I’ve long nursed vague plans of moving back to China for a few years, to solidify my place there. But with each year that passes in the US, such a move gets harder and harder to make

多年来，我一直有个不明确的计划，计划回到中国，巩固我在中国的地位。但是随着在美国待得越久，我的计划实施起来就越困难。

My grandfather died on 25 August 2020, Chinese Valentine’s Day. I believe it was peaceful. He had been in hospital in a vegetative state for several months, and had been declining from dementia for three years. He was 95; he had always said he would live to be 100.

2020年8月25日，中国情人节，我的祖父去世了。他走得很安详。在那之前的几个月，他已经是植物人状态了，一直躺在医院里。他已经得老年痴呆三年多了，而且越来越严重。他今年95岁了，他一直说自己能活到100岁。

Fifty-three days before he died, my grandmother died. She was eating a sweet rice ball at the dinner table and her heart suddenly stopped. Mid-bite, she simply stopped moving. Froze, like a buffering video clip. By the time they got her to the hospital it was too late. She had been in good health. No one had been expecting that she would pass away.

就在祖父去世的53天前，我的祖母就去世了。她在餐桌前吃甜饭团，突然心脏停止了跳动。饭团刚咬了一半，就一动不动了。就像正在缓冲的视频。当大家把她送到医院，已经来不及了。祖母的身体一直很好。谁也没有想她走得那么突然。

I was alone in New York when I heard about my grandfather’s death. Because of the pandemic, none of the family in the US could travel. We used WeChat video to attend his funeral. From China, my aunt called us all in on a group conference – my brother in New Jersey, my parents in San Diego, my cousin in San Jose, my uncle in Indiana. The faces of all these separate individuals in different parts of the US were huddled on to the small screen of her mobile phone, which she held up at the funeral as she cried and prayed.

我听到祖父去世的消息时，正一人在纽约。由于疫情原因，美国家庭都不准外出旅行。我们通过微信视频参加了祖父的葬礼。我中国的姑姑邀请我们加入一个群，群成员有我新泽西的哥哥，圣地亚哥的父母，圣何塞的表弟，还有印第安纳的叔叔。所有这些来自美国不同地区的脸都挤到了她的手机屏幕上，姑姑在祖父的葬礼上一边拿着手机，一边哭泣和祈祷。

I set my phone up on a small tripod in the living room of the Brooklyn apartment I’d been subletting for more than a year but never felt quite at home in. It was a summer evening, quite late, after dinner. After the hard pandemic months of March and April, Brooklyn felt warm, festive, alive, with outdoor restaurants packed with relieved diners. To prepare for the funeral, I got dressed and put on makeup. Instead of sitting down, I remained standing in front of the tripod to show my respect. I watched the tiny square within the square – the video of my grandfather was one of the five screens on the call – on which they were laying flowers over his dead body.

我的公寓位于布鲁克林，我把手机放在公寓客厅那个小三脚架上，这个公寓我已经转租一年多了，但从来没有家的感觉。夏天的夜晚，晚饭后天就很晚了。经历了3月和4月的严重疫情后的布鲁克林能感受到温暖、喜庆、这里充满生机，户外餐馆里挤满了如释重负的食客。为了准备葬礼，我穿好衣服，化好妆。我没有坐，而是站在三脚架前以示尊敬。我看着屏幕里的小屏幕，手机屏幕上有五个画面，祖父葬礼的画面也在里面，画面里大家把鲜花放到了祖父的遗体上。
My grandparents, by whom I mean my 爷爷 (yéye: my father’s father) and 奶奶 (năinai: my father’s mother) lived in Hefei, in Anhui province. Hefei is a sleepy, midsize city, overshadowed by Nanjing to the east and Wuhan to the west. For tourists, it’s most likely a stopover on the way to the famous Yellow Mountain to the south. Growing up, my brother and I had regularly spent long summer holidays at my grandparents’ apartment there, sharing beds with aunts and cousins, splaying out in front of the air conditioners, walking to the internet cafe to play Starcraft and virtual pet games, getting spiced beef jerky and Calbee shrimp chips from the nearby shop and watching soapy Chinese dramas in the evening. To get to the apartment, we buzzed in through a heavy front door and stomped up three floors of cold concrete steps. Outside the building, there was a mulberry tree; occasionally, my grandmother would use the leaves to raise silkworms.
我的祖父母,也就是我的爷爷和奶奶住在安徽省合肥市。合肥是一座沉睡的中型城市，风头都被东边的南京和西边的武汉抢了。合肥最有可能成为游客去著名的黄山旅游途中的中间休息的地方。哥哥和我小时候漫长的暑假经常是在祖父母家度过的，和姑姑以及表兄弟们挤在一起睡觉，夏天在空调前懒懒地躺着，去网吧玩星际争霸和虚拟宠物游戏，到附近的商店买五香牛肉干和卡乐比薯条虾片，晚上看中国肥皂剧。要想进入房间，必须穿过厚重的前门，踏着冰凉的混凝土台阶爬三层楼。外面有一棵桑树;奶奶偶尔会用这些叶子养蚕。

