My grandpa—my 阿公—liked to recite proverbs. One of my favorites from his catalogue was “除了错的, 都是对的,” which roughly translates to “apart from what’s wrong, everything’s right.” He wasn’t an eternal optimist; he just wasn’t easily fazed.
My mom tells me that even on his last day in the hospital, before his heart gave out, he’d been calmly informing his doctors how he’d felt, keen to help them help him but not alarm anyone. When my grandma visited him, he attempted to soothe her, assuring her that this was like his previous hospital stays—merely chest pain he couldn’t resolve at home. I know it’s odd to say that the death of someone just shy of his 95th birthday came as a shock, but it did; my grandpa was always so unflappable, I’d bought into the notion that he’d be around forever.
I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember. Though my parents and I moved from Shanghai to New Jersey in 1993, shortly after I turned 2, they sent me back to China a year later. (Settling into the U.S. was—and still is—painfully hard.) My grandparents took me in, and so, until the fall of 1996 I spent practically every waking moment with them, my grandpa a steady presence in my first real, concrete memories. When my mom told me he was in bad shape, I closed my eyes after our call and could see him at his desk, sipping his tea and peering at the newspaper through his giant glasses. I could feel myself in the room I’d shared with him and my grandma, clambering across the furniture and playing a game I later learned kids called “the floor is lava” but to me was simply “get as close to 阿公 as possible before he notices.”
Memories of those years come with a rosy glow in my mind, but can you blame me for the cliché? My world felt limitless, because my grandparents made it so—my grandpa in particular, with his endless imagination and his meticulous care. When it got hot and sticky in the summer he’d soak a towel in cold water, wrap it around his neck, and tell me it was his “summer scarf.” When I spotted paint splatters in the hallway and asked him what they were, he told me they were tadpoles. When I got ravaged by mosquitoes, he’d set an alarm to get up in the middle of the night to relight the incense that drove them away. When I’d itch somewhere on my back that I couldn’t reach, he’d know exactly where I needed his help scratching, because we’d come up with a grid system together—an amusingly complex one that always made him laugh when I said things like “上面的下面，左边的右边,” or: “bottom of the top, but right of the left.”
Plus, I had a built-in best friend in my cousin, who’s a year older and who, along with his parents, lived with us in the same apartment. He and I would cajole our grandparents into putting down their work, taking us to the park across the street, and waiting patiently while we caught goldfish—goldfish we’d bring home and immediately forget to feed. Our grandpa would secretly feed them for us, because that’s how he was: quietly nurturing. The windowsill in the hallway to our apartment was covered in potted plants he watered every day. A birdcage housed a pair of parakeets he raised. My cousin and I loved including them in our action figures’ adventures. To Ultraman, the cluster of vases was a forest. Godzilla intimidated all of Shanghai with his two parakeet pals.
In 1996, when my parents were ready for me to return to their adopted home, my grandparents came with me and stayed for a few years. Together we figured out Halloween (was face paint required?), weekend Chinese school (I went to class; they went to the retirees’ choir), shopping at American supermarkets (the huge portions astonished my grandma), and decorating Christmas trees (why can’t napkins be used as ornaments?). The day they left to go back to China in 1998, I teetered on the verge of tears the whole time—my expression’s captured in a photo below. My grandpa deployed a saying then, too: “不见高山，难见平地”—as in, “without ever climbing tall mountains, it’s hard to know the pleasure of plains.”
***
My grandpa grew up in a small village outside Yuyao, itself a small city outside Ningbo, south of Shanghai. His father died when he was 3; his mother raised him alone. When he caught cholera as a child, she sold most of their possessions so he could see a doctor. When he returned to full health, he sold soy sauce to make ends meet, learning the trade from an enterprising friend. He grew up, perhaps unsurprisingly, wanting to study medicine or biology, so he moved to Shanghai when he was 16 after hearing about an opportunity to enroll in public college courses. Universities, he’d been told, would resume operations following the Chinese Civil War. He walked back and forth down Nanjing Road until his only pair of shoes gave out. He read textbooks at night, sitting by the window where the street lamp’s light entered his room.
He was—according to my grandma, who’d been his classmate, and to pretty much every person I met at his funeral who knew him when he was younger—preternaturally good-humored, and therefore extremely well-liked. He studied relentlessly and made friends easily, while never trying to hide his rural accent. At Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University, he worked as a researcher in the biochemistry department, eventually becoming a lecturer, then an associate instructor, and then, many years of white-knuckling through periods of “reform” later, a tenured professor. The building in which my grandparents lived since my childhood was faculty housing, with the Huangpu campus as their backyard.
