Grandpa Died An Hour Ago.

Grandpa died an hour ago. 

I’m not sure how I feel. Hearing my father cry over the phone before he abruptly hung up puts the whole situation in a more acutely verifiable light than did my mother breaking the news, which simply put me in shock. And shock, though immediately jolting, is actually quite a numbing sensation once it settles. 

In a patriarchal society such as China, the death of a father’s father is a deeply transformative ordeal. The family unit is central to Chinese culture, philosophy and political science. Everyone is now looking to my father, the youngest of his siblings but the only brother to his three sisters, to lead the family into mourning. 

My father is grieving in a way that I can’t understand because since I left China at three years old, I had only a cross-continental relationship with my grandparents. To me, my grandfather was an obstinate man. That’s what I know him for primarily. He survived nearly 10 years on dialysis when younger victims of acute kidney failure maxed out at eight on average. After he was hospitalized a week ago after partying too hard at my cousin’s wedding banquet, he repeatedly tried to escape.

But then what made my grandfather human to me was a story my mother once told me about him when all I personally knew of the man was his short temper and his illness. 

When my grandfather was young and his mother passed away, he had been presented with the challenge of finding a place to bury her. Back then, Chinese families were buried in clan plots. My great-grandmother was either a divorced, illegitimate or second wife to my great-grandfather, but in any case she was not an actual member of the Du clan. She could not be buried in the Du plots nor her maiden family’s plots because she had technically married. Thus, my grandfather personally begged each household of his father’s family to allow him to bury his mother on their land, carrying her ashes from door to door. 

No, I don’t think I’ve ever heard my father cry, but what unsettles me more than that are my dry eyes. I don’t want to over-analyze my feelings toward my grandfather. There are lots of things I don’t understand about him, such as his feelings toward his American granddaughter for one.

Respect is all my family asks. This is where the etiquette of mourning comes into play. Ritual covers for awkward, ambiguous feelings.

Aphrodisiac

This is only the first part of something that hasn't been titled yet. It's sort of an experiment in introducing characters with a bang.

***

At eight in the evening, the Calle de Sonrisas resounded with the clatter of heels and young people’s laughter steeped in herbal humor. The sun had barely set and the air was heavy with the scent of sea salt and charcoal from the neighbors’ patios.

A clear breeze wafted through the open skylight of Mona Lee’s penthouse bathroom where she, sweating in the heat of Miami in July, sank naked into the bath with a glass of her late grandfather’s prized No.2 1889 cognac.

The tub was short for Mona, as were most men in her life, she thought regrettably as she crossed a pair of emaciated legs over the edge of the bath. She was sore all over after a long day, and gently kneaded her stringent muscles, taut tendons with the tips of her fingers.

It had been a long day in court, spent sitting under scrutiny on the wrong side of the courtroom. It had been an exceptionally long, disappointing afternoon of bogus verdicts, millions lost and pink slips. Her ass hurt from the hard wooden benches and from shame, from her boss’ pointed displeasure.

But that was no good to dwell on when the night was new and the bath hot.

Closing her eyes, Mona thought instead of exotic restaurants, dark evening dresses heavy with the fame of the names they carried, avant garde dishes of third world portions hand-carved by some of the most self-indulgent chefs in Miami.  

She thought of the curious eyes of waiters peeking out at her from kitchen windows and how they dazzled at the tiny James Beard medal clipped into her lapel.

She held her breath in recollection of crisp aftershave, from that night she leaned forward and whispered into the ear of her vegetarian editor-in-chief, “Not the sea cucumbers,” just as one wriggled on the plate.

And as the blood fumed beneath her skin, Mona slid beneath the scorching surface of the bathwater. A trail of oxygen sacs rolled toward the surface as she exhaled.

Mona recalled late-night coffee in the newsroom with Tom Geier, writing the cover piece of “Wine and Dine” magazine in a haze of drunken eloquence. He held his liquor better than she did, which wasn’t saying much if the flare in his cheek and the tousle of his hair and the one more open button in his shirt than was appropriate meant anything.   

“I think you mean the old-world balsamic oil was sensuous, not sensual,” he had said, leaning close over Mona’s shoulder.

