My auntie Su said her sister-in-law’s mind had slowed because she didn’t have enough people to speak to in Shanghainese, her native tongue. She promised she would take my mother out to lunch more often and talk to her.
My sister Jindo sent Wisconsin ginseng, the best kind, she said. “She will get better,” she assured me. None of my sisters felt the numb shock I did in recognizing that our mother’s brain was dying and thus she would disappear even before her death.
Yet as I discovered, her memory losses were not always a bad thing. For instance, she seemed to forget what had happened to my father and older brother. She no longer dwelled on their deaths as much. Instead, she began to talk about happier days, for instance the trips she and I had taken together. She counted them out on her hand: China, Japan, China again, New York, China again and again. She loved to tell people about the year we lived in Switzerland, when I was so bad and so was my boyfriend Franz. “So much headache you give me,” she would claim proudly. It was astonishing how much she remembered, details about my misadventures that I had forgotten.
She recalled the night she drove my younger brother and me through the mountains in Spain: “You remember? We afraid to stop, because so many stories about bandits. So I drive, drive, drive all night, but too sleepy to keep my eyes open. I told you, ‘Start fight about you boyfriend so I can argue, stay awake.’ ”
Oh yes, now I remember, I said. She could summon the past better than I. How could she have Alzheimer’s? I fantasized that she did not have that dreaded disease at all. Her earlier confusion and delusions were due to a stroke or a tumor, perhaps vitamin deficiencies or severe depression. Soon, with medicine, she could be restored to her old feisty self, but as happy as she was now.
One day, she talked about the first time she met my father. What a joyful day that was. “You remember?” she said. “You with me.”
“Tell me,” I said. “Your memory is better than mine.”
“We in elevator,” she reminisced. “All a sudden, door open. You push me out and there you daddy on a dance floor, waiting. You smiling whole time, tell me go see, go dance. Then you get back in elevator, go up. Very tricky, you.”
Instead of being saddened by her delusion, I was choked with happiness. She had placed me in her memory of one of the best days of her life.
In part, some of my mother’s newfound ease may have been due to a pink pill, an antidepressant. Ostensibly the new medications she had to take were for her hypertension. That was the lie, the pill that was easier to swallow. Paxil was rolled into the lot, as was Aricept, various benzodiazepines, a changing assortment of antipsychotics, all of which in time lost their effectiveness or yielded peculiar side effects like the lip-smacking and foot-twirling of tardive dyskinesia. Her neurological tics were more exhausting for us to watch than for her unconsciously to do. I kept a journal of what she took and why, what her symptoms were and how she was changing as she lost bits and pieces and chunks. I often wrote that my mother seemed happier than she had ever been. I marveled over that. Was happiness in dementia true happiness?
Yet I was saddened to think that with proper medication, my mother could have been a different person. Clearly, she had suffered from major depressive disorder most of her life. She must have gotten that from her mother. She had bequeathed that to me.
At moments, I mused over what life would have been like had I been raised by a happy, depression-free mother. Imagine having a mother who was nurturing instead of worrying, a mother who would have filled my head with enthusiastic suggestions on what to wear to the dance rather than issue warnings that a single kiss from a boy would render me both pregnant and insane. Then again, if my mother and I had had a wonderfully happy relationship, I would have been wonderfully content in childhood. I would have grown up to be bubbly, well balanced, mentally stable, and pregnant many, many times from many, many kisses. Instead of becoming a fiction writer, I would have become a neurosurgeon and a concert pianist on the side, much to the surprise of my doting mother, the happy one who never would have foisted her expectations on me.
A new stage of my mother’s illness began. More delusions took hold. Sometimes she became obsessed with conspiracies against her by my half sister; Lijun, she believed, was trying to steal the starring role from her in a documentary about her life. Another time she believed my husband was having an affair with a Chinese woman at Lake Tahoe. She had gone there and seen the whole sordid mess, she claimed.
