Late in the summer of 2024, my mother was moved into hospice after a brief hospitalization. She was given a week or two to live. I promptly returned home to Los Angeles from New York and steeled myself for her passing. The trip lasted five months.
My days would begin at 5 a.m., when the Slack switchboard lit up. I worked to the sound of birds outside before the house stirred. When the lunch lull arrived on the east coast, I’d head to the kitchen—to make my dad’s breakfast, review whatever errands or housework needed doing, and prepare a Thermos of Hong Kong–style yin yang coffee: loose Ceylon tea, flushed with boiling water, combined with strong black coffee, then topped with evaporated milk until rich and creamy. It was the one thing she would always want.
By the mid-afternoon, I’d close the laptop and call my dad. “She’s been sleeping most of the day, didn’t eat much,” he’d say. I would open the fridge, which was always crowded with leftovers—creations of my own, and prepared foods dropped off by church friends—and assemble a sampling in a Pyrex container. We never knew what would entice her limited appetite. In the car on the way to the hospice, I’d look at the same strip malls and store fronts I’d driven past in my youth, many now faded and vacant.
My dad, brother, and I had begun the process of sifting through her things, knowing she wouldn’t ever see most of it again. We brought her the more precious heirlooms, hoping she might tell us their provenance. Most jewelry was too antiquated and valuable to consider wearing in hospice. One item caught my eye—a floral cloisonné bracelet that her mother once wore. My mom was not particularly sentimental, but she let me clasp it around her wrist. By then, she had become so skinny that whenever she raised her arms, it would slip down to the upper arm.
The three of us did what we could. My somewhat fussy but always considerate dad would sit with her most of the day in order to receive visitors and to keep abreast of medications and status checks. I was the kitchen task rabbit and the garbage disposal. I cooked, cleaned, kept a mental inventory of foods and containers, and ate anything that would soon need to be tossed. My brother was the handyman, tech support, and logistics shift worker—the one who filled the unexpected gaps. He always had a sweet treat or fast food when my organic, nutritionally dense, and insulin-friendly recommendations were rebuffed. Any moment that perked her up was a day won.
Just a few times, after the hospice quieted down for the evening, I tried my hand at the oak-finished Baldwin piano in the common area. I’d play something familiar—pieces she had enjoyed. It was my mother’s capable but limited playing that first drew me to the piano. When I was seven, she sensed my interest, scraped together the funds for lessons, and then drove me weekly to the teacher’s house, deep in the winding hills of Palos Verdes Estates. As I advanced, she would leave scores open at the piano—pieces she didn’t have the patience to learn herself, gently steering me. The last pieces she placed before me were a pair of Chopin nocturnes.
My mother was the second of seven children, and the eldest daughter. She grew up in a three-bedroom flat in 1950s and ‘60s Hong Kong, with her grandmother, and, occasionally, a live chicken waiting its turn. Her parents ran a print shop for a newspaper and Buddhist periodicals. Her father was a photographer, photo editor, and a type setter, while her mother was the proud beautiful face of the operations who could also keep her children behaved with a single glance or word. There was a strong sibling rivalry in the flat, which shaped my mother. She was averse to conflict and kept to herself, dutifully helping with the cooking. She learned to block out distractions as she patiently washed, soaked, marinated, gutted, descaled, deveined, cleaved, and minced away—learning and practicing a craft that had been passed down across generations of woks.
