Peanut

We called her many names. To me, she was lao lao. To my mother, she was ma. But when my cousin’s son was born, we couldn’t find the words. Lao lao was the title appropriate for his own grandmother—my aunt. Should he say Old lao lao? Great lao lao?

“Either way, I have the most lao [old],” my grandmother piped up. In my mind, she has been 90 since the day we met.

I texted my mom for her birthday. She replied: Thank you. How is school? I am not sure if you dad mentioned to you or not, your grandmother in Jinan passed away about three weeks ago.

I once wrote a Daily Theme from the perspective of a goldfish, whose short term memory condemned it to a life of swimming around the same castle again and again with unceasing excitement. The last time I saw my grandmother, she appeared to me like a goldfish. She could no longer recall events that had happened 5 minutes prior. She introduced me to her houseplants one by one, again and again. “This one has two new buds. How nice!” She never remembered my name.

I would have felt bad for visiting so infrequently were it not for the fact that my existence made no impression on her mind, given her inability to form new memories and her gradual loss of old ones. When I was 18, she gave me a sandalwood fan. “Don’t you remember? You gave me the fan made from the special scented trees. I still keep it in my drawer at home,” I tell her eagerly when I am 21. That day, I discover three more fans in her wardrobe, identical to the one she gave me.

The only time I’ve experienced a death in the family was when my maternal grandfather—lao ye—died. I was twelve. My father broke the news much like the way my mother broke the news today—three weeks late, in a single sentence, with no details about the cause of death. I remember sitting at the dining table, trying to keep my eyes downcast and pretending to feel sad. How could I mourn a man I never knew?

I didn’t know my grandmother’s name, her date of birth, her Zodiac sign, or which of the houseplants she liked best. The last time I saw her, she was less than 5 feet tall and her skin was soft as velvet. She had a thousand wrinkles, but not one looked out of place. She took a walk around the neighborhood every day. She lived on the 6th floor but could climb the stairs all by herself. “I carry the little stool so I can sit down in between each flight,” she tells me, pointing to a shabby wood-and-fabric structure ubiquitous in China yet impossible to describe in English. She lived with my aunt. Before leaving the house, my aunt reminded my grandmother that she could eat in her absence.

“And if you get hungry?”

“Hungry?”

“Then eat a fruit! Or eat the leftovers in the refrigerator.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t just sit and wait for me to come back! Or else—”

“—I’ll starve to death.” My grandmother grinned, never one to miss a beat.

The only English words she knew were fire and peanut. She learned fire from a television program about fire safety. She wrote the word in the margins of a newspaper so she could ask me what it meant. I taught her peanut when we were shelling peanuts that summer, after boiling them in salt water. She could only pronounce “pea” and after a few attempts, I decided it wasn’t worth the effort. “Nut!” I repeated, again and again. “Nah?” “Nut!” “Nuh?” “Never mind.” When would it ever come in handy?

I once asked her what brought her joy. I wanted her to tell me the story of her life. “What was your happiest memory?” “My what?” I leaned in and spoke directly into her ear. “Your happiest memory?” “What?” “What made you happy? HAPPY!” “WHAT?” “Never mind.”

There is nothing left to tell. Everything I know about my grandmother fits in the space of 700 words, and it is this vacancy that consumes me—the blank page and blinking cursor—when I read the words “passed away.”