Granted



Part I
There were only two things on my mind at the time: Home, and…hatred.

Both concepts were not very well understood by my mind at all, and even less so in my state of panic. All I knew was that I wanted to go home, and these…people…were keeping me from doing so.

I despised them for it, for forcing me to stay here against my will, making this dark, dank house even more of a cage than it already was. Even more, I hated myself for walking right into it in the first place. It was a come-in-and-you-won’t-get-out scenario, and I had walked right into it believing I could get out. My flight-or-fight response had been twisted into the atypical flight-and-fight response, and it was wearing me out in fatigue.

I would have fought if I could, but I was small and tiny, and my captors were fully capable adults. There had been a personal experience with one of them, enough to prove that I was not strong enough to win a struggle. I was seven years younger than what I am now, which makes this experience all the more profound to remember. I knew if I fought, I would fail, and I would drag my mom down into the consequences of whatever they would do to me. She, after all, had come with me, and we were now chained to the situation.

I hated them for doing this to us. So I cried; I screamed. With my pathetic eyes, small and having seen more than I could understand, I glared at anyone who tried to near me, anyone who was to try to take me farther into the cage that I already was. My tears had run out, for I had been crying for hours, but all of my fervor and emotion had not run out just yet. I may have sat down on their wretched furniture, but that was only because I knew I needed some sort of strength, even if that supposed strength sourced from mere energy conservation.

My goal was to deafen them, to make them suffer as much as the pain I felt: The suffering of being trapped inside somewhere they wanted to force me to call home. I had escaped once through deception; there was no chance of that now, and besides, they had actually trusted me back then. At that time, I had said I would return, but did not. Even with their idiocy, there was no possible way that they would ever believe another word I said.

There was no consolation left for me. All there was left for me was to drag on the night as long as I could with what I believed to be the power of my voice. But I was small, and children do not have much power.

At some point, even that died out, faded out into nothing like radio static. Besides, I had no water by which to soothe my hoarse throat. At that point, I only sat in defiance, saying nothing to them. My message was made clear: “All I have to say towards you is nothing.” I was determined that I would not capitulate my will to them, even if that meant I were to spent the night holding a tissue box as a weapon.

Nonetheless, the subjects of my hatred continued to drift by, malevolent phantoms, and each time I beat whatever they tried to say back with my almighty tissue box. No, it was as if the world, not just this enclosed one, were all phantoms, including myself. On some level, I was truly a ghost. I was drifting in this meaningless pattern of actions that would be for nothing, in a world that seemed to only enclose me in its efforts to choke my breath away. Anything and anyone else were meaningless to me. All that mattered was that I believed there was something I awaited in the future, but even if it was hope, it was too faded for my mind to register, worn out from and shadowed by my own incessant screaming.

In the entrance of the room, the small, faded world I had both been enclosed in and enclosed myself into, she stood there, maybe for longer than I had realized. I remember seeing her there, slightly leaned over. She did not approach, and somewhere, I appreciated that, for I wished more for solitude than the pestering of people who were supposed to be family. Instead, they are nothing to me.

I knew who she was, of course. I had met her the same day I met the rest. She never talked much, and as much as I hate to say so, her voice was not impressionable enough upon me for me to remember. Of course, it is also a matter of my memory never being the best regarding the voices of anyone, and at the time, I was far enough gone into the illusion of asylum from what was happening that I could have even forgotten my own voice. I did recognize her, though, as who would be my great grandma. In Chinese, we have a distinction for this title. I called her “Lao Zu”, roughly meaning “elderly ancestor”. She was ninety-four years old at that time. It is Chinese custom to be pious and courteous to the elderly, but that wouldn’t have stopped me from screaming at her, too. She was part of that family which I had detached myself from, never having belonged to it in the first place, and had it not been the fact that I had seen her endure more than I had, I would have done something that I would definitely regret now. In spite of everything, I still am thankful that even in my fury, in my world where I suffered the most, I could see she was suffering, too. It was wrong for me to impose my suffering on someone like her, even if I did not know the specifics of her pain. I could not scream at someone who was already the victim of presumptuous and unjustified castigation.

