The Waiting Room - Part III
Last week, the doctor’s visit revealed that the holes are still moving and our narrator has to wait it out in Taiwan until they’re stable. A meeting with the grandma after reveals that she has a magic pill she’d like to use to transform into a crane, which intrigues our narrator as well.
We take a taxi to the outskirts of Taipei, an area I didn’t even know existed within the city limits. I look outside the car window, a portal to a verdant blur with spots of hot pink bloom. Grandma sits in the front and chats with the taxi driver, alternating between Taiwanese and bursts of Mandarin I barely understand. She slaps his shoulder twice in raucous laughter, summoning sparks of affection in the driver’s eyes visible from the rearview mirror. What a flirt! I think with a raised eyebrow as I shuffle my attention back to the scenery outside.
We pass a street parade on the way. Devotees in multi-colored religious robes and the heavy heads of gods amble across the road. Firecrackers pop and distant temple music blares from faraway speakers. As with any religious festival, the line between cheerful celebration and fearful fealty is blurry to me.
After an hour, we finally arrive at the modest temple where Grandma’s daughter is laid to rest. The main worship hall is flanked by a zen garden and an administrative building. The same bright pink flowers surround the gated entrance. A pop of life before your communion with death, I suppose. The taxi driver drops us off in the empty parking lot and refuses Grandma’s money. After an obligatory insistence with cash in hand, Grandma relents and gives the cursory, polite head bow of accepted defeat, a recognizable gesture from the ritual of fighting over the bill at family banquets. Grandma offers the taxi driver a cigarette instead, which she lights with her own when he accepts. With the car dancing side to side on the uneven cobblestone, he reverses his car toward the exit’s circular arch, waving at us with his right hand while smoking with his left.
Grandma grins as I raise my eyebrow at her. She sticks her tongue out, daring me to say something.
“Are you sure you can smoke here?” I say lamely.
“Everyone here is already dead,” she reminds me. “And we’re not far to follow.”
We move toward the buildings in the back and she loops her arm around mine, guiding me forcefully toward the right path. The sharp menthol of Grandma’s cigarette mixed with the ambient smell of incense throttles me to my early days in New York, chain-smoking in Patrick's hippie den on his dirty, serape-lined futon. The sight of a dog scampering across the zen garden in the distance breaks the memory. I nearly burst into tears.
Bucky died right before I left for Taiwan. In many ways, his death is the reason I’m here: the end of him signified the end of my ties to America. I buried him with his favorite snacks: a Milk Bone, a pecan praline, and a soft caramel. Even colorblind, Bucky was partial to tan-colored sweets.
Grandma begins to speak: “Every morning when I wake up, I’m happy. I think about my daughter—a professor at Harvard!—and her three daughters—mixed blood since she married a German—and I am proud. I picture my beautiful son, living with his daughter after his wife’s tragic passing. Though I mourn the bitterness he had to eat, I know he is strong like the dragon year he was born under.” Grandma pauses and closes her eyes, holding her loved ones in dormant lucidity as plumes of incense smoke billow through her Bichon-puffed perm. “I don’t want to lose my brain, to lose these memories. I don’t want my family to spend thousands of dollars flying over from America to visit me when I will not recognize them, not be able to have a conversation without breaking their hearts.” Death by a thousand cuts, I think to myself.
Grandma and I enter a room lined with ornate, evenly-sized cupboards for walls. In the middle of the room sits a golden statue of a goddess, surrounded by pristine fruits on Pepto-Bismol-pink plastic plates. Behind the altar is a rusty bowl filled with the ash of incense. Grandma scans the gridded cupboards for a number, muttering it under her breath as she does. San-ba, san-ba, san-ba. 3-8, 3-8, 3-8. In Mandarin, the number is a homonym for silly goose, which always made me laugh as a kid. The humor is lost on me now, as Grandma locates her daughter and opens the cupboard, revealing a black and white portrait of an unsmiling woman pasted in front of an urn. Grandma licks her thumb to wipe a stain from her daughter’s cheek. She places a fresh cigarette next to her daughter’s urn and sparks another for herself.
I examine the headshot to pinpoint any resemblance between mother and daughter. The only similarity is the hairline, which comes to a sharp point against their foreheads. Her daughter had a flat nose with matching flat eyes, empty like those of a British orphan with soot on their face. Grandma talks quickly and laughs as if they were sharing a smoke outside a bar. I wander toward the zen garden to grant them a private conversation, scanning for the dog I saw earlier.
Toward the end, Bucky wasn’t Bucky anymore. He zigged when he usually zagged, with an increasing obstinance on our routes home. Oftentimes, he would lie in the middle of the sidewalk in protest, as if he wanted a treat, but when you gave him one, he wouldn’t eat it. The well-meaning pedestrians were the worst: their concern somersaulted my annoyance into guilt. Get up, I commanded through gritted teeth, tugging at Bucky’s leash. You’re making me look bad. I finally understood the mothers who hit their crying children in public.
