Eulogy for Grandfather

Eulogy for Grandfather

When I was little, if you couldn't find me, I could be anywhere— up a tree, under the covers, in the closet, even hiding in the bathroom where I couldn't be disturbed... but almost always with a book. Friends even through college would ask how it was that I gobbled up words like peanut butter. Usually, I would just shrug and say, “I have no idea where it came from!” Thinking back, though, it's so obvious— how could I miss it?

My GungGung took such an amazing interest in books that one of my lasting childhood memories is him sitting in that armchair in the corner of the Ross Road house, under a pool of lamplight, poring over some biography of a thousand pages. My mom and two uncles used to joke that if an earthquake or fire hit Palo Alto, my grandfather would never notice, because he would be so wrapped up in his reading. I used to think, wandering around that Ross Road living room and looking at the shelves overflowing with books, that hopefully some day I would be able to cook like my grandmother and read thousand-page books like my grandfather.

I also secretly thought that GungGung must be bursting with words, because so many went in... but so few came back out. At least when I knew him, he was not a man of many spoken words. On occasion, an old friend would stop by, and then I would be astounded by their animated back-and-forth. Usually, though, my grandfather was very quiet. I heard amazing stories of his studies in Paris, his political involvement in the Young China Party, and his years at the United Nations, but never from him. He never boasted, and I would never know these stories if it weren't for my mom and two uncles, who were so proud of their dad.

So much of what I know of my grandfather is pieced together from these stories that have trickled down from relatives and friends, and PoPo's photographs that I love to look at. In those, I see a wholly different GungGung— someone who wasn't a GungGung yet, someone laughing tremendously with friends on a beach in Paris (wearing a very fashionable 1920's bathing suit!), someone who, as my mom was fond of saying, looked like a Hollywood movie star, someone striking a debonair pose in my grandmother's garden with a guitar.