The Last Summer

On Thursday, I caught a fish in Columbia Lake. I had been fishing there ever since I learnt how to fish at the beginning of this year, and had spent at least 20 hours on this water, but this was the only fish I got, and likely the last one.

August, who taught me how to fish earlier this year, was not a big fan of Columbia Lake. He would drive to Conestoga River or Grand River. I would accompany him on these trips, but when he was on his bouldering day or otherwise busy, I wouldn’t bother to go that far alone. Unlike him, who claimed that fishing wasn’t fun if you didn’t catch any, and whose ultimate goal was to eat the big fatty fish he caught, I was content simply to spend time casting and reeling.

“Have you heard of microfishing?” I asked him once.

“No.”

“You use tiny lures to catch tiny fish. I’ve seen a lot of YouTube videos.”

“I want to catch big fish,” he said.I was wrapping up my degree and preparing to move to Pittsburgh. I had defended my PhD thesis on Monday, and the rest of the week was a bliss. Every day felt like a weekend. I spent mornings at Tim Hortons reading random papers, then went to the Waterloo Public Library and flipped through The New Yorker, Toronto Life, Ontario OUT of DOORS—a fishing and hunting magazine—or whatever magazine with an interesting cover story.

The day before the defense, I asked August to order pizza for the people attending in person. The crowd was smaller than expected, so instead we went to Grad House. The heat had subsided, and there was no trace of the wildfire smoke that had blanketed the sky days earlier. We sat on the balcony in a gentle breeze. It was a beautiful day.

I don’t remember ever seeing the entire lab as wasted as it was that day. Just as I was thinking it was enough beer and it was time to go back, Jack proposed to order another pitcher, Edward chimed in, and Daisy said she could have more. I later marveled about this with Ende; he said he had been waiting for a paper’s reviews to come back that day and wasn’t in the mood to work anyway.

By dinnertime I was full of beer. I said I was leaving to get a bite at McDonald’s, and everyone came along. We sat at a children’s round table with coloring sheets and pencils. After the meal, Daisy picked up a sheet and started coloring. Ende did too, with less patience and more enthusiasm. I had eaten McDonald’s the day before the defense because I wanted something simple. Now I was having it again, and I would have more later that week.

On Friday morning, Mom texted me: Grandpa was very sick. I immediately video-called my parents.

“He is not dying anytime soon,” Dad said, assuring me. “But if you come now, he might still be able to recognize you.”

I told them I would be back the next week.

A few weeks of saying goodbye were suddenly packed into one day. I told the lab I had a family emergency and would leave the next morning. My message crossed with one from Ende, who wanted the lab to eat sushi with him. He had a habit of going to a sushi restaurant every quarter of the year.

“Okay, I’ll ask the lab to lunch at Jinzakaya for you,” Ende said. Inevitably, with such short notice, some people could not make it. Ende, being a perfectionist, would not tolerate such imperfection.

“You are staying here for tomorrow’s lunch, right?”

“Yeah, but I can’t linger too long after lunch tomorrow,” I said.

After another flurry of messages, he gave up. “Fuck it. Let’s eat sushi today.”As I drove to Jinzakaya with Ende, he looked at me and said,

“You don’t seem particularly sad. I guess this family emergency is not terribly bad.”

I told him what was going on.

“Are you close to your grandfather?” he asked.

I paused. I badly wanted to say yes. But my recent memories of Grandpa, accumulated through yearly visits to China, were muddled with his cognitive decline. He did not speak much, and I could not remember whether he had ever been talkative.

“So are you two close?” Ende asked again.

“My grandparents speak a dialect that I don’t speak very well,” I said, deflecting the question.

“There you go. You two are not close,” Ende said, jokingly matter-of-fact. “My grandparents speak Wenzhounese, and I couldn’t understand a word they said.”

“Right,” I said, appreciating his honesty. Most conversations with Ende were like that.

