By: Katherine Kam

“It’s crazy that you have a family member you can’t communicate with at all,” my boyfriend said to me one night earlier this year, after we’d left my parents’ house in downtown Manhattan. I sighed. 

We had just finished having dinner with my family. My grandma sat quietly at the table as we chattered and discussed our lives in English. I always greeted her, asked her how she was doing, and served her at the dining table. 

But my lack of Cantonese and the presence of my Caucasian boyfriend meant our discussions happened in English. Present at the table but unable to join in our conversation, my grandma’s eyes flickered from her plate up to us, her gaze moving from face to face as we spoke.

This is the woman who raised me, and I barely know anything about her. Like many Chinese-American families, she watched me and my sister when our parents went to work. She didn’t work, but had social security, and with that limited income she bought us snacks from the dollar store and stuffed red envelopes with money for us during the Lunar New Year and our birthdays. She cooked dinner for all of us – Chinese food you would never be able to order in restaurants.

Despite all the time we spent with her, our lives were in English. In pursuing our desire to assimilate and our teenage selfishness, we spoke English at home, and spoke to our grandmother less and less.

That night, my grandma pulled me aside to speak to me privately. My sister had just moved out of my parents’ house to Indianapolis for work, and my grandma was worried. Vaccines for COVID-19 were not yet in widespread circulation and the pandemic was raging. Moreover, stories of racially-charged attacks against Asian-Americans were circulating all over the news.

“It’s dangerous for her,” she said in Cantonese. “She should come back.”

Her eyes bore deep into mine, trying to determine if I understood her. I can understand basic things in Cantonese, but my ability to speak it is limited to simple things like food and the weather. I wanted to reassure her and say, “She lives in secure employee housing and only interacts with her co-workers outdoors. She’s fine.” 

But I didn’t know how to say any of that. I stared back silently; my lips parted but unable to respond. After an eternal moment, my grandmother asked, “is she happy?” 

Another pause. 

“Is she happy?” she asked again, trying to elicit some response from me. 

“She is happy,” I stuttered back in my toddler-level Cantonese. 

“Are you happy?” I asked, now worried about her. She looked at me, then said, “You don’t understand me, do you?” She looked away, giving up on trying to communicate. 

“I do understand you!” I quickly answered, but that was all I could say. My limited vocabulary rendered me useless. 

During that walk back I sent a text to my sister. “Hey, grandma misses you.” It was all I could do in response to my grandma’s words.

We attended school, read books, and consumed television and music all in English, gradually forgetting Cantonese. We lost the ability to have deeper conversations with her, like asking her what her life was like in Hong Kong. I don’t know how to express how thankful I am to her, or how sorry I am for excluding Chinese from our conversations, and by extension, excluding her. 

Was this the future she imagined when she got the call from my mom to move to the United States to join her and her family, and meet her youngest granddaughter? When she packed her bags, did she ever foresee sharing family meals with a white man, listening to her family converse in another language, unintentionally leaving her out? 

It is typical in Chinese families for younger generations to take care of older generations as they age, so when I couldn’t respond to her that evening, I truly let her down. I wish I tried harder to retain Chinese but being born in this Anglocentric country with parents that speak English fluently made that nearly impossible.

Immigration takes its toll on families in different ways. In exchange for assimilation, my family paid the price of a generational language barrier. My grandmother and I will never have an ordinary conversation.

In return, I hope one day I can make her proud and reassure her that the cost of leaving her old life behind for this one was worth it.