I had the chance to vis­it my pater­nal grand­moth­er yes­ter­day, whom I haven’t seen in more than a decade. Her face is more sunken now, although she still has the same strength and vital­i­ty I’ve always known her to have. Even though she’s 82, she still heads down to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange every day to buy and sell stocks. It’s what she does to keep her­self occu­pied while every­one else is at work, and to earn a lit­tle spending/medical mon­ey. Even when I called her up before vis­it­ing, she was very down-to-busi­ness, and nev­er both­ered with for­mal­i­ties or small talk.

She’s had a hard, though suc­cess­ful life. Born in Hong Kong, she was the third wife of my grand­fa­ther, who died ear­ly, but not before gam­bling most of the fam­i­ly for­tune away. Had he not done so the fam­i­ly would have been filthy rich, although I real­ly doubt this would have been a good thing, for myself at least. She has no edu­ca­tion, taught her­self to read well enough to get by, and was left to raise her sev­en chil­dren by her­self. There was enough mon­ey left to hire a ser­vant to help her, a woman who lived with the fam­i­ly for more than four decades before suc­cumb­ing to dia­betes, and did all the cook­ing and clean­ing, and was even a wet nurse to my father at one point.

My grand­moth­er earned enough to send most of her kids to study in Canada, and had the guts to bring them there her­self to look for appro­pri­ate schools, unable even to read most of the air­port signs. Now my uncles and aunts have had great careers, and I believe are doing bet­ter than she could have imag­ined. I still wear the jade neck­lace she gave me more than ten years ago, and have tak­en it off less than a half dozen times. I usu­al­ly send her the first pay­check that I earn from any job I take. She has every­thing she needs now, so there was noth­ing I could have giv­en her, although I was con­sid­er­ing some nice gin­seng until I found out that the qual­i­ty of the gin­seng she buys costs more than $1000 CAD a pound.

She told me to find a girl who isn’t white (I don’t think she’s racist, she just wants to look out for my best inter­ests and believes that Chinese girls treat their guys bet­ter), although she seemed hap­py for me when she found out that I was dat­ing a Caucasian girl. The most impor­tant thing, she told me, is to find a girl who loves me more than I love her, hee hee.

I can’t tell if she loves me or is proud of me from her body lan­guage. She acts like a very strong per­son and hides her emo­tions well, so does­n’t even come to greet me at the door when I first walk in. I have a great respect for her, and hope that she’ll end up respect­ing me as well.