An elder scolded me for my inability to speak Cantonese: ‘You must learn.’ My father heard my elder’s words and said nothing. My shame was as much his as it was mine.

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I have three missed calls from my mother. When I finally call her back, she doesn’t even greet me.

Do you know 嫲嫲 is in hospital?

What happened? Do I need to fly out?

Well, there’s only one reason you’ll have to. You might want to think about it.

The matriarch of our family is 95. My family tell me she hasn’t been eating or drinking, sleeping 18 hours a day. Later, they tell me she’s depressed. She’s stopped eating and drinking because she wants to die.

I book a one-way flight. A week later, I’m on a plane at 6am from Wellington to Hong Kong.

*

The day I was born, my grandmother visited a fortune teller in Hong Kong. Though I lay in a hospital cot thousands of miles away in London, his charts mapped the position of the stars and planets at the exact moment I was born, and his corresponding papers listed every potential destiny that lay in wait, as well as the elemental make-up of my being. From this, he concluded, I was missing metal. 

“Choose a name with metal to replace it,” he told my grandmother.

She chose 金 – gold – the most precious, the base character which depicts all metals in written Chinese. Isn’t that so telling? That all metals can only be defined in relation to gold? The name she selected was 李鎧l儀 — Lee Hoi Yee. Lee was our family name, Hoi had the character for gold added to the character for victory, and Yee was a character used frequently for girls, meaning “elegance” or “poise”. 

My brother, born a couple of years before me, had been missing wood. The name my grandmother chose for him was 李楝樑 — Lee Tung Leung, meaning “pillar” and “beam”. It was a symbol of stability and righteousness, of a well-behaved child. My grandfather had thought it was too complicated to write. 

“They live in the UK,” he’d said, picking up the Chinese Yellow Pages. “He’ll never be able to write such a complicated name. I’ll find something better.” The Yellow Pages were arranged with the simplest characters at the front and most complicated at the back. He began to flick through.

“哎吔，you only care about it being simple? Fine, then why not just call the children 李一一，李二二，李三三？” my grandmother had snapped.

While not exactly poetic, there was no arguing that the characters for “one”, “two”, and “three” were easy to write. My grandfather put the Yellow Pages down.

My brother lives in the countryside. It takes me an hour and a half to travel from his house to the hospital in Hong Kong, first on foot to the closest town, then on a bus to the nearest MTR station (the city-wide rail transit system), a change to the Island Line, and finally a short walk through the busy markets in Wan Chai. Visiting hours at the hospital are from 11.30am to 12.30pm, followed by 5pm to 8pm. Only two visitors are allowed at a time. I opt for the morning shift, giving my aunt a much-needed break.

My grandmother had been discharged but returned the next day with aspiration pneumonia. She still isn’t eating much: her dementia has affected her sense of smell, and she can only taste strong flavours. 

When she sees me, she starts coughing. Don’t come too close. You shouldn’t stay too long.

You don’t want me to stay?

There are lots of people here.

That’s OK. I’ll stay for a bit.

OK. You should go now.

I’ll go soon. Are you tired?

I look horrible.

No, you don’t. You look beautiful. 嫲嫲 好靚。My pronunciation is terrible; the tones are all wrong. 

She pats my hand. OK, it’s better if you go now.

*

The first time my mother told me the story of my Chinese name, I was 10. Escaped to my bedroom, I stood in front of my floor-length mirror and tried to see my missing parts. 

Was it in my nose? My feature that matched my father’s side of the family so well, but which a girl at my private London school had pressed hard with the pointed tip of her finger, while she declared, “Flat nose.” Perhaps it was in my eyes? Too wide to be “full” Chinese, as I was often accused, but narrow enough that teenage boys pulled at the edges of their own, screaming, “Ching, chang, chong!” when we passed by.

“We should make T-shirts,” my mother said when someone bellowed “arigato” at us for the thousandth time. “They’ll say, ‘We Are Not Japanese’.”

In London, I was one of two Chinese girls in my entire year, the last year of my primary school. We weren’t friends, though our mothers tried to force us together. In Hong Kong at age 10, I stood half a head taller than most of the people around me. They knew from my clothes, my hair, my accent, my body that I didn’t belong. 「鬼佬，」 they whispered: foreign devil.

Had I been born missing an element, or with no identity at all? Was my missing metal a core part of my being that I would never have, meaning I would never belong in either land I called mine? 

Whenever I told people I was visiting Hong Kong for the holidays, they’d smile. Sometimes they’d touch me lightly, as if I were a statue in a place of worship; as if I could absolve them of their sins. 

“It must be so nice to go home,” they’d say.

“I was born and grew up in London.”

“Oh.” And then they’d remove their hand and say something like, “Still,” and the sentence would hang there, until I scrambled to finish it for them so they wouldn’t feel awkward. So I wouldn’t feel any less Chinese than I already did.