Eventually, it became easier to keep Bucky at home and just let him shit on the living room rug. He was too heavy for my noodle arms to lift, so we’d often be stuck on our walks for hours when he became publicly sedentary. Once, when I did manage to lift him, he dribbled diarrhea down my sleeves and gazed into my eyes with such open shame I had to look away. His dispassion became a hunger strike; he refused to eat the home-cooked salmon and sweet potato brown rice bowl I had been feeding him for years, which he usually scarfed down with zeal. Every time he trotted away from the bowl toward the bathroom, I felt grief lodge in my esophagus. He lost a quarter of his body weight, withered and unrecognizable like a melting block of ice. All day, he tucked his paw under his chin on the bathroom floor, asleep so soundly I’d nudge him with my foot as I peed, just to check if he was still breathing. It got to a point where his immune system was so rotten that our first walk of the winter cursed him with an unrecoverable chill. For a week, he sneezed, coughed, hacked, and spun in my cramped and humid apartment. I had to wait three days for the baby carriage I bought online to arrive just to take him to the vet, where they found a lump in his neck, told me his chances of recovery were slim to none, and anyways, if we wanted to operate, the anesthesia alone would cost $5,000, so could I decide within the next ten minutes whether or not to put him down? A dozen gallon jugs couldn’t contain the tears I cried then. He died with his fuzzy ears soaked with my snot.
“Ready to go?” Grandma appears suddenly, strangely jubilant until she sees my twisted mouth. My vision blurs wet on my lashline. I nod lightly, so the tears don’t fall out.
****
Grandma and I spend the next four days together. Every morning, we sit in the waiting room for our appointments: her for her pain management, me for my scans. Sometimes we chat, other times we don’t. But we always leave together.
On the fifth day, the doctor comes in with a fresh new fade. He’s gotten increasingly excited during our appointments, marveling at the mystery of my spots, the changing positions, the morphing shapes and shades.
“Look how dark this one has gotten! You really can’t feel anything there?” He presses a palm against my belly as he looks at the hole in my stomach. I shake my head. He tsks.
“Well, as long as there is no pain, all we can do is continue monitoring. I’ve posted your case online and I’m getting tons of emails. Some doctors have suggested religious interventions,” he chuckles. “I never thought I would say this, but you might be beyond science.”
“Today what happened?” Grandma asks when I plop down silently next to her. “That doctor’s an idiot,” she says, taking my hand. I’ve grown accustomed to her touch, can anticipate the smoothness of her palms as they press against mine.
That day we go to the mall and feast in the food court like it’s our last meal. We drool over pork katsu drowned in Japanese curry, slurp unending udon from bowls of miso broth, pry fish cakes from their wooden skewers with our teeth, and top it all off with an anthill of shaved ice and grass jelly.
When we’re done, we wander the floors to walk off our engorged bellies. We assume the classic Chinese elder stride: a straight spine with both hands clasped behind our backs. In the basement is a sprawling array of home goods, a Korean cosmetics display, and a pristine produce section with sprinklers that spray light mist onto the platonic ideal of persimmons. Grandma and I chat up the store clerk who graciously lets us sit through three demo trials on neighboring massage chairs. Next, he introduces us to a platform that vibrates as you stand. Grandma’s round cheeks jiggle and she giggles as she tests it out. Only her perm stays perfectly in place.
“Does this help you lose weight?” she asks the teenage clerk with spotted acne and a K-pop-bleached haircut.
“People ask that a lot. Unfortunately, it’s not that powerful.” He gives the shy smile of someone still shackled with the self-consciousness of their braces.
“That’s a shame,” Grandma says as she hops off to give me a try. “A machine that helps you lose weight without you doing anything…Now that would make a lot of money.”
My braless tits bounce erratically under my loose t-shirt at the machine’s vibration. The boy increasingly fixates on the floor, as if tracking for a missing earring, scratching his chin to feign nonchalance.
“So you’re saying that I need to lose weight, huh?” Grandma says, nudging the boy. “I was quite beautiful back in the day, you know.” His face flushes, matching the rest of his pink pimples.
“No, a-yi—I mean, no, jie,” he course-corrects with the younger Chinese honorific. “You look very young for your age. I mean, very young in general! Very pretty, very elegant, very skinny.”
“I’m just messing with you! Calm down, kid, no need to get all bashful.” Grandma pinches his cheek with a twinkle in her eye. “Now you’re just overcompensating, such a polite boy.” He lowers his head and forces a laugh, nervously wringing a band from his index finger — on, off, on, off.
Later, when we’re outside of a dressing room on the fifth floor, Grandma cackles: “Did you see how red his face got? How he stared down the whole time you were on that thing? Aiyah, he was so shy it’s like he didn’t spend the first few years of his life sucking from a breast!”
I’m still howling with laughter when I emerge in the white dress Grandma picked out. Grandma gives a finger motion to twirl and I oblige, ballooning the ruffled hem as I do. Grandma hums with approval as she tugs at the fabric to assess its quality.
“Mei li, oh,” she nods. I blush at the compliment. She pats my cheek tenderly, her voice coarse with sentimentality. “You will be a beautiful bride one day.” The way she says it feels more like an imperative than a prediction and despite my misgivings about matrimony, in this moment, all I want is to prove her right. I duck back behind the curtain to hide my pleasure and disrobe. When I reemerge, Grandma announces the dress has been paid for and that the store does not allow refunds.
Jun Chou is a solar-powered human, Brooklyn-based writer, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop 2025 Margins Fellow. Her writing has previously appeared in Electric Literature, Cake Zine, Hobart, and is upcoming in Honey Literary. She also interviews creatives of all disciplines as a regular contributor to The Creative Independent. During the day, she improves recipe discovery for The New York Times Cooking. Other times you can find her belting karaoke, adding to her Letterboxd, rock climbing, or drafting her debut novel.