“No, he never mentioned these things. I heard them from other people. While he was there, he fell in love with a woman. Afterward, he came twice a year to see me and to give my mother support. We saw him every year until I was twenty. Then I went away to school, and it became more difficult.”
“Why would it be difficult? You were in Pyongyang, I imagine.”
“In Pyongyang? No, I was in Beijing.”
A breeze came down the hill and scattered the leaves that the groundskeepers had raked into a tidy pile. “Your mother, she is well?”
“She is.”
“And she lives where?”
“In Yanji.”
“Aha, I see. She is Korean?”
“Half-Korean, half-Chinese.”
I smiled, and then I laughed. It was a happy laugh, the sound of an old tree budding in the spring. “Some Chinese blood is a good thing,” I said. “Your great-grandmother had Chinese blood, did you know that?”
It was only days later, when I was back in my house, looking at the moon as it rose through the gap between the tall pine trees, that I realized the man at the grave was not just my brother’s son. He was my nephew and I his uncle.
That night, I dreamed of my grandfather and wondered even as I slept if he had dreamed of his grandfather, and he of his, and so on back in time. It was interesting, I thought to myself, that at the end we dream of the beginning.
Macau
2009
