My grandpa had been bedridden for several months before COVID-19 hit New York City, so staying inside wasn’t the problem. He was used to limits: limits of where he could go and who he could talk to and when. Limits of language. (He speaks only Cantonese.) Limits of the body closing in. In December, long before words like “coronavirus” and “quarantine” entered our daily vernacular, he had had to make peace with a sudden severance. At the nursing home, he had already become accustomed to small routines, the white walls, the white noise of the television set. 

The covered trays of cafeteria food came like clockwork, but so did the family. Pushing aside the monochrome meal once a day, my dad and aunt took turns coming to dinner. They brought my grandma, and she brought the good stuff: pork dumplings and fried rice, sponge cake and egg tarts. 

My grandpa turned 95 a few months ago (though he tells people he’s 100), and the whole extended family came out for cake. We sang happy birthday to him (in English), but the words weren’t as important as the fact that we were there to sing them. 

When my grandparents immigrated to the United States in the 1950s, they opened a Chinese restaurant in Gravesend, Brooklyn in the storefront below their apartment. The shop was so narrow that it had to be take-out-only. (I guess you could say they were way ahead of their time.) After it was a restaurant, it was many things: a ninety-nine cents store, a geriatric supply outlet, a boutique for ballerina clothes. That storefront witnessed many attempts at the American Dream.

I grew up around my grandparents, but I don’t carry any Cantonese. My grandpa speaks very little English. We count on my parents to translate, on gestures and facial expressions, on context. Mostly we count on food to fill the silence, to give us something to share. It is a concrete exchange, something to do with our hands. The relentless piling of spinach on my plate translates to: I see you growing. Also: get stronger. Also: don’t waste (food, opportunity). The mindless refilling of cups of tea, warmed palms on autopilot, a way to say: Stay a while. 

Before the quarantine, when I visited the nursing home, it would always be at mealtime. I’d sit in a plastic chair at the foot of the bed, and my dad would fuss around him, refilling cups of water and pouring hot tea, while my grandpa would lift a bony arm and point at me. “Your daughter,” he’d say to my dad, correctly naming me. What he meant to say is: he remembers. We never had much to say to each other on these visits. Rather, we never had much of the same words for each other. He’d ask if I wanted some of his food, a stand-in for all the questions he couldn’t ask. The only words I know in Cantonese are “no thank you” and “I’m full.” What I mean to say is: the only words I know in Cantonese are refusals. 

Several years ago, my grandpa wound up in a different health care facility. He had been hit by a car. It was around Christmastime. I promised myself then that I’d learn Cantonese. What I meant is that I’d learn to be a better granddaughter. (I didn’t.) The doctors at the hospital were trying to figure out if he had a concussion. Not speaking any Cantonese themselves, they turned to my dad and aunt to relay the questions: What day is it? When’s your birthday? Who is the current president? They found some things hard to translate. Broken language to match the broken ribs. Their working Cantonese is very utilitarian. Over a lifetime in the United States, they had left it in the back cupboard of their memory. They can say the date and order chicken at a restaurant, but they’ve lost the words for the more complicated stuff—politics and current events, little life things, whole human emotions, how to ask if someone is okay. 

My family only says I love you in case of emergencies. We don’t use it as shorthand for a casual goodbye, a simple sign-off on a call. But it’s something we’ve been saying a lot more lately. The words come out clunky across the telephone lines. The words feel unpracticed on my tongue. 

A few months ago, when the ballet boutique closed, my dad decided not to rent out the storefront again. He wanted to keep it empty, for now, so that my grandparents may more easily access their garden. (They’re growing tomatoes.) This, a new language in which he says I love you.

When the city-wide quarantine began, the nursing home suspended visiting hours. They were afraid of the rapid spread of the virus. People everywhere feared for the elderly. People everywhere feared death and death of family and the unpreparedness of grief. People feared the quarantine, the loneliness of it. (What’s a fear of death if not a fear of loneliness?)

When the quarantine began, I thought of my grandpa, who used to have family visiting every day. Now it’s been two months since we’ve been able to visit. Very few of the health care workers at the nursing home speak Cantonese. For him, I fear the loneliness of a language no one around you understands. The loneliness of a body confined to a bed. 

My dad calls the front desk every day, hoping to find someone who will relay a message from home, hoping to convince someone to FaceTime him from their own phone so that he may say hello to his father. The one time a lovely nurse did offer her phone to him, though, my grandpa didn’t understand the concept of a video call. He’s 95, he’s 100, he thought it was just a photo of the family, a still life, a life stalled like his. I’m just hoping there are hands that keep his teacup hot and full. 

There is no resolution to this story. 

At the time of writing this, it’s been 77 days since we’ve been able to visit. Seventy-seven days ago, when we first heard that they would be closing the nursing home to guests, I was worried for the elderly. We’d heard a lot about how the pandemic would render them most vulnerable, this part of the population that we often don’t think a lot about. And then I was worried about how it might exacerbate a language barrier, between essential healthcare workers and the elderly immigrant population that used only their mother tongue. It was a language barrier that I was guilty of putting up, a divide I never cared enough to reach across. It magnified my guilt. 

What I mean to say is this: When I tell people that I grew up seeing my grandparents all the time but cannot talk to them in their language, on their terms, they think it’s weird. There’s a shame in it for me. Dinner left on the plate, something made with love left to rot. Broken language, they say. But what’s a break in something if not a crack open, a window to a new understanding? Seventy-seven days of reflecting on it, and I’ve come to realize that we do have a language. Of shared gestures, insistent offerings across the dinner table. There’s a physicality to it. Somewhere between China and America, Cantonese and English, in the divide, we have made up our own way to speak to one another. What we have lost now is the context we built up around ourselves. Our language requires two bodies in a room. 

In my grandpa’s store, the shelves are still up. These days, my family stocks cans of soup and bags of rice there, in case of emergencies. Like love, like something to sustain.

In Memory of Frank Yee

9/7/2020

Katie Yee is the Book Marks associate editor at Literary Hub. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Epiphany, and No Tokens. She holds a BA from Bennington College and lives with her rescue dog in Brooklyn.