Scallion Pancakes
By Winshen Liu
It is a race every time you say you need to go. We catch what you say over the TV, always playing the news and already on low, and we need to divide and conquer: hug you into a standing position while someone runs to the bathroom to retrieve the plastic bucket with a little water in it. Someone else takes the stack of cushions off the wheelchair seat so we can lift the holed seat, set the bucket in, put the seat back down, pull down your diaper, and make sure you sit in time to go. We make it. And we are glad. Sighs of relief and passes of gas, laughter that follows and pats on the back. It’s okay. This is normal. Farts are normal. And then it’s a hug up to standing, ointment and wipes, someone takes out the bucket to flush its contents, someone else adds back the cushions so you can’t feel the hole in the seat, and you sit back down. The room fills with sighs of exhaustion and sighs from exertion. We see why you don’t want to keep doing this.
You have all of your strong and straight teeth, your eyes and ears that watch viral videos and track the stock market on your cellphone, your flexible fingers that still play mahjong, your stubborn opinion that vegetarianism is wrong unless you’re over 60, your stories of how you fled the Communists and lied about your age – once to be older so the army would take you, once to be younger so you could keep your pride. But now, standing takes one person, ideally two. Walking takes two people, ideally three. Breathing takes a machine.
It’s torturous, isn’t it, that we want you to keep doing this. We come back from the cities – our Taipei apartments with roommates, partners, and cats, the ones with no guest rooms so that when our parents come to visit, we sleep on the floor – to help. Some of us stay up until midnight to buy roundtrip train tickets during festivals. Some of us use all ten of our vacation days and ask for unpaid leave. The most filial are the ones who get new jobs, who leave Taipei to live down the street, who take two weeks to move, so all future weeks are with you. All so you can keep doing this: wake, change your diaper from the night, wash your face with a towel, check your pulse and oxygen, sit up in the hospital bed we’ve rented, go to the wheelchair bathroom, sit back on the bed, change from one collared pajama shirt to another.
Breakfast is soft, except for the medicine – a red capsule that helps your lungs but ravages your digestion. It’s the reason, some of us think, we have to race you when you need to go. Life is a history of tradeoffs.
You’ve taken to scallion pancakes lately. We ordered some a few weeks ago and you decided you like it, but we think you shouldn’t have it every day. Not right now. It’s too much grease and too few vitamins for your hardening lungs. We watch you peer into your bowl of ground oatmeal, with almond meal and peanut butter and dried blueberries and black sesame seeds and listen to you say (like you do every day it’s not scallion pancakes), it’s too much, too much, I can’t finish this. We seem to be the only ones who remember this is half of what you used to eat.
It’s time for more medicine, the next three pills, but you shake your head, wave your hand to tell us no. We stand in shock, at how you’re suddenly your own doctor, how you think it’s okay to skip a dose. We explain what the pills do, how they slow the scarring of your lungs, how they help you cough, how they help your blood oxygen levels – you groan over us, saying you’ve had enough. Your voice grows louder as you press the bed controller to lie flat again.
You won’t have it because, my goodness, you’ve already taken medicine!
These are different, we say. You have many medicines. But this is the wrong thing to say because you want none of them.
What is the point of doing anything anymore? you shoot back .
Sometimes we wonder the same thing.
We come up with reasons like weddings and birthdays and new years and trips, things to look forward to, things defined by happiness.
You shake your head. You’ve experienced enough weddings, birthdays, new years, and
trips. You don’t need great-grandchildren.
But there’s more, we say. They’re different, they’re better, they’re exciting!
Just let me be comfortable, you say.
You’ll be more comfortable with the medicine.
You chew up the tablets instead of swallowing them because it’s too hard to take big gulps. We don’t remember seeing you yawn since we arrived weeks ago. You drink water out of a teacup, tiny like the plastic ones in the cooking sets we used to play with, filled barely halfway. It takes five minutes to drink the bit, but even then you don’t finish it.
When we were little, you used to go out to the market once a week and buy yang le duo, five short bottles in a pack for your five grandchildren. We peeled back the red foil lids and sipped, grinning like it was the best thing summer had to offer.
The plastic bottles now fit in our palms and taste like watery yogurt. They come with boxed lunches, the ones we order on days when it’s too hot or we’re too tired to cook for eight, ten, twelve of us. Our parents think the dairy in it upsets your stomach, but we think the races are just from the medicine. We offer you one when we think no one is watching. But you won’t drink it, and now we can’t remember if you ever did.
*
You brush your teeth while sitting in bed. We hold a basin for you to spit into and wipe your chin with a towel every few swishes. You won’t use toothpaste anymore because it requires more swishes.
