Recognition

“This young man is definitely hungry. It’s just another plate at the

table, no trouble.”

When grandma said this, pointing at me, my father’s mouth opened

but no sound came out. The summer heat hung motionless in the air.

On the wall, in the photo from her nighty-sixth birthday, the boy with

his arm around her shoulders—younger me—smiled out at the room.

He seemed to be watching, gently and silently, as his older self was

slowly forgotten.

A few hours earlier, I had stood before a familiar door: the peeling

paint, the dim motion-activated light, the doorbell that had been silent

for a decade. The concrete stairwell smelled exactly as I remembered

when I had first come here ten years ago; time here had lost its desire

to flow forward. An unfamiliar homecare worker opened the door, and

an entire world of old rushed out. Walking into the apartment, under

a mantel clock with a stilled pendulum, a tear-off calendar with yellow

paint hung on the wall. A water stain spread on the ceiling, like a vague

medieval animal-hide map. An electric fan turned slowly, trying to stir

the stagnant atmosphere of the room. Grandma sat next to the wall, not

in a wheelchair, but on her sofa. Her silver hair was thin but still fluffy;

her face had a landscape of wrinkles, but her eyes still held a soft clear

light. She didn’t hear us entering the room and sat watching TV until we

appeared in her sight. Immediately, she recognized my father. With his

prompting, she also smiled and nodded at my mom. Dad was making

a 15-mile trip to see grandma three times a week. These journeys have

been proven by stacks of walnut and egg cake boxes. Though unopened,

they have become the most stable anchor in her fading memory.

Then her gaze settled on me.

“And who is this?” she asked my dad, her tone polite and distant.

“It’s Jinlong1

!” father raised his voice.

“Who?”

“Jinlong! Your grandson!”

“Ah...Who?”

He repeated it several times. She frowned slightly, her lips moving,

muttering a string of syllables, an accent only my late grandfather could

understand: “Is he the [indistinct mumbling]?”

“What?” We didn’t catch that.

“Huh?” said grandma.

We gave up, all of us. Or rather, we collectively agreed to an

unspoken performance: to pretend she remembered. The clatter of

mahjong tiles resumed in the living room while I played PVZ on her

old computer. I gathered from what I heard of the conversation that

grandma still remembered how to cheat in mahjong.

“Mom, how could you make this combo?” my dad asked, confused.

“Ah...this is the wild card.”

“This is not a wild card. This rule doesn’t exist!” dad said, keeping his

volume up.

“[Indistinct mumbling] it is.”

Every round between them typically ended with grandma’s

authorized privilege of adding a rule into the rulebook, and that day

was no different. Mom and dad tried to communicate, but later they

were too tired. After each round, she would slowly shuffle around for a

few minutes without answering dad’s question of “what are you looking

for.” Then she would open the bags of snacks that dad had brought, and

place a few nuts or two biscuits beside my hand. A kind of affection,

ungrounded in memory, flowing purely from instinct.

“Do you recognize him?” asked my dad.

“I think...?” my grandmother answered.

Before dinner, she came to me again. “Time to eat,” she said. I stood

up to follow. In this place, no matter how old I have grown, I will always

be treated as a “grandson.” But then she turned to my father, her voice adopting a tone of negotiation, even a hint of pleasing, “Let this young

man join us. It’s just another plate at the table.”

The world went quiet for a moment.

Dad’s eyes reddened. Without a word, he reached out and gently

guided grandma toward a photo on the wall. It was a birthday photo.

Standing in front of the picture, my father took a deep, trembling

breath. “Mom,” he said, his finger pressing against the glossy image

of the boy beside her, the one smiling without showing her teeth. His

fingertip turned pale with the pressure. “Look. Who is this?”

Life circles around. In childhood, we are also taught to recognize

people in this way: our parents pointed out one person with their

fingertips and asked us, “who is this?” Now it’s the same, it’s just the

person who asked questions switched position with the person who

answered.

Grandma leaned in, squinting slightly. Her eyes scanned the bright

frozen scene with the ease of someone reviewing a familiar object. “Ah...

Jinlong, of course,” she said, her tone carrying a hint of “why do you

even ask?” The face in the photo and the name were locked together in

her mind: solid, clear, and inseparable.

“Then look,” my dad’s voice dropped, low and heavy enough to press

the air out of the room.

“What?” grandma asked.

Though we hated to disrupt the atmosphere, dad wasn’t loud enough

for her to hear. He raised his hand and began to move. It was no longer

just a finger, more like a trembling bridge, attempting to span the

void of time. Its starting point was that smooth youthful face in the

photograph who seemed a little reluctant to sit for that picture; its end

point was me, standing here now at the edge of the light, breathing and

solid. That short distance across the room stretched, in the slow arc of

his movement, into a long passage through time.

“Who,” his finger finally hovered in my direction, like a weighty

question mark, or a yearning period, “is he?”

Grandma’s gaze, led by his question, began its long journey. It

lingered for one more second on the “Jinlong” in the photo, as if

confirming its coordinates. Then it left the safe glossy island of the

photograph and dove into the chaotic ocean of time. It crossed the

still pendulum, the weary sofa, the out-fashioned fan, each object like

a vague reef in the deep sea of memory. It traversed the thick and

soundless wall of years—ten? perhaps more—that had accumulated

between then and now. I could feel the hesitation in that gaze as

it moved between two of myself in different time dimensions like

swimming against the current.

Finally, it arrived. Heavily, it landed on my face. This was no longer the polite, vacant glance reserved for a stranger.

It was a true landing. At first, pure blankness, as if the world behind her

eyes hadn’t yet found its focus. Then deep within the mist of her pupils,

the faintest sparks were struck, one by one, with great effort. First like

confusion, then...Her gaze moving like the most delicate fingertips over

lines of my brow, the corners of my eyes, my jawline, trying to match

them against some remembered template. Finally, all those uncertain

points of light contracted suddenly into a single, thick, brilliant, and

fragile beam. Unbelievable, astonished, not the words I’m looking for; it

was a faint resonance of scattered pieces finally reassembled on the far

shore of time’s ocean.

Her lips moved, a half-beat behind her eyes. In those eyes that had

witnessed nearly a century, there now was a childlike clarity.

“You...” her voice was soft, as if afraid to disturb the freshly

assembled vision, “...are Jinlong?”

I didn’t speak. My throat felt stuck. I only nodded.

In this world where sound had completely failed and explanation was

utterly useless, kinship had finally shed all its linguistic trappings and

retreated to the most primitive path. That was enough to renew every

bond, to claim every lost memory.

In that moment, a miracle occurred. I felt myself yanked away from

the present by that fragile light in her eyes. The kitchen faded. My

parents’ murmurs stretched away. I was thrown back to that bright

afternoon years ago, just before the camera shutter clicked. I felt again

the warmth of her hand on my shoulder, smelled the faint, unchanging

scent of soap that always clung to her. Two moments in time collapsed

into one at the singular point where our eyes met.

There was only her and me, standing on opposite sides of memory’s

deep fault line. She, from the shore shrouded in forgetting, had flung a

cable across with all her might; I, on this side, held on tight. No cheers,

no tears, only the vast and complete silence between our gazes. Within

that silence, we completed an act of recognition. And at that moment,

time paused for us, hiding all its cruelty.

1 That’s my nickname that my grandparents call me, meaning “golden dragon.” I heard

it was from a random Taoist priest who said I needed “metal” in my name...