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      
               
Her hands off the frame have been holding me, my grandmother, my mother. 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.