Often, you cough afterwards, a cough that wakes those of us still sleeping upstairs, a battle between exhales and inhales that sounds like you’ll tear your vocal cords. There is scar tissue in your lungs and there will only be more. We don’t tell you this, but you probably know from our faces as we pat your back, pass you tissues, sigh.
You tell us you are tired of sitting. You want to close your eyes and lie back down.
Ninety-three years old, you say, shaking your head. It’s enough.
We think, ninety-three is a lot, maybe enough, but we say, why not ninety-four, ninety-five, ninety-six? One hundred! Like it’s a game of hide and seek.
We see why you wouldn’t want to keep doing this.
*
The longest moment of the morning is also our favorite. It’s when you walk across the living room, from the bed to the wheelchair. It takes ten minutes because first you refuse to walk. We say you haven’t walked yet today, so you should. Then you tell us you don’t feel like walking, that you just ate, and we point to the clock like it’s our witness that breakfast was an hour ago. You agree to walk, just not right now, and we say why not right now, it’ll be lunchtime at this rate. Finally, you blink a long blink and nod a small nod and that is the start of your walk.
One of us lifts and swings your legs off the bed while another hugs you until you’re sitting. Then we sit on the bed, side by side, like three summer friends at the edge of a pool, feet dangling in the water on one of those cloudless days. We rub your back, pretending and hoping it helps you breathe.
When your breathing eases, you nod and press your lips shut like you’re holding your breath to go underwater.
“Don’t hold your breath!” we say.
You spit out some air, but breathing is hard enough already.
We dodder across the tile, two of us under your arms, holding you up and cheering you on, pretending and hoping that crossing the room means soon you can walk outside, on your own, like you used to. We remind you to inhale, to exhale, to take it step by step.
You used to walk to the park every morning, wearing a light gray jogging suit, the only time we didn’t see you in a collared shirt. They have a track there where you’d walk ten laps in the summer, swinging your arms, returning home with breakfast before we even woke up. Back then, we weren’t ones for early mornings or walking. We slept in until the baos in the rice cooker grew soggy. Now, we wish we had gone with you more than once.
Your feet shuffle quickly, but we want you to walk for longer, not faster. There’s no rush, we say.
You’ve always been a fast walker, you tell us, and you clamp your lips back together. We don’t remind you to inhale and exhale because we know you need to hold onto as much as you can.
When we get close to the wheelchair, we wish the room was bigger .
*
Every day, you ask the same questions. We look forward to them like they are inside jokes.
After meals, you ask if you’ve brushed your teeth and we tell you yes, because you have.
At breakfast, you ask what we’ll have for lunch and we tell you what we’ve planned.
At lunch, you ask if A-ma will take a nap and we say she will.
At dinner, you ask what we’ll have for breakfast, to which we ask what you would like. You tell us scallion pancakes, and we say, how about oatmeal? You think about it, nod, and say that will do, and we are glad you concede, glad we aren’t wronging you when you’re the only one who has oatmeal for breakfast.
*
You don’t like anyone in the family eating processed foods. Not even baos because who knows what kind of meat they grind up and stuff in there. But one night when we were little, you went out at 8PM, after dinner and the dishwashing we took turns doing.
You climbed up the stairs as you proclaimed, “Late night snack for my grandchildren,” arms toting pink-striped plastic bags, the smell of steamed bread and pork and cabbage wafting up the stairs to us – your five grandchildren, your three daughters, your three sons-in-law, your wife – in the living room. We swarmed you with wa’s and thank you’s, the smallest of us squealing, some of us gasping, the oldest rendered speechless as you smiled a smile that comes only from indulging someone you love. We huddled around you, salivating, never mind that we just had a five-dish, home-cooked meal, complete with fish and soup.
No one was allowed to stand while eating so we sat, bouncing baos between our palms. They were too hot to hold, but too delicious to set down. We were jealous of the slowest eater who still had a bite left after all of us had finished ours.
You clapping your slippers up those concrete steps, your voice scratchy but vigorous, your tone proud and delighted about buying treats for your grandchildren – this is what we talk about when you nap.
*
The doorbell rings and wakes you. The intercom you installed years ago means you hear the voices on the other end despite our efforts to muffle the sound, our palms pressed over the speakers. They are here with a bag of herbs or a box of peaches or a block of turnip cake. They have, sometimes, come from a long way.
Don’t let them up, you say.
We dodge your glare as we buzz them in. They settle in on the couch next to you, so we retreat to the kitchen to brew tea and pour guava juice, cut mangoes and open the best cookies we have.
Their exclamations and your chuckles bounding down the hall make us imagine what it is like to tell you how well you look. We wonder what it would feel like to hold your hand and be surprised at how they feel, like the silky thin skin that forms on a pot of cooling soy milk.
