About Wai Po. You say your memories of her are blurry, but everyone takes that as a consequence of age and not the fault of failing eyesight. She is footsteps creaking against the floorboards as she hobbles to bed, a tongue that clicks as she says sit-sit-sit! with a tinge of a Yangzhounese accent, the married pair of spatula and wok clinking together as she fries bok choy.
In the summer of 2018, you find yourself back in Suzhou sleeping in the same bed where she drew her last breath four years ago. Since your grandfather no longer lives here, your family has taken his keys so that you can stay in her apartment over the summer. The ascent up the long steps was familiar, not unlike hiking the Great Wall of China for the first time this year after touring Beijing. In the sticky Suzhou air, you brave the chunky cement stairs whose rusty railings are crooked and sagging from the heat. You follow the path of peeled plaster and flickering lights. Outside Wai Po’s door, you have the urge to knock. Your father reminds you that your grandfather isn’t home as he fumbles for the keys.
A mosquito buzzes and you slap it. A bit of blood smears across your arm. You’ve always remembered your Suzhou summers as being filled with bug bites, even while underneath the tent Wai Po perched around the bed to protect you from them. Bad memories still itch—the sleepless nights battling the heat, the repulsive smell of cigarettes that fuse up from the streets into the window and your grandmother clearing her throat as she clutches her blanket.
Wai Po’s slippers are still lined up on the doorstep. They are sizes too small for your feet. How big you’ve grown! cried Wai Po during your last visit as she went to fit your shoes and arched her head up to see your face. Your mom is grabbing some flip flops stuffed in her purse, but you have decided to slip on the shoes with the red fabric that you always wore.
Your family splits up. You and your mother take the bed that you and Wai Po used to share. On the mattress there used to be a pillow that Wai Po had sewn for you, stuffed with green tea leaves as a remedy for your nearsightedness. Until age twelve you had refused to wear your glasses, choosing instead to suffer inside an impressionist painting of your own making where everything appears as if behind condensed steam on a mirror. Before she died, Wai Po had been obsessed with curing your eyesight. You were supposed to sleep with the leaves underneath your head to clear your vision by morning. Yet you got sick by their sweet smell and woke up groggy with the same blurred vision you always saw the world through.
There were other remedies. Wai Po taught you to look for green leaves outside the window. Green is bright and good for the eyes. Look at all the beautiful trees outside. She’d forgotten, however, that not much greenery thrives in a city like Suzhou. Your grandmother lived in an older part of the city, one where the buildings still resemble those of China’s old dynasties. The features of all the old apartments were scraped off like the skin of a daikon radish and then diced into slabs of white. Glasses off, and Suzhou becomes a sea of jagged zebra stripes, the black pagoda-styled roofs juxtaposed with those drab, white buildings underneath. Row after row of windows with metal bars are reminders of your confinement back then. Your grandparents essentially kept you cooped up in the house—the sidewalks were hot enough to melt the bottom of your flip flops. Sometimes cousins took you to air conditioned malls, but most summers you watched television with Wai Po while your grandfather smoked by himself in a separate room.
You’ve come to know that your grandmother’s effort to fix your vision was not a doomed exercise to restore the health of your eyes. Rather, she had wished you knew how to see the world better without aid. To recognize and appreciate that the apartments by Wai Po’s house were more than just buildings; they were filled with stories and the people who live in them. You can see all signs of life—clothes hung over the window, birds on the roof, a child waving to her mother from below—because it is the mind that takes what is in front of our eyes and interprets it to give sight. What we look at does not mean anything until we give it purpose.
You try to see the world anew. Yellow was once only a primary color, the bright round yolk of a pigeon egg. One afternoon you held a pigeon egg under your grandmother’s apple-shaped lamp. What are you doing? Wai Po asked, and your eight-year-old self told her you were trying to hatch a baby bird. “I want to heat the egg,” you babbled, “like a hen sitting on it. I want to know if there’s a baby.” You had wanted to say “incubate,” but the only word you could equate it to in Mandarin was heat.
