Dreams Apart

by Maggie Lu

Ping, my favorite cousin, was standing on the porch. What a lovely surprise – it had been so many years and Ping had never visited us in Australia.

“Come in my brother, come!” I said, grabbing him in my hand. He did not move. He simply stood there and looked at me, tears welling up in his eyes.

I woke up. The day had yet to break, but I couldn’t fall back to my dream.

Waves of sadness slapped me in the dark, wrapped me, and nearly suffocated me. When I was staring at the ceiling and replaying the dream, Ping was counting his days in his sickbed 8,000km away. Days later he died.

“He was saying goodbye to you, he knew he was leaving,” my auntie said over the phone as I told her about my dream.

If only. Once I read about dying was like the soul shedding the body and moving on. That could make sense, I said to myself. When Ping was shedding his body, he broke out from the mortal bondage and even crossed the oceans to visit me in a parallel world. He set himself free finally.

Favorite cousin

We were six years apart and played a lot together when we were kids, probably because he was my mum’s favorite nephew and my grandma’s favorite grandson.

I still remember those summer days blooming with white gardenia when I stayed with my grandma and with Ping living next door. I would read so many books from his bookshelf and he would proudly say to his pals: “this is my sister and she is so clever!”

He would take me to see those Kungfu TV shows and would imitate Cantonese pronunciations – he even told me why Hong Kong was called Hong Kong. He would squeeze his eyes and mouth to make clown faces and I would laugh and laugh.

Our paths parted when we grew up and he left home for a boarding school, but he still held a special place in my heart. I admired his handsome handwriting and his taste of literature – he was subscribing to some elite literature magazines at that time while I was swamped in cheap romance novels.

When he met his first love, he told me first and showed me the photo of the girl. That made me feel so special and so important – I so looked forward to meeting the girl.

Life, however, does not always follow your script. I never got to meet the girl and Ping had to give up on his first love for reasons I was not exactly aware of. Once I heard my auntie noting briefly, “Ping is a good boy, he listens to parents.”

It was truly a virtue to listen to parents, they said, but I somehow felt sad for him. I never asked him why. Maybe I secretly despised him for being so obedient and dreaded his future as an aftermath of himself not having the guts to stand up.

Everything accelerated when we got older. Work, marriage, kids, aging parents… there was no time or space for us to ponder whether life was what we wanted - no long summer days for adults.

Ping changed jobs several times and had ups and downs, while I was keeping a comfortable life in another city. He had a baby girl when I was pregnant with my first child. He adored the girl and spoiled her; he was such a loving dad.

He still was my favorite cousin but we rarely talked anymore except for those Chinese New Year family gatherings where adults feasted and kids ran around.

Dying on the other side

When mum told me Ping was diagnosed with a type of very aggressive lung cancer, I was already settled in Australia for nearly a decade. My throat grew thicker and I tried not to cry out in front of the mum.

So many years had suddenly been compressed and my cousin Ping, whom I had been almost out of touch with, shrank to that teenage boy who played with me in those long summer days at my grandma’s house. He showed me his books, he sang those Cantonese songs, and he made funny faces, now he was dying, on the other side of the world.

I started to text him; he was finding it hard to talk at that time. I asked if he was reading some book and said I was praying for him. He said, “Don’t worry sister! I am confident that I can beat this monster.” He was funny as usual, or he tried to sound cheerful.

“I can beat this. I will visit you in Australia when I feel better! I promise,” he said. Sure, I would wait for you here, and I would make tea for you, I said.

Text from the Lady

Other than that, I carried on with my life in Sydney. A full-time job, two kids, and mortgages had kept my days full and I could not afford to slack off. Only beneath the flow of daily runabouts was there an undercurrent of grief rising and rising that winter, sapping me of energy and vigor.

One day I got a text from a lady. She was that girl Ping showed me a photo of many years ago. She said Ping used to tell her about me, a special sister, and that he was so proud of me. She heard from mutual friends that Ping was very sick and wanted to see him, for the last time.

She asked if I could help. I was dumbfounded and hesitated first. I was brought back to that point in time when Ping “listened to parents” and gave up. Maybe at that time, I should have questioned him why and challenged him to change his mind.

Maybe I could do something now, even from 8000km away. I told her I could not promise but I could probably ask. I asked an uncle, who is very close to Ping, whether this was possible and if he could coordinate.

Later I heard she did manage to see him before he died. No details had been relayed back to me and I did not ask. I would never know whether he was still conscious or still recognized her as he was lingering towards his end.

I didn’t go back to China for Ping’s funeral. I never liked those funerals they held in my hometown. He already bid me farewell anyway, so did I. Yet I imagined I would go back the following year and would visit his tomb.

Loss of Grandparents

I had to keep imagining in the following two years, or perhaps in the years to come, as the world was turned upside down by a strange pandemic. Many countries shut international borders and travel was out of the question for people like us.

I stayed in Sydney, a relatively safe place in an increasingly dangerous world. Not much to complain really – I was working from home, the family stayed healthy and a loving husband was always by my side.

On the other side of the ocean, my loss deepened since Ping’s demise. My grandma passed away the following northern hemisphere spring, when it was late autumn in Sydney, and a couple of months later it was my grandpa, on the other side.

They were both dear to me. My parents comforted me and said at least they died of age. It was like the withering of a leaf that finally returned to dust, all naturally, not like Ping.

Meeting in Dreams

I sometimes dreamed about them, not about them coming to visit me though. Once I dreamed of my grandma still living in her old house, which had been uninhabitable for many years.

I could not recall if we conversed, but even if we did, I had no idea of what I had to say. The last time when I visited her, she could not even recognize me. She smiled at me and said, “Oh you’ve grown so tall!”

But my mum said grandma always had that remark for anyone she met nowadays, like a baby repeating a phrase she had just learned. The burden of ages crushed her brain, no matter how sharp-minded she used to be.

For all her life she had been a housewife raising five kids, not an easy task under any circumstances, and she proved to be a shrewd manager of family matters during difficult times. She also sang beautifully and played mahjong well.

My grandpa was a different story. Since my university days, I had dreamed many times about grandpa dying and wept so hard that I woke myself up. I vaguely heard that grandpa did crazy things when he was young and converted to Christianity around middle age, which still sounded unconventional to the family, and led a frugal and restrained life.

At high school, I received a letter from him asking me to forgive what he did to discipline me when I was six years old. Only years later when I came across the concept of “repent” did I realize what grandpa’s letter meant. When I had my first child, grandpa came to bless the newborn. He put his hand on my child’s forehead and prayed for the boy’s health and happiness.

When I told him our decision to move to Australia, he said in a murmur, “you are going so far away…” I last saw grandpa in early 2019, when he was waning already but seemed content. “I have my heavenly father and he will look after me,” he said to me. “Don’t you worry.”

Borders are still shut after nearly two years and I can’t really see when I could possibly travel back to visit the land that buried my grandpa, grandma, and Ping. I keep dreaming of all sorts of strange things – it is like a secret tunnel connecting the present and the past, the diaspora and the left-behind, the living and the deceased.

One day my daughter asked me, “Mum, what if we actually are now living in a dream? Could it be possible?”

I laughed and pinched her arm. “Does it hurt?” I said. She shook her head and giggled.

Do we live in a dream? Or are our dreams just other versions of reality? With the world continuing the slide into chaos, I sometimes find more comfort in my dreams. Perhaps I would dream about having tea with Ping in my little garden one day. If only.