Written By Miaw-Yi Tu / Translated by Hui-Wen Chen
“A-Ma[1], do you still recognize me?” holding her gaunt hands, I asked my grandma.
“Who are you?” A-Ma grinned and asked me in return.
After being abroad for 4 years, the saddest thing for me was that grandma was no longer able to recognize me, in the same way that she could not recognize her 19 grandchildren a long, long time ago. We had been blocked from her memory by Alzheimer’s disease. In the past, I used to drive her around for fun in my mini Austin . She would laugh and giggle like a little child all the way. Every time, when she saw me coming home, she would trot towards my car from my uncle’s house near the top of the alley, touch the light green roof of the cartoon car and say:
“Your car is so cute. I have been waiting and longing for you but not seeing the car coming!”
I always knew my grandma was waiting for me at the top of the alley. “Little Frog”, it was what the children of my family named my car. Little Frog was the connection which tied the happy memory between grandma and me. It took her to the Cultural Center , to the park for a walk, to the McDonald’s, etc. Those years, I took grandma to McDonald’s for ice cream cones. It was the most fashionable snack for grandma who had been a vegan. We would sit down for a cup of coffee together. That was her first time ever to enjoy this sort of trendy drink at this kind of trendy restaurant.
“A-Ma, how’s the coffee?”
“Not bad, it’s quite nice. But it tastes a little bit bitter. Like Chinese herbs!” Grandma narrowed her kind loving eyes and said, giving me a funny expression showing her feeling of the exotic novelty. We looked into each other’s eyes and smiled. Maybe it was because of my frequent visits with Little Frog to grandma; and because I, the naughty granddaughter of hers, used to drive her for fun with Little Frog, grandma started having impressions on Little Frog. She always searched for the trace of Little Frog from the coming and going motorcade passing through the alley, waiting for her granddaughter sitting in the mini car, expecting another happy outing, just like a little child looking forward to a picnic.
Grandma’s memory had deteriorated for a long time. At the age of 32, she had become a widow. After these long and lonesome years, she retreated to the childlike mind to pass her golden years. In contrast, my memory of grandma had become more vivid as my age increased. Every time, whenever I saw grandma, I always loved to hug her tiny and skinny body which had shrunken through age. I liked to seek for her pampering:
“A-Ma, was it fun last time when mum took you to Shan-Lin-Shi[2]?”
“The hill was quite nice.” Actually, all mountains looked the same to grandma, they were the same mountain hills just like the one where her parents lived, the rural village on the hill in Hsin-Hua[3]. When I was 6 year old, I went back to her hometown for a wedding banquet. We had to take the little train of the Taiwan Sugar Corporation[4], pass a shaky and old bamboo bridge, and walk for a far distance up and down the muddy mountain trails to get there. Even though grandma had reached the venerable age of 90 years old, she still loved to walk on foot. Her character commonly retained by children growing up in mountain villages still remained even now. In the eyes of my aunts, the unique skills which grandma obtained by growing up in a mountain village also included bamboo-climbing. They once saw grandma climbing up the bamboo trees. At that time, there were several clumps of bamboo trees in the village, people usually used broadswords to trim off branches. It was a shame that I had never got the chance to see grandma performing her skill. By the time my mother married into the family, grandma had already retired from the farm chores, and was only in charge of looking after her grandchildren. She was only 42 or 43 years old at that time. By the time I was born, grandma had turned 50.
In the memory of my childhood living in Bitter Melon Liao[5], grandma always carried my cousin on her back, held the hands of my sister and I, walked to visit family members in the village and to chat with her sisterhood. Those aunties usually could easily distinguish who might be our parents according to our looks. Amazingly, their guesses were always correct. Grandma sometimes would sit down peeling off peanuts and chatting with them about farm chores. She was very popular among the family because of her kindness. She always let the family members pick the fruits during the harvest season of longans or mangos. She was purely an ordinary farmer who could never be good at calculating. However, she made the whole family bind tightly and affectionately together. She always kept her smile all day no matter what a life of poverty her own family was leding. Smiling seemed to be the only attitude she possessed to face the world. To her, there was no bad person on earth. Everyone was part of her family.
Grandma had a very, very nice and soft temperament. She always stuffed the eleven grandchildren of her three sons together on the tatami bed in the Japanese style room. We would chat, bluff, plan, argue, and even fight together, which almost blew the roof off. But grandma never got angry with any one of us. She would take a pu-kuei[6] fan and flap wind to every of her grandchildren here and there alternately. At the end, she would usually got exhausted and started dozing. One day, while we were pouring water down the holes of big crickets in the grove, my cousins saw one extra large cricket popping out of its flooded home and got scared. They screamed to urge the help of grandma. Grandma was preparing for the meal when she heard their shriek. She ran off from the kitchen immediately to help catch the big cricket. Although grandma had no literacy, never got the chance to study under the “humanistic education”, and never heard of the term “educational psychology”, she loved her grandchildren with her true and sincere heart.
When I was small, grandma often shared her pocket money from her sons with my sister and me. I used to have a biased thought that grandma preferred the children belonging to the eldest son. Not until many years later, when my cousin was diagnosed with leukemia, and grandma vowed to become a vegan to make petition for her, I finally realized her love for her grandchildren was so true and sincere. And due to her true and sincere love, it was needless to say that she loved every one of us equally. When she newly became a vegetarian, she occasionally told me that “Sometimes, when I see pig livers, I really feel a craving so badly, but I can’t eat them.” Grandma affirmatively believed that the vow was made between Bodhisattva and her. Though my cousin did not survive because of grandma’s loving kindness, I believed that she certainly would never forget the deep and sincere family affections of the time she spent in this world.
Maybe due to the coddling of grandma, the temperaments of my cousins were very nice and soft like hers, as tender as lotus leaves. The characteristic of such temperament stood out apparently when we were together with children from other families. Whenever we encountered barbarian and reckless kids, children of our family would try to avoid the encounter, not to face or deal with the fierce fighting occasions. Grandma had to look after her eleven grandchildren all by herself. Some had grown old enough for school, but there were still around five or six kids surrounding her. She usually gathered her grandchildren together in front of the buffalo cart preaching her one and only rule for the game:
“Don’t one-gei[7].” she said in her unique Ho-Lou mother tongue.
Grandma’s unique Ho-Lou mother tongue later became my clue for finding the genealogy of my family. At that time, I was searching for the blood of Pin-Pu tribes in our family. My family was originally situated right at the boundary between Jia-Nan Plateau and Hsin-Hua Hills. It was the rest area when Hsilaya tribes evacuated from An-Ping area in Tainan to Hsin-Hua Hills. I tried to enquire from grandma about the memory of her youth. By that time, grandma had started showing the syndrome caused by Alzheimer’s, gradually losing her memory. Her memory was scattered and shattered. I could only trace and catch the rare and precious pieces of her memory little by little.
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