Voices on the New Diasporas - an MIT student journal
Submission deadline for Spring 2008 issue is March 15, 2008.
Copyright Notices
The works displayed on MIT's E-merging Journal are protected by copyright and other applicable laws and are made available by MIT's E-merging Journal for use by you, the individual accessing the E-merging Journal, solely for your own educational, non-commercial, non-monetary purposes provided you credit the author(s) identified on the particular work(s) and the MIT E-merging Journal for the material you use.
These works may be viewed on-line, downloaded, copied, distributed and displayed by you for your own educational, noncommercial purposes, or the URL of a document (from this server) included in another electronic document; however, the text of a work may not be published commercially (in print or electronically), edited or otherwise altered.
This is a summary of the license terms to you, the full text of which is available - Legal Notices.
Grandma's Story by Deborah Pan, Class of 2003
Her breath, warm and spicy like the ginger tea we sipped that evening, soothed the back of my neck as she braided my hair before bedtime. I felt it, heady with the strong aroma of ginger laced with the sweet fragrance of red-bean cake, pulsing steadily in time with the deft motions of her fingers. My scalp tingled as sections of my hair were gently guided into place by experienced hands, an evening ritual of ours ever since I had hair long enough to braid. It's a private moment we share, my mother and I. Sometimes, if I hold perfectly still and do not shift or squirm too much, I will hear her clear her throat and take a deep breath. For a brief moment, there is absolute silence. And then she begins her story.
My mother's stories have no beginning and no end. She starts somewhere in the middle and stops at no point in particular, and when I ask her what happens next, she looks at me blankly and says,"What do you mean? That's the end." But I know it's not. Sometimes she will continue a story told a few weeks or months earlier, starting right where she ended the last time. It's possible that she has forgotten that she started the story in the first place, but I doubt it. My mother is deliberate in not telling her stories all at once. She is not one to keep her past sealed up like fireflies in a tightly sealed jar, only to remove the lid and let them all fly away in a hurry. She opens her jar cautiously, carefully. She lets out one fly at a time, only when she knows it will light up the world on its own.
"You know, I never told you this," she said one evening. I knew this was my cue to sit up straighter, my back flush against her shins, so I felt her bony knees resting in the nook of my shoulders.
"Your grandmother was a very small woman, no taller than 150 centimeters. When she was growing up, her sisters used to make fun of her by saying that she would never bear children, for she looked no older than a child herself. It was true. Her hips were narrow and girlish, and it was hard to imagine her birthing healthy children. In those days, being skinny was not looked upon favorably.
My father, your grandfather, was a very handsome man. He was also an extremely wealthy man. This combination did not make for the best character. When your great-grandparents heard that he was looking for a wife, they sent your grandmother's picture to gain his approval. They spent much money on these pictures. But as you can guess, money was but a small investment when it came to marrying their daughters off rich and happy. What they did not understand is that being rich does not mean being happy and being happy does not mean being rich. When your grandfather saw her picture, he was pleased. He told his parents that she seemed smart, beautiful, educated, and kind. Your grandmother was all of these things except for one. She had left school at the age of nine to help her mother clean the house and look after the other children. But what she lacked in formal education, she made up for with natural intelligence, common sense, and good cooking."
I had heard this part of the story before, so I didn't quite understand where she was headed. My grandmother, although small, had given birth to six sons and five daughters. I had grown up listening to numerous tales of her ingenuity and sharp-witted thinking, despite her having only completed the equivalent of a third-grade education. I knew better than to say this, and my mother knew better than to tell the same story twice.
One night, soon after she had delivered his first child, a healthy son, your grandfather did not come home after work. She had prepared his favorite tempura platter and seaweed salad. She waited for many hours. When it was time for bed, still she waited, until she finally heard him come in around three in the morning. And when he came in, smelling like expensive sake and cheap perfume, she did not say one word. When he stumbled into bed, she silently pushed his senseless body away, down to a tatami mat she had placed on the floor. She had not bothered to leave him a pillow or a blanket. He woke up the next morning to find his clothes missing from his drawers. They were neatly folded and packed into three large trunks that sat at the edge of the tatami mat. From then on, he never came home that late again."
I don't like to think of my grandmother being married for convenience, but she had little other choice. A twenty-year old local Japanese girl in the 1920's with less than an elementary school education, she had only two options: become a geisha or get married. And since her parents were opposed to her becoming a geisha, she was married to my grandfather. She envied his easy lifestyle, his inherited wealth. And for the small price of marrying a man she did not love, a man that she perhaps could never love, she was guaranteed a prosperous life and the chance to educate her children in the most elite education system that Tokyo had to offer.
