By Claire Chen

The latch on the gate clicks open with a heavy clang, the screech of metal on metal. The first time I arrived in Beijing, almost ten years ago, the metal bars guarding the apartment’s front door had intimidated me, seemingly caging in something dangerous. They were foreign, just like this new country.

I am sixteen now, and the rusted gate welcomes me like an old friend. Swinging it open, I rap my knuckles on the door encased behind it and wait. 

My breaths come in short bursts of dry air, the heavy sweetness of cigarette smoke and pollution hitting the back of my throat. I hunch over with my hands gripping my knees, still woozy from my morning run. 

My aunt opens the door for me in one abrupt swing, and my childhood is on full display behind her. It is just past midday, the sun swollen through the glass balcony door, mosquitos buzzing against the mesh screens. As soon as I step into the apartment, a bubbling pot calls my aunt back into the kitchen, where she bustles around, calming the fire, stirring the pot, starting the blender. 

I head straight to my grandmother’s room. Amidst the agitated honking sounds rising from the Beijing streets, my aunt’s tireless shuffling around the kitchen, even the smoke drifting lazily from the pots on the stove, my grandmother’s room sits still, preserved. 

Nainai sits before an ancient television, her eyes closed. Sticky summer heat permeates the room, yet her frail hands clutch the worn quilt draped over her body. The curtains are drawn across the windows, and a small lamp glows on the nightstand. Squinting in the dim lighting, my eyes seek out the familiar furniture and decorations: the lucky red pillow embroidered with the word “fortune”, the full family photograph, the framed artwork that I had drawn as a child.

Finally, my eyes rest on the vase of fabric flowers my grandmother and I hand-crafted a few summers ago, still proudly displayed on her bedside table. Crossing the room, I lift a hand to touch the petals. As my eyes focus on a pale blue flower, I hesitate, my fingers quivering. 

I clasp my fingers around the thin plastic stem, plucking the flower from its resting place. As my fingers trail a winding path from the stem to the petals, the feel of nylon pulls me back through the years until I sit across from my grandmother, learning how to spin magic from thin strips of wire and vibrantly colored pantyhose. We started with a deep royal blue fabric, and I watched my grandmother’s fingers as they danced around the wire, weaving circles and patterns to form the framework of the flower. 

Huddled together at the cramped worktable, we slowly transformed the kitchen into an art gallery, filled with a mosaic of multicolored fabric scraps, each surface adorned with resplendent flowers. 

The royal blue flower in my hands has since dimmed into a faded, washed-out hue. The nylon has stretched thin, revealing the metal bones of the flower within. I fear that even the slightest touch might reduce the fabric to crumbles, the delicate beauty of the flower disintegrating into dust. 

Turning away from the vase, I realize my grandmother has awoken. She smiles contentedly, watching me reacquaint myself with her room. 

“Nainai, are you cold? Let me get you another blanket.” I rush over to the closet, but she waves a hand in my direction, softly shaking her head. 

“Come sit,” her voice rasps, cracking between words. 

As I settle beside her on the couch, I ask, “Nainai, have you been busy making flowers recently?”

Even before the words leave my mouth, I know the answer. From the moment I entered the room, I noticed her trembling fingers too unsteady to fold fabric, her thin wrist too weak to hold tools, her translucent skin too delicate to work wire. 

She leaves my question floating in the humid summer air. 

“Come here, make Nainai a flower.”

Slowly, I nod my head. 

I find the craft tools deep in the corner of the closet, wrapped in an old plastic grocery bag. The bag softly rips at my touch, dust flying into my eyes. 

My grandmother watches intently as I spread the tools out on the small coffee table beside her bed, running my fingers along the nylon pantyhose fabric used for the petals.

Breathing in, I let the familiar medicinal scent of the room wash over me, carefully carving this moment into my memory. I smile at my grandmother, and reach for a handful of wire and a square of faded yellow fabric. 

The sharp wire digs into the pad of my finger as I clumsily bend it into a squiggle, one curve at a time. I end up with a worm, miserable and shapeless. Closing my eyes, I think back to the intricate hydrangeas we had weaved together last year. I remember my grandmother effortlessly shaping the wire into individual petals before reaching over and helping me with mine, both of our hands wrapped around the metal, fingers interlocking and tangling and dancing in harmony. When I open my eyes, my hands alone hold the thin strip of wire, a lone dancer forced to dance this duet solo. I crush the next piece of wire in my fist, feeling the metal ends scrape against my palm. 

