And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance. — On Death, Kahlil Gibran
Nine days before I threw my last mushroom party in October, a ping on my family’s Whatsapp group chat informed me that my paternal grandma, who we called nai nai, had four to eight weeks to live. I stared at my phone, which was exploding with the endless emails, spreadsheets, and texts that go into party-planning. Decisions that once seemed so important faded to black as my attention focused on the tiny gap of time between those single-digit numbers. Six to eight weeks. How quickly could I press pause on my life in Los Angeles and fly back to Singapore, where nai nai and my parents live? The guilt I carry for living my selfish little life in America–where I am free to pursue professional success and personal pleasures without any familial responsibilities–became untenable. I had to go home.
I always imagined that when my surviving grandmothers approached the end of their lives, I would move back to Singapore for a while. It seemed like the time had come. Nai nai had just turned 87, and her health had been deteriorating for the past year. A hospital visit revealed an inoperable tumor in her stomach that the doctors said would eventually kill her, and now he’d given us a deadline.
The funny thing is, I barely knew nai nai. Like many Asian women who came of age in the 50s, she was an emotionally guarded person, reluctant to speak much about herself. She preferred to express care through her exquisite cooking, which married the elegant flavors of Southern China, where her parents were from, with the spices of Singapore, where she was born. Our conversations mostly revolved around what I wanted to eat and whether I’d gotten married yet. My prodigal return to Singapore felt like the last chance to cross an invisible threshold that had kept her inner life hidden from me this whole time.
I booked my flight and looked for a voice recorder. Maybe the interview skills I’d picked up as a journalist would help me crack nai nai’s hardened exterior to reveal the mechanisms of her soul. If I’ve charmed some of the most famous film directors, politicians, and actors into divulging their secrets, shouldn’t nai nai be a relative breeze?
Interviewing our silent generation grandparents in their twilight years also seemed to be a popular rite-of-passage for millennials, and I turned to friends for advice on what questions to ask. “Ask for life lessons,” a friend who’d just lost his grandmother said, “but don’t get too philosophical.” Another mushroom medicine woman said something that still stays with me: “When grandma lifts up, everything changes.” I wanted to know what that meant.
I made it to Singapore during monsoon season, when the country felt wild and haunted. Late at night, wild civet cats danced on the roof of my family’s home as I lay awake listening to their yowling, and the spooked maid whispered that she heard voices calling to her in the dark. Thunderstorms interrupted every afternoon with angry explosions, and I stared dumbly at the black sky, wondering if I was crazy for committing to stay here for three months—the longest I’d been back since leaving for college.
I found nai nai in the living room where, as a child, I would visit her most Sundays. She’d refused to spend her final weeks in the hospital with its cold medical devices, and her house, which I associated with rich aromas of coconut curries and wonton noodles, now smelled of the sweet soap that a faithful maid used to bathe her emaciated limbs. She raised her hand to greet me silently, and her jade bangle slipped below her elbows. My dad and the maid had moved her mattress in front of the TV because she was too weak to stand, and the chatter of Cantonese soap operas and talk shows filled the days like a lullaby. I plopped down on the couch next to her, and we both took a fitful nap.
Nai nai had dementia, which made it difficult for me to tell if she knew she was dying. In the following days, she would ask me the same question again and again: “how old am I?” When I told her, she’d nod as if the number 87 contained some great wisdom. “Nai nai is old already,” she would tell me gravely in Chinese, then fall silent. I took this as an acknowledgment that her life had been well lived. I tried over and over to start a conversation with her, my tongue tripping over Chinese words I’d learned as a child but since forgotten. The language barrier between us felt like an invisible pane of glass that kept us from connecting. I downloaded AI-enhanced translation apps on my phone, squinting at alien phrases and rushing to find the appropriate tones. I was met with her confusion, indifference, and exhaustion.
Undeterred, I decided to spend the night. Maybe if I could catch her at a good time when she was feeling energetic and chatty, she’d spill the stories I wanted to hear. One evening I plopped down next to her and began my interrogation: “Nai nai, who were your parents?”
“Who were my parents?” She parroted back, her eyes fixing on me with a skeptical stare.
My childlike Mandarin came out with: “Um, what was your father like?”
“My father?” She furrowed her brows, then exclaimed, “He was a good person!” in a tone that suggested that this should’ve been obvious. Her eyes slid back to the television screen. I could tell that she didn’t care to understand why I was asking these strange questions.
I became tongue-tied and suddenly overcome with shyness. There would be no further questions tonight.
