look | lōōk |
verb. direct one’s gaze toward someone or something or in a specified direction.
Oh, that’s what I look like when I look at you.
I’ve always wondered what I look like when I look at you, what my eyes say when we hold hands through eyesight, staring into the vast worlds that occupy each of our minds. I wonder, whenever we hold hands through our eyes, whether you are looking only into my eyes or my face, entirely.
My brittle mouth too uneven for my teeth. My nose too big for our mirrored faces. My eyebrows too undefined in the questions my forehead can’t quite wrinkle into words.
Sometimes when we stare at each other for too long, we find the deep canyon of different languages deepening, swallowing us until one of us looks away. I always look away first.
Your grey peacock of a hair too beautiful to stay asleep on your forehead. Your nose too twin sized to mine. Your eyebrows too undefined in their greying from living a life that proved so many theories and predictions wrong. Your upside down mouth. And your freckles, oh your freckles.
Or liver spots. You are aging faster than I can hold your eyes.
I’ve always wondered what it takes to stop time, to hold time still while the rest of the world spins on, wildly, carelessly, and undisturbed.
If I have to choose one word to capture the way my grandmah looked at the world and how the world looked back, I would choose smallness.
Smallness not in the immense warmth of her embrace, arms that I often squish and jiggle to match the wideness of my smiles. Smallness not in the journey of her refugeehood from running far and farther than her Laos can crack a separateness between her children and their infinite potentials to do something, be someone. Smallness not in her spirit of looking hard into the deafening cries of two world wars, the indochina war, and nameless unnamed wars scattered in between the fold of her dreams and moment before waking. Smallness, certainly not in her eyes.
But in the way she holds her version of the world with her fingers, gently. The smallness of how comfortably her life sits in the palms of her hands, how gracefully she offers the world to me. The smallness of the life she lives, the space she occupies, and the coziness of how she wraps me up inside her constellations of inheritance. She does not ask for anything, demands nothing. She gives. She offers what littleness she has, what generosity her eyes hold, that look.
That’s what she looks like when she looks at me, generously.
Upon arriving here after living in Thai refugee camps long enough to see the birth of two grandsons, the engagement of one son, and the marriage of one daughter, she settled into a life in the small town of El Monte, California. Her new home of two bedrooms, one living room, one bathroom, and one kitchen, most of which was too much space for all the things she could not carry with her across the ocean. The house looked on with smallness. She lived there for twenty years, raising a tribe of warrior grandchildren who never felt the smallness until each one graduated high school and left for college in unexplored parts of California to find their history, stories that they couldn’t quite understand until they finally found their way home.
On nights of returning visits from real world explorations through textbooks and case studies, she cooks a special dinner to honor her grandchildren, in which she digs up a burnt and aging wok from the garage with three sewing machines, and deep fries frog legs over a mini portable fire on top of a cardboard stove, squatting by the entrance of her back door. She makes me wait comfortably on her sofa of twenty years and waves me away when I ask her how I can help. The most I can do in these moments is to take a photograph to forever keep this image of how small she looks in the immensity of her generosity.
In her old age, aging faster than my eyes can hold her, she tells me stories of her growing up in Laos, of raising her tribe of a family, waving her arms in every which direction as if the only way to tell her stories is through a sign language of gestures to make up for the absence of untranslatable words. Like sparrows taking flight against the wind with every smallness of their wings.
The deep canyon of different languages deepening between us, still.
Do you understand me? She often asks at the end of a brief monologue, to which I always answer no in my head, but yes through my lips. There are words that lose their way in the air between us, shadowed by my shame of not trying hard enough to learn her language. But her hand gestures, they save me every time. And that look, her eyes holding mine, peacock hair and all.
I don’t think we are meant to understand each other only through words.
This is a growing up, a wondering of how life looks so differently when you are standing on the other side, outside of it all. Never did you and your livelihood feel so small in that forgotten town of El Monte, California, and never did I feel you didn’t have enough of the world. And now, standing on the other side of the coast surrounded by a thousand layers of bricked ambition that calls New York City the center of the world, I feel lonely for you in your smallness, in the simpleness that all you’ve ever known will always be more than enough for you. And I want to cradle that sincerity of a gratitude for all the smallness handed your way so I will always feel small enough to still fit in the center of your life.
There are many things and people to be grateful for this year, and one of them is smallness. That very ability to choose to stay small in a growing world and look at each other with all the humbled love any pair of eyes can hold. Generously, still.
