sure that she suffers emotionally, if nothing else. Once a strong, intelligent, capable woman of much repute, she now requires help for basic daily necessities. Her sense of pride, I know, is extremely wounded. Before we came, she asked my mom over the phone, “Won’t it be embarrassing for your family to know I wear a diaper?” Of course we don’t care, but that’s besides the point, because she does.

Jiu Ma, my mother’s brother’s wife, takes good care of my grandmother. A retired nurse, she devotes hours to dressing, feeding, bathing, and exercising her mother-in-law, patiently answering questions when she gets confused or taking abusive tirades when she gets upset. Words cannot express to my aunt how thankful we are, but then again, she wouldn’t want them. To her, this is her family, her duty, and neither assistance nor gratitude are necessary.

I try not to think about all this as I sit with my grandmother. After all, it’s only the first night here; I have two more weeks to ponder and worry and grieve. For now, I focus on the remnants of beauty still visible through the wrinkles and the too skinny body in the pink pajamas. She wakes up, and I smile into her large eyes as she asks me the usual questions.

“Fei ji hao ma?” How was the plane?

“Hao.” Fine.

“Du zi uh ma?” Are you hungry?

“Bu.” No.

“Lei ma?” Tired?

“Yi dian dian.” A little.

“Ni kan dao a-gong le mei you?” Have you seen your grandpa?

I pause and find myself unable to think of an answer as the threat of tears stings behind my eyes. I wonder if I should tell her that grandpa has been dead for six years.

For once, I’m glad I don’t know how.