I had seen her two times before, which was why I recognized her. The second time was a visit my mom made to her, bringing cakes. They were small cakes, and Mom had me take the bag and give it to Lao Zu personally. Truth to be told, I knew nothing about the meaning of the deed (except for the fact that the elderly like it when children seem so cute and insightful, and that this would lead to the benefit of being able to eat a few cakes too).

She was happy. A smile graced her wrinkled face, and it seemed to be a foreign thing. I hadn’t seen her smile before, really, other than that faintly recalled attempt to smile that she had made the first time she had met me. In that instant, though I didn’t think of it that way, I experienced why a smile is said to be the least distance between two people. A person was happy, albeit a person I barely knew, but still I smiled, because I was able to transfer some kindness to her and bring her happiness.

Neither of us were smiling this time, not even two weeks later. I was as if paused in time, and in fact, I felt quite like I was on display in a museum exhibit. I became aware of my tear-stained cheeks, rumpled clothes, and aura of despising towards all of my surroundings. Mom always told me that children should make sure their elderly do not worry about them, and all things considered, I considered her different from the rest of that family, even to the point that my mind assumed her to be in my own. I was far from feeling ashamed for making her worry so, just as I did not learn to be ashamed of my selfish reasons in bringing her cakes in the first place weeks back; but there was sort of deep-satiated uncomfortableness, like something was off, but I didn’t know what. It was enough for me to lift my eyes to look at her, perhaps, trying to form a memory as a futile effort.

Maybe I expected her eyes to be alike to my own, distant, faraway, but they were there, and they conveyed what she could not say. She wanted to help, but was helpless. That made me think back afterwards that maybe she was looking off in a faraway place, maybe a better place, where her own child and grandchildren and son-in-law and everyone else verbally abused her for the problems she experienced, that other humans would have expected an elderly woman to experience, including myself, a young child at the time. Perhaps she was looking towards the world she had not been a part of from the one she was restrained in, in this place that was not a home for her and me at all.

There was not enough time for me to remember the look in her eyes. Someone who had supposed to be family for both of us yelled out, and she turned away as briskly as she could. It seemed that she had faded back into the long night, into silence.

That was the last time I saw her. The next morning, I was somehow released from the expansive prison house. Not to be said, she was not, but I, selfish as always, didn’t think about it anymore than that. I do not remember even glimpsing her as I stormed out the door with the longest strides I could manage in my pace, determined never to return again.

Part II
January 12th, 2020, in what would have been January 13th of 2020 where she was, in China. A few weeks away from the most important Chinese holiday, Chinese New Year. Seven years away from the last meeting. Seven years different from then.

Approximately 7,417 miles away, I learned of her passing with a hollow feeling, the ill feeling of ironic humor. My usual joke “A heart? What heart?” seemed to have manifested itself into my chest cavity. The joke “Feelings? What feelings?” had manually tuned itself into my mind. For all the times I have cried for seeing someone vanish into what some call the afterlife, or some call nothing, I did not even turn completely to my mom, who had told me the news. I only slammed my hand onto my computer’s keypad to pause the song that I had been listening to, my face was burdened into a mask of indifference. Then, I turned back to my homework, the world of typicality, my mind once again in that haze it had been back then. As for her typical world, it had always been one beyond my comprehension, even if all I could try to comprehend was passed on to me as well throughout the years. It washed over me, as if I were being overcome with flashbacks of her life. Lao Zu had been widowed with five children in one of the hardest times of the world, after World War II, in a country that had not yet considered giving women the right of education or to work.

Somehow, she managed, in her own way I cannot even begin to understand now. She worked every day, for many hours. She worked with her soul, and her blood. For the latter, it was quite literal. She had sold her own blood numerous times to exchange for any sort of food or asset that could aid her in raising her children to adulthood, giving them the ability to be in school, to be able to get a job in the competitive world.

After that, her children conflicted over an inheritance, to the point of never again communicating with each other again, and her heart must have been split just like them. But she continued on.