This was particularly sad to me, since Lou had taken care of her as lovingly as any Chinese son. He had purchased her home, had seen to her financial needs, had served her first at every meal, and was always available to accompany her to the hospital or to search for solutions for her care. But now, at our twice-weekly dinners at her favorite restaurant, she glared at him the entire time. Day and night, she called me every twenty minutes to tell me I had to leave him. After two weeks, I figured out what I had to do to make her stop. I could not argue with delusions. I had to acquiesce to them.
When the phone rang next, I answered with a sad voice. I informed her that I had kicked Lou out of the house. (Lou, who was standing nearby, looked at me with a puzzled face.)
“So now you believe me,” she said.
“You’ve always been right,” I said. “Only you worry about me. Only you can protect me from everything bad.”
Yes, my mother said.
“Everyone else, they don’t care. But you do, because you are my mother. Only you are this good to me that you would worry this much. You know me better than I know myself. You know what can hurt me. You are the best mother.”
“Now you believe,” she whispered in a grateful voice. Then she said what every good mother would say. “Okay, go get something eat now.”
“I can’t,” I answered. “There’s nothing to eat in the house. Lou used to go to the store to get food. But now he’s not here. And I can’t go out at night by myself. Someone might rob me.”
“But you hungry?”
“Well, only a little, but really, it’s okay. I won’t starve between now and morning. It’s all right if I’m just hungry.”
A good mother cannot bear to think her child’s stomach is empty.
“You scared, all alone?” she asked.
“A little,” I replied. “The house is so big now that I’m by myself. But I’ll check the doors often to make sure no burglars can get in. Good thing I’ll be moving to a smaller place.”
“Moving? Why?”
“You know, with the divorce, Lou will get half of everything. We’ll have to sell the house and cut up the money. And if I marry someone else and divorce that man, he’ll get half of that half, so then I’ll be left with one-quarter of what I have now. That’s how it is when you divorce your husband.”
My mother began to recall Lou’s better qualities. He bought me groceries, he drove me around, he was strong. She advised me to forgive him. Of course, I should punish him for a short time, tonight, but then tomorrow I should take him back.
“What good advice,” I told her. “Only you know how to save my marriage and my house so I won’t be poor.”
What had started as subterfuge on my part grew into an epiphany. I began to see how much I actually knew about my mother and myself. She was losing her mind, yes, but I was losing the defenses built up and fortified from childhood. The scars were dissolving and our hearts were becoming transparent. How could I have been so stupid not to know this all these years. It had been so simple to make my mother happy. All I had to do was say I appreciated her as my mother.
I now knew the answers to my mother’s impossible questions. “When you coming home?” was a common one because I was often away on book tours. If I gave her an actual date, she would ask five minutes later, “When you coming home?”
“We’re almost home,” I would say over the phone, no matter how long Lou and I would be gone. “Because we’ve missed you so much. We love you so much we can’t wait to come home and see you. You are the most impor
tant person to us in the whole world.” And she would stop asking. That was all she needed to know.
I found similar ways to help her remember. I used to tell her not to eat her regular dinner at five-thirty p.m. on days we would be taking her out to a restaurant. But she would inevitably forget and, when we showed up, act surprised and annoyed. “Dinner? You don’t tell me you take me to dinner.” The next time we wanted to take her out, I called and said in an excited voice: “Guess what! Tonight there’s a party at Fountain Court, your favorite. You know why? Because everyone who loves you will be there. You’re going to be the star! We’ll order all your favorite dishes—juicy prawns, and tender squid, and the fresh snow-pea greens with the little sweet sprouts you love so much. Wear your pink dress. You always look so pretty in that. You will be the prettiest girl in the entire restaurant.”
And sure enough, when we arrived to pick her up, she had remembered not to eat her regular meal and she had on her pink dress. Is happiness in dementia true happiness? Yes, it is. I know for certain now.
