I’m in the Dhaka airport, and surprisingly, there is a tiny internet cafe here with the ability for me to plug my laptop in and update my blog. Bangladesh is changing, and fast. The cost? $1 USD per hour. Not bad.

I’m here because I’m headed back to Canada—my 82-year-old grandfather has been fighting lung cancer for two years and has been in hospital for more than a month now. It’s time to return to pay some final respects. Thanks for taking the time to share in these reflections and I’ll update as I find the time.

It would be Paulo Coelho I have to thank for crystalling my feelings on death into words. After I read Veronika Decides to Die, I consciously decided to live my life very differently. Instead of fearing death by making it something I couldn’t think about or contemplate, I decided to keep death by my side. Why? Because he was always pretty good at reminding me to live.

Meanwhile, I have also been extremely fortunate in my life to have not yet lost anybody particularly close to me, whether by natural or unnatural means. For years now I’ve held on to that notion of just how lucky I am, and how one day I would eventually know someone who died, only because I knew quite well how they lived.

My earliest memories of my grandfather center around hot pot and mah-jong. My grandmother always prepared amazing hot pot meals, spending all afternoon in the kitchen preparing fresh meat and shrimp balls, although after she became a vegetarian Buddhist in 1991, she rarely tasted her own work. Then, we would sit around the tiny table in their kitchen cooking all the wonderful things she put together in that boiling pot. I didn’t really think much of the meal at the time, but it seems I’m become much more nostalgic than I once was.

After dinner, I recall that the clatter of plastic mah jong tiles never featured too largely in our Calgary home, as I would often use the tiles to build bunkers for my toy war games and bomb them using marbles from my lego fighter jets (Top Gun was one of my favourite movies). But when Grandma and Grandpa were in town, we settled down for a few quiet games to pass the time. I didn’t even realize it was a gambling game until much later in my life. Given that so many fortunes have been won and lost on the game, I think I understand why they didn’t teach us all the rules—having hustlers for grandsons seems a bit unbecoming.

My grandfather’s disposition was very sweet and he smiled often, which is perhaps why I like to smile so much when I’m with people. He spoke sparingly, and perhaps it was his lack of English and my lack of Chinese that held us back from communicating more frequently. Nonetheless, I later noticed we shared the same eyes, eyes that he passed to my father and eventually to me.

From my understanding his family originates from a small village in the Shunde area of Canton. They later emigrated to Hong Kong, where my grandfather was born in 1924. There, he would father three children: the first born was my father, Stephen, followed by my Auntie Sandra and then, more than 10 years after their first child, my Uncle Ray. After setting up a small tailoring business in 1962, my grandparents managed to save up enough to send my father to Canada for education, with a scant $2,000 CAD (about $1,800 USD) in his pocket. It must have been a fair amount of money at the time and I can only imagine that they must have been working and saving very hard, as traditional Chinese people are wont to do. In 1979 he would eventually emigrate to Canada, probably not long after I was born in 1978. He would eventually quit smoking in Canada, although it would be malignant effects of lung cancer that would eventually claim his life.

For the next 25 years, my grandfather and grandmother took lived in Toronto, with the last 15 of those at their apartment in One Park Lane near the intersection of Dundas and University, a great location for them. Nestled right at the edge of Toronto’s downtown Chinatown, the area has now become a tourist haunt, with its street-side vegetables and funky funguses on display for the gawking masses.

When I was young, I often felt terribly offended by the smells of their apartment and that area of town, as it was an odour I’d begun to associate with the houses of my Chinese friends. Throughout my upbringing, I’d always felt rather confused by the alienness of my Chinese cultural heritage inside the Canadian context. I knew I was “different” from everybody around me, it was just something I lived with and it became a part of me. I grew up in a quiet suburban neighbourhood of Calgary, where all the neighbours were white and even I believed the neighbourhood was changing, perhaps for the worse, when an Indian family moved into our little cul-de-sac of houses. Now isn’t that a strange thought—one ignorant immigrant kid fearing the arrival of another immigrant family in the neighbourhood?

Back at that time, and given the fact I felt at odds with my “cultural” self, visits to see my grandparents seemed more like a family obligation. Now that I’ve grown older I feel like I’ve come to understand that those experiences mean more to me now than they did before. They have now matured into a knowledge of where I come from and what my family background is. I am now proud of my Chinese heritage, happy that I used the last few years I spent in China to knock down the barrier I felt between my grandparents and I. When I first told them I was going to China they asked me not to go, and when they finally accepted that I was they told me to “watch out for the Chinese girls.” I merely shook my head at the time.

Over my successive visits back home, I could see that I had finally acquired enough Chinese to communicate, if only basically, with my grandmother and grandfather, but neither of them were particularly prone to giving long lectures in Chinese either. I had more communication with my grandmother than my grandfather, because of his limited command of Mandarin. He could always understand my broken Mandarin, and I could make educated guesses at his gruff Cantonese. I’d spent so much of my life drowning out the Cantonese at the dinner tables and on the television, thinking that I would never need nor want to understand it. I’ve spent so many years trying to get it back, restoring a link to a past that, like the culture itself, spans dozens of generations.

In 2005 I made a trip back to what I understand is my home village in Shunde, the estimated location patched together by scraps of details I’ve managed to collect from my grandmother and grandfather. I’m still not sure if I even went to the right place, but it satisfied me enough to walk upon the same earth that generations before me had lived on.

In the middle of what had become a bustling and developed Chinese city, I tried to imagine my ancestors there, and what their lives might have been like in the fertile farmlands of Canton province. Nearby, I discovered a whole village of people surnamed Leung, and, as my limited understanding of Chinese tradition dictates, I burned incense there, in honour of the roots so valued in my culture, roots that lay just below the surface of my western upbringing.

My last significant memory of a time that just him and I spent together was in 2003, when we went out for dinner at one of the local restaurants in Chinatown—obviously one of his favourite places as he knew the waiters there and didn’t take long choosing his meal. It was my first time back in Canada after spending almost one year out of it, and suddenly, all things “Chinese” in Canada had taken on a different meaning for me. My Chinese was still terrible, I hadn’t integrated to a high degree in Beijing, but one thing I feel is that I understood my grandfather and our culture, a notion that for my entire life I’d felt at odds with and alienated towards. As we ate, he asked me the same questions he always asked: “Did I have a girlfriend yet?”, “When was I coming back to live in Canada?”, or “How old are you now again?” and while his questions never changed, I think I knew him much better from my experiences in China.

My connection to that past lies with my grandparents and though my grandfather will soon pass on, I feel, in me, his connection to the future. It is not an obligation of responsibility, as my life is my own, but it is the potential of the future—his future—that stays with me and goes into whatever it is I decide to do with my life. In a way, that is what I hope for in the people who succeed me, whether they are my own children, my friends or my colleagues.

Ye ye, I miss you. My memories of our time together are warm and heartfelt, like the smile you never hesitated to share with me. I hope that I made you proud with the choices I made in my life, and I am sure that one day, we will meet again.

With all my love,
-Mikey.

Update: My grandfather passed away while I was in the air returning home, unfortunately I missed him by about eight hours.