The Parting
When we left China in 2000, my parents and I, we carried with us the hope of a better future. However, we also left behind someone irreplaceable.
On our final evening together, we went out with my great-grandmother. We walked slowly, gently, not making a scene of parting, just sharing time the way we always had. When the evening ended, we rode with her in a taxi back to her long-term care facility. That ride, quiet, tender, unspoken, has never left me. I remember the streetlights brushing across her face, her calm posture beside me, the soft hum of the city outside, and the ache of knowing what we could not say.
No one told her we were leaving for good. We couldn’t. The words caught in our throats. Instead, we smiled, helped her to the door, and watched the taxi drive away.
After we arrived in Canada, my mother called the care facility to check on her. That was when we learned what had happened. After realizing we were gone, my great-granny had gone out on her own, wandering through the neighbourhood, asking where we were. “I searched for you in the neighbourhood,” she said over the phone, her voice trembling. “I looked everywhere for you.”
We all broke into tears. It was not just a goodbye delayed, but a pain deepened by absence. My great-granny was left in the care of my aunt and great-aunt — people who tried, but who did not fully understand her. They lacked her stillness, her discipline, her quiet strength.
Even from across the ocean, she remained the centre of our world. And even in that small room where she waited for news, she remembered us — and searched.
What Might Have Been
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if my great-granny had gone to Taiwan.
Not for politics, not for allegiance, but for memory. For the hope that, across the strait, someone might still have remembered Gao Lingwei with respect — that the family name might have been preserved, not erased.
However, no invitation came. No message. No hand reached across the sea to say: “Come, you are still part of us.”
Even among those who bore the same surname, among the descendants of Gao Lingwei himself — whose eldest branch my mother had marked as “Taiwan” on the family tree compiled by my grandfather — there was silence. She was not part of their story. Perhaps they had forgotten her. Perhaps they had chosen to. Perhaps it was impossible to contact us from across the strait.
And so she stayed. In a place that had once been hers, but no longer welcomed her. In a city where her legacy had become a burden. She stayed, not because she lacked the strength to leave, but because she had no place to go.
And in that staying, she did something greater than escape:
She endured. She remembered. She protected what could still be passed on.
It wasn’t the better path. It wasn’t the easier one, but it was the one that gave me this voice.