When my father’s father died, I realized with aching shock that I had never learned his name. I can recall the way he prefers to eat golden slices of starfruit—one prong at a time—but I cannot tell you how he signed his letters, the word his friends used to shout for his attention from across the street. At his death, I did not know how he would complete the blank in the most ordinary stickered name tag.
HELLO. My name is _________.
_________.
I had only ever called him grandfather.
On the phone with my father, I volunteer my shame and regret through tears. His name. How could I not know his name? My father gives me the information, but nothing else. His stoicism remains intact.
The Chinese character for “ask” is the symbol for a mouth encased by a door. The mythologies about my family I should have grown up hearing do not unfurl easily. My father, like his father, never volunteers himself without prompting. His memories peek into public only after explicit excavation.
On my next return to Taiwan, I tense sinew and push the gate open. In family living rooms, hotel banquet halls, and hospital lobbies, I prod. I earn steadied looks, raise my voice to be heard above the evening news, square my shoulders against the awkwardness of emotion. I ask every relative for stories. Ask twice if they demure.
I discover my grandfather was the son of a carpenter and a mother who died before he turned six. He couldn’t afford books, so he brokered a deal with the sympathetic owner of a local shop. He would borrow books, cradle them with kindness, flip each precious page with practiced touch. He would return them—often as quickly as a day later—with no marks, no stray indents, no evidence they’d ever been consumed or loved.
My grandfather studied English, spoke in Japanese, taught himself the forgotten calligraphy of the Taiwanese dialect. He started a shipping company. And though his social rank was low, the respect he received was absolute. He was taciturn. Rigorous. My grandfather worked 364 days a year, took leave only by mandate of the tradition that demands sons return to their mother’s home on Chinese New Year. My aunt tells me that the only time she saw her father smile was when he met his grandchildren.
As I learn the lore of my grandfather, my father also takes shape. I see his heritage in the way he handles his iPhone so gently its unprotected corners wear no ruts; in the way he brings me lists of unrecognized English words for instruction at the kitchen table. I recall him driving to work with infected lungs. I remember his expectations. My father reflects his father’s sternness as an elocution of care. In Taiwan, I learn about where I come from.
When I ask my uncle to describe his brother, he pauses between bites of fragrant, braised pork over rice to slide the word “artistic” out from between his chopsticks. We are sitting together at the kitchen table in Kaohsiung—the city of his brother’s adolescence. When I react in surprise, ask if my father has paintings hidden away, my uncle corrects—elaborates. He means not that his brother is an artist, but that my father is a man who possesses artistry. “It takes artistry,” my uncle says, “to do what he does.”
My uncle speaks stories I’ve never heard into the whorl of my ear. Storied vines of how my father has been raising things since long before I arrived. There are the starving songbirds with crooked beaks he fed by hand, the thirty guinea pigs he fostered in his dormitory, the turtles he nurtured on the balcony.
I am reminded of our garden in Michigan, the painstaking array of organized flora my father protects with fishing line hand-strung between bamboo poles. When I was a child, he came upon abandoned baby bunnies and taught me how to feed them a slurry of milk and fish food out of a dropper. On my last visit home, I stumbled upon my pajama-clad dad sitting on sunny carpet, taking notes in number two pencil on how to properly trim hydrangeas. His half-eaten breakfast of one-dollar-a-loaf toast and discount orange juice forgotten on the kitchen table in the next room.
The overflow of orchids blooming in every sunny corner of the house is managed by Excel spreadsheets, marked and revised by his hand. The separate timetables for feeding, watering, repotting, cleaning, remind me of busy weekly schedules crafted for my brother and me. Piano, Chinese school, math practice, tennis. Four times a week, he would gather our petulant attitudes to the free courts across the street. I can’t fathom how many hours he’s spent 餵球—feeding us tennis balls, one by one by one.
It strikes me, in earnest, that I have never cared for anything as carefully as he cares for everything in his life. This is my dad. “It takes artistry,” my uncle says, “to do what he does.”
The summer before my grandfather dies—the summer before I learn his name—I see him every day. At 10:30 a.m and 7:30 p.m., when the stroke ward opens for half an hour of visitation, I don a gown and greet the nurses with a smile hidden behind a face mask. I say good morning to my grandpa, ask him for stories of his youth in broken Chinese. The words come out clumsy, but I push myself to practice. My grandfather doesn’t answer. I massage lotion into his limbs, spread balm around a mouth choked by plastic tubing, drop artificial tears into unseeing eyes. A rehearsed ritual. Every day, twice a day.
During the first visits, my father hovers, unsure of what to do. He seems afraid. I want to ask if he is scared to touch his father.
On the third day, my father discovers trimming scissors and purpose. He cleans the blades with calculated sprays of alcohol and dedicates himself to shaping the salt-and-pepper sentries serving as his father’s eyebrows. My dad twists and turns, steadying his hand at different angles. Steps back to examine symmetry, bows to seek errant hairs. My father is scared of blood but in this act, he steels himself like a surgeon. He is accompanied by the shallow beep of hospital monitors, the thin smell of disinfectant. I will never forget it. My father—60 years old—bent at the waist, attending to his father’s eyebrows. Millimeter by millimeter. Every day, twice a day.
This is my dad. My grandfather’s son.
Even now, at the dinner table, my father often meets my inquiries with furrowed eyebrows. I ask him what he dreamed about as a child, whose voice he hears when he reads. He often shakes his head—perplexed by the foreign plot that offers soil to my interrogations. He tells me I have too many questions that do not have answers. He is a military engineer. He doesn’t like talking about himself.
I am frightened of knowing my father only as dad, terrified I will only come to know him secondhand. I do not want him to be like his father in that way.
So I push. There are stories recessed in my father’s mind and I am determined to draw them out, dust them off, water their narratives until they bloom and stain my fingers with the heat of an August garden. I want to line them up like sweet yams by the window, hear them take flight from the windowsill of his mouth.
The gardener.
The artist.
My father.
His name is 蔡宜璋.
***
Rumpus original art by Lauren Kaelin
