Family Story
by Kenley Ellis
golden shovel after Robert Bly’s “The Loon”
We never knew where the next tears would be falling from.
The walk from our grandparents’ house to the water was not far,
but to a child that path was endless, swallowing any voice calling out
to signal the moment for return, silencing the beckoning echo of come in.
Sadness lurked quietly in those summers. Stealthily it seeped in the
hollow hallway between Waipo and Waigong’s 1 bedrooms, whirled in the center
of the room where we fled in frantic circles from the hot red sting of
piano practice; it lapped steadily on the shoreline. Deep in the
night, Waipo would scrub invisible stains till her fingers were rubbed naked
and bloody raw. We had never seen redness like that before except for the lake
days when Waigong would gut fish and their blood would run rivulets in the
creases of his knuckles. He spoke bitter behind her back. Her obsession was a loon’s
obsession, he said, meaning a deranged person, a mournful bird. We never saw her cry
even when her eyes must have been aching to water, scrubbing till the sun rose.
So, we carried her tears in ourselves. They would spring forth at random. It
might happen at the piano bench, after the fourth knuckle-rap; once, it was
on the dock, where the presence of a pretty red pocket-knife flipped from fascination to the
scolding of an exhausted grandmother, my tender palm, our confused children’s cry.
When I think of my grandmother now I am ashamed to admit that I think of
the blood on our hands more than I picture the definite figure of someone.
When we speak of our grandmother now, my brother and I, we speak of our Waipo who
always seemed so far away. Our outside grandmother, swallowed by the wide field owned
by the confines of her mind, sowed by Waigong’s crow bitterness. And our hands, stained very
red still, having held her sharp stifled tears and with them having done so little.
1“Waipo” and “Waigong” are the Mandarin words for maternal grandmother and maternal grandfather, respectively. Directly translated, however, these terms become “outside” grandmother and “outside” grandfather, referring to the way that maternal grandparents are not included in the traditional family unit, though paternal ones are. As such, many Chinese families use different names for their maternal grandparents — e.g., “Popo” and “Gonggong.” Mine does not.