I called my grandparents last week. My grandfather told me about his morning. He had gone to the market and gotten five pieces of sweet cakes. He had gotten them, because he got some earlier in the week, but before my grandmother had any, my cousin came and had two with lunch and then took the rest home. So he went out and got some more for my grandmother. When I was listening to his familiar voice I could picture him carefully putting on his battered, honest, navy-blue linen shoes, rolling his cigarette deliberately, slowly, putting on one of his several newsboy caps, giving the front end a firm tug downwards to make sure it's snug.
I was rendered silent by something, and could not find words that should come next from my mouth. We don't say "aw" in Chinese. We don't say "that's nice" to your elders, like you need to tell them what's nice. But I doubt that was the whole problem. I don't think it was just an insufficiency of Chinese as a language. I think it was a feeling that is universal yet cannot be put into any language, a feeling that haunts someone at times like these.
It was not a fantastic picture, the one my grandfather told. It was a picture of routine. But routine is underrated. Newness explodes in youth, in New York, in a world where time is not a concern. But at some point we do face another side of life, when newness is not welcomed indiscriminately, when we will have to re-catalogue some old things; when we will see, sometimes despite ourselves, the shaping of our routine.
And my grandfather's routine. It was so ordinary, so unadorned. Yet at that moment, it seemed so scarce to me, that thing he has day in and day out, for the better part of half a century. It's a strange thing, having a surplus of new, unique things; and not enough the opposite.
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