At some point as well, her daughter (who I was supposed to regard as my grandma) moved into her house, as well as her son-in-law, and then who I regard as the rest of the entire pack of dogs. That was at least fifteen years earlier, and since then, she never left the building, even though she expressed to my mom an interest in the outside world, and the fact that she wished they would help her go out.

(About the topic of going out, I recently learned there was an elevator. If there were stairs, it would have been more plausible for that group of what were supposed to be human beings to be too lazy and indifferent to ever aid her in walking down them, but there was an elevator.)

But they never helped her at all. On the night I had been trapped in that place, she had had a coughing fit in the middle of the night, and the only person out of the many who got up to give her one cup of water was Mom. Everyone else ignored her, just as they always did when they didn’t want something from her.

My grandmother, the mother of my own mom, had passed away before I was born at the age of fifty eight. I constantly hear my mom speak, in a determined voice, that she will live life to the fullest for her own mother, who never could stop working and enjoy something quality from life. As for Lao Zu, she had passed at the age of one hundred and two. My mom said it was a long age, and perhaps, a reprieve from the abuse forced onto her, but I still felt like a mask of cold, dark steel was pressed unto my face as I listened. I felt like I finally knew what apathy was, as my mind ticked away.

My mind calculated that she had lived to almost double my grandmother’s age, yet still she had never been truly happy from her life. My grandmother had labored hard and long, but she did it with the support of her children, my mother, aunt, and uncle. Lao Zu had no one except those to yell at her for nothing she could control, for things any human being should have been sympathetic to. What did a long life matter without her own happiness and those remembering her for anything but the inheritance she left behind? Why did a life matter?

My mask crumpled with regret. The regret in that I had been able to guess that it would happen, for there had been news that had come about her not eating as of late, as I realized that I had that hollow feeling long before the news of her passing, because to my mind, she had already been gone. Still, I regretted: That I had seen her but a few times, that I had spoken to her once, that I had only given her one smile along with the cakes. She deserved so much more.

Along with that regret, anger and hatred, once again, filled that void within me, or perhaps, they were the void. My tears were of regret and confusion and anger and hatred, to those people who refused to spare any money to send her to the hospital in the half of a month that she, who usually seemed healthy, had been barely eating, to those people who lied about the hospital refusing her for her age when they hadn’t called for the ambulance at her, scoundrels to the end. She had passed away, trapped in that little dark place until the end, until the cremation or the cheapest way to dispose of her body was found a few days earlier, and she was taken out, still trapped by that apathy, and…

She will be forgotten. All that she has of value to them is the home she left behind, that house they turned into one resembling a cage that held her. Perhaps it will split them again, and in some part of my mind, I compare the house to a skimmed meat bone for the ravenous dogs they are.

I still believe that people live to be remembered. She will not be remembered by them. Everything they have is how she once looked, that empty chair she took in the kitchen, and that upholstery she had to use for bedding, and that house with everything of that, and… It is true that I have none of that. I can’t even remember the few words she had spoken to me, and I do not remember how she looks. She will be but a silhouette in my dreams, as if that phantom world years ago, for I do not know the specific shade of emotional color that had been in her eyes, or weariness that had dyed her greyed hair, or even the hands that took the bag of sweets from me and patted my head lightly, affectionately.

I do not have what they would have to remember her, but I remember that moment of a shared smile that taught me that even small acts of kindness conveyed to someone can bring the happiness that he or she needs. I have remembered that every step I take, every breath I breathe, every time I look up to the wide open sky above, I am living my life, and I am living it for those who were cared for by others and now are gone, and now, she is amongst that number as well. I have remembered that her want to be happy and live on are reasons for why I should do so myself. The future lives on from the past, and if I can call myself part of her future, I wish to live on for that part of the past as well.

I cannot remember her face, but I remember her, because with all that she had to endure, she kept going; even in the home that had become a cage for her, she still could smile. She has taught me that a home is not a place to take for granted, and that life is worth carrying out to the end. These are what she has taught me to remember, and so, it is with what I wish to be finality that I finish typing these words.

This is tribute to my Lao Zu, her memory, her dedication, and her life. This is to my own dedication to my memory and to carry out my life with dignity.

This is to my wish that, wherever she is, she has found happiness and her own true home.