Fiction - Grandma by Tammy Ho Lai-ming

Grandma

by Tammy Ho Lai-ming

My grandma was toothless for as long as I could remember. She carried a pair of sharp scissors whenever she went to a restaurant to mince food into suitably tiny pieces: steamed chicken breast, fried broccoli, curry squid, etc. One afternoon, when she was preparing dinner in the kitchen, grandma accidentally chopped off her right index finger. How that happened was now unimaginable. She managed to call an ambulance quickly; but the finger could no longer be redeemed. After the event, grandma was physically weak. She refused to cook again and claimed that her world was now monochromatic. Her six children, my mom included, came to a consensus to send her to a home for the elderly. They said that was only a temporary measure. Like many other 'temporary' decisions, the arrangement became permanent.

The home for the elderly was near where I worked and lived. Therefore, I was able to visit grandma everyday. Even in the first week, grandma's hair was more unkempt than before. She also gave up dying her hair and putting different kinds of lotion on her face. Within a month she had a full head of wild pearly strands like a mermaid who asked for immortality with eagerness but unwittingly forgot to demand perpetual youth. She was still beautiful, I thought, for an eighty-year-old woman, even though she seemed to have grown weary of her looks and was no longer proud of her tailor-made flower-pattered cheongsams.

I was twenty-two years old that year, and worked full-time in a day-care centre looking after young kids when their lower-middle-class parents went to battle in brightly-lit and dully-decorated offices. It was a huge consolation to just sit there with grandma in almost absolute quietness after prolonged exposure to shrieks and screams and loud giggles. Grandma's room was neat, carpeted and had mullioned glass windows that generously absorbed the scene of a small street outside. Every now and then there was a pleasant whiff of fresh bread and chocolate cookies. Her six children were not thrifty about their mother's final earthly lodging.

Grandma started talking about her lost finger the following year. It was one gloomy Saturday, a typhoon irresponsibly left behind a cracked grey sky featuring kaleidoscopic lightning and a massive amount of rain that smelt strangely of animals' blood. I peeled an orange for grandma after she had finished an early dinner of cut spring rolls and lukewarm pork congee. She extended her right hand, ambidextrous as she was, and tried to fetch that slice of juicy orange with her thumb and index finger, obviously forgetting that the latter was no more than a sprout of human flesh, its development brutally arrested by her own momentous wrongdoing. The slice dropped onto the floor before I could catch it.

Grandma lost appetite for the orange and asked for Oolong tea instead. As if I was the culprit of the mild fiasco, I felt inexplicably guilty and became speechless. Perhaps I was also a little bit angry. Why was she so incompetent? I really thought after one year grandma should have already grown accustomed to the finger's absence.

An embarrassing fifteen minutes passed, she sitting upright and I standing next to her like an intimidated maid in her probation period. Then grandma asked if I thought losing a finger was similar to losing a child. Baffled, I expressed ignorance by knitting my eyebrows and producing lots of wrinkles on my forehead. Grandma pointed at the empty space between her thumb and middle finger and swore there existed a ghost finger, haunting her, just like her ghost first child. She must have lost her mind, I thought. Her first child was my mother! She gave birth to her in the toilet of the village hospital in Hubei when she was twenty-one. That was the most well-known joke in the family. My mom's younger sisters and brothers each had more elegant ways to make their first appearance in this clumsy world.

Grandma said enormous years kept sliding out of her grip, and that she was referring to the first child, the aborted one, not my mother. She got pregnant in the same year when she started having her menstruation. The bleeding crotch was warm and dripped patterns on her underwear. The father of the unborn baby was her then best friend's farmer brother, all sweaty and stiff muscles. I felt extremely uncomfortable with this piece of information she had just irrevocably fed me. Why me? Why was I chosen to bear her secrets? Because I was her eldest grandchild? Once started, grandma would not stop recounting her past. Like the rain outside, her tale was persistent and passionate, forming small streams of freckled mirrors and roadside dust.

She was only fourteen years old. Her hair was tied up in her favourite gingerly pony tail, and her legs smooth with unshaved fine hairs. She enlisted the best friend to help with the abortion while the baby's father was 'kept inside a drum', as the Chinese idiom graphically goes. The scene was not very bloody, grandma boasted, and continued to talk about long ropes and blunt knives. I told her I was not interested in the details, too disgusted about the whole affair. Grandma and her best friend, due to shame or maturity, could not speak to each other anymore after the 'surgery'. That friendship was gone; so vulnerable was the teenage bond. Grandma compared the boyfriend and herself to two trains going in opposite directions on parallel tracks but meeting instantaneously to produce electric sparks in their vicinity.