In the last week of my mother’s life, she began to talk to ghosts. “Nyah-nyah,” she moaned in Shanghainese, and waved to someone she saw above her. Then she motioned to me, indicating that I should invite this ghost to come in. She spoke gibberish in a shaky voice, yet it was understandable what she meant. I could still translate: “Sit, sit. Tea. Quick, quick. Coat, coat, best coat.” And I fetched the mink out of her closet and placed it where the ghost might have sat down.
My mother continued to chat excitedly to an invisible crowd of people. She grabbed my hand and pointed. “Yes, I see,” I said. “So many people.” At one point, I forgot about the pretense, and when a chilly fog wind blew through the open window, I took the mink coat that I had draped over the sofa and placed it over my mother’s legs. She grunted and protested with spitting sounds, then pointed to the bare spot on the sofa. Oh, right—how could I forget! Nyah-nyah was there, wearing the mink coat. I put the coat back on the sofa, marveling over the contradictions of my mother’s memory.
I finally thought to ask what Nyah-nyah meant.
“A Shanghainese nickname for ‘Grandmother,’ ” my oldest sister replied. And then I remembered a story my mother had once told me, of her being four years old, delirious and near death as she called to her grandmother to stop the pain. My mother had been horribly injured when a pot of boiling soup fell across her neck. Nyah-nyah had sat by her bedside, day and night, telling her that her funeral clothes had already been made but were very plain because she had not lived long enough to deserve anything more elaborate.
She told the little girl that everyone would soon forget her because she had lived too short a time for them to remember much. That was how Nyah-nyah, who loved my mother very much, scared her back to life. Now my mother was calling for Nyah-nyah once again. This time I think Nyah-nyah was telling my mother that her funeral clothes had already been made, and not to worry, they were fancy beyond belief.
Shortly afterward, my mother fell into a coma. Ten to twenty family members were in her rooms, at all hours. We played poker and mah jong. We ate pizza and Chinese takeout. We watched videos of her favorite movies, Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, including one she called “Southern Pacific.” I put on a CD of Chopin piano music and whispered in her ear: “That’s me playing. I’ve been practicing harder.”
For four days my mother’s breathing kept us in suspense. She would take three breaths, then nothing would follow for forty-five seconds, sometimes longer. It was like watching the tidal wash in anticipation of a tidal wave. At night I lay next to her, sleepless, staring at the pulse bobbing in the cove of her throat, my own heart pounding to this steady yet uncertain rhythm. Later I put a pearl in the hollow so I could more easily see this proof of life. Though I dreaded that she would stop breathing, I was relieved that she would die of natural causes and not from suicide.
During the last hour of her life, as my mother’s skin turned gray, our family murmured that we loved her very much and were sad to see her go. We whispered to her all the things we would miss: her dumplings, her advice, her humor. To myself I mourned: Who else would worry about me so much? Who else would describe in explosive detail what might happen to parts of my body if I was careless? Who would be frank enough to warn that my husband might exchange me for a younger woman unless I forced him to buy me jewels so expensive it would be impossible for him to leave both me and the gems behind?
My mother did not speak during those last four days, but with her final breath, a long release of an exhalation, she uttered a faint sound, a single sustained note. I had to bend my ear to her mouth to hear. I was the only one who heard it, but I don’t think it was my imagination. It was as if our mother, this woman who had been so full of surprises until her final day, had just said, “Ah!” to signal that she had gone on to her next surprise.
After my mother died, I began to rewrite the novel I had been working on for the past five years. I wrote with the steadfastness of grief. My editor, Faith Sale, would have called that grief “finding the real heart of the story.” My mentor, Molly Giles, said the bones were there, and to repair them I had to dig them out, break them into pieces, then put them back together.
And so I threw away some pages, rewrote others. I wrote of wrong birth dates, of secret marriages, of names that were nearly forgotten. I wrote of pain that reaches from the past, how it can grab you, how it can also heal itself like a broken bone. With the help of my new ghostwriters by my side, I found in memory and imagination what I had lost in grief.
My mother (center), around age eight, Hangzhou, China, circa 1924.
