top of page

       There is nothing in the world that my grandma loves more than food. My grandparents and I used to huddle around that same table, eating my grandma’s homemade dishes. My grandma was always reaching her kuai zi across the glass tabletop, tossing meat over my bowl of white rice. When she finished eating her own food, she sat there and stared at me. I complained,              “Why are you staring at me?”

She said, “I love to watch you eat.”

       On this trip, I bring her lots of food. Bagels and Pringles—her old favorites. Nutritional yeast popcorn and all-natural marshmallows—new treats to try together. Macadamia nuts—from Kona. Tinned sardines—from Lisbon. Pappardelle—from Florence. Alfajores—from Santiago. All the cities I visited when Shanghai was locked down.  

       The apartment feels like a time capsule. The same red calendar hangs on the wall, just a different year. The same postcards and coupons are sprawled beneath the glass tabletop, untouched. The same magnets—from the alma maters of her grandkids—cling to the refrigerator door, but the once vibrant colors have faded into white specks. The same beige clock ticks above the dining table, but the time is off by an hour.     

       “It needs to be fixed,” my grandma says.

       “It just needs new batteries,” I reply. It’s as if my grandma’s life, like the clock, has been stationary.

       In the bathroom, the same pink shower curtain is now riddled with mold, from bottom to top. Her fake teeth set is drowning in a bowl of green algae. A snowman-shaped monitor now sits above the fridge and swivels its head, watching over my grandma, making sure she is alive, courtesy of my aunt. And of course, the kitchen is silent without my grandpa’s handheld radio bleeping away all day.  

       “Where is the radio?” I ask.

       “It broke.”

       “Are you sure the battery didn’t just die?”

       “No, it broke. I threw it away.”

       We lost my grandpa to cancer five years ago. Since then, my grandma has been living alone. She lives in the apartment that they shared, the apartment where I learned to play chess and where I watched my first Olympic games. I talk to my grandma almost weekly on WeChat. Every time I ask how she is doing, she says, “Mei shen me hao.” Nothing good. Then she rattles off a list of ailments. My hip hurts. My back aches. My blood pressure is high. My eyes can’t see. The list grows each year.

       When my grandpa was on his deathbed, my grandma told me that she would travel the world in her widowhood. She hadn’t traveled much other than to the US to look after me when I was young.

       I send her postcards from my international trips. When she receives them, she asks, “Was it fun? What did you eat?” She says, “Next time, take me with you.”

       When I ask about her travel plans, she tells me that her local relatives who look after her caution her not to travel. “What if you get injured? What if you get sick?” they say. They tell her to wait at least until her hip pain resolves. Better to be tai ping. It’s easier if she stays put.

       I wish they didn’t stop her. I wish my grandma could travel the world. But it’s not like I made travel arrangements for her. If something happened to her during her travels, it’s not like I’d be the one seeking treatment for her or taking her to doctor appointments. I didn’t offer to move to Shanghai. I never volunteered to take responsibility for her. Now she can barely walk a few minutes at a time.

       Neil and I are planning to get engaged on this trip. He will ask for my grandma’s blessing. Then he will propose in front of her. It will bring her joy to witness this moment. It will distract her from her melancholy. It will be a nice way for her to be a part of my life. She probably won’t make it to the wedding. We won’t ask her to travel thirteen hours each way.

       The next day, my grandma and I binge-watch Chinese soap operas while in the other room Neil naps and battles a migraine. He suspects it’s the dust in her apartment. My grandma is leaning forward on the two-seater sofa, squinting at the TV and scarfing down the bag of popcorn I brought her. “It’s bland,” she grumbles. On TV, a plane soars over lush green mountain peaks—a popular vacation destination in southern China.

       “Maybe we can go,” I venture. “It’s not too far away.”

       “Not with my hip.” Her eyes stay glued to the TV.

       “What did the doctor say about your hip?”

       “It won’t get better. Without an operation, it won’t get better.”