The rest of the time, we were in California. Since I wasn’t physically with my family in China, WeChat, the ubiquitous social media app for Chinese speakers, became the portal through which I could peer to the other side. Our WeChat group is a repository of baby photos, funny videos and chatter between all the relatives. When I scroll far up, there are holiday photos, old conversations between my aunts about my grandparents’ health, small squabbles and gossip about their daily lives.

其他时间，我们都在加州。虽然我没有和中国的家人在一起，但是无处不在的中文社交媒体应用微信成为了我窥视世界另一面的窗户。我们的微信群是存储婴儿照片、有趣视频和亲戚聊天的资料库。翻阅聊天记录，就能看到假期的照片、姑姑们关于祖父母健康的对话、小争吵以及关于他们日常生活的八卦。

“At six o’clock this morning, the old princess said she was hungry, and she got up to eat,” they would write of my grandmother. “Good thing the caretaker knows her rules by now.”
“No gas at my house this morning, but luckily I got a dinner invitation from my friend. I brought over strawberries and pickled clover from Chongming Island,” one aunt wrote, sending pictures.

“今天早上六点，老王妃说她饿了，就起来吃饭了，”这说的是我奶奶。“好在护工现在知道她的规矩了。”
“今天早上我家停气了。不过幸好朋友请我吃晚饭。我从崇明岛带来了草莓和腌金花菜，”一位姑姑写道，还发了照片。

“I like Song Joong-Ki,” a female cousin wrote of a famous pretty boy actor during a conversation about Korean celebrities, and another aunt, 30 years her senior, gravely affirmed, “I also like Song Joong-Ki”, to my cousin’s amusement.

“我喜欢宋仲基，”一位表姐谈论韩国名人时写道，另一位年长她30岁的姑姑认真地说，“我也喜欢宋仲基。”

My grandmother, who could read WeChat but never figured out how to type, occasionally entered nonsense letters as she scrolled through. My father would always reply, “Poor Mama. What are you trying to say?”

我奶奶能看微信，但不会打字，她偶尔会在滚动页面输入一些毫无意义的字母。我父亲总是回她:“可怜的妈妈。你想说啥？”

At my grandmother and my grandfather’s funerals, WeChat was the technology that let us be present at those ceremonies in real time. But it is an imperfect portal: one cannot truly be back. We couldn’t put flowers on the bodies; we couldn’t, as our relatives in China did, go back to the apartment afterwards and lay oranges by my grandparents’ photos. How alienating it was, to be sending our spirits through our screens – rectangles the size of our hands. My grandparents’ deaths still do not feel real. Not really. They were already so far away. My grandmother is still listed in my WeChat contacts, a name that, when I scroll through my phone, makes me startle.

祖母和祖父的葬礼上，微信是能让我们实时出席葬礼的技术手段。但这个入口并不完美:人不可能真正地回去。我们不能把鲜花放在遗体上;我们不能像中国的亲戚那样，等到葬礼后回到房间，在祖父母的照片旁边摆上橘子。通过手掌大小的长方形屏幕发送我们的情感，感觉很疏远。祖父母的死仍然让人感觉不真实。这不是真的。他们已经走得很远了。我的祖母仍然在我的微信联系人列表中，当我翻阅手机，看到他们名字的时候吓了一跳。

In Reflections on Exile, Edward Said writes: “Exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical … like death but without death’s ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography.” I had not been forced to be in exile, but in the US, I too was torn from the nourishment of tradition, family and geography. To make up for this, I desperately longed to fill in the gaps of my knowledge about Asia.

