Going through the fire.

My maternal grandmother—my ah-bu—lives in Shanghai. Her dementia is worse. “The other day your ah-bu said to me, who will burn the silver for me on Qingming when I'm dead?” my mom's voice crackles through the car phone. It is that interstitial time of day, driving out from work where I am “doctor” and before getting home where I am “mama.” In the car I am unmoored from the questions and desires and demands of others; a place where the mind can wander. I imagine something similar happening in ah-bu's mind—starting to drift from our agreed-upon reality, setting out on its own journey to that place in between. “She says ghosts visit her,” my mom says, “asking her for money in the middle of the night, trying to steal her stuff.” I remember the last time I saw my grandparents 5 years ago. They were all shorter than I remembered, kyphotic spines folded further inward. I could feel the ridges of their vertebrae when I hugged them. How small they were under their clothes; how much air there was between their shirts and the surface of their skin. The giants of my childhood had gone; my childhood, too, had gone. “Have they taken her to see a geriatrician?” I ask, remembering the time I spent in the geriatrics clinic as a resident, struggling through the Montreal Cognitive Assessment with patients. What would ah-bu score now? My mom pauses, “No one back home believes psych meds work. Besides, Shanghai is still locked down. They're just dealing with it.” - - - The Qingming festival was the Chinese day of the dead, a day to sweep the tombs and honor the ancestors. Two things stand out in my mind about Qingming from childhood. First, when offering food to the dead, one must push the chopsticks straight down into the rice, so the sticks stand at attention, perpendicular to the lip of the bowl. It was as if spirits who came all this way for dinner could not be bothered to lift a chopstick laid flat. The second was that the living had to burn spirit money to ensure those on the other side had enough means to live comfortably in the afterlife. This is what ah-bu meant by burning the silver; we fed paper glazed with silver-tinted paint—joss money—into the fire. As a child, I helped ah-bu fold, crease, and puff the silver-tinted paper until they resembled the silver ingot, which was currency of Imperial China. We filled boxes with the joss money days ahead of time; the boxes would sit in the corner of the room, fermenting, waiting for the big night. Qingming night, I watched ah-bu go out onto the balcony alone, closing the door behind her. Behind the glass, I saw her shake out a mass of paper silver ingots into a chipped enamel basin. She reached in and lit the fire. The paper caught quickly, blackening at the corners, curling up and folding inward, burning gold and orange and red. It did not take long to burn. It all went up in a second, and then it was over, the whole box was gone. Afterwards it was only a pile of huddled ashes at the bottom of the basin, with the rare lip of red gleaming against black ash, and a trail of smoke going up into the night sky. Ah-bu and I looked out into the night, to see where the smoke went. - - - Mom, still on the car phone, tells me that Shanghai and other major cities have banned the burning of joss paper on Qingming. “The air pollution is bad enough without everyone burning a bunch of stuff,” mom says, “they found out it was horrible for the environment.” Later that night, I'm slicing a summer watermelon for my daughter. I hear the crack of the knife sliding splitting the rind, then the cold, sweet red-pink flesh opening to air. I remember watching ah-bu splitting the green rind with a cleaver, then wedging a spoon into the center to core out sweet, seedless heart of the watermelon for me. She would watch me eat, smiling, and making encouraging noises. I remember her standing in the kitchen frying fish—a favorite of mine. She wore arm protectors made from sleeves of older shirts, with elastic sewn into the wrist and elbow, to protect her skin from the splash of hot oil. She would shoo me from the kitchen, away from the spatter and crack of oil, to wait for dinner. Through cooking and feeding people, she showed love to the living. I think of her mind now, some memories and desires still stirring, like embers gleaming in the ash of papers that have been burnt. One day, when her memories are gone, I will be the last remaining, and not-entirely-reliable witness to all the ways she showed me her love for me. - - - As a child, watching the trail of smoke rising from the burnt offering into the night, I screwed up my eyes, as if doing so would help me see the ghostly hand reaching out of the night to take what was due. When I grew older and more skeptical, I started to wonder about the logistics. How many silver ingots for a year in the underworld? I would ask my mom. What's the inflation rate down there, anyway? And sure, you can send an iPhone over, but did they send a charger? What if they need tech support? Yet there was something about those nights during the Qingming Festival, watching the paper burn, As the smoke rose, so did something that felt like hope. Medicine can name pathology; it can treat disease. What we cannot cure we can palliate; we can diminish suffering. But watching that paper burn, I felt the hope that somewhere beyond my understanding there was a place where everything that had fallen apart came back together. By going through the fire, the silver paper would transform into the thing itself: true silver, heavy and cold in the hand, the spiritual currency of some unseen realm. It would become something you could buy dinner with, or clothes, or a house, by going through the fire. I imagined there would have to be an underworld vault to hold all the offerings. A central repository where everything sent over from our world was gathered, sorted, and sent on to their rightful owners. Someone had to be in charge of such an operation—perhaps a Goddess of Burning Things. She would sit in a dark room at the center of that vast hall, tending a small red-yellow fire in the middle of that room. All day and night, she watched for what came through the fire. Things that turned into ash in our world emerged, restored, in hers. Sometimes, out of her fire, piles of silver would come, and entire houses, and all the newest technology. She would bring them out of the flames. She would take careful notes of the name and the destination of the recipients; she also noted who sent them along. (She would have Franz Kafka's drafts, the 90% of what he had written which he carefully fed into the fire. Ralph Ellison's second novel, and Maxine Hong Kingston's, too, burnt up in house fires.) She could do more than try to repair what was broken, the way we do. She could turn back the clock. She would bring new vitality into the faded, burnt things; she would transform them into something new. One day in the future, I will ask my mom if we can burn the papers for ah-bu, to carry on the hope that somewhere out there, molecules of burnt things are put back together, with a little bit of the divine imbued.