Some notes from my journal, from that visit to China:

At dinner with 爷爷, he looked at me and said, 这个姑娘什么贵姓? (‘What is this girl’s last name,’ or more properly, ‘What family is this girl from?’)

…
Later we asked him how old he was, and he said 95. How many children did he have? Three. What were their names? Xiaojiang, Xiaobing, Xioaer. Xiaosan. Then my aunt asked, So how many children is that? Isn’t that four? Do you have any other children, or is that it? (He’d forgotten his fifth child, his eldest daughter.)
…

关于我这次中国之行日记的笔记:
晚上和爷爷一起吃饭的时候，他看着我说,这个姑娘贵姓呢?或者这是谁家的姑娘呀?

…

后来我们问他多大了，他说95岁。问他有几个孩子?三个。他们叫什么?小江、小兵、小三。我姑姑又问:那这是几个孩子呀?这不是四个吗?你还有其他孩子吗，还是就这些了?(他忘记了第五个孩子，他的大女儿。)
At dinner I watched 奶奶 break open a crab shell and spoon the yellow yolk on to bread for 爷爷, very quietly, while everyone else was talking. Jostling his elbow so he’d look down and see the bread in his hand, and methodically, unthinkingly eat it. His eyes barely open any more, I don’t know if he sees.

…

I realised this may be the last time I see 爷爷.
吃晚饭的时候，奶奶打开蟹壳，用勺子舀出蟹黄抹在面包上递给爷爷,整个过程很安静,其他人都在聊天。奶奶推了下他的胳膊肘，他低头看了看手里的面包，然后不假思索地咬了下去。他的眼睛几乎都没有睁开，我都不知道他有没有看到面包。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


…

我意识到这可能是我最后一次见爷爷了。

After her birthday dinner, I spent three days interviewing my grandmother. Because she spoke in a thick dialect, my aunt had to be there to translate into standard Mandarin for me. In the evenings the three of us piled into the old, familiar bedroom across the only bathroom in the apartment, my grandmother grumbling about her hearing aids while I fiddled with the microphone. Together, we tried to cobble together some understanding of her history.

生日晚餐后，我花了三天时间采访祖母。因为她说话方言很重，我姑姑必须在那里翻译成标准的普通话。晚上我们三个人挤在唯一一间浴室对面那间又旧又熟悉的卧室里，祖母在抱怨她的助听器，而我则摆弄着麦克风。我们试图拼凑出她的过去。
My 奶奶 was born to a landowning family in Jiangsu. Her surname was Shi, which means “stone”, a stubborn word that suited her personality. In 1944, when she was not yet 16, she renounced her class and joined the army in service of the Communist party’s cause. She had dry, sturdy hands that raised three generations of children. My cousins, relying on her long after they’d left home, would often leave their children, her great-grandchildren, in her care. She was fiery and straightforward, unpretentious to the core. On the other side of the ocean, my father often laughed at how you couldn’t trust 奶奶 to buy any clothes. One summer, in middle school, I grabbed a cigarette from her when she was playing mahjong and told her not to smoke. She laughed at me and pulled another cigarette from the packet.
奶奶出生在江苏一个地主家庭。姓石，就是石头的石，这个字有固执的意思，很适合她的性格。1944年，未满16岁的她与自己的阶级断绝关系，入伍加入共产事业的建设中。她的手又干又硬，这双手养育了三代人。我的表兄弟姐妹们离开家后很长时间都很依赖她，他们会把自己的孩子，也就是我奶奶的重孙子留在家里，这些孩子都是奶奶在照顾。她热情而直率，朴实无华。在太平洋的另一边,我父亲经常嘲笑我奶奶永远都不会买衣服。我上中学的一年夏天，她正在打麻将，我从她手里一把夺过烟，告诉她不要抽烟。她对我笑了笑，从盒里又抽出一支烟。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


On the last day of our interviews, after I turned off the microphone, she put a hand on my wrist and started talking again. She said that in her life, she had just been an ordinary person. Not extraordinary at anything. And with a personality like a boy’s. But she’d always tried to help others. Whether she had money or not, if there was something she could do, she did it. So even though she was just a low-level cadre in the civil system, people liked her. They all came to give her greetings at New Year. She was known for being diligent at work. She wasn’t selfish. That was how she’d lived her life.