Jianlin and I originally thought that he would leave Waterloo before me. When he told me he had accepted a job in Toronto, the next thing he said was that he was moving on Sunday and the job started on Tuesday. We had both been traveling that summer, and news was slow to arrive.

My sudden departure brought an even quicker end to our two years as roommates. As I packed, Jianlin carried up the cardboard boxes he had been hoarding in the basement.

“Please use them. Otherwise I’ll have to throw them away, and my effort will have been in vain,” he said.

Things I found distracting often gave him comfort and security. He saved cardboard, advertising mail, and other odds and ends that I had trained myself not to notice. In fairness, he was probably just as frustrated by how little attention I paid to concerns he considered significant. I recall that the day before we left for a conference in Singapore, I heard a noise in the kitchen. I went downstairs and found him standing on the kitchen counter, fiddling with the blinds.

“What are you doing?”

“Closing the blinds. The house will be empty for two weeks,” he said.

I was a little speechless at how seriously he worried about break-ins. All I had ever seen around our student-housing complex were groundhogs and skunks, with coyotes howling in the evening.

We were very different people and yet, by the grace of God, had lived peacefully under the same roof for two years. I thanked him for the boxes as they were exactly what I needed at the moment. It was too late to tell him that I didn’t like them.

Jianlin and I had our last dinner at a Subway in the nearby strip mall. Jianlin didn’t have much of an opinion on the nuances of Subway sandwiches, so I ordered two sandwiches with the same toppings. He categorized Subway sandwiches as “boring food” and was always curious about how I found them “interesting”.

We hadn’t talked in months, and there was a lot to catch up on. I knew he would be interested in my recent U.S. green card application, so I brought him up to speed. He was always drawn to policies and procedures, paying meticulous attention to graduate school regulations, credit card rules, and immigration policies around the world.

“You need to satisfy three merit criteria to apply for EB-1A.” He held up three fingers, a habit of his. “What did you use for the peer-review requirement?”

“Actually, I applied for EB-2 NIW,” I said. “My lawyer found a White House paper listing ten computer-science research areas of national importance and asked me to pick two.”

“Two areas.” He held up two fingers. “Which ones?” So I told him.

We talked about his future in Toronto: renting versus buying, upcoming tennis lessons, and his plan to learn “jazz, rock, and funk guitar”—“the things young people play nowadays.” Finally, he asked:

“What is your plan in Pittsburgh?”

For months, I had told people about my plan in private first, then announced it at several lab meals, hoping the news would gradually reach everyone. I was a little surprised that he had not heard. However, I was also unsurprised.

“I’m going to try to be a writer for a year,” I said.

He nodded.

“I’m going to write novels,” I added, sensing that he wasn’t getting it.

“Oh, I thought you meant writing papers.” He took a bite of his sandwich. “So what are you going to do afterward?”

I knew he still did not understand. “It depends on whether my first book sells,” I said. I meant it sincerely, though I knew how improbable it must have sounded.

He paused.

“You must not be serious,” he said.

I gave up trying.

A few bites later, he said, “You worked for a year before grad school.”

“Three years,” I corrected.

He began his usual accounting in his head.

“And Jia works and has an income.”

“Yes. I am lucky,” I said.

He nodded. Whether he was satisfied I was not to know, but he seemed less confused.

My parents picked me up at Shanghai Pudong Airport. Mom handed me a box of chopped fruit, and I ate a few pieces.

“Grandpa has gotten much better in the past two days,” Dad said. “When we called you last week, he had pulled out his catheter and no one noticed.”

“We only realized when the caregiver put him to bed,” Mom said. “The moment he hit the bed, boom, a stream of urine shot out. He pissed an entire bowl after the catheter was put back. It was all white.”

“It was a really big bowl,” she said again, checking with Dad. “And very cloudy.”

“He must have been terribly uncomfortable, but he didn’t know and we didn’t know. Now he is much better,” Dad said.

“His appetite has improved. He ate well yesterday,” Mom said.Grandpa had sustained a fall a month earlier. Doctors performed emergency surgery on his spine, and afterward he seemed to walk fine. But a week later, he was paralyzed from the hips down.