Eventually, I turned my questions to my father, who’d watched my stumbling attempts with bemusement. He told me that nai nai had a childhood straight out of a dark Confucian fairytale: her mother died shortly after she was born, and she was raised by a stepmother who isolated her from her cousins, and beat her just for falling asleep at the dinner table. Her early life was marked by a lonely, love-deprived brutality that was accepted as normal according to the social customs of her time. Nonetheless, she grew into a beauty, and after graduating from high school, she worked in a factory, where a wealthy man who drove by in his luxury car every day attempted to court her. This man could have dramatically changed her fortunes, but as nai nai liked to recount with a twinkle in her eye, she’d rejected him because he was too… short. Instead, she married my grandfather, a tall, handsome man who’d been orphaned at a young age. “In a sense,” my dad said, “They were two ‘broken’ people who worked their way to building a home.”
These little crumbs of stories I managed to collect about nai nai’s life began to shift the way I saw her. Growing up, I was often afraid and resentful of her criticism, which began at a young age: you’re too dark from swimming, she’d told me, inspecting my bronzed skin. Your shoulders are so broad. Look at your hair, it’s so dry and ugly. You’ll never attract a husband. Even back then, I knew that I should laugh off these insults because marriage was not my ultimate goal. But her words still dug into a deeper fear I harbored during those awkward years when I was already so full of self-hatred: that I was unlovable, fundamentally flawed by design, a freak beyond repair.
In the many years since I’d left Singapore and started writing about drugs, psychedelics had revealed to me how trauma and healing are generational cycles, and the mysterious forces that shaped nai nai’s life may have contributed to my own pain. Maybe, the mushrooms had whispered to me during a macrodose trip a few years ago, nai nai and I were actually cut from the same cloth. We shared this trait of raw honesty—an ability to be direct about our thoughts no matter how inflammatory or awkward. She was a woman whose bluntness cut like a knife, and her generational paradigm had mutated her values into a fixation on feminine beauty as the key to improving a woman’s material conditions. My aptitude to speak from my chest without fear had allowed me instead to become a writer. In a way, this quest to understand her was actually an attempt to know myself better—to make myself whole.
One night, I was riding an empty bus to downtown Singapore when the rain came in. Out the window, I watched the white sheets sweep the asphalt like curtains, sitting back and letting the sadness seep in. I arrived at a mall that was due for demolishment, most of its stores shuttered and guttered, covered in dust. A few shops, however, linger on in a strange afterlife, and up a rickety escalator, behind a pair of blackout doors, was a dance studio called CUN. A friend who practiced the avant-garde dance form of Japanese butoh had invited me to an open gathering of dancers that happened here from time to time where anyone is invited to join their practice of free-form movement. Tonight, a group of musicians were honoring a friend who’d recently passed away, performing a noise dirge so loud that it drowned out all thought as soon as I stepped in.
The red lights and flickering strobes created the atmosphere of a purgatorial underworld. Shadows of bodies crawled slowly around the room, contorting into clenched poses then releasing into frenzied headbanging. I kicked off my shoes and started moving, celebrating the freedom of my body as I thought of my grandmother lying so still on her deathbed. Dissociation from feelings is often my standard coping mechanism but dance is how I turned the grief switch on, metabolizing it through movement. This was the only time I was able to cry until long after grandma’s funeral.
Grandma passed away in January—sixteen weeks after the doctor’s deadline. She fought for her life till the end, and in a state of terminal delirium during those final days, she let loose a torrent of recollections about people she had known. She spoke in Cantonese, the Chinese dialect she was most comfortable with, and since I only understand Mandarin, her words remained inscrutable to me. Only my father, leaning his ears toward her lips in a way that reminded me of a child, could fully process what she was saying. “What is it?” I implored him, imagining that this was the confession I’d been waiting for. “Nothing important,” he said.
In the end, she slipped away when no one was watching, as if she didn’t want to bother anyone. Only the maid, while checking on her long after everyone had gone to bed, had noticed a few tears on her cheeks and black vomit on her lips. When my father woke up to check her pulse, he realized she was gone.
None of it happened the way I’d imagined, but in her own way, she’d left me with a few invaluable lessons: people die the way they lived, nothing really changes at the end except, perhaps, the ways we choose to perceive them. There is no greater intimacy than being with someone as they slip away, watching these most vulnerable moments when the body gives up but the spirit still clings on. Sometimes it is enough just to be there, bearing the painful privilege of being a witness.
*This story originally appeared in DoubleBlind Issue No. 11