The next time I see my grandmother, she’s in much better spirits. She beams when she sees me, reaching for my hand.

I’m so surprised! I didn’t expect to see you!

I crouch next to her bed and put my cheek on her hand.

She laughs. You came all this way just to see 嫲嫲？

Of course!

My daughter, she shouts around the ward, she came from Los Angeles!

Granddaughter, I say. From New Zealand.

Oh, yes. She chuckles, touches her forehead with her fingertips. New Zealand. New Zealand. A few minutes later, she calls out again, My daughter came from Los Angeles!

New Zealand, I say again.

Oh, yes. New Zealand. New Zealand. She touches her forehead with her fingertips. I get muddled.

I know. It’s OK.

She holds my hand tightly. I am so surprised to see you. I really did not expect to see you today! 嫲嫲 is so happy!

I’m happy to see you! I’ll come every day.

Every day? She laughs, brings my hand to her cheek and presses it against her skin. It’s soft and paper thin. 嫲嫲 is so happy to see you. My baby, my baby, my baby.

*

When my mother told me the story of my name again, I was 18. She’d changed the meaning of the words: it was no longer “Golden Victory Elegance”, now it was much more poetic.

“It could be translated as ‘The Grace of God and His Armour’. So, if you had an English equivalent, it would be Grace. You can tell people that. Your name means Grace.”

But that was worse. Grace was such an English name. It conjured up visions of rolling green hills, and a blonde-haired, blue-eyed little girl. It wasn’t me, with my blunt, black bob, and fringe my mother cut with kitchen scissors while perching me on the edge of the bathroom sink, my bottom falling into the basin. 

I tested the name out, the letters falling off my tongue as foreign as the Cantonese I stumbled over. Unlike the language I should’ve been able to speak but couldn’t, English felt so flat. Cantonese had mountains and valleys, but my ear could only hear the long, straight road of English.

Was my untuned ear another sign of the metal I lacked? I tried to memorise the way others’ voices lifted and fell with each word and repeated them as whispers under my covers at night, mouth muffled against the sheets, inhaling and exhaling cotton with each syllable. But when I tried them again out loud, somehow I was always off-key.

What was the point in trying? I had no gift or need for it. I filled the hole with other passions and tried to forget my failings.

My grandmother is discharged from hospital again. The infection is gone, but she’s still frail and eating is a struggle.

I know I need to eat more, she tells me. I am trying.

You just have to try.

Sitting at her bedside, I show her photos from my childhood. Here she is, holding me on her shoulder as a newborn. Here, we’re looking at each other and laughing. Here, my brother and I are sitting on a set of swings, she’s bending towards the camera, one hand on each of us. She’s wearing a white blouse and pencil skirt. She’s so glamorous.

She touches her finger to the photo, the tip resting on her face in miniature. I look so nice here.

You do! 好靚。

She taps the photo. So nice.

When a photo of my father – her eldest son – comes up, she pauses. She touches his image. 阿德。He’s not here anymore. He’s gone already. She looks at me for confirmation and touches him again. Then she takes the photo between two shaky fingers and passes it back to me.

When we look at them again a couple of weeks later, she doesn’t recognise my father, uncle, or aunt. I don’t know who any of these people are, she says.

*

When I was 18, I lived in Malaysia. On my gap year, my parents had arranged for me to work in a school for children with learning difficulties, run by a local church. The pastor was a friend, and his three children were around my age.

The flight from London to Kuala Lumpur took 12 hours, followed by a short 45-minute flight to Ipoh, during which my cup of orange juice tipped over and spilled all over my jeans. Hot, sticky, and sleep deprived, I’d emerged from luggage claim to the entire Chinese church youth group, as well as the pastor and his wife.

“Welcome!” they’d shouted.

“Everyone came to greet you!” said the pastor. “She doesn’t speak Chinese,” he told the waiting group, who’d all stared at me. 

There had been murmurs and whispers. “OK, see you later!” they’d said, and then the group waved, turned around, and left.

“They’re going around greeting people for Chinese New Year. They wanted to see what you look like,” the pastor had said, laughing.

I learnt to communicate in broken Cantonese, English, and Bahasa Malay. The children in my classes — as with most schools in Malaysia — spoke a mixture of Cantonese, Mandarin, English, and Bahasa Malay, so every lesson had to be translated four times. I even learnt some Mandarin, though I never got the hang of Hokkien — the unfamiliar syllables felt slippery, shifting too quickly from my comprehension to give my brain time to hold onto them.

My Cantonese pronunciation was terrible, and my vocabulary had been limited to the odd word or phrase learnt from childhood, but for the first time I was surrounded by Chinese friends who were patient and accommodating. They didn’t make fun of or scold me when I stumbled over my words and, surprisingly, I’d begun to understand the majority of what they were saying. Was this what it felt like to be whole?

One evening, someone asked me my Chinese name. 