采访的最后一天，我关掉麦克风，她把手放在我的手上，又开始说话了。她说，她只是一个普通人，没有什么特别的。性格像男孩子。但她总是努力帮助别人。不管有没有钱，只要是力所能及的，她都会去做。因此，虽然只是民事系统中的低层干部，大家都很喜欢她。大家都来给她拜年。她是出了名的能干、不自私。这就是她的处事方式。

After she died, I shared the recordings of my interviews in the family WeChat group. My uncle, who had been in Indiana and was also unable to physically attend the funeral, thanked me. “I cried hearing her voice again,” he said.

祖母去世后，我在微信家庭组分享了我的采访录音。在印第安那州的叔叔也没能参加葬礼，他对我表示感谢，“又听到了她的声音，我哭了。”他说。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


Later, he pointed out how basic my questions had been. “That interview – you don’t understand Chinese history at all, though!”
He probably didn’t realise how this hurt me, but oh, it hurt. It was another reminder of how I didn’t really “belong” with the people on the other side of the WeChat group. I had tried my best to keep up with the Chinese world, but time spent in one world was time spent away from my other one.

后来，叔叔说我问的都是最基础的问题。“那个采访——你根本不懂中国历史!”
他可能没意识到听到这句话我有多伤心，真的很伤心。这再次提醒我，我并不真正“属于”微信群的另一边。我已经尽力跟上中国的步伐，但是在那个世界里的时间和我在另一个世界的时间是不同的。

After I interviewed my family, I stayed in China for a month to travel around by myself for the first time. I’d gone sightseeing in the past – to the Three Gorges, to Yellow Mountain, Mount Emei, Jiuzhaigou, Xi’an – but always with family who had planned everything, bought the tickets and figured out the routes. As an adult, I had travelled alone in several foreign countries in which I’d felt confident figuring things out independently, but I still felt a sense of unease in China, like a child who doesn’t know how to take the train by herself – and this was the feeling I wanted to overcome.

采访完家人后，我又在中国待了一个月，也是我第一次独自在中国旅行。我以前也旅游过，去过三峡、黄山、峨眉山、九寨沟还有西安，但都是和家人计划好，买好票，定好路线。作为成年人,我在几个国家单独旅行过，在这些国家旅行我很自信，可以独立解决问题，可是在中国使我仍然感到不安,就像一个孩子不知道如何独自坐火车,我想克服这种感觉。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


I welcomed in the new year with a friend in Nanjing. Alone, I travelled through Hangzhou and Suzhou. These days, the logistical hurdles for a tourist visiting China are complex and ever-changing. For one, everyone uses Alipay. If you have Alipay, the whole world of modern China is spread out at your feet: train tickets, taxis, bike shares, late-night food delivery. But it’s very difficult to register for Alipay as a mere tourist, and it’s getting harder and harder to use cash. I had to get around this difficulty by using my mother’s smartphone, which is lixed to her Alipay account. Because it was her identity, with her name listed, and not mine, I couldn’t use the account to buy train tickets, which have names printed. At the station, I had to line up at a separate window to get my paper tickets, instead of just scanning a code with my phone. I was acutely aware of how outside the system I was.

我在南京和朋友一起过得新年。我单独去了杭州和苏州。现在到中国旅游的后勤障碍非常复杂，而且一直在变化。首先，所有人都用支付宝。如果你有支付宝，现代中国就在你的脚下:火车票、出租车、共享单车、深夜送餐。但是，仅以游客身份在支付宝上注册非常困难，使用现金也越来越难。为了解决这个问题，我不得不使用妈妈的智能手机，因为这个手机绑定了她的支付宝账户。因为这是她的身份，上面写着她的名字，不是我的，所以我不能用这个账户去买印有名字的火车票。在车站，我不得不在另一个窗口排队买纸质票，而不是用手机扫描代码。我敏锐地意识到我跟这个系统完全脱离了。

Once, a friend asked me: “How good are you at passing?” – that is, passing as Chinese-Chinese, not Chinese American. I wanted to pass, but like the many Asian Americans who, like me, have tried to go back to the motherland and find a place there, I could never “pass” for long.

