Aaron and Anne-Sophie

To be honest I knew very little about the life of my grandmother outside of knowing her just as my PaPa (grandma). For some reason all my grandparents told us almost nothing about their lives in China, or their struggle as immigrants in the US. Occasionally we got a peek into their social lives going to Chinatown with them and playing Mah Jong with their friends, but that’s about it. They would just introduce me to their friends and make me say my greetings in Chinese and then they proceeded to talk and talk in Chinese, none of which I ever understood. Generally though my grandparents did want to know about me . . . mainly how I was doing in school, my kungfu, and if I had enough to eat. Unlike many grandparents, ours didn’t really try to glorify the past . . . in many ways happy to be in America for the opportunities it represented, Grandma Chan especially seemed to always have her eye on the future . . . not really her own future, but the future of her children and grandchildren.

Despite spending much of my childhood up until the age of 8 being partially raised by my grandparents who took care of me while my parents were working, I never really learned Chinese and at that time I never really wanted to learn Chinese or anything about my grandparents’ culture. Instead I watched “The Brady Bunch” and the “Facts of Life” to form my culture, and my grandparents stayed in their room to do whatever they did: watch Chinese programs or listen to Chinese opera, spending time in the garden growing vegetables, or cooking for us. They seemed happy to let me be American and transform myself into something they could not fully understand or control, but as long as I was healthy, well-fed, and educated with a good job, that would be enough for them.

Now, I am probably not how my grandma envisioned me to become. As the oldest male on my dad’s side, Grandma Chan did favor me some and technically I should have been a doctor or an engineer or some responsible job to take care of the family. She probably could not understand why after college I went to seminary, although she always seemed to value any extra education I got, and she probably didn’t understand why I would go to Palestine . . . we never told her that I was in Yemen and not in Europe all this time. I became something beyond American or perhaps something in between. It was only till I was 20 or so did I start to care about who I was as Chinese and American, but by then it was already too late. I saw my grandparents much less and we were even further apart; there was no way we could really communicate beyond those childhood ways of communicating about school and having enough to eat. My grandparents’ generation slowly started to die away. Perhaps one of the reasons why I travel so much is that I’m searching for that lost identity that is dying with my grandparents. I began to see in the lives of simple village people I would meet in developing countries the lives of my grandparents coming from small villages in China for a better life. I’ve still yet to travel to my grandparents’ village in southern China, but I’m sure it’s not the same. Really they are all we have to link us to the past.

And as politically liberal I’ve become, and as conservative my grandparents are/were, I now realize that bottomline all I really ever want(ed) to see changed in the world, is for it to become more like my grandma Chan. Why can’t governments and corporations look not to their own immediate future for gaining power and money and look at the future for the world they’re going to leave their grandchildren in? Why can’t governments be like loving grandparents and parents? I’m convinced Jesus asked similar questions, when talking about God as a loving parent as how the kingdom of heaven is and how the kingdoms on earth should be like. She understood that better than me, though she wasn’t a Christian (her ways of thinking like many Chinese consisted of local Taosim, Confucianism, and Buddhism). Why can’t they be as self-sacrificing as my grandma Chan? Why do the powerful give people leftovers and seek to consume so much? Grandma Chan always gave me the best pieces of meat, while she ate whatever scraps were left over. Almost never punishing me, she rewarded me with money for getting good grades and getting an education. She saved everything she could just in case one of us might need a sweater or want some cookies or want to go back to school for a doctoral program. She chose a simple life, reused everything so much so she could save for us, and focused so much on the future for us that she ignored her own pain and health before it was too late to stop the cancer in her body. So beyond my losing her language, many of the cultural traditions, some of the wealth that our family has accumulated with her hard work and some luck by my choosing a not for profit career, and even discontinuing the full Chinese blood line by marrying a French woman, I hope to preserve at least a piece of the true conservatism (the most precious of treasures that she could have saved and passed on with her to her children and grandchildren) for my family and the rest of the world: self-sacrificing love and simple living.

I’m very sad to say that I won’t be able to return to attend her funeral, but I will always try to keep her spirit with me for the rest of my life wherever I may be. This reflection is not at all a eulogy for her or a biography of her life. There’s no way I could do her justice with what very little I knew about her, but it’s just a reflection on how she’s influenced my life in the many little ways like taking care of me when I was sick or preparing me a toasted peanutbutter sandwich in the morning when I was hungry and in big ways like giving me so much unconditional love that it couldn’t help but spill out into other parts of my life despite my attempts to hold on to it in my cynical adult age. I believe the best way to thank her is to look toward the future as she did for my children and grandchildren as my generation assumes its role as leaders of this world to make it a better place for them. May she rest in peace.

AMC