爱德华·萨义德在《流亡的省思》中写道:“流亡是无法补救的非宗教行为，是无法忍受的过去……就好像死亡一样，但是却没有死亡的终极仁慈，流亡撕裂了数百万人的传统、家庭和地理的滋养。”我没有被迫流亡，但在美国，我同样失去了传统、家庭和地理的滋养。为了弥补这一点，我非常渴望填补我的亚洲知识空白。
I loved hearing stories about China. Whenever I learned about Chinese history in school, I would go home and ask my parents. “No, that’s not how it was, this is how it was,” they would say. In contrast to what my textbooks said, my parents shared happy stories of the Cultural Revolution – of friends made on the farms, about the brilliance and charisma of my oldest aunt who had a posse of young admirers, about how the government rewarded my 奶奶爷爷 with medals and pensions for their military service. During my summer vacations, my cousins joked that my 爷爷 paid for my dinners with his wallet from the CCP. And whenever I went back to Hefei, it was to a family that told me this was where I came from, where I would always be welcome and would always have a place.
我喜欢听中国的故事。只要我在学校学习了中国历史，我都会回家问我父母。他们会说“不，事情不是这样的，事情是这样的”。与课本相比,我的父母会分享文化大革命中一些快乐的事——在农场认识的朋友，身后跟着一群崇拜者的大姑妈的光辉岁月,政府如何回报我奶奶爷爷，他们在部队赢得过奖章，政府给他们养老金。暑假回到中国，我的表兄弟们开玩笑说,我吃的晚饭的钱是爷爷从政府那里拿的。只要我回到合肥，这个家庭就会告诉我，我来自中国，中国永远欢迎我，这里永远有我的容身之所。

In December 2018, a year and a half before my grandparents passed away, I went to China to collect my family’s oral histories. Like many children of immigrants, I had an uneasy feeling of being born out of formlessness, occupying an invisible space in a country that never filled in where exactly I was supposed to fit. I wanted to articulate my family’s past, make sense of where we had come from, where I had come from. This was a duty I felt all the more responsible for because of my role in the family as the “writer”.

2018年12月，我祖父母去世一年半之前，我回到中国收集家族口述史。像许多移民的孩子一样，我们有一种不安感，觉得自己来自于无形，觉得自己在永远适合我容身的国家占据着看不见位置。我想要明确有力的说出家族的过去，弄清楚我们来自哪里，我来自哪里。因为我在家里的角色是“作家”，所以我觉得我更应该承担起这个责任。

But for a long time I delayed making the trip – because it would be time-consuming, because it would be emotionally exhausting, because my Chinese was not good enough, because I did not know the right questions to ask. Yet my grandparents were getting older and older, and China changed more rapidly by the day. Finally, I knew I couldn’t keep putting it off. I bought my ticket and went.

但很长一段时间里，我迟迟没有开始这段旅行——因为这非常费时间，可能会让我精疲力竭，因为我的中文不够好，因为我不知道要问什么样的问题。然而，我的祖父母年纪越来越大，中国的变化也越来越快。我知道我不能再拖延了。于是买票，出发。
I landed in Shanghai and took a high-speed train to Hefei. Before I left, I read an article on how the US-China trade war was affecting the price of soy. When I arrived in Hefei it was evening, and I was just in time for my 奶奶’s 90th birthday dinner. I walked out of the enormous, near-empty train station to meet my uncle’s car, and we drove to a family restaurant on a quiet street. When we brought out the cake, 奶奶’s great-granddaughter, my little niece, offered her a plastic yellow crown with lights and helped her blow out the candles.
上海下飞机，然后坐高铁去合肥。出发之前，我读了一篇关于中美贸易战影响大豆价格的文章。到合肥已经是晚上了,正好赶上我奶奶90大寿晚宴。我走出巨大的、几乎空无一人的火车站，上了我叔叔的车。开车来到街边一家安静的家庭餐厅。当我们拿出蛋糕,奶奶的曾孙女,我的小侄女,给了她戴上了塑料的亮着灯的皇冠，大家和奶奶一起吹灭了蜡烛。

My grandfather wasn’t present at the dinner table. Before I arrived, I had harboured some hope – not knowing the full extent of his dementia – that I could talk to him still, excavate his memories. But by the time I arrived, it was already too late. Mentally, he was long gone.

