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Two Sundays from now, I'll climb into a Lincoln Town Car from a car service in Chinatown. My parents, my sister and I will settle into the leather seats, and clutch offerings of incense, chrysanthemums, and perhaps a boiled chicken in our laps. The driver will take us under the Hudson River and onto the New Jersey turnpike. A few miles past Newark Airport, we'll arrive at the gates of Rose Hill cemetery. My father will take out a photocopied map, and guide us to the grave we're looking for.
It's somewhat absurd that my grandmother is buried in a town we don't know, and one she never visited. She grew up in a rural village in southern China. She had a tough life, and was tough herself as a result. She worked the rice paddies as a child, never went to school, and endured near starvation during the Sino-Japanese war. She married my grandfather in an arranged marriage. It was never totally clear to me whether she was given away, or sold, to his family as a little girl. As soon as she had a child, her husband left her.
She raised my father by herself. To make a living, she moved to Hong Kong with my father in the early 1950's. She got factory jobs, sewing and doing beadwork. And that meant my father could go to school. He graduated high school and worked as an office clerk. He got married and had children. Then he decided to come to New York in the early 1980s. He got a job as a waiter here. My mother, my sister and I joined him a few years later. But the family wasn't yet complete. In 1991, he brought his mother to New York.
I don't think she ever felt at home in our Queens apartment. There were a few other Chinese families around, but she couldn't talk to most of the faces she saw on the street, because she didn't speak English. She complained that the food tasted different-- the chickens were not as flavorful as they were in Hong Kong. She was not given to displays of emotion, but occasionally nostalgia would slip through in her speech. In Hong Kong, most people came from somewhere else in China. And they use the Cantonese phrase "herng ha" to refer to the place on the mainland that they, or their ancestors came from. It translates roughly into "hometown." Sometimes, when she lived in Queens, my grandmother said "herng ha" to refer to Hong Kong.
She was self-sufficient, never looked for luxury or comfort. She was often gruff, even bitter. I remember thinking it was impossible to make her happy.
She asked for very little in life. But three years ago, when she was dying of cancer, she DID ask my father for something. She wanted to be buried, in a coffin, in the ground. She did not want to be cremated. It was out of character for her to show such vehement desire about something. So my father bought a burial plot through a Chinese benevolent association. The plot happened to be in New Jersey.
She never said it, but I believe my grandmother wanted to be buried because she wanted to be, well, grounded. Life tossed her around. But before she died, she wanted to know she'd be somewhere forever. Maybe northern Jersey wasn't her turf when she was alive. But it's where she belongs now. And now, every year on Qing Ming, we bring offerings of flowers and chicken and memories to her grave. She is there, her tombstone surrounded by dozens of other tombstones, etched with the Chinese names of immigrants and hometowns.
BACK ANNOUNCE: Annie Lok lives in Brooklyn.