有一次，一个朋友问我:“你的表现及格吗?”——也就是作为中国人而不是华裔美国人是否及格。我想及格，但我和许多亚裔美国人一样，打算回归祖国，在祖国找到一席之地，可是无法永远及格。

The China I know the best is my grandparents’ China. It’s an old China, with rusty bicycles and motorcycle fumes, sweaty street vendors and dusty convenience stores where, as children, we took ice-cream from the coolers. Trains were slow, and everything could be haggled over. While travelling around by myself as an adult in the new China, I couldn’t escape the feeling that much of what I was experiencing was a novelty. I paid for groceries via QR code. In Hangzhou, I ordered by pointing at the food other people were eating. I was reminded that, despite my family connection, China was a separate world to me, and I was a tourist like so many other expats in the country.

我最了解的中国是我祖父母时代的中国，是过去的中国，生锈的自行车和喷着烟的摩托车，汗流浃背的街头小贩和尘土飞扬的小卖部，小时候我们老从小卖部的冷柜里拿冰淇淋。慢悠悠的火车，一切都可以讨价还价。现在我是成年人了，在新中国独自旅行有种感觉如影随形，那就是我所经历的很多事情都很新奇。买乱七八糟的东西都得用二维码付款。在杭州，我用手指着别人吃的食物点餐。这让我意识到，尽管我和家人有联系，但中国对我来说是个独立的世界，我和许多在中国的外国人一样，只是一名游客。

While travelling alone, I wasn’t sure what my purpose was. I spent a lot of time in Airbnbs doing my freelance work. I had a research gig combing through recent media portrayals of China in the US to create a summary for an academic institution. I trawled through white papers describing Chinese student spies and ominous articles predicting a second cold war – abstract, alarming concepts that seemed far removed from the gentle patter of my family WeChat. The articles I read seemed to have no connection to the ordinary lives going on around me.
In the evenings I stayed in my room and read manga. I had hardly anyone to see. Most of the time I was on my own.

独自旅行时，我不知道自己的目的是什么。我花了很多时间在爱彼迎做自由职业者。我曾做过一项研究，梳理美国媒体最近对中国的报道，为一家学术机构撰写摘要。我翻看了描述中国学生间谍的白皮书和预测第二次冷战的文章——这些抽象的、令人震惊的概念似乎与我家庭微信群的温和模式相距甚远。我读的文章似乎与我周围的日常生活没有联系。
晚上我呆在房间里看日本漫画。我几乎看不到其他人。大部分时间我都是一个人。
A year after my interviews, I did see my 爷爷 one more time. Over Christmas 2019, I found myself in China again. This time, my parents, brother, and I were paying a quick family visit before returning to the US. 爷爷’s dementia was worse. I asked after his novels, but still didn’t get my hands on any. My 奶奶 ate at a new hotpot restaurant with us in Hefei. In Shanghai, I dyed my hair blue. Three months after we returned home, the US locked down for the pandemic.
我采访的一年后我又看到了爷爷。2019年的圣诞节，我又来到了中国。这一次，我父母、哥哥和我在回美国之前进行了一次快速的家庭拜访。爷爷的老年痴呆更严重了。我打听了他小说的事，还是一无所获。奶奶和我们在合肥一家新火锅店吃的饭。在上海，我把头发染成了蓝色。我们回国三个月后，美国因疫情封锁。
“还是想哭,” my father said in the WeChat group after my grandfather’s memorial was over. (“Still want to cry.”)
Also: “这是人生.” (“This is human life.”)
“还是想哭”爷爷的葬礼过后，我爸爸在微信群里说道。
还说:“这是人生。”

In a eulogy written after my grandfather’s death, my aunt wrote: “Father, you always wished for one of us to become a great writer. Your granddaughter is at this moment working towards that goal.” When I read it, my first reaction was resentment, that they would use my dreams of being a writer to appease my grandfather’s spirit. That after his death, the pressure on me would only increase. The pressure to honour his memory, and my grandmother’s.