My mother and I inherited from this woman an extremely keen sense of smell. It made her not only a superior cook, but also a stealthy detective. She could detect the signs of infidelity on her husband's skinsecret invisible traces of powder, rouge, oils, sweat, and tearsafter only a brief half-hearted embrace or lying next to him at night. My grandmother never let her nose go unchallenged; she guessed correctly she could trust her sense of smell more than she could trust her husband.
On nights that she smelled the women on his skin, she slept very little. But she was not restless because of sorrow or even anger. It was then, in the gleam that the moonlight cast on their loveless bed, that she planned her clever retaliation. When he woke one such morning, she stood before him, wearing the scraps of an exquisite dress that she had cut into mere shreds of shiny fabric. With gaping holes haphazardly slashed across her chest, stomach, and buttocks, she pranced in front of her half-sleeping husband, singing the street songs of Tokyo's most notorious prostitutes. When he seemed the slightest bit more coherent, she jumped into the bed, laughing loudly, screaming, and thrashing about. His reaction was one of utter confusion. He wasn't sure whether this was a strange dream--perhaps a continuation of the previous evening's debaucheryor whether this was a guilt-inflicted hallucination. And before he had the sense to realize that this wildly beautiful temptress before him was his own wife, she slapped him hard on the face three times to wake him up and whispered,"You are not hiding anything from me. I know everything you have done," and slipped out of the room. Later, she said nothing about the mysterious whore that had appeared earlier that morning. And neither did he, although she could see that he was bothering himself with worry over something, as he had very little appetite.
I often wonder if she ever fell in love with him. I suppose I could ask my mother, but I think I prefer the mystery of not really knowing. Did she ever learn to forgive him for his infidelity? Did he cheat because he didn't love her or because it was customary for wealthy Japanese businessmen of that era to drink themselves into oblivion and visit whorehouses after a long day's work? Did he love his eleven children? Were all eleven of those children his?
I envision my grandmother with many admirers of her ownrich, poor, handsome, plain, scholarly, and uneducatedwho appreciated her smooth, dark hair, her flawless porcelain complexion, and the still-girlish figure she kept after childbirth. I like to think of her having a lover, someone who cared deeply for her, someone who valued her opinions, someone who listened to her dreams and hoped in vain to one day be part of them. He had the power to make her feel like a young girl of twenty-two, not a meek, dutiful housewife and mother of my grandfather's children. They need not have been physically intimate.
And that is the story of how my fourth brother was born. I did not know the secret until about twenty years ago. She told me just before she died." My mother fell silent for a moment. "Well, get ready for bed," she said, tying the last few braids together. "It's late."
Wait. Is that it? Is there any more to the story?" I felt horribly guilty. Had I missed the most important part of my mother's story for me that evening? Had I let the secret of her fourth brother's parentage pass me by? I knew I could not ask her now. How could I tell her that I had not been listening?
That's it." I could have easily predicted her answer. The only way for me to fill in the gaps of this story would be to listen very carefully and catch future allusions to it. She patted my braids as she did each night before I drifted off to sleep. "Sleep well," she said.
But I had trouble falling asleep that night. I thought about the story that my mother told. I thought about the images I had created in my mind, so fantastic and so real to me that I had stopped listening to my mother's words. These images, which were once nothing more than a faded bag of verbal descriptions, memories from old photographs, and hidden secrets from half-remembered stories, were suddenly reborn in full color in my mind.
I realize that the personal dreams and ideals I have envisioned for my grandmother are just thatpersonal. In my mind, she possesses personal qualities that I admire, qualities that I wish for myself. I view myself objectively and wonder: what would I have done if faced with evidence of my husband's infidelity? Would I have left him? My grandmother did not have that choice. Had she left him, she would likely have been penniless, starving, and childless. It is nave to think that she would be given claims to her firstborn son. Would I expose his wrongdoings? This was not an option for my grandmother, who would have been ignored at best. More likely, she would have been banished or beaten for making such public outcries denouncing her rich and powerful husband. Would I have had her strength? Would I have had the courage to find love elsewhere?
I fell asleep still reliving her life, drifting off to taste the blandness of her tears and the richness of her love for her children. I envisioned myself wearing the gilded kimono of a wealthy woman, sipping ginger tea on weekday afternoons as I watched my children play in the next room. And suddenly, smooth silk grazed my legs, the stiff thong of my geta chafed my toes, my hair was pulled taut against my head in a neat bun; I saw my husband's charming eyes and felt his passionless embrace. For what felt like a mere whisper of a moment, I had her brave, unbridled energy. I had her spirit. And it was indeed a beautiful dream.
