My grandpa and the pink bicycle in the hallway
Some grandparents’ care is like a fridge magnet — quiet, seemingly insignificant, but always present. My grandpa wasn’t like that. He was loud, persistent, and impossible to ignore — more like a broken fire alarm, going off at the most unexpected times, demanding your attention whether you were ready for it or not.
When I was in kindergarten, grandpa bought me my first Barbie doll — a doctor Barbie with tiny medical tools. As a product of China’s one-child policy, I was enveloped in abundant care and indulgence. Sometimes, he’d hide a bag of my favorite Cheetos behind his back and ask me to guess what surprise he’d got. I remember the very first pink bicycle that sat in the hallway of our apartment building when I was little was bought from him as well. It had training wheels on, as I hadn’t yet learned to ride. We lived on the fourth floor, and whenever we went downstairs, he’d teach me to recite Chinese ancient poems. “One line for every floor,” he’d say. By the time we reached the bottom, I had memorized the whole thing. That bike, though — it got stolen from the hallway one day. But even now, when I think about it, I realize it wasn’t the bike that mattered.
Beyond teaching me how to play poker and mahjong, he taught me the value of stability — something I still value the most in every meaningful relationship. However, stability sometimes relates to Confucianism, relates to sacrificing personal desires for family and social harmony, relates to patriarchy, and relates to hierarchies and rituals, which I hate the most. I resent the moments when he took my stepmom’s side in our conflicts, hiding behind the excuse of maintaining stability. Love is like a giant box wrapped in shimmering rainbow-tinted paper. But when you open it, you find hate, comfort, jealousy, happiness, regret, resentment, confusion, envy, joy — twenty-four emotions all tangled together. It’s like a chaotic bundle but packaged like the perfect Christmas gift, placed right in front of you. Just the good moments shone so brightly that when the bad ones came, I forgot them entirely.
As well-educated grandparents, they were masterful storytellers, sharing tales of events left out of history books — stories of the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. These ironically became my very first lesson in my politics class during my college years in Hong Kong, I appreciate that I’m not too surprised. When they first shared these stories with me, I didn’t fully understand. I could only grasp a few keywords, and the names and terms felt like scattered puzzle pieces. My university studies helped me connect the dots — I finally understood what the Red Guards were, the Bloodline Theory, and the content of the first Big Character Poster.
I can’t clearly remember the last time I spoke to him, but I still hold onto the scene. I was leaving, hurrying to catch my flight to the U.S. He shuffled along, pushing my suitcase to the elevator at our doorstep. The elevator arrived with a soft chime, and before I could say goodbye, I disappeared into its closing doors.
This February, I got a message from my dad, who only texts me once a year: Grandpa had passed away. During those days, I was running a high fever — the worst of it hit right around the time he passed.
I closed my eyes, those things I had grown used to and long forgotten came rushing back to me. During my high school years, he would constantly ask if I had enough cash in my pocket. No matter if I said yes or no, he would slip money into my pocket anyway. This was the same man who compared prices at every market to find the cheapest celery, the same man who would turn off lights everywhere to save on electricity. Yet, when it came to me, he was endlessly generous. He kept asking, over and over: “Do you have enough money? Have you eaten enough?” As his memory started to fade with age, he repeated these questions even more. That repetition was his love language.
—— And this is mine.
