It came as quite a shock to me.

My grandmother had given me a stack of photos to share with my mom and as I flipped through the oldest ones, I found myself staring face to face with a joyous man. Earlier pictures had shown him as a young man in black and white, but this picture… it was thirty years later, just months after I was born. And suddenly it struck me that this was my grandfather, the grandfather I had one vague (possibly fake) memory of. The one who saw me off when I was three and a half, headed to a great new world to join my parents in Pennsylvania, and never saw me again.

Hi gramps. That’s grandma holding me and grandpa holding onto my cousin.

I sat there absorbing the shock as I realized… I never really knew what he looked like. Here I am 28 years old; how did I get to this age without ever knowing his face? Of course I must have known him briefly when I was a baby, but I have no memories of that. The one fleeting memory I think I have was when I was leaving. He sent down a basket from the second floor, I think with something we had forgotten. He was alive when I was born and still alive when I left China for America as a toddler. Maybe I could have known him then. Now that I think of it, was the reason that my grandmother was the only one who came to visit us at Penn State because he had already died? I had no impression of time back then. I vaguely remember watching my parents receiving the news when I was around 5 or 6. Phone calls to and from China were a rare commodity. We couldn’t afford long distance, so it was a pretty big deal. The news wasn’t good – a heart attack. And just like that, any hope of knowing grandpa was gone.

What happened after that? It’s all a blur to me. All I know is that when I was almost too young to remember, my grandfather passed away and I never got a chance to really build memories with him. It was about four years later that I first returned to China again, long after he was gone. In my family, we don’t really talk about the past, so I never asked about him. I didn’t even know who to talk to and I figured I’d learn more over time. Many years ago, my mother took me to his grave. I remember taking a bus far away from the city, to a neat cemetery lined with headstones. I don’t know how my mom made her way to his headstone through the long rows, but I think she had a map. Since then, I haven’t been back. Next time I’m taking notes so I can find it again (though I think that year I actually wrote down some notes in my journal, if I can dig it up).

My maternal grandparents in 1956, probably soon after they got married.

Now that I actually think of it, it’s so very sad that I let all this time go by without trying to know him. I had no idea there were any pictures of him. We don’t have many pictures from the 80’s and earlier, so I thought I’d seen them all. But now that these have surfaced, I’m realizing that I could have known his face all this time. This smiling man who looks so kind, so amicable. I wish I knew what his personality was like, what he sounded like. I know that he was an excellent student and accomplished professional, but what about home life? Was he a good cook? Did he enjoy playing chess? Did he love animals too? I wonder if I got my smile from him, and perhaps my penchant for reading as a child. Now that I have a face to put with this fuzzy idea of my grandfather, his death seems so much more real. I’ll have to figure out when the 30th anniversary of his death is, so I can make it out to see him.