College: Senior Year

“Come on, Jenny! Only one more boba spot left to hit!”

Carey and Liz had bounded ten paces ahead again, leaving Jenny huffing and puffing behind them. Embarking on a grand food tour around San Francisco’s Chinatown had been their way of celebrating the end of finals week ever since freshman year, which meant clambering up and down hills all morning to sample pork buns from Yummy Cafe and egg tarts from Golden Gate Bakery.

As Jenny ran to catch up with her friends, she dodged an old woman yelling at her friend and caught a whiff of raw fish from a nearby seafood market. Whether or not Jenny was in a Chinatown on the East or West Coast, she could always count those sights and smells. But even though UC Berkeley felt like home, San Francisco’s Chinatown still felt foreign to Jenny after four years. Maybe it was because businesses perched atop rolling hills instead of crowding against each other in narrow streets like in New York; or that the buildings felt more old school with their sloping roofs and red paint. Most likely it was because this Chinatown was not the one Jenny had visited twice a month for the first eighteen years of her life. 

As Jenny, Carey and Liz rounded the corner from Clay to Kearny Street, they passed a group of elderly men and women in Portsmouth Square. They hunched over cardboard boxes, deeply engrossed in games of mahjong and chess. One of them – an old woman with a shock of curly gray hair and round rimmed glasses – turned around and caught Jenny’s eye. 

For a brief moment, Jenny half expected the woman to smile and say “Mei Mei zhǎng gāo le” – until she realized with a jolt the woman wasn’t Po Po. The real Po Po was back in New York, most likely sleeping, the last of her precious memories sloughing off one by one. These days, she even had a hard time recognizing Jenny’s mother.

Although San Francisco wasn’t cold this time of year, Jenny felt chilly. Suddenly, all she wanted was to be in the warm embrace of Po Po’s apartment. Between busy courseloads, internships, and expensive plane tickets, her visits with Po Po over the past four years had been far too brief. But hopping on a plane right now and flying back to New York would still not be enough. Jenny wanted to go back in time, back to her very first visit with Po Po, and redo her childhood over again.

Instead of burying her nose in her phone during every car ride, she would’ve watched the grassy New Jersey suburbs transform into the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan. Instead of stressing over trivial social media posts and homework assignments, she would’ve listened to Po Po’s proverb explanations and asked her to elaborate on the words she didn’t understand. She would have savored each bowl of wonton soup and memorized the feeling of Po Po’s warm hand over hers, guiding her calligraphy brush over rice paper. If Jenny had done these things, maybe she would have picked up on the times when Po Po had described what it was like for her moving to America, and where her passion for calligraphy had come from. She could have been sitting with Po Po at the dining table, calligraphy brushes in hand, swapping stories about themselves: Jenny’s life growing up in America; Po Po’s in China.

It was a futile dream, Jenny knew. But as she fantasized, real memories came rushing back to her: inhaling the faint scent of tiger balm that clung to Po Po’s shirt with every one of her hugs. Listening to her mother and Po Po’s rapid fire Mandarin-Cantonese conversations over homemade wontons. Hearing the symphony of car horns that sometimes accompanied the rustle of Po Po’s newspapers while she completed her homework. Dipping brushes in ink and filling page after page with bold, elegant strokes into the waning afternoon. There was still beauty in the way things had been.

After graduation, Jenny would finally be returning to the East Coast. A job offer on Wall Street was waiting for her, lucrative and only a stone’s throw away from Chinatown. Work would undoubtedly be busy, and visiting would not make up for lost time, but Jenny made herself a promise: she’d see Po Po whenever she could. 

“Jenny, hello? Earth to Jenny!” Somehow, Liz and Carey were twenty paces ahead now. Jenny realized she hadn’t moved from watching the senior citizens playing games at Portsmouth Square.

“Everything okay? Did you see something?” Carey asked.

“Yeah, I’m good. Just got distracted,” Jenny said, and ran to catch up with her friends.