• my grandmother's choice •
In my writing room, on my desk, sits an old family photo in a plain black frame, depicting five women and a girl at a temple pavilion by a lake. When I first saw this photo as a child, I thought it was exotic and remote, of a faraway time and place, with people who had no connection to my American life. Look at their bound feet! Look at that funny lady with the plucked forehead!
The solemn little girl is, in fact, my mother. She looks to be around eight. And behind her, leaning against the rock, is my grandmother Jingmei. “She called me Baobei,” my mother told me. “It means ‘treasure.’ ”
The picture was taken in Hangzhou, in 1924 or so, my mother said, possibly spring or fall, to judge by the clothes. At first glance, it appears the women are on a pleasure outing.
But see the white bands on their skirts? The white shoes? They are in mourning for my mother’s grandmother Divong, known as the “replacement wife.” The women have come to this place, a Buddhist retreat, to perform yet another ceremony for her. Monks hired for the occasion have chanted the proper words. And the women and little girl have walked in circles clutching smoky sticks of incense. They have knelt and prayed, then burned a huge pile of spirit money so that Divong might ascend to a higher position in her new world.
This is also a picture of secrets and tragedies, the reasons that warnings have been passed along in our family like heirlooms. Each of these women suffered a terrible fate, my mother said. And they were not peasant women but big-city people, very modern. They went to dance halls and wore stylish clothes. They were supposed to be the lucky ones.
Look at the pretty woman with her finger on her cheek. She is my mother’s second cousin Nunu Aiyi, “Precious Auntie.” You cannot see this, but Nunu Aiyi’s entire face was scarred from smallpox. Fortunately for her, a year or so after this picture was taken, she received marriage proposals from two families. She turned down a lawyer and married another man. Later she divorced her husband—a daring thing for a woman to do. But then, finding no means to support herself or her young daughter, Nunu Aiyi eventually accepted the lawyer’s second proposal—this time, to become his number-two concubine. “Where else could she go?” my mother said. “Some people said she was lucky the lawyer still wanted her.”
Now look at the small woman with the sour face. There’s a reason that Uncle’s Wife, Jyou Ma, h
as this expression. Her husband, my great-uncle, often complained aloud that his family had chosen an ugly woman for his wife. To show his displeasure, he insulted Jyou Ma’s cooking. During one of their raucous dinner arguments, the table was shoved and a pot of boiling soup tipped and spilled all over his niece’s neck, causing a burn that nearly killed her. My mother was the little niece, and for the rest of her life she bore that scar on her neck. Great-Uncle’s family eventually arranged for a prettier woman to become his second wife. But the complaints about his first wife’s cooking did not stop. When she became ill with an easily treatable disease, she refused to take any medication. She swore she would rather die than live another unnecessary day. And soon after, she died.
Dooma, “Big Mother,” is the regal-looking woman with the plucked forehead who sits on a rock. The dark-jacketed woman next to her is a servant, remembered by my mother only as someone who cleaned but did not cook. Dooma was my mother’s aunt, the daughter of her grandfather and his “original wife,” Nu-pei. But Divong, the replacement wife, my mother’s grandmother, shunned Dooma, her stepdaughter, for being “too strong,” while her own daughter, my grandmother, loved Dooma. She did not care that Dooma’s first daughter was born with a hunchback—a sign, some said, of Dooma’s own crooked nature. She did not stop seeing Dooma after Dooma remarried, disobeying her family’s orders to remain a widow forever. Later Dooma killed herself, using some mysterious means that made her die slowly over three days. “Dooma died the same way she lived,” my mother said, “strong, suffering lots.”
Jingmei, my own grandmother, lived only a year or two after this picture was taken. She was the widow of a poor scholar, a man who had the misfortune of dying from influenza shortly after he was appointed vice-magistrate in a small county. I only assume it was influenza, since his death in 1918 was sudden, as were the millions of other deaths during the great pandemic. Family lore, however, reports that the ghost of a man on whom he had passed a judgment for execution returned from hell and killed him.