Grandfather

Going to see my grandfather was my father's idea. Which was itself unusual — my father initiates perhaps three things a year.

"Your grandfather has asked about you several times," he said. "Go alone. Your mother and I won't come."

Grandpa lives in an old complex on the west side, fifth floor, the kind of old building that never got an elevator. The stairwell still smells like my childhood: someone frying ribbonfish, someone's bicycle blocking the second-floor turn. When he opened the door I was startled — the tall old man of my memory had shrunk a size. But the eyes hadn't changed. Everyone else in our family has eyes that look out. My grandfather's eyes look at something far away, and not necessarily in the direction he's facing.

He made me Longjing tea in the glass tumblers he's used for forty years. We covered the standard topics: America, the resignation (he didn't criticize; he nodded, which threw me), how Hangzhou has changed. And then, in a gap I never saw coming, he said:

"A-Dai. The dreams have been heavy lately, hm?"

The tea trembled in my hand.

"Did Grandma tell you—? Did my mom—"

"Nobody told me." He waved it away and unhurriedly topped up my water. "Nobody needed to. I saw it when you walked in. You sleep like a person working the night shift — the body lies down, the eyes close, and the rest of you clocks in somewhere else."

Downstairs a child was bouncing a ball. Thock. Thock. Thock.

"Grandpa." I heard myself ask it, small, the way I'd asked him at ten whether ghosts were real. "This thing I have. Is it an illness?"

The old man looked at me for a long time. Those far-looking eyes came near, and focused, and rested on me — the first time I'd ever felt their full weight. Then he said the thing I will carry for the rest of my life:

"The people of this family are born with different eyes. Other people's eyes see the present. Some of ours see the road." He gazed into his cup, where the tea leaves stood on end, one by one. "Your great-grandfather had it. I have it. Your father—" he paused, "—your father has it too. But he shut his eyes decades ago and has not opened them since. He has his reasons."

"Then I—"

"A girl with this — I have never seen it. Never even heard of it." He nudged the tea toward me. "Which is why you've suffered, child. You saw, and nobody told you what you were seeing, and on top of that they told you it was your nerves." He set his cup down. "A-Dai, your grandfather does not have the learning to explain this thing to you. Your grandfather will tell you one sentence. Hold onto it."

I sat up straight.

"What the eyes show you is not given to you to fear. It is given to you to walk." he said. "That direction inside you — the one that keeps sounding — go. Don't call ahead to negotiate. Don't make one of your lists. Don't ask whether it's worth it. Go. The stupidest death for a person who sees the road is to stand at the crossroads telling their own fortune."

I sat in his peeling wooden chair with my eyes going hot. Still didn't cry — but that was the closest I ever came, up to that point.

He walked me out to the stairwell. Half a flight down, he suddenly called my childhood name. I turned. The old man stood above me holding the rail, backlit, his face unreadable.

"That place in the dream," he said. "Look at it twice for your grandfather. These eyes of mine only ever reached as far as they could see."

I asked my grandfather whether it was an illness.

He said: it's a road.

And then I stood in that stairwell a long time — because I understood, suddenly, that he had always known. He'd been waiting twenty-eight years for me to ask.