Christmas in California, at the cemetery, in Chinatown, with Charlie

On Christmas, just before noon, my family goes to the cemetery. With flowers in the trunk, we go up the winding paths (the cemetery is located in the Oakland hills), and up almost to the top to where there’s a slope that looks west towards the Pacific. “From here,” my father said to me in 1975, “Yeh-Yeh can see all the way back to China.”

Yeh-Yeh was my father’s father, Charlie Chew—yes, Charlie was named after him. He died in 1975 when I was six years old and I still remember how my grandmother, Ngin-Ngin, keened and wailed at his wake and funeral, and how it rained and rained, and how high the pile of flowers—wreaths and fancy displays on green posts—was atop his gravesite in the rain. My older cousins admonished me not to smile and no one could wear anything but black or dark, dark blue.

Ngin-Ngin’s mother was already buried up on the mountain slope and, too, my mother’s grandfather, who used to own a laundry in Oakland Chinatown. But it was after Yeh-Yeh died that we started to make regular, and at first frequent, trips to the cemetery. Over time, there have been more stops to make, and more flowers to bring. There are five times when my family goes up to the cemetery now (at least); I only go back to California now once a year, at Christmas time, and it’s good to go and stand among so much family and look out and think about what lies west.

Charlie woke up smiling out from under his blankets, ate a pack of special pack of sushi for breakfast, and started whining, and then howling and stomping. We practiced piano and having to listen to the music and concentrate on reading his music book helped to redirect whatever his thoughts were. He was still moaning when we got into the car and drove to the cemetery, where he ran out and ran down the grassy slope and rolled around onto his back and stomach. At the top of the slope, my aunts and cousins were dividing up the flowers and filling the watering cans. Everyone went to greet Ngin-Ngin in the passenger seat of my aunt’s car. Charlie cheered up considerably over lunch at a new Chinese restaurant that was celebrating its Grand Opening (”actually, we went here for Thanksgiving lunch” someone quipped). In the usual manner of lunch with my family, it was one dish after the next—soup, fried rice with salted fish, green beans, beef chow fun, fried chicken wings, tomato beef chow mein, beef with thick rice noodles and bok choy, whole fried and salted shrimp, gai lan, tomato beef chow mein (which was somehow ordered twice). (You can guess which dish Charlie did not care for……..). We went home, opened presents, Jim took Charlie on a walk up some hilly paths (they encountered a cat that Charlie tried to walk around), and then it was up to my aunt’s house.

Charlie had been to her house on Saturday for a Christmas sing-a-long party and clearly felt at home tonight: He nuzzled his face into the couch, ran up and down the stairs, hovered around the food table, climbed up into a loft to look at an electric train set, tried out an old exercise bike. Jim and I found ourselves talking to one of my aunts and to a cousin about Charlie and, even more, about a special needs trust, how Charlie will be going to middle school next year, where we think we may be living when Charlie is an adult, what his life then might be like—and how important these year by year rituals of family getting together and doing the same things and celebrating, mourning, and remembering mean, for all of us, for Charlie.

I always wish Yeh-Yeh could have known the great-grandson who is his namesake. Everyone liked Yeh-Yeh; strong in my memories is the image of him sitting in a flannel shirt in my dad’s big chair and leaning back and smiling at his children, grandchildren, and friends at family gatherings. Ngin-Ngin calls Charlie her bidoy—her little boy; Charlie is the youngest of her male great-grandchildren. This Christmas night my father had Charlie give Ngin-Ngin a Christmas hong bao and he did so with another round of “We wish you a Merry Christmas.” Ngin-Ngin was seated right in the center of the room with everyone around.

Charlie included.