On the left side of my mother’s kitchen, a cabinet is filled with mismatched china bowls. At family dinners, we all eat from different portion sizes, but through second helpings, we somehow eat the same amount of rice and chicken. Usually, I use a white china bowl, its rim lined with a blue pattern, and drink from a Hello Kitty mug I’ve had since I was eight.
At the back of the cabinet, behind the stacks of assorted china, lie eight identical dinner plates, each adorned with a pastel-colored fruit design. They’re hidden by the rest of the dishes because they’re only meant for “special occasions” (when we have guests over). There’s never been an urge to use the matching plates; my family finds comfort in using our more personalized dishes.
In pieces, my mom told me how this paralleled her own childhood. When she immigrated to America, her family didn’t have the means to purchase fine china from the stores. Instead, my grandmother’s friends from the mainland lent them excess kitchenware—single bowls that were unused from their fanciest sets of porcelain. As their circumstances improved, they never bought a matching set. Even if they could have, why would they have bothered? There was always something more important than luxury table appliances.
Whenever my mom informed me of my grandmother’s next visit to our apartment, I was scared. My grandmother’s nostrils flared at me as she spoke, her Cantonese accent harsh and strident. Her features were tarnished from Vietnam’s ashes, her smile permanently diminished into an expression of fury and fear. The girl that her body once contained slipped into the seams around her eyes, never to be revealed unless I were to smooth out her skin with my hands—but I was too afraid to ever try this. I avoided her at family gatherings, eating dinner at opposite sides of the table from her. My mom scolded me for it, reminding me it was my grandmother who brought the family to America, who protected us for decades. The least I could do, she said, was set my bowl beside hers.
I positioned myself to be estranged from my grandmother for most of my life. Offhandedly, I convinced myself that strained ties could coexist with love, that the distance I put between us wasn’t our fault, wasn’t my fault. She lost her husband when I was two—an age too young for me to have any recollection of the man, and memories too painful for my mother to recount in an anecdote. Since then, my grandmother lived with different relatives in Vietnam and the States. I understood her to be a restless woman, independent of her own accord. Well into her eighties, she would take the bus to Chinatown alone each morning despite her children’s wishes that she stay home.
This, I told myself, was the way she wished to live; surrounded by a language different than mine, with people far away from me. She wished to speak like she was at home, and we were too different for me to ever feel like home to her, or her to me.
Cantonese became a hidden language in our household, heard in the background of the dinner table when my mom spoke to her family members on the phone. And so, whenever I saw her, my grandmother spoke to me in incomplete phrases, piecing together the English terms she’d heard from her children as they grew up. In turn, I knowingly responded to her in words she couldn’t understand. Maybe it was easier that way, terminating the pain of trying. Each conversation ended with suppressed facial expressions of frustration, though this frustration seemed to differ between my grandmother and me.
At twelve, I saw my grandmother at a family reunion in my youngest auntie’s home. It was the first time we had seen each other in years. My grandmother was distant, not because of her lack of kisses and touches to my arms when I saw her again, but from my own uncertain affections. The family went out for dim sum, where I requested we order pork cheong fun, a noodle roll that was my favorite at the time. This was a word my grandmother understood. She tapped my shoulder and asked me if I liked it. I looked down at the floor when I told her I did.
The next morning, I poured a bowl of Apple Jacks with milk, taking advantage of the sugary cereals my aunt had that my household didn’t. This breakfast was even more exciting because nobody else was awake yet, leaving me to enjoy my meal in secret. I ate, standing at the kitchen counter, when my grandmother entered from the front door, carrying bags of takeout containers.
A grin spread across her face as she walked forward and grabbed one of the containers from the bottom of the plastic bag. Holding it steady, she set the rest of the bags down and reached for an azure china bowl from my aunt’s cupboard. She placed the bowl in front of me and opened the takeout container. It was filled with cheong fun.
“Thank you, but I already ate.” I pointed to the china bowl, where all that was left was green and orange-dyed milk. She looked at it, then me, with confusion, and still began to lift the cheong fun from the container into the bowl.
I shook my head. “I’m not hungry.” My grandmother understood my rejection, more than I did, and set the food back in its original box. She began to cry. I wanted to say some other words she would know, words that I meant. But I couldn’t think of the right combination. I just stared at the tile while she cried. I should’ve said I was sorry.
Two years ago, I visited my youngest auntie alone in San Francisco. My grandmother had lived fifteen minutes away from her for over twenty years, alone in a smushed house on an upturned hill since my grandfather passed away. Right before my trip, my grandmother left her house in the city to see my eldest auntie up north. All of her belongings remained, so I lived in the house for the week I was there.
I spent most of the trip with my auntie’s family, rarely lingering in the dilapidated house by myself for very long. One night, before leaving me alone for a few hours, my auntie took me to the store and bought a bag of groceries so I “would not starve.” She handed me rice noodles, garlic, and chicken. I told her I couldn’t cook, to which she responded, “Learn.”
Later in the night, I decided to try—not out of hunger, but curiosity. My grandmother’s kitchen contained the seasonings and pots I needed. I counted fifteen spatulas, two toasters, and three air fryers—two still sealed in boxes, stacked inside the kitchen stove. I overcooked the garlic noodles, but they were, at best, edible.
All I needed was a bowl and chopsticks. I searched the cabinets, pushing past overcrowded shelves cluttered with unfamiliar cooking utensils that I will never know the names of. But one shelf was nearly empty, containing a single china bowl, flamed red and enveloped with black Mandarin characters I couldn’t read. I picked up the clean dish, revealing a matching second bowl behind it.
The bowl was a ways above my head, making the dust that covered it look like fading color from my perspective below. As I picked it up, the white grime slicked its surface, and it slipped from my fingers, shattering into large chunks of crimson on the floor.
For a moment, I didn’t understand why the bowl went untouched long enough to collect dust. But then I remembered, it was here in this house where both my grandfather and grandmother lived together. It was here that he left her.
Until the china bowl had crumbled, I’d only thought of my grandfather’s legacy twice. When I was ten, I snooped through my mother’s drawers and found a photo of him and me playing on his hospital bed. At fourteen, our extended family visited his grave, bringing sui mai and cheong fun (his favorite foods) and fake money to burn as offerings to him. My grandmother led the ceremony. I wondered if my grandmother bought his cheong fun from the same shop where she had gotten mine. Would she still put it in this shattered bowl? I wondered if my grandfather was watching and remembering me, though I couldn’t remember him, hating me for not taking care of his wife in his absence.
Once, my grandmother’s kitchen cupboards had been filled with mismatched bowls. Now, it had come down to just one. One bowl, one old woman, one home.
My knees hit the floor and I gripped the scarlet glass in my hands. While my fingers were left unscathed, I winced from shards of glass that pushed into my legs as I collapsed. My limbs began to bleed in shame; shame for breaking my grandfather’s bowl, for never setting my grandmother’s bowl next to mine at the dining table. I gathered the crimson chunks into a pile and looked at my hands. Red dust had collected under my fingernails. I didn’t wash it away until the next morning.
That winter, I visited my eldest auntie, whom my grandmother had officially moved in with. Her kitchen was different from my mother’s, with matching white china from Ikea still bearing their price stickers. When we ate dim sum at her house, we set up plates around her kitchen counter (the dining table, my auntie said, was just for display) and drank out of never-before-used glasses.
For the first time, I put my plain Ikea bowl next to my grandmother’s and ate beside her. We exchanged a few words, lost in translation, but I looked up to see her eyes smile at me regardless.
Courtney Hines ’28 (courtneyhines@college.harvard.edu) is piecing together a broken porcelain bowl as best as she can.