“We don’t know whether the paralysis came from the fall or the cancer,” Dad said. “But since the fall, his condition has worsened every day. We put him in hospice.”

I gave the fruit back to Mom. She asked if I wanted pretzels. I said no.

“It isn’t exactly a hospice,” Dad said. “It’s a small private hospital run by someone who went to the same high school as us. Your mom and I hired an old man as a caretaker and pay him 250 yuan a day. He has been doing this work for a long time.”

The pay was higher than I had expected. In today’s job market, some college graduates barely earned that much in their first jobs.

“Young people don’t want this kind of job, regardless of the pay,” Dad said.

“Wait until you see what the job entails,” Mom said. “After I saw him help with a bowel movement, I thought the price was worth it.”The car moved through traffic and onto the Hangzhou Bay Bridge, with the murky yellow sea on both sides. The sky was low and gray, and a thin rain fell, blown into lines on the windows.

“Grandpa is really thin now,” Dad said.

The hospital was a four-story concrete building with a crimson facade. The neighborhood still had an old-town feeling that had disappeared from the part of the city where I lived. There was a stationery factory next door and several factories making auto parts and electronics. Across the road, a suancaiyu restaurant with a large red sign stood among a row of auto shops. On hot days, the air smelled of a mix of grease and the resinous scent of the camphor trees lining the street.

The top floor was a senior-living ward. The residents were not necessarily sick; some had lived there for years. When I entered Grandpa’s room, a nurse was checking his blood sugar. The room had two beds, and everything was neatly organized. The wall-mounted AC kept the air cool and crisp.

“18,” the nurse said to Mom. “You must not feed him any more fruit.”

“We won’t,” Mom promised, though we would.

The nurse injected insulin into Grandpa’s belly, then left.Grandpa lay in bed with his upper body raised. His hair was short, bristling, and unapologetically white, with the energy of a young man, fearless and ready. His face, though, was exhausted. His eyelids drooped; keeping them open took effort. When I entered, he looked at me, then his eyes drifted away. I walked to the bedside.

“Look. Who comes to visit?” Lao Ding, the caretaker, announced to the room. “Do you recognize him?”

Grandpa muttered, then abruptly, as if gathering all his strength, said, “It’s my grandson.”

“See, his brain still works,” Lao Ding said, offering his diagnosis to the room. “He knew you were coming. Your grandma visited this morning.”

“She did?” Mom said.

“She left earlier. She said she took the bus,” Lao Ding said.Lao Ding helped Grandpa into a wheelchair for lunch. He tucked the urine bag into Grandpa’s pants, put one hand under an arm and the other under both legs, then lifted. Grandpa closed his eyes, his face twitching.

“He ate a meat bun this morning, and noodles and soy milk,” Lao Ding said as he tied Grandpa’s dangling legs to the sides of the wheelchair with strips of cloth. “Today he has a good appetite.”

“That’s great,” said my mom.

“I had no idea when he pulled out the catheter last week,” Lao Ding said, recalling the accident, perhaps a little apologetically. “I check every day now. He keeps trying to pull it out, but look—the urine is nicely yellow.”

We looked at the urine bag.

“He drinks a lot of tea. must be thirsty all the time. I just refilled the mug on the nightstand; it’s still hot.”

I looked at the mug.

Dad said Lao Ding did a decent job at almost everything except feeding, so my parents brought meals and fed Grandpa themselves. Dababa and Damama—Dad’s brother and his wife—came too. There was no schedule for who should come on which day. Plans were made at most a day ahead. I guessed any plan would be a bad plan, so it was better to leave it ad hoc.

Lao Ding wheeled Grandpa toward the table near the wall, beneath an old flat-screen TV that was tuned to CCTV. On the screen, Chinese dancers were taking part in a cultural exchange in Hungary. Dancing robots performed while Hungarian officials watched, looking impressed.

The television made everyone talk louder and Grandpa’s garbled words harder to understand.

