First time I held my mother’s mother’s mother’s hands was several months before her

death. Her skin feels rhizomatic with knots, scars, and marks. When I whispered 太姥姥 “great-grandma” next to her, her hands was shaking in the most unrecognizable style. She wasn’t able to speak.


“What does your voice sound like? You would be speaking in a dialect of your home before you married. Your daughter and granddaughter and great granddaughter’s home How do I learn to talk to you in the language we both converse now?”





After marrying her husband, her wealthy Li family joined together with the similarly wealthy Ma family, but soon . The photo of her wedding was grand, a moment when she has. The moment marked the explosive momentum of giving is going to set off.

Her hands off the frame have been holding me, my grandmother, my mother. Have been letting go of my dying grandfather, her dying husband. The same hands were holding her golden wedding ring in exchange for a meal for her children when fleeing her home in northeastern from the Second World War. The same hands were putting a tiny piece of tourmaline in my mother’s hands, the only things that’s small enough so she didn’t have to discard during the war and couldn’t be taken away in that scourge.


The act of giving, the inscrutable generosity of a mother deeply set in her most hidden saddest loss.