Grandma

I am my grandma’s favorite. My 8 cousins won’t bother arguing with me on that. She was around since I was born. That was part of her “new grandchild tour”, when she moved from one house to another, helping her children with their own newborn children. Her grandchildren appeared on a pretty even pace, average a new one every 2 years. After completing the tour, she came to live with my family. That was the beginning of my 12 years of grandmother’s full time attention.

She is always cleaning something. Her obsession with cleanliness is ranked at a professional level. Not a speck of dust escapes her eye, and that is not an exaggeration. She dusts and sweeps and mops everything at least twice a day. She closes all the doors and windows if she feels that the air is dusty, which is every day from 9 AM to 8 PM, when she can hear vehicles running on the streets. If a fly appears in her room, she will hunt it down, terminate it, and then dust and sweep and mop everything again. Her clothing and belongings are mostly in light colors: it is easy to spot any dirt or stain on light colors.

Her second obsession, after cleaning, is hoarding food. This is a left-over habit from war time and the coupon rationing period afterwards. A large part of her life was spent in scarcity, and she got into the habit of accumulating as much food as she could to feed a family of seven for as long as possible. The food is to be consumed based on level of spoilage: you start eating from the worst one and save the better ones for later (when they have gone bad). When coupon restriction is no longer in place, she still buys food in abundance and stocks it in the fridge, on the counter, in buckets and baskets, under the bed. Bananas would turn from forest green to mud brown. Grapefruits would dry and shrink. Other things would have colorful molds on them. She would cut off the moldy parts and hand the rest to a grandchild who happens to be nearby, “Have a bite! It’s still good!”

Like most grandmothers, her favorite hobby is to make sure her grandchildren are well-fed. I am particularly lanky and a picky eater, and therefore, she spends extra effort to make sure I eat “enough.” The quantity that she considers “enough” is usually 3 times more than I would like to eat. When she no longer lived with me, she biked to my middle school — about 8 km one way from her place — everyday, to deliver assorted snacks. She often brought soy milk in plastic bags, tied with rubber bands. My school let out at noon, and in the heat of Hanoi, the milk had started to curdle. My friends started recognizing her, “Hey Linh, your grandmother’s over there!”

When she got older and her joints began to cause troubles, biking 10 miles a day wasn’t an option anymore. But nothing can stop her from coming to see me. She started taking the bus to wherever I was. My college campus was a good 2-hour bus ride from her place, but I would come home to my apartment and saw her waiting at my doorstep. I would scold: “Why didn’t you call first? I might not be at home.” And she would say: “I want to surprise you. Hey, I bring rice cakes. You love rice cakes, don’t you?”

She is one of the four people who will drop everything to be at my side when I need them. When I’m sick, she comes over and nurses me back to health. She finds some herbs growing by the sidewalk, brings home a tote-ful, grinds them up to make a potion, and tells me to drink it. It looks like Shrek’s sweat and tastes worse, but somehow it doesn’t kill me. It might even have scared the fever out of me, because after a week, the thermostat reads 36.5 degrees Celsius, and I am allowed to take a shower.

Sidewalk herbal potions are only a small part of my grandmother’s healthcare regime that she practices rigorously on people she loves and herself. She is the textbook version of “living healthy.” She exercises, eats well, sleeps well, brushes after every meal, and gives herself a massage every day. She makes the most of her insurance by going to checkups every month, sometimes more often than that. She takes going to her regular clinics as if she is going on a field trip: with packed lunch, bus ride, and lots of stories to chat with whomever she meets on the way. When I call over the weekend, she proudly tells me: “They admire my teeth at the clinics. They could not believe they are still so white and perfect at my age!”

Our weekend phone calls become routine when I go study abroad. I tell her about how cold it is here, about my cat running to the door when he hears us about to head out, about what I eat today (this topic gets the most of her interest.) She tells me about her newest great-granddaughter (“She bullies all the neighborhood kids.”), her recent visit to the clinics (“The woman sitting next to me in the waiting room did not believe I had diabetes. She said I looked so good!”), what she’s cooking today (“I couldn’t use sugar, so it tastes funny, but it’s still pretty good. I’ll make you some when you’re back.”) I ask what she gets in her bucket today. The bucket is one of her engineering inventions. Her room is on the third floor of my uncle’s house. On days when she doesn’t feel like going downstairs, she will call street vendors from her balcony — her voice is more than sufficiently loud. She winds a rope around the balcony railing, ties a bucket at one end, and lowers the bucket to the ground. The vendor puts her purchase(s) into the bucket, and she pulls them up. The bucket will make another trip down, carrying either cash or the returned merchandise.

Time doesn’t seem to have an effect on my grandmother, and if it does, I don’t recognize it for my entire childhood. I don’t notice that she has stopped biking around, because she is still going around by bus. I don’t notice that she only walks two laps around the park near her place, instead of three or four, because she is still out for a walk everyday. I don’t notice that she needs a ride to the clinics, instead of going there on her own, because she still goes and still tells me all about it on the phone: “My liver enzymes are a little high, but they give me a bunch of pills. Oh and I don’t have to pay for the pills at all, I have insurance!”

My grandmother gets older, even though she doesn’t tell me so. My aunt comes over to alter her clothes — she has shrunk quite a bit and starts complaining about stepping on the hem of her pants. She tells me the same story on the phone, not remembering she has already told me several times. But her shrinking height and memory don’t seem to have a touch on her spirit. Here’s an example that happened during the last summer, when I was visiting with her.

Linh: (playing with a backcratcher/massager thingy with interest. It has a foot-long handle with a rubber ball on one end that you can use to thump on your back, and a plastic scratcher on the other end.)

Grandma: Do you want to take it with you?

Linh: I can’t, grandma. I’m flying. They’d think I’m bringing a weapon.

Grandma: Nonsense. A weapon it is, if they think so! Give them some good punch!

(I did not take the weapon with me.)

I did have to go to the airport, though. She hopped into the car with me in her pijamas — I asked at the last minute if she wanted to go to the airport to see me off, so she did. Impromptu, that’s her way.

It was the last time I saw her. She died a few months later, a few days ago, from malignant but quiet cancers, so quiet that they had gone unnoticed until the last two weeks. She didn’t believe in the afterlife, but just in case there is such a thing, I hope she has long, good chats with my mother. She probably tells my mom: “Traffic’s awful lately. Good thing you missed that!”

I keep not wanting or knowing how to end this story. There is still so much about her to be written, to be remembered. So I left it open. I also didn’t plan this piece as a structured essay, her stories simply poured out. I choose to write them in English, for Vietnamese would have made it overwhelming and generally very hard. And I choose to write in presence tense whenever possible. That’s how she always is to me, in presence.