In my family, people didn’t kiss. My parents never kissed my siblings and me good night. They didn’t kiss each other in front of us. If a couple started kissing on a TV show, they changed the channel. There was certainly none of that kissing on the cheek as a greeting. We didn’t even hug.
This was the 1980s in Michigan and we were Vietnamese refugees. We were always trying to figure out white Americans and how we were supposed to behave. Except my grandmother Noi. She didn’t worry about things like that. She had raised four children on her own and uprooted her life twice, from Hanoi to Saigon and then to the United States. I knew her as the matriarch, the one who could not be messed with when it came to cooking, knitting, orchid-growing, or just being. She was a calm, no-nonsense figure, and I was hardly ever happier than when we were eating ramen together and watching her favorite American soap operas.
I never kissed my grandmother Noi. She never kissed me. Maybe it was an Asian thing; maybe it was our family. I knew she loved me and she knew I loved her, yet we never said it. Not in any language. Instead we ate fruit and laughed at sitcoms and wondered who would marry whom on Santa Barbara. At night I would jokingly ask her if it was okay to go to sleep and she would say yes, it’s okay.
Noi died in 2007, on the winter solstice. I drove from Chicago, where I was living then, to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to the hospital where she had been taken after she collapsed. An aortic dissection, it would turn out. It was the only time she had ever been admitted to a hospital, and by then she was already dead.
It snowed hard the next couple of days. My grandmother’s body, by Buddhist tradition, lay in an open coffin in my parents’ house. Guests came by to pay their respects and we wore white cloths around our heads. The night before we drove her body to the crematory, I kept wanting to see her one more time. She was dressed in a silver ao dai, one that she had made herself, and her silver hair was in its usual bun. She was eighty-seven years old. The last time I had seen her alive, she had stood on her tiptoes to water a hanging plant in her living room. Now her body would become ash, though it was already something or somewhere or someone else, unknowable.
How many nights, growing up, had I walked around sleeplessly only to find that my grandmother was also awake, waiting for me?
I touched her wrist. I kissed my grandmother Noi. Her forehead, her cheek. I do not mean to say that it was necessary. It wasn’t. We were not ones to say I love you. Our language never needed that. And I have never written this, or told anyone this, until now. The kiss, I knew even then, was more for me than for her. She would have understood that. She would have understood all of this.