Sarah

Now that I am older than she was when I was born, I've been thinking more about my grandmother, who died 17 years ago. As a toddler I used to sit cross-legged at the foot of the upright piano while her hands glided over the keyboard, the balls of her feet pressing the pedals at just the right moment. We sang folk songs and nursery rhymes, show tunes and hymns. She showed me how the fifth note of a major chord leads to the next chord and then the next, until the sharps transformed themselves into flats, “b’s” buzzing around the treble clef.

We relaxed by playing Chinese checkers, a game that requires one to move marbles across the board to the other player’s triangular base. In my concentration, my lips would part, and the drool would run down my chin. “Close your mouth!” she would scold, as I carefully picked up a little ball of colored glass, trying not to disturb the others. In triumph I jumped over her marbles and outmaneuvered her. We would play cards, too, a simple game she called “donkey”, which introduced me to the basics of “trumps”, the Hawaiian version of whist.

Sarah’s white hair framed her delicate smile. A lifetime in the Islands had burnished her face, and her color did not fade even during the later years when she rarely ventured outside. She would sit on the couch, hands folded in her lap, gazing serenely at the bustle of activity in the living room. My most vivid memories of her involve food. The dishes reflected the potpourri of cultures in post-war Hawaii—American, Hawaiian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Long before “fusion” became a term associated with food, our Thanksgiving meal included roast turkey with cranberry sauce, gravy on rice, kim chee (Korean spiced cabbage), lau-lau (roast pork wrapped in ti leaves) and fried noodles topped with soy sauce and vinegar.

Pictures of her as a young woman revealed that she had always been stout, yet she gave birth to two beautiful daughters. She passed on to them a love of music that lives on in my generation and the next. In our family the Yiddish proverb, “when you teach your son, you teach your son’s son”, is, if anything, an understatement.

Today is the hundredth anniversary of her birth. Happy birthday, grandmother! © 2004 Stephen Yuen