There is a running joke between my dad and his older sisters about my grandpa and grandma. That he was the handsome and stylish boy, and she was not-the-prettiest lady but she knew how to make a mean spinach sticky rice ball. And somehow, someway, they ended up a couple.
They gave birth to two daughters and two sons. My dad, the second son, gave birth to two daughters, among them I am the last one.
My sister was born as that pretty baby. The kind that if Instagram had existed during her teens and 20s, she would have thousands of followers. I was not a pretty baby. As I grew up, everyone always said I looked like my grandma. I took pride in it, not knowing what it meant. I wore it proudly on my smile every time I went back to my dad's hometown to visit her and the remaining family who still lived there.
By the time I was 5, my grandma was already in her 80s. She no longer talked much but from her eyes, I felt her mind was still crystal clear. She would always sit on her blue plastic chair on the front porch of the house that my dad and my aunts grew up in; her fully black teeth chewing her betel and areca; her hair tied up in a traditional brown hairdo; her big black long eyes gazing toward the river where my grandpa used to work on every day as a ferry driver. My grandpa had left Earth way before her, even before I was born, but my grandma's gaze never took a day break. What was going through her mind each day, I now wonder. As she sat under the country-almond tree; no radio, no TV; a tiny brown blouse in front of the yellow brick house; all together left a yellow-soaked canvas painted forever in my memory.
By the time I got older, my parents told me that her mind was no longer very alert then. The clearness I felt when she looked at me might have been my imagination. Or maybe in those moments, she and I were conversing with our own language.
By the time I got older, my aunt told me I was the one who cried the hardest at my grandma's funeral. Even though I barely understood the concept of death. Even though we had no shared conversation, no shared memory except one - me sitting in her lap in her chair gazing over the river with her. She died when I was 8. My aunt said that because I looked so much like my grandma, she would always watch over me.
By then, I had understood what it meant. I look like that lady who was not the prettiest. But my pride was flying just as high. I went through life not the most confident person in the room but I felt an invincible-ness that someway, somehow, even when there is no one left that supports me, I would always have my grandma. Maybe spiritually, or maybe just through the memory of living inside me - she is always with me and has never left.
When I close my eyes at any given moment, I see her in my yellow painting, I see the river, I feel her embrace.
I'm not a hugely religious person. I have never pondered about whether there is life after death. But every time there is anything lucky happened to me I always felt strongly, "that is your clever doing again, grandma".
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