Searching for Sylvie Lee

by Jean Kwok

I wear black today too, for Ma’s sake, while Pa dresses in his normal clothing. It’s not that he doesn’t care. It’s that he can’t show us that he does.

Now, many years later, I was not sure if we had truly loved each other or merely the versions of ourselves we had seen reflected in the other’s eyes—as if we had acted out a play together, both of us player and audience alike.

When you truly love someone and you see them again, even if it is many years later, their new face blends back into their old face and it is like no time has passed at all.

Next to her, on the table beside the oxygen tank, sat a photo in a silver frame: me and Lukas, the day after my birthday, both four years old, hand in hand, my first day at elementary school. For Grandma, I had always existed.

“It is good to have my girl back. I have something for you. It is in the drawer next to the bed.” I slid the rickety wooden drawer of the bedside table open and gasped when I saw what was inside. “Tasha!” My old rag doll, the one Grandma had made for me—and so much smaller than I remembered.

“I have missed her.” “I know. She has been waiting here for you,” Grandma said, and my heart smote me again, because I knew Grandma was speaking of herself.

“She is yours.” “I know but there is time enough for that.” We all knew what I meant. I felt bereft at the thought of taking Tasha away from Grandma, after Grandma had kept her safe for me all these years.

Here I was with Lukas, who had known and loved me before I became somebody and before I lost it all too. Being with him was as natural as breathing. My cousin, my friend.

exposing pale skin untouched by the sun, arms and legs grown so spindly and frail, an intimacy she had never shared with me before. Grandma’s chin had trembled the first time, but I said, “When you love someone, there is no shame. When I see you, I only know that you are my grandma and you are beautiful. You did this for me when I was young. Now it is my turn. You always said, the old become children once again.”

“She stayed away not because she did not care enough. She stayed away because she loves too much,” Grandma said. “I understand, but still it saddens me.

He bent his head toward me to say in a hushed voice, “You are very clear in my memories.”

As one, Lukas and I protested, “We are not fighting.” “Fart!” she said. Great, now even Grandma called me on my bullshit.

“I think that wherever you are, to live in the world as a white person is a completely different experience than a person of color. Discrimination is invisible to them because it does not affect them. They are truly shocked.”

She would fill her shopping cart with miniature china ballerinas, bronze clocks, crystal glasses, and then we would walk home together, with Lukas pushing the cart and Grandma and I following, swinging our hands.

Families fought for the best spots on the mountain for their loved ones because it was the only place with good feng shui. This way, they believed, the departed could continue to bless the living. The forces of wind, water, and earth were in harmony there.

“When I moved to America from the Netherlands, the moon was the only thing that came with me.”

‘Lukas is your French Revolution. Once you loved him, everything in your life fell into a before and after. Nothing would ever be the same.’”

When you are a woman, people always assume success comes from your bedroom and not your boardroom skills.”

As Sylvie told me once, we are all ultimately unreliable storytellers of our own lives, whether we wish it so or not, whether we share a common language or not.

Ma told me that while nothing can replace that which is lost, emptiness creates room for new growth.