Finding Momentum

My grand­fa­ther (ah gong, or 外公, but we call him gong gong), dri­ven by winds of Com­mu­nist change, arrived in Tai­wan in the 1940s. He was a Fuzhou busi­ness­man, 26 at the time. He was a busi­ness­man, rel­a­tively wealthy and edu­cated, and fled from the incom­ing Communists.

He met my grand­mother (ah ma, or 外媽 — but we’ve grown up call­ing her puo puo) while they both worked as school­teach­ers at the same ele­men­tary school.

“Your ah gong was a hand­some man” my grand­mother says with a chuckle and a glim­mer in her eye. She is dig­ni­fied, lady­like, and pre­cise. She bears eyes with depth, hold­ing her teacup with delib­er­ate old-world del­i­cacy. My early mem­o­ries are sprin­kled with her con­stant pres­ence in our house, mak­ing fan­tas­tic food and read­ing me chi­nese fables for bed­time stories.

They met in the years in between the world wars, when the world was chang­ing. My grandma was native Tai­wanese, telling me about the world she grew up in, hear­ing Amer­i­can bombers fly over­head, when alarms would sound and they would have to head to the moun­tains to hide in the hills. Tai­wan was dif­fer­ent then, they were raised to believe they were Japanese.

They fell in love, but they don’t speak much about it nowa­days. I won­der how it was back then. She was trained as a school­teacher, and he must have been good with the kids given his gre­gar­i­ous charm. It’s not hard to imag­ine why they fell in love, but how? I won­der if they can still remember.

These days, they live in Taipei in a mod­ern apart­ment, pan­eled in mar­ble and dark wood. His hands trem­ble when they reach for the dishes on the table. She reaches for the dish and stead­ies it for him. After each meal he silently shuf­fles to the couch and picks his teeth with a tooth­pick and looks out the win­dow at the glassy beams of the Taipei 101 tower.

Her fam­ily would have noth­ing to do with him. He was an out­sider, one of the KMT occu­piers. Sto­ries ran ram­pant about KMT men look­ing for Tai­wanese wives while keep­ing a wife back in China. What did my great-grandfather think of him? Did they ever meet? Or did he for­bid their love from the outside?

So they eloped.

Annie asks if puo-puo gets tired of cook­ing for us. My dad laughs. “I bet she loves it that we’re here. She loves to cook.”

The spread is enor­mous. Taro fish ball soup, fresh steamed fish from the mar­ket, boiled chicken, dumplings, radish salad, an array of steamed veg­eta­bles and guavas and wax apples for dessert. We lay there after each meal, stunned and deliri­ously happy.

My mom would tell me about how in the years down the road after their mar­riage, gong-gong would even­tu­ally win over my grandmother’s fam­ily with his kind­ness, gen­eros­ity, and charm and twin­kle in his eye. I won­der what it was like, a slow, grad­ual warm­ing, a rec­on­cil­i­a­tion that may have taken years to mend.

My uncle calls us when we’re there, ask­ing if they want to come with them on their upcom­ing vaca­tion to Japan. Puo-puo hes­i­tates, smil­ing a bit, think­ing. When she is think­ing, she knits her brow and blinks slowly. It’s her reserved nature that defines her ele­gance, I decide. But she is like a wall, dif­fi­cult to read. I want to ask her about her young love.

“No,” she finally says, “I should stay here. It’s cold in Japan. And I need to be with your dad.”

Later as we sit around the liv­ing room shar­ing our hopes for the new year (my dad puts us through these things) gong-gong makes an inno­cent face and tells us that his hope is that “your puo-puo should visit Japan and get out of the house and not have to take care of me.” She smiles.

Gong-gong is always dressed well: suede jack­ets, pressed wool, a sleek Kan­gol cap and shiny loafers. These days, he’s still dap­per but much less mobile. His walk is reduced to a shuffle.

He’s shrunk over the years, but his charm is still there, shrouded by ail­ing health. As we leave, he grabs my arm and tells me he’d like to attend my wed­ding soon and leaves me a kiss on the neck.