纪念祖父的悼词中，姑姑写道:“父亲，你一直希望家里有人能成为伟大的作家。您的孙女此刻正在朝着这个目标努力。”读到这句话的时候，我的第一反应是有怨气，怨他们用我当作家的梦想来安慰祖父的在天之灵。祖父去世后，我的压力只会增加。缅怀他和我祖母回忆的压力。

I had been trying to live in two worlds: spending time in China, improving my Mandarin, learning what I could of Chinese history, of my grandparents’ pasts. Then there was my American life. Classes, jobs, money, rent, Netflix, friends, growing older. What country, what story, what character, what experience can I claim? Do I want to tell the story of my grandparents, or do I feel that, to do justice to them, I have to?

我一直试图生活在两个世界里:在中国生活一段时间，提高普通话水平，尽我所能学习中国历史，了解祖父母的过去。然后是我的美国生活。课程、工作、金钱、租金、网飞、朋友、变老。管他什么国家、什么故事、什么性格、什么经历?我是想讲祖父母的故事，还是觉得为了公平我必须讲他们的故事呢?

In an essay titled No Reconciliation Allowed, Said revisits the varied landscape of his childhood. He was born in Jerusalem, spent his childhood as a refugee in Egypt, was educated in elite English-language schools, before building his career in the US. “Why, I remember asking myself, could I not have had a simple background … ?” he asks, “ … all Egyptian, or all something else, and not have had to face the daily rigours of questions that led back to words that seemed to lack a stable origin?”

在名为《不允许和解》的文章中，赛义德重温了他童年时多姿多彩的生活。他出生于耶路撒冷，以难民的身份在埃及度过了童年，在精英英语学校接受教育，后来在美国开创了自己的事业。“我会问自己，为什么我没有简单的背景……?”他写道，“……所有埃及人，或者其他所有的东西，不用每天面对这些严峻的问题，就连这些问题的词汇似乎都没有稳定的来源?”

I will go back to China to visit my grandparents’ graves. Meanwhile, the old apartment in Hefei has been sold. When my brother and I were children, there were so many people who gathered in that apartment. Now the generations have scattered. My aunts grow greyer every year, and my cousin’s children, mostly strangers to me, will soon be teenagers. My three oldest cousins are married, and some have moved to other cities or emigrated to the US. Before, Hefei felt like the core of the family and we, the ones in the US, were the outliers, the moons in orbit around the planet. Now we are all dispersed.

我要回中国给爷爷奶奶扫墓。合肥的旧公寓已经卖了。哥哥和我还是孩子的时候，大家就经常聚在那个公寓里。现在几代人都各奔东西。姑姑们的头发一年比一年白，而我表哥表姐们的孩子也将很快步入青少年时代，这些孩子大多数我都不认识。我的三个最年长的表哥表姐都结婚了，有些已经搬到其他城市或移民到了美国。以前，合肥就像是这个家庭的核心，而我们这些在美国的人是局外人，是绕着地球轨道运行的月亮。现在我们都散去了。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


I wonder what life will be left for me in China in the future. I’ve long nursed vague plans of moving back to China to live for a few years, to get to know it better and solidify my place there. But with each year that passes in the US, such a move gets harder and harder to make. I wonder at what point I will have to choose – or if, with the passage of time, a choice was already made for me.

我想知道我在中国还会有什么样的生活。多年来，我一直有个不明确的计划，计划回到中国，巩固我在中国的地位。但是随着在美国待得越久，我的计划实施起来就越困难。我不知道何时我将不得不做出选择——或者，随着时间的推移，我已经做出了选择。

In her novel Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Marilyn Chin, whose family moved to the US from Hong Kong, writes: “Deep in her heart, she knew that each step backward would only mean regret – the vector goes in only one direction, the homing geese must find their new nest, the 10,000 diasporas will never coagulate – there was no way back to the Middle Kingdom.”

全家从香港迁往美国的华裔女作家陈美玲在她的小说《复仇的月亮女神》中写道:“内心深处，她知道每后退一步都意味着遗憾——前方只有一个方向，归巢的大雁必须找到自己的新巢，一万名散居海外的人永远不会聚集在一起——没有办法回到中央王国。”