I was a goody-goody in every way possible during the thirteen hour flight between Newark and Beijing International. I didn’t even fight with my sister, who occupied herself by figuring out the best way to hog my view of the window. But by the time we arrived at my grandparents’ apartment, I had endured a solid hour and a half of Beijing’s stop-and-go traffic and was more concerned about not throwing up on the taxi driver than about manners and cultural niceties. So I responded to greetings from aunts and uncles with halfhearted smiles to show them I had not asked for this. I let my suitcase fall to the ground to demonstrate the unfairness of having had to drag the stupid thing upstairs all by myself. Then I invited myself to the living room sofa, sighed loudly, and demanded air conditioning.
“Wait,” my father said. I didn’t want to wait, so I threw a temper tantrum. Over the next two weeks I proved to be the living confirmation of my relatives’ notions that the typical American teenager was over-privileged, rude, and hellishly self-absorbed.
“How spoiled she is,” my grandmother observed, thinking I couldn’t hear.
Maybe my antics brought some excitement into my grandparents’ quiet lives. Maybe they cherished the idea of finally being able to give a child everything and anything she wanted. Whatever it was, they spoiled me further.
My grandfather was particularly doting, in that way that those well-versed on the miseries of life tend to be. As a young man he had fought in the Communist Revolution, and he had gone home afterward to find himself caught in a family quarrel that tore apart the household. Years later, he had watched his only daughter leave for America to find a better life; he had let her go, knowing that he would travel there and she would travel here but his little girl would never come back.
It seemed to me that my grandfather was always happy, as if past calamities had molded his features into an eternal optimism. So when it was time to return to America, there were the tears and the farewells, the hand waving and the handkerchiefs; there were my laconic bye-byes; and then there was his beaming, wrinkled face.
“Oh, no need to worry about me,” he chuckled. “Take care, take care! Until next time!”
My grandmother would stay in the apartment because of her bad leg, but my grandfather could manage the stairs with a cane. As always, he saw us to the taxi and stubbornly insisted on helping load the luggage into the car.
“Beijing Airport, departures,” my mother said to the taxi driver, and we were gone. When we turned onto the main street I glanced out the side window, about to lift my hand in one final gesture.
And the figure I saw was an old man, no more grey, no more weathered than before, but a man so alone, so vulnerable, that he seemed almost childlike—and I pitied him, hated myself for pitying him, this frail figure draped over a walking stick as if he would have collapsed but for its support.
He turned back to the stairwell. His daughter was gone; her family was gone. No one left to see. Oh the relief! No need to keep it together, now. No more need to pretend.
For so long, I had tried, and failed, but tried nonetheless, to be someone I was not, and to make a show of it all. I wanted my relatives to like me, to be proud of me, and I wanted for the neighbors and friends to say: "There she is. She is such a good child. I wish our daughter was more like her."
But the ultimate acts of kindness aren’t the ones seen or heard or talked about. They’re the ones calculated behind doors and under tables. They’re the schemes dreamt up on waking nights by worried hearts. It’s a sick game of game theory where the goal is to minimize their losses by maximizing yours, where you have everything to lose and hope to God you’ll lose it.
Calculated—so carefully! so coldly!—so nobody’d ever know.
