The Love That Can’t Tell

 Yesterday, I drew a picture of an old lady taking three children to eat jelly in a revolving restaurant. My son saw the picture, pointed to the little boy in the middle, and said, "That's me!" "No," I said, "that's me when I was very young." The story behind the picture is that my grandma took me and my sisters to a revolving restaurant during her first visit to China since migrating to Australia. I was five years old at the time.

Grandma was the kind of person who liked to hide almost everything in her mind. I felt it was very challenging to know what she was really thinking about. I remember that many times I saw her staring at an old black-and-white photo of a lady sitting on a chair. I asked her who she was. "She's my mother," she said. However, she refused to tell me why she looked at her mother's photo again and again throughout the year. "Do you miss your mum?" I asked. "No," she responded.

One day, when I woke up in the morning, Grandma merrily told me that she had cooked some noodles for my breakfast. "Now you should know how good I am to you. I am over eighty. Who else would I make breakfast for?" she said. "Yeah, you're good to me. But that doesn't mean you're better to me than to others. You took care of others when they were very young. You cuddled them, soothed them to sleep, and fed them. But when I came to your place, I was already grown up. At least you don't need to feed me," I rebutted.

A few days later, I came home just as the moon was rising. Grandma was standing on the porch, waving anxiously at me. She urged me to come to the dining table as soon as possible, and she opened the microwave to fetch a bowl of soup. After dipping a finger into the soup, she said, "The temperature is just right. This is a bowl of American ginseng soup. I only have one bowl. Drink it as soon as possible." "But I am not hungry," I said. "Sit down!" she ordered.

With one hand holding the back of my head and the other hand holding the bowl, she fed me! After she finished feeding me, she looked out the window and glanced around. Suddenly, she giggled and said, "This is a secret between us. Don't tell anyone that I gave the soup to you!" She looked smug.