Opinionator | Private Lives: Forgetting Grandma

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

My grandmother has Alzheimer's disease. But in a lot of ways, she made us forget each other a long time ago.

Several years ago, I found out from my father that she lived four miles away from me in San Francisco. This was news: I'd last seen my grandmother almost 25 years before.

"Your ma-ma is turning 81," my father informed me on the phone from China, using the Cantonese name for paternal grandmother. "We'll go see her when I visit you this month."

I pictured a "??!" floating over my head in a comic book bubble. Then I asked him why he'd never told me this before. I'd been living in the Bay Area for six years.

This was a weird situation in which to find myself. I talk to my mom every week, and visit her and my extended network of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in New York as often as possible. My brother just moved to San Francisco to be closer to me. My maternal family has always been strong, steady, there: when my uncle and his wife had children, his parents and sisters pitched in. When one sister lost her husband, another sister moved in. In a family this intimate, it was impossible to lose track of anyone.

My father, on the other hand, comes from a complicated line of divorce and stepfamilies. He and my mother divorced, as did his parents and his grandparents before them. I'm the only person I know whose family history involves the triple-whammy of three successive generations of divorce. After her own divorce, my ma-ma promptly remarried a wealthy older man and had two other children, after which there were no letters and no phone calls. We had assumed it was because she was living in Hong Kong.

When I expressed astonishment at his withholding information about my grandmother's whereabouts, my father feigned ignorance, before telling me that he had probably seen her only about 30 times in his life. Total. As a young boy, after his parents broke up, he'd been shipped off to boarding school. It did not seem outrageous to him that he'd allowed me to think she lived in another country for a quarter-century.

"You know your ba has a very strange family," he went on, temporarily referring to himself in the third person. Was this supposed to make me feel better? "Ma-ma has this whole other family. But she's getting old. And don't you want to see your grandmother?"

What self-respecting woman doesn't know that her grandma lives in the same city as she does? It felt appalling, unnatural. It did not seem as important that I had seen my grandmother only twice, the last time when I was 8, or that neither she nor my father had tried to foster her bond with my brother and me. I had developed a far more significant emotional connection with the FedEx delivery woman I saw on my doorstep almost every day. But still I felt ashamed.

When I reluctantly related this discovery to my friends, they expressed awe. "You have a grandmother here?" my friend Jenny asked. Her Chinese grandmother also lived in San Francisco, but she visited her every two weeks.

"No one ever told me," I said. I knew how lame that sounded. And I felt angry at the position that my father had put me in. If I didn't go, I'd be the bad granddaughter. The thought galled and embarrassed me. And yet: wasn't it unfair to expect me to feel unreserved love for a virtual stranger?

On the day of the big visit, I made my husband come along with us. The four-mile drive from our neighborhood to the foggy Inner Sunset seemed to take forever. I was moving backward, the gap between my 30-something self and my younger self getting smaller with every block we traveled.

On the steps of her small stucco house, my grandmother was waiting, with two of my father's half sisters, one of whom I'd never met (the other I'd seen just once). They waved cheerily as we pulled up.

We started the evening at a bad Japanese restaurant, eating gummy rice and greasy tempura. My grandmother and I chatted about my writing. She teased my father about how he was looking older now — at this, he bristled comically — and his half siblings shared in the good-natured ribbing. We talked about my father's recent art show, my husband's job, and how we all hadn't seen one another in ages. My grandmother said that she had been forgetting things. But when she asked me if I remembered her, her eyes were sharp. "I last saw you when I was 58," she said with certainty, in Cantonese. "You were very little then."

Of course I remembered her. Or rather, I remembered a character sketch of her. A cool, distant relation who swept in to visit us twice in New York and didn't get along with my mother. There was suspicion on my mother's part — this woman doesn't care about my husband, when has she ever visited, what does she want now? — and it colored my consciousness. But I was 8. My memory of her was dulled by all the intervening years of absence. I didn't remember her having a big, sweet smile. Or a keen sense of humor. Or this kind of youthful vigor. In front of me now, with her neat red lipstick and dyed-black hair, she didn't look a day over 60. And she seemed like a perfectly delightful person.

We all had a good time. We drove back to her house after dinner and sat around eating chocolate, watching a basketball game and looking at pictures of my grandmother's recent trip to China. It was fun, but somehow false. The pleasantries were just that: surface exchanges that didn't have the weight of history behind them. After all, there wasn't a single photo of my father or me in that house. As my husband and I wandered through the rooms, every tabletop cluttered with other family photos, I found to my surprise that I didn't feel longing. We were strangers whose paths intersected now and again.

When we got up to go home at the end of the night, my ma-ma flashed her bright, all-encompassing grin and took my arm. "If I see you on the street and I don't know who you are," she said, looking into my eyes, "you have to remind me. All right?"

I looked back at her and wondered what I owed her. It was the moment to tell her that we should see each other more often.

I smiled, gave her one last hug, and didn't say anything. It's true that many things that night weren't quite what I expected. But it turned out that this wasn't a family reunion, and I wanted us to exit with some grace.

If she called, I told myself, I would answer. But I knew she wouldn't.

Bonnie Tsui is a writer based in San Francisco and the author, most recently, of "American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods."

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