The lost finger reminded grandma of that ghost child, now resurfaced after being absent for almost half a century. The unborn baby had also conjured up the involuntary memory of other children she had selfishly abandoned before coming to Hong Kong, she said. Without them, her life was now incomplete. They were like holes in a supposedly perfect quilt. I was shocked: what 'other' children? 'Children'? Was there more than one?

Grandma embarked the fishing boat for Sha Tau Kok with a cast of villagers who were in their twenties and thirties. The year was 1957 -- everyone was starving and shooting hostile gazes at those who were fortunate enough to have food and did not resemble skeletons. The night before, she had sent her two daughters to a distant aunt's house on a hillside; the house was partly made of straw and cow dung, looking west. Grandma never considered retrieving the girls, even though the whole time when she was on the cramped boat saturated with an agglomeration of hope and loss she was thinking of their long eyelashes like their dead father's. She held her cloth bag tightly on her lap -- inside, the remains of some summer clothes and a few broken jewellery her mother had endowed to her.

The suppressed past was ripped up, grandma said. About five years ago, the two daughters who were still living in Hubei sent her a handwritten letter, asking for some money so that they could travel to Hong Kong and reunite with their biological mother. The letter weighed so lightly and yet so heavily in grandma's palm. Out of horror, fear and self-condemnation, she wrote back to tell them there was no need to meet, since her entire happy family was now in Hong Kong. Perhaps she wanted only to be known by this invented and partial identity ¡V a mother of six and grandmother of seven. She had no strength to cling to the past; instead, she was to purge it. Grandma also cruelly asked the two daughters not to contact her again or beg for money. She said she burnt the letter; snuffed fire was the sad heart.

I was utterly confused. One of these daughters must be my mother. According to the family legend that was often repeated at festival gatherings, my mom was born in a village hospital, the year before grandma was illegally tossing and turning -- swimming like a butterfly -- in the formidable Hong Kong waters.

Grandma said she gave birth to a stillborn, the first child of the nameless man with unforgettable eyelashes, in the toilet of their house. In a toilet, but not in a hospital toilet. A baby, but not my mother. The anecdote was misunderstood and misattributed to my mom after several retellings.

Does she know? I asked. Grandma beckoned me to refill her cup with some more Oolong tea. The sky was completely dark outside, more apparitions were hauling up. She said not only did my mom know that she was not born in a toilet; she also knew that she was only a half-sister to her siblings. The three of them: my mother, her father (it should be 'step-father' ¡V my beloved grandfather who died when I was fifteen), and grandma had kept this secret for their whole life, lest if her brothers and sisters knew about the truth they would not respect my mom as much. I always wondered why my mom did not have the Chinese character, Lai, in her name. My aunts were called Lai-Fan, Lai-San and Lai-Lan; my uncles were called Lai-Man and Lai-Dan. The word 'Lai' is a noun, it means 'encouragement'. My mom's name was 'Yan-Hong', a red swallow, a swallow soaked in blood.

That perhaps was a more appropriate name for grandma. Like a swallow she flew from one place to another either for escape or for livelihood. And she had blood on her hands in her teenage days when she ultimately rejected a baby's entrance to life. In her old age, she regretfully dismissed and humiliated her own blood.

A handful of children: some male, some female; some tall, some short; some older, some younger; some dead, some living; some in Hubei, some had planted themselves in Hong Kong; some probably loved grandma, some didn't. Ten of them in total, all of them were once in her womb with great expectations. Now, except those who died prematurely, everyone had a different destiny, adding new branches and new secrets to the same family tree forked like meandering rivers.

Grandma died the month before she turned eighty-five. Her openly-acknowledged children and grandchildren were all by her bed when she lay dying. I imagined in her last waking moments she touched the ghost finger and apologized.

A week later, grandma was buried with her right index finger which had been preserved in the hospital.

Tammy Ho Lai-ming, aka Sighming, is a Hong Kong-born writer. She is the editor of Hong Kong U Writing: An Anthology (2006), a co-editor of Word Salad Poetry Magazine and a co-founder of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. More at sighming.com and at her writer's profile.