By the time my cousin and I were running around that same complex pretending we were characters from Slam Dunk, 阿公 had published dozens of papers, including one studying leukemia in the Chinese Journal of Hematology. (It’s titled “The Effects of Retinoic Acid on Expression of C-MYC, C-FOS in Leukemic Promyelocytes of Primary Culture”—and no, I have no idea what that means.) With his lab partners, he traveled to conferences in New York, D.C., and Toronto. For the research he did throughout the 1980s, he won a bevy of awards.
I found these accolades tucked away on the top shelf of his bookcase a few weeks ago, behind photos of our family and trinkets he and my grandma had collected on their travels. Though I’d known that he’d been a popular professor, along with my grandma—I’d greeted enough of their students over the years to know they had their fans—he’d never mentioned his trophies. The only time I can remember him coming close to bragging, he’d done so to set up a punchline: It was 2018, and we’d been wandering his hometown outside Yuyao when we stopped before a small structure. He used the umbrella he was carrying to point at the entrance. It had been his elementary school, he told me, where he’d graduated second in his class.
That’s impressive, I said.
Is it? he replied, grinning. There were three of us in total.
***
I spent eight days in Shanghai earlier this month. As soon as I set foot into the old apartment and held my grandma’s hands, I felt better. Time stopped feeling like mud I was pushing through. The tendrils of sadness that I’d felt coiling around me since he first entered the hospital in May loosened. Sitting with my grandma and my mom that first night, I felt like maybe if I stayed perfectly still and held my breath, I’d hear him rustling his newspaper in the bedroom.
There was rarely stillness, even though I spent that week doing nothing but keeping my grandma company, reminding her to take her naps and check her blood pressure between visits from—well, from everyone. So many people stopped by: old colleagues who still lived in the building, former students of my grandpa’s, family friends, relatives of family friends. Everyone wanted to talk about him, and my grandma wanted to talk about him with everyone.
Many of our relatives from Yuyao brought us baskets of yangmei, a berry native to the region that’s in season very briefly, and goes bad quickly after being picked. Knowing this, my grandma and I ate them like popcorn. I hadn’t tasted yangmei since before the pandemic, and just seeing them made me miss my grandpa and feel like he was there with us—no need for breath-holding, after all. A few months ago, he’d requested a trip back to Yuyao, so my mom had started planning one; he’d just sent me the invitation letter I needed to renew my visa last month. It occurred to me, somewhere around my 50th yangmei, that even though we couldn’t bring my grandpa back to Yuyao this year, Yuyao had come to him.
I think he would have enjoyed that twist in his plans. He had a way of finding the slimmest of silver linings: When he tripped and fell in a cave we were visiting outside Zhangjiajie in 2016, he’d chuckled at receiving the most boyish of injuries—a scraped knee—at 86 years old. When my grandma’s memory began rusting, he started giving her a daily pop quiz, reciting the first lines of a familiar poem and encouraging her to finish it. (If she didn’t, that was okay; they got to revisit art they both loved.) When we visited the former World Expo park in January, his eyesight had diminished to the point of only seeing vague shapes and colors, but he initiated a game of I Spy with me anyway. The rest of our party had gone to use the restroom, and we were waiting by a lake. What were we going to do, not admire it?
I could call his level-headedness a form of Olympic-level mental gymnastics, but really, I think it’s just hard-won wisdom. My grandpa had the unshakable conviction that gratitude, not worry, warded off uncertainty best. He also believed that humor mitigated fear, that learning is a privilege, and that curiosity is a skill—the one most worth honing. He rarely dwelled on the past except to appreciate it: In his bookcases, as I sorted family photo albums, I found a menu in his handwriting detailing the dishes served one Chinese New Year; an envelope of stamp-sized portraits of him and his friends in their youth; and a folder of birthday cards from my sister.
It’s been weeks since I’ve returned to the States, and I’ve been taken aback by how unmoored I still am. I feel far from home—even though in many ways, I know I’m not. My grandpa cultivated a sprawling community of friends and loved ones; his care transcended distance and time. I like to think that I’ve inherited some of his good cheer, work ethic, and love of home-cooked meals. I strive for his decency—or at the very least, his ping pong skills. And I’ll miss him very much.
Some pictures I love, from the thousands I sorted:
Shirley Li 