The sign outside the chapel will bear three iterations of your name. All of which, even the romanized versions, carry with them the home we left when the sun was setting in our boyhood. This is how your grandchildren will know your name, and for the first time, they’ll see it written in our native script. There is no shame in this. Just as there is no shame in having reserved gatherings, this glaring gap between dining tables formed by friends and family leaning to the language they prefer, their backs to each other. They know the weight of today. This crippled tongue is just part of our story, something families face and will continue to face as long as people flee their country. At your wake, things will be somewhat different. Reverend Lazarus will lead the mass. He’ll pray over you as he does now, but he’ll have a translator, the pianist Cristine. She’ll speak in English so your kids and grandkids and their spouses will have words for their grief, find solace in your passing. Po Yeong, who will lend her arm to Lucy during the funeral arrangements, will want to stream the memorial service for your students and churchmates. But there won’t be internet to make it happen, which is a real shame. All the same, when your loved ones speak of you, they’ll speak to each other. They won’t valorize you because that’s never been your way. Everyone will simply take what they want from each story—your sharp memory even at 98, that you spoke in your mother tongue and found that you belonged, your smile, that you practiced and taught tai chi every morning, that you ate holding your bowl and chopsticks, as Ma had taught us, how generous you were with praise, that you called when they were sick. Luck goes both ways. Some will realize what they most value, and they’ll be free to live it out.


Exactly a year from today, you will enter a new chapter—the one you and Tin Sen made arrangements for 11 years ago, the one that came for your grandmothers, your mother, your mahjong friends, such is the fate of women, to bury their husbands, and not without watching them go, first the body then the bones—and for this new chapter, you will leave your humble home, leave it to Emerson and Nits and their kids, change your cellphone number, and you will live far from Soler, its potholed road coarsened by gravel, the beat-up tricycles you take to zip past cars at a standstill, the fruit stalls and peddlers with their rainbow-colored umbrellas, those damn pickpockets, the rows of hardware stores tucked in arcades of sooty concrete buildings, which is to say, you will live far from Luneta, kilometer zero, his center all these years in a foreign country; for a while, you will stay in an apartment near the CBD, which has a mahjong table in its game room, and your four other children will help you settle in: Charlie on all fours assembling an electric fan, Alex—he will be in town and stay with you for a few weeks—will help with the dishes; Evelyn will start doing the groceries for you, look for replacements of your Chinatown staples, like, believe it or not, pandesal as airy as King’s; Tess will often take you out with her family, including Ching Mm, widowed all these years, so you could enjoy the clear skies and the breeze outside the city, company, your grandchildren’s dogs, but there’s a fine line between distraction and acceptance: you can’t trick the body; your family will offer their arms to you and dodder with you, because they care for you, but their arms are not the same spotted, sinewy brown arms you’ve held and walked and stood with for sixty years; most nights, right after his passing, you’ll lie awake, your body not used to empty spaces on a bed, the absence of warmth, the hypnotic rhythm of a body breathing in and out, in, then out; you will lie still, empty and heavy, and lament, How the body depends on another to rest. Stephanie will endure this too, one day. But today, you must toast to her marriage to remember a time in love when death was nowhere in sight.


When people think about a patriarch’s death, they think about legacy. The idea that you should keep his memory alive through stories is in that vein. But many of us have no tales about a grandfather escaping a barren or war-ravaged country; we just know he did. We didn’t have the words to ask why, when, how, with whom, what did you leave behind; if we did, we still wouldn’t have understood the story. Your guakong didn’t have a rags-to-riches immigrant epic either. This is why you’ll rage when your mom brings up the eulogy. You’ll interpret it as having to paint a romantic image of a hero then unveil the man behind the legend—that’s how it’s done for tycoons. But you’ll be surprised. The frictions from barriers, gaps, and rank afflicted your family too. Your mom will admit not having known her papa well, her voice low, guttural like when she wept over betrayal, yet still tender. Part of our grief is mourning our lot—the absence of stories, this distance, our fantasies eluding us—and asking if this makes sense, if we have the right. But what crumples you now and will crumple you always is never seeing your guakong again. You’ll search for him everywhere. Because you’ve soaked in his copper skin, his gray hair and brows that whitened with time, his gummy smile, his upright posture, the calm air around him, his raspy voice of solid tone, you’ll find him. In your aku and your cousins. When you do tai chi again, you’ll think he’s with you. Every wedding anniversary, because loss will reacquaint itself, you’ll sit across from your husband and drink from it his presence.