He wanted to say that his grandmother had passed away. He wanted to say that his mother believed she was returning to this world. He would tell everybody, “My mother believes my grandmother is being reincarnated as my child. That is why I am here, because my grandmother’s first language was Teochew.”
But all this, all this was too much. This was a place of strangers, and anything they had shared had been lost generations ago.
He had come to a community event for Teochew descendants at a nearby university. They sipped passion fruit iced tea with homemade, hard-shelled boba, and now they were cutting shapes in red paper. In the heat of a Vancouver August, sweat was pooling under his armpits as he sat on a blue-padded folding chair. This yellow T-shirt, even after a tumble in the washer and dryer, always bore faint stains. What had he wanted when he’d filled in his details on that Google Form for this lantern-making event?