“Easy,” my grandmother says, “think easy. Let your hands do the work for you. They will always remember.”

I reach for another strip of wire, then another, and another. Each finished petal falls carelessly from my hand, forming a metal scrapyard on the table. 

As a child, I could never sit still for longer than a minute. While I liked to run and jump and dance, my grandmother seldom moved from her seat at the kitchen table. To keep me with her, she told me story after story, unfolding entire histories for me to hear. One day four summers ago, when I was twelve, she told me about her husband. 

My father has told me this story countless times before. For years, my grandfather had worked at a bank two blocks away from home and biked back to the apartment every evening. My father was only a toddler when his dad biked across a busy intersection and collided with an oncoming car. 

After growing up with the popular missing-parent-trope featured in so many novels and movies, I grew curious about my dad’s childhood, being raised by a single-mother. In middle school, I once asked him about it with the innocent hope of curing him of unresolved trauma. My questions were simple and blunt: Do you feel like you’re missing half of yourself? Do you feel like there is a hole in your identity where your father should be? He laughed and waved my questions away until we wore each other’s patience thin. I told him that of course he felt an absence in his life because he didn’t have a dad to take him to the movies or to go fishing. He replied that had they had enough money for the movies, he wouldn’t have needed a father anyways.

Sitting at the kitchen table, my grandmother told me her story of loss. After her husband’s funeral, she had no choice but to double her working hours at the local library. When my father tells the story, he neatly packages the story into a glorified lesson about hard work and persistence. Pride lines his voice as he recounts his childhood daily meals of white rice and cabbage, with a portion of one slab of meat per year. As my grandmother’s rolling rasp filled the room, I settled into the kitchen chair and fiddled with a handful of wire, preparing to hear her version of her story.

It began a week after the funeral, she said. She had lain awake at night for hours, wrapped in his comforter, squeezing her eyes shut. Without him beside her, everything fell out of rhythm, like playing the piano with one hand, five fingers stretching to fill in the silence, reaching for notes meant for the missing hand. The following days, my eldest aunt had waited for hours after school finished as my grandmother cooked dinner at home, thinking that her husband would pick up the children. 

My grandmother’s voice caught in her throat as she described the fifth day she had forgotten to pick up her eldest daughter from school after a full day of rain. Pregnant clouds hung low in the sky, and as she biked to the schoolyard, she felt as though she touched each cloud with the tip of her head as water poured down. She found her child wrapped in a soaked jacket, shivering and small with a face streaked with droplets, both rain and tears. As her daughter suffered through the week-long sick spell brought on by the rain, my grandmother commanded herself to reclaim her motherhood, to find a way through what she had thought impossible: raising three fatherless children. She learned to do with one body, one mind, what had previously been done by two. She named herself breadwinner, caretaker, and head of the family. 

I have just set down my fifth ruined petal when my aunt knocks on the closed bedroom door. 

“Ma,” she says, brushing past me with a plate of fruit, “Don’t forget to take your vitamins, okay? And I’ve told you so many times, you have to keep the door open. What would happen if you fell with all this wire lying everywhere?” 

I quickly scramble to push the wire into a neat pile on the table, but my grandmother merely waves her hand. 

“Hai zi, how can I fall when I’m sitting on the bed? I’m not that fragile yet. Leave us in peace. The girl is making flowers.”

My aunt has spent every single year of her life in her childhood home. Forty years ago, when she cleaned out her younger sister’s room, wishing her the best of luck in New York, she imagined that soon her brother would do the same for her. Years passed, and she found herself emptying her younger brother’s room, grudgingly helping him schedule his one-way trip, pack, and book his flight. Every morning afterwards, she awoke to a full day of caring for her elderly mother, paying rent, cooking dinner, and as her eyes opened to the sound of her alarm, she imagined her siblings across the world, safely asleep, sinking into their soft American dreams.

My aunt sighs deeply, scrunching up her shoulders before reminding me where the vitamins are and that it’s currently seven minutes to the hour. She eyes my broken flower petals before returning to the kitchen. 

“Close the door,” my grandmother urges. “You must concentrate now. Pick up the wire and feel it. You will remember what I taught you.”

There is life in her voice that I had not expected to hear. 

She looks me squarely in the eye and tells me that when life asks us to move on, we have to follow its lead. 