There was the screech of wheels on the street, the crack of skulls against brick, a gunshot in the distance barely distinguishable from the sound of shattering glass beside the edge of the tub. The salsa bars across the street were opening up shop for the night.

Mona shut it all out, her toes trembling above the surface of the water.

Sweat, sex, psychological distress. There was the rumble of the earth in heat, the planet turning on its side and South America drowning from the tilt of the oceans. Mona recalled nearly drowning in the sink as an infant. The need to breathe so absolute back then, she had opened her lungs to the faucet thundering over her face before the giantess hands of her mother rescued her.

She broke the surface gasping for air, a murky fluid spreading like octopus nerve poison between her legs. Standing from the bath, Mona turned her face toward the cool shaft of starlight falling through the window, dripping with fatigue.

Thus, by studying the abundances of radioactive elements, we are led to a remarkable insight: Some 4.56 billion years ago, a collection of hydrogen, helium, and heavy elements came together to form the Sun and all of the objects that orbit around it. All of those heavy elements, including the carbon atoms in your body and the oxygen atoms that you breathe, were created and cast off by stars that lived and died long before our solar system formed, during the first 9 billion years of the universe's existence. We are literally made of star dust.

Universe by R. Freedman, R. Geller and W. Kaufmann

Self-help

This is another installment in the short story I've been working on. It's an attempt to create a feel-good intermission in a tragicomedy.

***

The day after being released from her duties at Wine and Dine, Mona did as any strong, independent woman would do and practiced yoga on her balcony before the rising sun.

At eight in the morning, Miami traffic drowned out the songbirds, and the scent of orange chai brewing on the tabletop was overwhelmed by remnants of yesterday’s Gulf Coast catch rotting in back-alley dumpsters.

Yet Mona smiled as she performed salutations to the sky, her heart beating in tandem with the mp3 mimicry of ocean waves crashing upon the beach. Nothing should be quite as cathartic as sudden unemployment. She thought about jogging in the park, dancing in the dark and spending hours at the record store, just browsing. She imagined the world unobstructed by deadlines, and shuddered, unsettled by a sudden excess of freedom.

According to Guru Choudhury, the five steps to Creating a Better You includes identifying the toxic elements of one’s life, making reparations, wiping the slate clean, setting clear goals and visualizing success.

Thus in making a serious bid for DIY soul-searching, Mona first acknowledged her hunger.

Since she began to headline Wine and Dine nearly a decade ago, she ate little more than morsels in between sips of citrus water. In her prime, Mona could leave multiple-course dinners with her appetite piqued and her stomach empty, yet the maître d’ would watch her receding back with bated breath because gauntness in a critic was testament to her authority.

It was acceptance of this hunger which drove Mona all over the city in search of food, to the Chevalier Wine Cellar and the midtown Cheese Course. It led her to the fish farm on South Beach for shrimp and sashimi, then down to the farmer’s market on Sunset Drive where ripening fruits overflowing from their crates fermented in the street. She spent days filling her fridge with the delicacies of the sea and shore, ran her heels down to the sole hauling grocery bags alive with angry lobsters.

Step two entailed cooking and eating. Mona spent the next several weeks crushing tomatoes on the vine into caramelized onions, barding filet de bœuf with bacon grease and simmering capon breast in virgin olive oil while shaving white truffle over sautéed Mediterranean vegetables. She gained a healthy twenty pounds in the course of a month, elevating her BMI to an only moderately underweight status.

Besides cooking and eating, Mona even went so far as to blog about freelancing food. Some supporters of her old column made the transition, though other cyber anons preferred to bring up the reasons for her termination in ill-natured jest. In the meantime, the good Guru published Turning a Blind Eye to Anger, which she ordered. After that, she terminated the blog and seriously considered starting work on a memoir or throwing a plastic-ware party.

For a culture that invented all those things and that made such a big deal out of Confucian respect, there's in the modern era almost no sign of it at all. And if you... come from Mars and some shit, if you look at it now, you'd think that the Koreans and Japanese invented respect.

Chazz, a anonymous Chinese-American research subject in a 1995 language study by Adrienne Lo

I painted this pair of flats for my boyfriend's sister. Whether or not she will ever wear them does not concern me because I'm pretty sure she'll be amused to have them all the same.

I got the idea from Bobsmade, who makes amazing art on and off shoes.