       “Why don’t you get an operation? Hip surgery success rates are very high.”

       “Your dad says that at my age, an operation can paralyze me. Your aunt says that it’s too risky.”

       I wish they didn’t talk her out of her surgery. Then she might have a shot at world travel. She might have a shot at happiness. “Did you ask your doctor about the procedure success rates for someone your age?”

       She shakes her hand. “Suan le.” Forget about it.

       She grabs another handful of popcorn. “So is your mom still the same,” she asks, “Or has she reformed?” My grandma recites dialogue from their decade-old disputes. Every time I visit, she airs the same gripes. They flare up like a recurring disease.

       Then she turns to me and asks, “Tammy, how come Meer hasn’t proposed?        That’s the one problem with him.”

       My grandma is the queen of complaints. She complains with gusto, like it’s a hobby, something she enjoys doing in her free time.

       “Ni man hao,” I tell her. It’s a refrain I came up with for my grandma years ago. It means, “You’re pretty good.” I use it when she complains, to redirect her energy to something positive. Sometimes she chuckles in response. Other times she replies, “You are annoying.”

       The next morning, crouched together on the sofa, the three of us browse through my grandparents’ old photo albums. My grandma points at a photo of herself. “Who’s that?” she asks. “Grandpa?”  

       When I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, Neil asks for my grandma’s blessing in Shanghaihua. He has been rehearsing all week.

       “Hao, hao, hao,” my grandma nods. She lets out her high-pitched, unalloyed laugh that comes in waves. Every time it recedes, it comes roaring back.

       I lead my grandma to the dining table and dab lotion and essential oils I brought from the US on my grandma’s hands. They are so dry that she tapes her fingertips to contain the cracks. Neil walks into the room and taps my shoulder. He is standing with his palms facing up and outstretched. He takes my hands into his and asks me to marry him. I say, “Hao.”

       Later, I ask with pride, “Grandma, what did you think?”

       “He didn’t kneel,” she observes. “He didn’t have roses. He didn’t say ‘wo ai ni.’ Is he oblivious or just irreverent?” 

       I am caught off guard by my grandma’s proposal expectations. For the rest of the afternoon, I teach Neil to say I love you in my native tongue. We go out and return to the apartment with roses. Neil proposes again, this time on one knee. But of course, to my grandma, the proposal still isn’t and will never be good enough. “Where’s the ring?” she asks.

       That’s my grandma. She cannot be satisfied. She is a cannon of demands.

       From six thousand miles away, my grandma tells me what to do. Make yourself a fried egg. Include meat in your dinner. You need more protein.                Don’t go hiking. Don’t walk too much. It’s not good for your hip.

       When we’re under the same roof, her demands exponentiate.

       Tammy-ah, teach him Chinese!

       Show me how to send voice memos on WeChat.

       Come, put new batteries in the clock.

       Just hours after I put in new batteries, the clock stops again. “Ah ya,” my grandma sighs. “This clock has been with us since your grandpa and I moved into this apartment thirty years ago.”

       The next morning, Neil and I are walking back from the market when we see my grandma shuffling toward the longtang gate. Her fist clutches one of the reusable shopping bags stationed around her bathroom doorknob. The clock protrudes from her bag.

       “I’m going to get it fixed,” she says. My grandma is unstoppable. She may have aged, but her willpower has not changed.  

       To everyone’s surprise, she comes back with a working clock. “My neighbor fixed it,” she says. “The batteries hadn’t been inserted all the way in.”

       Hours later, it stops ticking again. This time, she says, “Let’s get a new clock.”

       The next morning, my grandma ushers us to go clock shopping. The three of us take a bus to the nearest mall. We poke around and see no clocks. We ask the man at the information booth, who responds, “Clocks are sold online now. We don’t sell them anymore.” 

       My grandma keeps looking. She limps down all the aisles like she’s searching for a lost child. When she is done, she takes us to an elevator to the next floor. When she is worn out, she sends Neil and me to walk down the rest of the aisles. 