When the clock strikes noon, I shake out three pills from the orange pharmacy bottle and present them to my grandmother. She clicks her tongue and pushes herself upright in bed, back leaning against the headboard. 

“I don’t need those. Don’t listen to your aunt; she keeps talking nonsense.”

I clutch the container of pills tightly in my hand, unable to open my mouth and contradict her. My hand wavers in the air, but I force myself to look my grandmother in the eye. 

She stares back at me for a moment, powerful and stubbornly proud like a lioness, before breaking my gaze. 

When she looks away, face turned to the ground, I see the tufts of white hair clinging to the back of her head and the loose skin on the nape of her neck. Then she turns back towards me and clears her throat.

“Go on,” she urges me.

I glance at the closed door, then drop the pills back into their bottle. 

Closing my eyes, I pick up the wire and envision her coarse, wrinkled hands on mine, guiding my fingers to the right positions. I work quickly and carefully, fearing that with too strong a grasp I may splinter my grandmother’s trembling fingers. With her voice in the air and a ghost of her fingers between mine, I manage to tease out an approximation of the flower’s outline, then slowly pull the nylon fabric over the wire, praying that it won’t tear. 

In moments, the finished flower rests gently in my hands, work that is for the first time entirely my own. Without a word, I present this lively yellow hydrangea I have created to my grandmother. She accepts it from my hands with a satisfied smile, and twists it into her hair, where it peeks out from behind her ear. Her fingers tremble as she begins to weave her hair into a tight braid around the flower, and I quickly reach over to help. Her hair is short and thinned, making braiding an easy task. I tie off the braid and sit back to take in my grandmother. 

I see eyes that crinkle at the edges when she is happy; I see the gray wart that protrudes from just above her right eyebrow; I see her thin lips set in a smile. I see my father’s mother; I see my grandmother who has taught me to make flowers and dumplings and how to refuse to give up. I see my past ten summers, the lanzhou lamian restaurant down the street, the bicycles and electric scooters, and I see the same sunset that visits my home in Pennsylvania, except now through a hazy orange, clouded by the fog of the smoking neighbors lining the streets. I see my golden flower twisted into her white-gray hair. 

Where the flower stands tall and strong, my grandmother droops, back bent and swaying like a willow. I realize with a chill that the sharp ends of the wire could pierce through her translucent skin. I know that even if the flower drew blood, she would keep it there, a golden crown atop her white hair. I see it in my mind, the silver wire lodging itself beneath her skin, a constant aching pain that would confine her to her bed, that would confine my aunt to this apartment. I see blood as red as the fortune sign on the front door, red as the vase of roses we had made together years ago. Everything in this fated apartment is red, so red, and I can no longer stand to be in this room. 

I stand, and the sudden movement brings a dizzy rush of blood to my head. Stumbling over to the pill bottle, I shake out three pills again and set them down on my grandmother’s nightstand.

Her sleepy smile slips off, and only now do I truly see her face, with her wrinkle lines no longer smoothed over by a curve of the lips. She only looks at me, her eyes tired, as if she doesn’t have the breath in her to argue.

“I have to use the bathroom,” I say. I cut my eyes over to the pills sitting next to her, saying, “Please.” 

I find my aunt wiping down the kitchen table, and I tell her that Nainai is taking her pills. My aunt puts the cleaning rag down and stretches, massaging the back of her neck. 

“My mother is a proud woman,” my aunt says. 

I nod, and look my aunt in the eye as I say, “It is not easy taking care of someone so strong.” 

As I watch my aunt bustle around the kitchen, back hunched over the cutting board as she prepares my grandmother’s favorite pork dumplings for dinner, I realize that my mind doesn’t have to reach far to imagine the family’s future without its matriarch. Beijing may pause for me when I fly home, but the time in this apartment plods on as always. The changes have crept up on me, escaping my notice until this very moment, as I watch my aunt fill three cracked bowls with piping hot dumplings. 

When I return to my grandmother’s bedroom, the pills have disappeared from the nightstand, leaving me and Nainai alone in the room. She pats the space next to her on the bed, and I sit with her, careful not to lean into her. Even without the question of her frailty, I have already grown too tall to curl into her embrace. Instead, I rest my hand atop my grandmother’s, feeling the delicate vessels blossoming from her skin, feeling the promise of blood beneath. 

–

Claire Chen is a seventeen-year-old student from New Jersey. She is an alum of the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop, and her work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Writers and The New York Times.