Passing of a Nasty Woman

My grandmother is dead.

It wasn't unexpected. It wasn't sudden. And in my opinion, it wasn't necessary, but that is neither here nor there anymore.

My parents received word that my grandmother had 2-3 days left to life. They immediately bought tickets and left for Taiwan the next day. I thank God that they made it just in time to say their goodbyes. My grandmother breathed her last as her youngest son (my father) and daughter clasped her hands in theirs, sang her favorite hymns, and whispered assurances that they would be there with her until the very end.

As peaceful as her death was, her life was anything but. My grandmother was a fighter, and in many ways, she never stopped fighting. Never give up, never surrender, that was Nancy Soong. She fought the Communists. She fled China and left her family at the age of 19 to follow my 18 year old grandfather to Taiwan. She fought the Japanese. If my grandmother wasn't fighting, she wasn't living. She was a true #nastywoman of her time.

One of my favorite stories about my grandmother took place when my grandparents were still struggling to make ends meet. The landlord came to collect rent, one thing led to another, suddenly my grandfather and the landlord come to blows. My grandmother sees a man on top of my grandfather beating him, and being no wilty flower, she brazenly thrust a hand between the two of them, grabbed a hold of the landlord's family jewels, and squeezed. He clambered off my grandfather real quick.

That's another thing about my grandmother. When she loves, she loves 100% and she loved my grandfather. When I think about my childhood trips to their apartment, I always see my grandfather sitting in his favorite lounging chair, while my grandmother was constantly moving around the house. Was my grandfather warm enough? She got him another jacket. Was he parched? She put on the kettle for tea. Anything he wanted was just an order away.  Whenever my grandfather was hospitalized (which was often, as he has always been somewhat of a hypochondriac), my grandmother could not be persuaded to leave his side. Even though she was a tiger in her own right, she served him because she loved him, and I've grown to respect that.

(That is not to say that she never unsheathed her claws. Another one of my favorite stories is about how the neighbors would always come running to beg them to stop fighting. Once, they came in to find a broom stuck in the ceiling.)

My grandmother also loved God. When my dad was still a wayward soul, my grandmother would sneak Bibles into his luggage whenever he left for trips overseas. He would discover them, curse, and throw them overboard. (My grandmother is single-handedly responsible for the conversion of legions of marine life.) But her persistence paid off (like it usually does, because my grandmother's persistence is bottomless). When I think about my grandmother's voice, I remember her emphatic "Amens" during prayers, singing Chinese hymns to herself, or just shouting "Hallelujah" out of nowhere. Every time I was about to embark on a new challenge, like moving away for school or going on a mission trip, she would tell me, "If you are ever afraid or in doubt, just call upon the Lord's name. He will hear you." Sometimes, I think she believed enough for the both of us.

My grandmother was a silly woman, but never intentionally. My family once attended a talent show hosted by my grandparent's senior center. My grandmother, who must have been around 80 at that time, announced that she was going to ribbon dance. When it came time for her performance, they couldn't get her audio track to work due to technical difficulties. Undeterred, my grandmother decided that the show must go on. She did her ribbon dance anyways -- a cappella. I don't think I had ever seen my father turn that color before.

She decided to get her driver's license later on in life. We begged her not to do it, but she insisted. Life became a game of "How to Avoid Getting Into Grandma's Car At All Costs". My cousin Jacky didn't get this memo and on one of his first visits to San Jose, he asked my grandmother to drive us to the mall. My sister swears to this day that that ride scared 5 years off her life. I must confess I blocked out most of the memories of that traumatic ride, but for some reason, I can still hear the echoes of someone screaming, "YOU CAN'T CROSS THE DOUBLE YELLOW!"

Every time grandma would see me, she would clasp my hand between hers and squeeze it firmly, like an orange at the supermarket. "Ah, you have thick hands (I tried not to take offense), these are the hands of a rich person." My dad would chastise her for believing in these superstitions. Maybe my Chinese isn't so great, but I think what she meant was that my hands were rough (rough and thick can be indicated by the same word in Mandarin...I think), which are a sign of a hard worker, and that my hard work would bring me to prosper. That's how I interpreted it anyways...so I put my head down and worked accordingly.

When my grandparents decided to move to Taiwan, we discovered that my grandmother was a greater hoarder than we had realized. My dad told her to throw away anything she didn't need, but as with many people of her generation who had to abandon everything once to flee hardship, it was hard for her to part with anything that she might...need later. We thought she had thrown out the most of it before she left for Taiwan. One day, weeks and weeks after their departure, my Dad discovered a stash of items that grandmother had hidden away in a small enclave outside our front door. She had literally driven over to our house, snuck up  to the front door, and tossed a bunch of items into the small fenced off area that holds our water/electricity meter. That's grandma -- never give up, never surrender.

Sometimes my grandparents would visit our home while we were out. They would drop off treats on their way back from Ranch 99 or Costco. But we would always know they had visited because inevitably something will have moved. Never anything conspicuous. Just a feeling that something was off...then you would get a whiff of mothballs and grandpa's aftershave. Sometimes the signs would be more overt. I still remember the first time I found a small innocuous package wrapped in tissues. I picked it up and unwrapped it, still young enough to believe that all surprises were good surprises. My mom later chastised me, not for screaming, but for throwing grandma's dentures across the room. "The floor is dirty," she scolded as she washed them off and started phoning grandma.

When I first heard that Grandma had died, I was lying in bed. It was 2AM. I felt nothing. I woke up the next morning, talked to my sister about it, and still felt nothing. Feeling nothing was almost worse than feeling grief, because the emptiness became filled with guilt. When Sonatina died, I cried for a week, if not weeks. And now my grandmother is gone, and I can't even muster up a single tear.

We weren't close in the last five or so years. She and my grandfather moved back to Taiwan. We hardly spoke, and when we did, it was over my dad's shoulder as they talked on Skype -- him writing his responses to her in large black script on scratch paper so that she could see because her hearing had long started to deteriorate. We did a lot of waving. Forced smiles. The small, shrunken figure I saw on my dad's iPad screen seemed to bear less and less resemblance to the formidable woman who used to kick my ass at ping pong every weekend.

Even though the last few years had their share of acrimony and exasperation, I reflect now on all the ways she expressed her love. In fact, up until two sentences ago, I had forgotten that my grandmother was the one who taught me how to play ping pong. She used to bring over pickled daikon and carrots all the time because she knew I liked them -- either that or that was one of two things she knew how to make. Lucky for her, I really liked her 八寶粥 as well. Whenever we went to her apartment, she would be sure to have ice cream on hand. I think she would get them just for us -- little plastic cartons of strawberry and vanilla or chocolate swirl that you ate with a small wooden stick. She would always bring over extra things from her senior center brown bags, even when my mom would beg her not to. That was grandma's way.

I really don't know how to say goodbye. Because of her, I never lacked a strong female role model in my life. I could never complain about hardship because grandma was once shot at as the military arrived to break up a protest. If birthing and raising five children couldn't break grandma's spirit, I could sure as hell survive an organic chemistry lab practical. Nasty woman runs in my blood y'all.

I don't think I've processed this enough to cry, but I don't think Grandma would want me to cry. Especially in times like these, grandma would want me to fight. Because if I'm not fighting, I'm not living.