We watch them laugh and chat with you as the mango cubes disappear. We only know the mangoes are sweet because we sucked on the seeds in the kitchen. The nectar dripped down our arms as the stringy fibers caught in our teeth. Yet, our mouths taste bitter until they leave.
*
You sit at the table for lunch, your wheelchair parked next to A-ma. When you’re next to her, you don’t throw any fits about taking medicine or drinking soup or even listening to the political opinions that come up. You ask if she will take an afternoon nap as if she doesn’t every day, because when she does, the rest of us do too, which means you can sleep soon, which means we won’t make you sit or walk or stretch. She sneaks you cuts of food you like but are not supposed to eat.
Your walk after lunch from the wheelchair back to the bed is one you skip sometimes. We know the walks are hard, that they leave you out of breath, that they make you move the translucent skin hanging from your bones. But every bit of movement helps your circulation: your feet are less swollen, you have more energy, you sleep more through the night.
This is good, look at how your oxygen levels improve, we say. You fight us on it. We watch you cough, groan, cough, wince. You tell us you need to go, and so we race. It’s an inarguable way to get out of anything.
The hug to stand, the cushions, the bucket, the diaper, the seat, the wipes.
You clamber back into bed, wincing when we carry your legs and swivel you onto the bed. When you’re lying flat, you sigh and ask when this will be over. You’ve had enough.
We stay silent, biting our lips, clasping our hands, letting out little sighs, pretending and hoping you’ll leave it at that and nap.
You shake your head. You say you want to die. You say it again. Your voice strains when you say it, you mean it so much.
We hate when you say this, so we snap. We ask you to stop. Stop.
But you continue. Ai-yo! Why, you exclaim, are you being tortured? What have you done to deserve this? Life, you say, has been so hard already.
You wince and cough, violent coughs like you’re launching a bone from the back of your ribs. You say it again and it takes our whole bodies to keep from talking back.
How do you think this makes us feel? We are here, every day and night, all of us women, carrying you, walking with you, talking with you, cooking meals we hope work miracles for you, wiping you down for in-bed baths, changing your sheets, changing you, flushing buckets of your last meal, waking in the middle of the night to give you water and check your oxygen, hoping and praying for you. How do you think it feels to do this and hear that you just want to die?
We tell you your time will come when it comes. There is no use in saying you want it to be right now. We all have our time and now is not yours. So why not make the most of each day?
We spew clichés, tell you each day can be better than the last, praying and hoping that it is.
We know life ends. We know it’s a matter of time. We know you will not learn an instrument or a new language, you will not discover a love for crocheting or painting, you will not hear from a long-lost friend. We know you’ve seen all the movies you care to see, eaten the foods you want to eat, celebrated the same occasions nearly a hundred times over. We know the days are all the same. But we are not quite ready to miss you. Not when it will be for so long.
*
After your nap, we do your in-bed exercises. We bend you at your joints, each of your fingers, your wrists, elbows, shoulders, toes, ankles, knees, hips. You can still raise your hands above your head. We say ooh and yay when you swing invisible baseball bats at the wall and climb invisible stairs to the ceiling. Maybe you let us do this because it feels like a massage. We like it because it softens you.
Afterwards, on a good day, you watch us play mahjong. Each round is a meditation, all of us counting ones, twos, threes, assembling straights and pairs. We make dinner, eat as a family, watch the news, floss and brush your teeth. You take your medicine without saying anything and we walk you to bed to rest. At 8PM, we walk with you, another side-hug to your wheelchair, and you watch us play mahjong. On a great day, you play too.
When it is bedtime, you take one more pill and each of us kiss you goodnight. We stroke your few strands of hair, hold your hand, say you did a great job today and look at how much you’ve gotten better. We’ll do fun things tomorrow, play some more mahjong, watch something exciting on TV, eat dumplings, drink yang le duo. This is the time of day when you nod and smile the most so that we almost want to say we’ll go up to the mountains, we’ll do a tea tasting, we’ll take you to Europe again.
Before you sleep, you ask what we will have for breakfast tomorrow.
We ask what you would like.
You take a few seconds, a pause, a breath.
We exchange glances, wondering if you’ll choose something like turnip cake. Maybe you’ll volunteer oatmeal.
How about scallion pancakes? You say it like it’s the first time you’ve considered it.
We laugh, and this time, we say, sure, A-gong, let’s do scallion pancakes.
Winshen Liu (she/her) is a former software engineer and product manager working on her first novel. She earned her BA in social studies at Harvard and MS in computer science at the University of Chicago. She recently started as a bookseller at Semicolon Bookstore in Chicago.