「李鎧儀，」I’d said, but they’d frowned.

“What? Say it again.”

My confidence had wavered. Wasn’t I saying it right? My own name?「李鎧儀。」

They’d shrugged. “I don’t know what that means.”

My shame had stung. Even after all the time I’d spent there, I didn’t belong. I was still missing something.

When I show my grandmother the characters for my Chinese name, she frowns and taps her finger on each one. So complicated, she says, shaking her head. This is very difficult.

You chose this name for me — do you remember?

Yes. Very complicated. So hard to write. She sounds the characters out and shakes her head, sighing.

A few days later, she’s readmitted to hospital. She’s still not eating enough, only a few teaspoons of various purées a day. Some days she refuses to eat at all, covering her mouth with her palm and making distressed sounds, or pulling the sheet over her head. My aunt discusses tube feeding with the doctor, but he says it’ll severely reduce my grandmother’s quality of life. At 95, it isn’t worth it.

A decision is made: no tube feeding. No more intervention. We know it’s the right thing to do.

I’m back at my grandmother’s bedside in hospital, holding her hand. 食少少，I encourage – eat a little – holding a teaspoon of thickened chicken broth to her lips or butternut squash soup or spinach purée or thickened water. Sometimes she takes it from me and smiles. Sometimes she gets upset. I try anyway.

I moisturise and massage her hands, but she holds them up in front of her face. Look at this. You see this? She touches the bones that protrude through her skin. 哎吔。Looks so terrible. Look. She presses her finger into the gap between the bones. So deep.

That’s why you have to eat more, I tell her. I loop my finger and thumb around her wrist. She’s tiny. See? So skinny! You have to eat more.

She smiles and pats my hand, pressing her fingers against the fleshy meat. This one is so nice. See? Not like this one. She holds her hand up in the air again, fingers splayed, as if she can see through her diminished flesh in the light.

Over the weeks, I learn to communicate in a mixture of English and broken Cantonese. 要唔要？– want or don’t want? – 好食？– delicious? – 攰唔攰？– are you tired? 

I don’t know when I managed to pick up all these little phrases. Dredged up from the depths of my childhood, they aren’t the sorts of things adults say to one another, but in many ways, she’s like a child.

She looks at me as I’m feeding her. You have to feed me like a baby.

That’s OK. I like spending time with you.

Look, look at the man over there, she says, nodding at the toothless man in the bed opposite. 

He’s being fed congee one spoon a time, gurning away at the rice porridge. His face is sunken and shrivelled. 

Look at that man, she says. I don’t want this.

I look at him again. Rice drips down his chin onto the bed sheets.

There were so many reasons not to learn: my failed repetitions only made my mother sigh and say the words again, louder, slower, more forcefully; my grandfather shouted at me in the car for having a lazy tongue, my throat too hoarse and tongue swollen from crying to make any comprehensible sense; my friends laughed at my poor attempts. “What?” they said between giggles. “What did you say?”

My stubbornness was well reasoned. “I’ll never live in Hong Kong or China, what’s the point in learning?” I said, or, “I live in New Zealand now. I barely have any Cantonese-speaking friends. Besides, it’s so hard to learn when you’re older.” But all I was doing was creating excuses to avoid confronting my missing pieces. Too many others were already doing that for me.

One New Year’s Eve in Hong Kong, already in my mid-20s, an elder had scolded me for my inability to speak Cantonese. “You must learn,” she’d said, each word punchy and deliberate. “When my children were little, I would make them stand in front of the mirror. I would ask them: ‘What are you?’ and they would say, ‘Chinese.’ ‘Well then,’ I would say, ‘you’d better start acting like it.’”

My father heard my elder’s words and said nothing. My shame was as much his as it was mine. What element had he been born without, I wondered. How had it affected his life? Was I the result of his own shortcomings? I bit my tongue and swallowed the bitterness of our failings.

*

Even in her less lucid moments, my grandmother knows me. She looks at me and mouths the words, I love you, then, slowly and out loud, 你好中意。

The translation isn’t quite the same as the English. It’s literally something more like, “I like you so much”, but the meaning is deeper. It’s more like, “I like you more than I have words to express”. She’s been saying the words to me since the day I was born. I’ve known you for a long time, she sometimes tells me, but again the translation isn’t quite right. It’s more like, “I have loved you since the moment you came into the world”.

你好中意，I repeat, and she smiles broadly.

Your Chinese is so good! Where did you learn this?

I don’t really know. All I know is that with her, I want to try, even if I get it wrong, even if it’s less than perfect.

I learnt for you, I say, stroking her hair, feeling the wrinkles on her forehead. I learnt because I love you.

You love me?

Of course I do. 

She gave me my name. She replaced my missing metal. She made me whole. I take her hand.

You love me because I love you.

Yes, I say, and my hand fits in hers perfectly, like it always belonged there. 你好中意。