祖父不在。我来之前，还抱着一些希望——我还不知道他老年痴呆的严重程度——希望我还能和他说话，挖掘他的记忆。等我到了才发现已经太晚了。他精神上早就走了。

His name was Qian Feng, Qian as in “money”, the family name I have inherited. He was born in 1925, in the year of the bull, on an impoverished farm in Jiangsu where they wove cotton and herded cows. He had six siblings and no formal education. Because he was always hungry, at the age of 15 he ran away to join the Chinese Communist party army, where he knew he’d be fed. He fought against the Japanese in the second world war, and was deaf in one ear because of a war wound. In the army, he learned how to write. From his illiterate, uneducated background, he became a professional writer, producing novels, stories and essays. This, a classic story of proletariat triumph, is one of the great origin myths of my family.

我爷爷叫钱锋，金钱的钱，我继承了这个姓。他属牛，1925年出生在江苏贫穷的农村，在农村织过棉花和放过牛。他有六个兄弟姐妹，没有接受过正规教育。因为总是挨饿，在15岁的时候就跑去参加了共产党的军队，当兵有饭吃。第二次世界大战和日本人打过仗，战争中负伤，一边耳朵聋了。他在军队里学会了写作。从没有受过正规教育的文盲，成长为一名职业作家，写小说，故事和散文。这是关于无产阶级胜利的经典故事，也是我们家最伟大的神话起源之一。

With my grandmother, he had five children. The first was born in 1953. Three of their children harboured ambitions to become writers; instead, those three went on to study medicine. Two, including my father, emigrated to the US. And then there was me, his granddaughter, born in a suburb of Los Angeles in a democratic country, in a completely different place and time, in the affluent, bourgeois west – and I wanted to be a writer as well.

我爷爷奶奶一共有五个孩子。第一个孩子生于1953年。有三个孩子怀揣成为作家的抱负;结果这三个孩子都学医了。另外两个包括我父亲移民到了美国。然后是我，他的孙女，出生在民主国家的洛杉矶郊区，我和祖父出生在完全不同的地方和时代，而出生在富裕的资产阶级西方的我也想成为一名作家。
In my memory 爷爷 was always alone in his room, playing cards. In the afternoons he played go; in the evening, mahjong. Before dinner, he always clapped his hands and said, in English, “HALLO HALLO EAT”. The other English word he knew was “MONSTER”. I remember the green jacket he wore in his photos from his first visit to LA. One day, in the winter, when I was two or three years old and living in Hefei, I watched him walk out with a plastic bag to fill with snow for us to play with. From the balcony overhead, I could see the footsteps trailing behind him, and the green jacket.
在我的记忆里爷爷总是独自在房间打扑克，下午下围棋，晚上打麻将。晚饭前，他会拍拍手，用英语说:“哈罗，哈罗，吃吧”。他还知道一个英语单词是“MONSTER”。我还记得他第一次去洛杉矶时的照片上穿得那件绿色夹克。我两三岁那年的冬天是在合肥度过的，祖父拿着一个塑料袋出去装雪，让我们玩。从楼顶的阳台上，我能看到他身后的脚印和那件绿色的夹克。
In the Hefei apartment, I spent several days paging through old photos. My 爷爷 as a soldier in black-and-white, and then, in full colour, swinging in a hammock in the US, grinning over a deck of pinup cards on the carpet, sitting on the front step of a very American porch. The pictures of him when he was younger filled me with a sense of loss. The family joke had always been how robust he was, how healthy despite his age and all his drinking and smoking. He could walk for miles, his back never drooping.
在合肥的家里，我花了好几天时间翻看旧照片。爷爷当兵时的照片是黑白的,后面的就全是彩色的了，有在美国躺在吊床上的摇晃的照片，有咧着嘴看地毯上扑克牌的照片，还有端坐在非常美国的门廊前面台阶上的照片。看到他年轻时的照片，我有一种失落感。家里人总是开玩笑说，尽管他上了年纪，又抽烟又喝酒，但他很健壮。他可以走好几里路，这么多年纪了，背都没有驼。