Your grandmother tells you some eggs don’t have baby birds. A white line through the yolk means there’s a baby inside. Come on, want me to show you?
You let her take your egg, only to become horrified when she cracks it into a bowl of soy sauce. Unraveled is a white thread piercing the yolk, a uniform yellow. A baby, you realized. It’ll taste nice scrambled, Wai Po tells you. I’ll go fry it with chives. And in that moment, Wai Po taught you that truth and discovery can be undone. What is found and learned ultimately erases itself. You know now that the egg was a baby, but pursuing that knowledge led you to its destruction. A week later, your grandmother will take you to a dim sum place notorious for pigeon deaths, where the sounds of birds being electrocuted on the power lines play like music.
That is what yellow is to you, not a happy color but the sound of dying birds. You see yellow as life and its uncertainty. You’ve yet to ask yourself what it means for you to be “yellow,” but that is for another day.
Today you wonder what sounds your grandmother associated with you. Maybe you are piano music. You used to play on an old piano in your grandmother’s apartment. At age seventeen, you no longer know how to play Bach with both hands or how the pedal works measure by measure. “Whenever she heard you were visiting,” your mother tells you, “she would hire someone to tune that piano. But who knows if the piano still sounds the same? You stopped playing.”
You pop in a round grape and wince when you bite into a seed. Chinese grapes are not the same as American grapes. They are round, purple oysters, whose skin must be gently peeled off—a dance of push and pull between teeth and tongue as the skin is stripped off the way one pulls off a dress. Slow, letting fabric move with body as it rolls off.
“You stopped letting me visit,” you say, spitting out the seeds.
Your mother elegantly unfurls purple skin out from her tongue and drops it on top of your seeds. “You would’ve been too loud. She was sick.”
You knew she had bile duct cancer, but your parents always told you that Wai Po didn’t want to see you. She needed peace and quiet to fight the illness. Only when you were older did you realize the truth was a lie. You prodded the yolk and it destroyed itself.
“She was dying,” you say. Your mother says nothing and swipes the grape skins into the wastebasket. She chose to shield you from the truth, but she underestimated how quick you were in unpeeling it.
You leave the kitchen to spy on your younger brother and father in the living room. Wai Gong has bought a new couch, so yet another blurred memory is now fading from view—sitting with your grandparents on the tattered sofa, snacking on fruit or the waffle fries Wai Po ordered whenever you missed American food. The television has been replaced with a new Sony model where your brother and father are watching the Suzhou news.
You are reminded of news coverage of the eclipse the last time you visited Wai Po, the Mandarin too fast for your eight-year old mind to comprehend. Someone spoke of the sun and how dark it would be at certain times. You remember scrambling up the stairs to the loft where Wai Gong smoked. Wai Po followed and then led you past the screen door to the rooftop where she hung her laundry. There was a metal gate in front of the door that she pulled away before stepping outdoors.
Look, can you see the sun? she had asked, pointing a bony finger to a beam of white piercing through the blanket of clouds. You told her that the sky wasn’t clear and you couldn’t see the sun, only the clouds. I can see it, she told you. Look at it, so small. Come look at how dark the room downstairs is. Quickly! It’ll be gone and you’ll never see it again.
You return to the loft now. You want to slide open the screen door and ask Wai Po if she needs help with the laundry, and for her to say no so you can go play the computer games that will ruin your eyes. It is noon. You’ve found the sun shining through the window on the piano and the small leather bench. Your grandmother used to scold you about how the light will hurt your eyes. You blink and a spot of pink drifts into your line of vision. You inch closer to the piano bench. You can see small cracks in the black leather. And you can almost hear a tongue that clicks as she says sit-sit-sit!
Contributor Notes
Janet Song is a student of Vassar College. She currently works as an editor for The Miscellany News and has written for Ringling College and Portrait: Vassar’s Asian Magazine. She was a National Silver Medalist for the 2017-18 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