       On the way out, a group of us exits the wrong door. The security guard yells at us. “What are you doing walking out of the entrance? Go back, go back, go back.” As he waves us back, he points at a man in a  wheelchair. “It’s all your fault,” the guard shouts. “They all followed you!”

       My grandma suggests that for lunch we check out the new wonton restaurant a block away. She’s been wanting to try it but hasn’t had anyone to go with. Her hip hurts so much she takes a break every twenty steps. She sits on objects she finds along the way—benches, sphere bollards, parking stops.

Neil offers his arm to help her walk. She chuckles, “Your father doesn’t even do that.” Arm in arm, they walk down the street. Even in pain, she laughs.

At the wonton shop, my grandma insists on ordering three large bowls, even though we ate breakfast an hour ago. She wants to make sure that we have enough to eat. When we leave a full bowl untouched and ask for a takeout container, the shop charges us a yuan. My grandma laments, “Ah ya, we should have ordered two bowls.”  

       My grandma is painstaking in her frugality. When I buy my grandma new t-shirts, she saves them for special occasions. When I gift her a new hairbrush, she packs it away and keeps using the one held together by masking tape. When Neil and I arrange to take my grandma out for a celebration dinner, she says, “How about lunch? Dinner is too expensive.”

       The only reason she agrees to take a Didi cab home from the wonton shop is that Neil has already ordered one and it will cost money to cancel. In her own words, “Xian zai wo you qian le.” I have plenty to live off. Yet if we weren’t there, she would have hobbled home, twenty steps at a time.

       My grandma needs help. People order everything online now, but my grandma doesn’t know how. She can barely see. We clean her algae bowl and order her a new shower curtain. Little white tissues strands appear everywhere—on the coffee table, between the sofa cushions, next to my grandma’s pillow. “What’s going on Grandma?” I ask.

       She says she has a perpetually runny nose. I wonder if Neil is right about the dust in her apartment.

       What is her cleaner doing? Who is visiting her? My grandma can do better. Of course she can. She’s my grandma.

On this trip, every time Neil and I come home late, my grandma sits at the longtang gate, bundled up in her flowery jacket, looking like Buddha. Her neighbors greet us. They know that we’re the ones she waits for.

       Every time I visit, my grandma does my laundry for me. This time, when I shove my clothes into the compact washer myself, she takes it all out and then puts it all back, piece by piece. “It must be jun yun,” she insists. Evenly distributed. When the wash is done, she nimbly loops the shirts and shorts through bamboo poles and sends them out the window to dry. She clips the socks onto a round clothespin rack. I watch in awe of her dexterity, relieved to see how capable she remains.

       Every time I visit, my grandma cooks for me. On our last day, she makes my favorite scrambled eggs with tomato. She deep-fries stinky tofu. She steams qingzheng fish, marinated with salt and ginger, topped with sizzling oil and green onions. She has no recipes, but every dish lights up my taste buds. This time, she takes breaks between each dish because even standing makes her hip sore.

       During one of the breaks, she is sitting on her bed, rummaging through her closet. “When are your vacations next year?” she yells over the hum of the fan.  

       I linger by the bedroom doorframe. “I don’t know.”

       “When do you find out?” She puts on her bifocals and digs through the drawers.

       “I don’t know.” When my grandpa passed away, she asked how often I would visit. I told her every year, to which she countered, “How about twice a year?” I acquiesced. But now I don’t know that I’ll make it back next year. I don’t know if Neil will want to come back so soon. I don’t know if I’ll come by myself, especially if I’m pregnant. I love my grandma, but it’s a long trip.

She finds what she is looking for—a wad of cash. She licks her index finger and counts them one by one. “Why don’t you ask your boss?”

       “Okay, Grandma, ni man hao.” I start to turn away. 