“Spit out the fish bones,” Dad said, feeding him a bite of fish with chopsticks.

“Can Grandpa eat fish with bones?” I asked.

“He can separate them,” Dad said. He reached into Grandpa’s mouth with a tissue and removed the debris.

Then he scooped up a spoonful of vegetable-and-rice soup.

“I don’t want any more,” Grandpa said.

“One more spoon and we’ll be done,” Dad said.

Grandpa opened his mouth. He chewed slowly and loosely, then closed his eyes and swallowed. His body was stiff, hands gripping the rail.

“Your dad always feeds him much more,” Lao Ding said. “When your mom or I feed him, if he doesn’t want any more, that’s it.”

Later, I read that one should not feed patients who refuse food because it can enter the airway. I told my parents.

“Every extra day we can feed him is better,” Dad said. “The doctor has started giving him nutrients intravenously. At some point, we will have to entirely rely on that.”

“Your grandpa has a great appetite,” Lao Ding said with official certainty. “He eats much more than other patients at this stage. And he drinks five cups of water a day. I keep counting.”

For the next few days, I rode with my parents to the hospital. Then one morning I went alone. Mom said I did not need to do anything, only sit in the room with Grandpa; he slept most of the time. Dad said I could work on my computer in the doctor’s office.

The hospital lobby smelled of traditional Chinese medicine, a comforting, eternal authority of wellness. At the far end stood a glass case of exotic medicines, their names and properties printed on faded cards under dust. A digital board above the check-in counter listed visiting doctors from the city and other provinces. I took the elevator with a woman and a boy. They got off on the second floor, and I continued to the top.

Grandpa was asleep, so I sat near the television and opened a book. The TV was too loud, and neighboring residents came to talk with Lao Ding. I could not focus. I worried about what I would do or say when Grandpa woke.I was two chapters into the book when Damama entered.

“I didn’t know you would come this morning,” she said, setting down a stainless-steel food container. I was grateful she had come, though it was supposed to be my parents’ turn to feed Grandpa.

“I brought soup. Can you wake him and see if he wants any?” Damama asked.

Lao Ding patted Grandpa’s shoulder and cranked the handle that raised the head of the bed. He fastened an apron around him, then let Damama bring the soup to the bedside.

“Do you know who is in the room this morning?” Damama asked Grandpa.

Grandpa, tired, mumbled something.

“It’s MaCong. He’s been here with you this whole time for the past few days.” I was warmed to hear her say it, though it was not entirely true. I wished Grandpa saw it as true. I moved closer so he could see me.

“MaCong, do you have a good picture of your grandpa?” Damama asked me quietly. “The one on his ID shows him too young, probably not appropriate. And the pictures I have are not good enough. It’s for the tombstone.”

I did have photographs of the family that I took the summer before I went abroad, nearly ten years ago. I dug them up on my laptop: the family sitting in the courtyard, grandparents serving dishes, Dad and Dababa talking and laughing.

“I had no idea these photographs existed,” she said.

Then I found photographs I had taken from beneath the glass top of an old desk in my grandparents’ attic. They showed Grandpa as a young man. In one, he appeared to be about my age.

“Let me show them to Grandpa,” I said, connecting my laptop to the television.

Now in his wheelchair, Grandpa sat close to the screen. His neck was stiff and his eyes drooped. I could not tell how clearly he could see.

“I don’t recognize this at all,” Damama said, studying a photograph of Grandpa in his thirties. “Is that really you?”

When a group photo taken in front of a paifang appeared, Grandpa’s eyes lit up. He managed a difficult smile.

“Do you recognize them?” Damama asked, peering at the photograph. She pointed to one person she knew. “Many of them are long gone.”

Grandpa spoke slowly and hoarsely, naming every person in the photograph.“One more,” Grandpa said when the slideshow reached the end.

So I started again from the beginning.

We made it through a few more photographs before he could no longer keep his eyes open. Lao Ding carried him back to bed. Damama said we could show the rest to him next time.