The Wax Apple

Grandmother had a driver who had taken her around for thirty years, and he was my ride too if I wanted to go out to the countryside. She would always want to come, though. Grandmother was never a homebody. I don’t think she’d spent a whole day inside her entire life. We’d go out to look around and she’d be on her phone calling people, like cousins and father’s accountant’s wife. How could they say no about joining us for lunch? She had been a teacher in the small town where she met my grandfather, and together they had traveled everywhere. One trip, she brought back gold rings with elephant hair embedded in them. She gave me one, and I found another rummaging through her things, and wear them both every day. If you went over to her house, grandmother would ask, “Did you eat yet?” and suddenly there would be pineapple cake or maybe a sliced wax apple, stuck with tiny forks.

The Wax Apple is all the things that are like a day with my Grandmother in Taiwan.