       She gets up, ignoring me. “The next time you visit, you don’t have to check the dates with me.” She folds a hong bao into my palm. “You can just come,” she says, “I’m always here.”

       My grandma retired early to help raise me, taking a lower pension than she otherwise would have received. Her love for me is tireless. It knows no bounds. It is not cagey or ever restrained. It is habitual and comes across in everything she does. It is sometimes annoying and never held back. It is as plain and plentiful as the sun in my eyes.

       As I finish packing my bags, my grandma is lying supine on the day bed next to the sofa, her ankle twitching over her knee. She stares at her cracked fingers. We both have eczema.

       “When you leave,” she says, “I’ll be on my own again.” She flicks a piece of dead skin onto the floor.

       “Don’t worry, Grandma, ni man hao.”

       “Zhe yang huo zhe hao xiang mei she me yi si,” she muses to no one in particular, but I’m the only other person in the room. There’s not much meaning to living like this.

       My grandma is waiting to die. She is not dying, but she is waiting to die. She wants more company than she has. She can use a hip surgery, but no one else supports it. They worry that it will leave her paralyzed. Would that be worse? I wonder. Do they know she’s waiting to die? 

       It’s so unfair. My grandma has so many years left. She is capable. Her mind is sharp. Yet every day, she waits for death to take her away.

       She lives in a country where older people in wheelchairs are chastised and sent back for taking a shortcut. Her children have their own busy lives and worries, their own health scares, their own retirements to plan. Their hands are tied, their own happiness at stake.

       My grandma can be difficult, but she doesn’t deserve this type of ending. I wish someone would scoop her up and take her in, care for her and love her. Can it be me?

§

       My grandma sends us off to the airport. On the way, she makes conversation with the Didi driver. She tells him which route to take and asks how much the trip will cost, making sure we don’t get ripped off. An hour later, the Didi pulls up to the curbside drop-off.

       “Grandma, do you want to just take the same car back?” I ask.  

       “Why don’t I watch your luggage while you check in,” she offers, already stepping out of the front seat.

       After Neil and I check in, we ask if she is ready for us to call her a car.              “Our flight boards in just forty-five minutes.”

       “Let’s sit,” she says. “You have plenty of time.” So we sit side by side on the cold, hard airport seats. My grandma grills us on when we have vacation next year. She suggests that we cancel our Taipei trip and stay in Shanghai for a few more days.

§

       I step into the jet bridge at SFO, and the cold wind blows against my face. But my face is numb, stuck in Shanghai mid-conversation with my grandma. I am thinking about how she told me that her life was meaningless. Who else has she told? How many years will it be before I go back?  

       Outside, planes glide into the violet sky. The haloed lights on their wingtips pulse into the thick fog. Inside, the honeyed lighting casts a wistful glow over the airport. Late night travelers swirl their wine glasses at the bar.        They read and sleep at the gate. The sun must be peaking through the overcast Shanghai sky right about now. My grandma is probably watching TV or eating her Guangming yogurt at the dining table. It’s the perfect time to call.  

       How are you, Grandma? “Zen me yang?”

       “Man hao,” she says. Pretty good. It’s the first time I hear her say these words since my grandpa passed away. A new clock now hangs on her dining room wall. It’s black and round and looks like it’s from IKEA. My aunt ordered it online. Before we hang up, she says, “Next week I’m seeing the doctor to ask about a hip surgery.”

       My heart rises like a wave. My grandma’s hopes and dreams have become mine. “Make sure you ask about the success rates for someone your age.” I imagine her scribbling something down and later inching her magnifying glass across the scrap of paper to remember what to ask.   

Fiction
Grandma, Ni Man Hao

by Tammy Zhu

February 2025

(continued)

IMG_2553.tiff
Tammy Zhu
San Francisco, CA, USA

Tammy Zhu writes in San Francisco and while traveling. She writes essays and stories about family and strangers. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Jelly Bucket, Popshot Quarterly, and Craft and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

bottom of page