For years I had feared one phone-call, and that was the phone-call to tell me my grandma had died. I remember being with my friend Natasha in the middle of Indonesia, in Bali, when my grandma actually called me and I answered. I was so afraid that something had happened, but now I no longer have to have this worry.
I hate this chameleon quality that I have, to move easily between cultures. And I hated that there were portions of my family who didn’t like that part of me, and they made me abandon that part of myself, and it made me persistently think that someone was angry at me. If I went between two cultures, there had to be someone out there who was angry at the way that I was, hasn’t there? There had to be someone who wasn’t pleased with the way that I was. But I think it would have been easier if I had gotten some parental support, because then my grandma wouldn’t have had to fill that huge hole. She was a naturally loving person, going about her life, and she was able to fill that hole in me. She had a charismatic way about her, that just attracted people to her, and she was able to be generous to all of them. On top of that, family was important to her. But she still ran away, but she ended up coming back to herself. But she didn’t run to another country, instead she traveled to one that she was originally from. It wasn’t perfect, but she was good, and she believed people at their word. It was as if I was watching the film Philomena, where an Irish Catholic’s son, adopted to the US, comes home to Ireland after he dies of Aids. I guess it is all a matter of where we come from, but people seem to want to bloom where they were originally planted. I don’t know if she knew what she was doing it *when* she was doing it. It seems like people have a hankering to return to their roots, as if it is an automatic part of them, something that they can neither deny nor stop. But she was also worried about the sad thing that she left behind– her family. “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”- T.S. Eliot. Her running away made the sense, because she didn’t want to live in Malaya, where she was born. And I don’t know if she ever thought her family abandoned her or if she abandoned her family; I don’t know if that mattered anymore once she lived in China. She felt abandoned, and she had abandoned.