Your house is silent now. At night, one by one, the lights turn off, and in the darkness, the house is quiet, still, devoid of life—it sends goosebumps over your skin, but at the same time, you feel a selfish, prickly sense of relief. At last, she is gone, you think. At last, your sleep will be undisturbed, your life will go back to normal, the normal that was disturbed several years ago, when she first arrived here.

Days after she first arrives, you notice uncomfortable changes in your home that you don’t want to voice out loud for fear of being rebuked by your parents. You notice her speech, the unfamiliar harsh rasp on the “h” sounds that she makes, almost as if she’s scowling, a grating sound that makes you flinch. You notice how she almost bares her teeth when she pronounces the word, like when she pronounces the Chinese word for “black”, 黑, hei, the way her throat seems to drag over the syllable, jarring and displeasing to the ear. You hate the unfamiliar vocabulary she introduces to the household, 馍馍 momo instead of 馒头 mantou for the soft steamed buns that have always been a staple in your family, the foreign sounds rotting in your mouth like a forgotten bun, discarded at the bottom of the fridge for a month. The more you will yourself not to notice it, the more abrasive it sounds, and the more impossible to ignore.

You don’t notice at first when she changes. The timeline of the entire matter is a tangled mess in your head, one that you have never dared to voice and unravel out loud. You only remember, at some point, realizing that your parents now take it as normal that she will come up every few days to inquire about some person who had died years ago. This realization is jarring—it makes you wonder when exactly she had changed, and how you possibly could have missed it, and since when your grandmother, the one who brought you around China as a child, who brought you to eat tanghulu, to walk the length of the Great Wall, who cooked for you in the summers, had finally faded from the world without anyone to notice her.

She feels that she is disappearing, but can do nothing to help herself. For one, moving to America has restrained her. She does not speak the language. She does not know our customs. She cannot drive or travel on her own. She has no autonomy, no independence in this strange world, and now, she is slowly losing control of her memories. She cannot contribute to the household. She panics. She overcompensates by cooking, attempting to clean, taking it upon herself to repair the holes and rips in our clothes, trying her best to make herself useful. A person who feels themselves fading away will do their best to maintain their grip in the world, to assert their existence, to voice their story for anyone to hear—but you have no sympathy for her struggles.

Instead, her overcompensation only makes you push back more. Every little thing annoys you, reminds you that your home is no longer your own. Her hands are dry, and the skin stretched over her bones sounds like paper rustling as she smooths her hands over her down vest over and over again. She adjusts pans and dishes on the drying rack, letting the heavy pots clatter on the kitchen counter. She puts away the bowls into the cabinet, letting the white glass bowls clink against each other. She shuffles those thick winter slippers that she wears even in the summer on the kitchen floor. The sound of the shoes against the floor irritates you. It irritates you especially when it wakes you up in the middle of the night, and you hear her turning around and around downstairs, one slow, heavy footstep after another. You think that her shuffling footsteps will at least be quiet for a while, until she comes back downstairs to turn again and again around the kitchen island, restless, unable to stay still. They are all sounds that you would never notice normally, only, now, coming from your grandmother, they echo back and forth like a feedback loop from a malfunctioning microphone and speaker, growing louder and louder, and you feel it coalescing into a shrill scream in your head, the high-pitched squeaking of a boiling teapot about to explode.

You become ugly. Whenever she asks you questions, you brush her off perfunctorily, and you get mad whenever she touches your belongings. You lose your temper when she makes too much noise, and you can’t stand it when she meanders back and forth in front of you. You refuse to see yourself for who you truly are—it is easy, in fact, to ignore the truth. On the other hand, you sometimes catch brief glimpses of yourself in the mirror, moments where you can’t suppress the vague twinge of guilt and panic at the stain on your soul. It is a stain that gets darker every time you lose your temper, every time you ignore her because you are frustrated, because you don’t want to talk to her, because you don’t want to look at her, but oh, you cannot go on avoiding it—

Because you hate her. You hate her, that is the truth. You hate who she isn’t anymore, you hate that she is intruding on your home, you hate that the grandma you know from years past, who taught you your Chinese culture, who opened her home to you in the summers, who cared for you, is no longer in front of you and can never be found again, and most of all, you hate that she stirs up this ugly hate within yourself, because how could you possibly resolve the conflict between your idea of your own innate goodness with these moments of evil?

When her mind dissolves further under the grips of dementia, your parents don’t dare to allow her to wander around outside of her room without supervision. This must be when the hallucinations begin. You don’t know for sure—everything about her blends together in your memories, a tangled mess of horror that smears years of a snowballing disaster into one muddy clump, one that grows even messier each day you refuse to speak. But it is around this time that you begin to hear her voice coming from her bedroom, day after day, talking with imaginary companions. At first, they sound like intelligible conversations. These conversations soon devolve, too, as even her capability of speech dissolves into nothing. Her words become noises, syllables that you know are supposed to form words but can’t quite understand. You cannot decipher a single word of her language.

You hear her voice in the middle of the night, mumbles and syllables of a foreign language you cannot speak. At first, you cover your ears and try your best to fall asleep anyways. Later, though, as the realization slowly dawns on you that this may be her last hurrah, her last desperate, fumbling attempt at telling her story, at communicating with the outside world, you begin to listen—only, it’s too late. You strain to listen, strain to hear, strain to find meaning, only to discover that her voice has long become meaningless. Her meaning will never reach your ears ever again. In the middle of the night, you lie in bed under your covers and stare at the ceiling in the dark, letting the noise surround you in a twisted, eerie embrace.

Your parents move her to a nursing home soon after. You don’t know what to expect when you visit her for the first time. You are not expecting the frail body curled up on the bed of the sterile nursing home that reeks of cleaners. You wear shoes, but you can imagine how cold the floor is, lacking the intimate warmth from the countless others passing over it who never consider this place a home. Her skin is now like tissue paper, barely covering any flesh beneath it, sinking into the hollows of her bones beneath, and she is so thin that you can clearly see the outlines of her skeleton. You are surprised at how helpless she seems. With guilty relish, you find the word that describes the sight before you perfectly: she looks pathetic.

But you don’t say a word to her. You do not really look at her. You won’t acknowledge it, but you are afraid. You are afraid to look at the frail body on the bed, you are afraid to see the shell of your grandmother and to recognize where she used to be, you are afraid that you will start missing your grandmother when you look at her—an emotion that you have no capacity for, no room to fit it alongside your hatred—and you are afraid, too, in the most selfish way, that this will one day become you. You are afraid that the buried curse that was inherited by your grandmother from her mother, that was inherited by you from your mother, that this curse will one day come alive and this debilitating, humiliating disease will then fall upon you.

You feel like a coward. You don’t cry after hearing that she has passed away. You never have the guts to talk about her with your parents. Most importantly, you can never bring yourself to acknowledge how horrible you were to her.

The silence kills you. Mentions of her never make it into your familial conversations anymore. Your parents do not bring you to the cremation. You cannot even attend the funeral, which is held in China. It is as if she never existed in the first place. The silence suffocates you, leaves you alone to deal with the complicated feeling of grief that is not quite grief, because even though you didn’t show it, you have already grieved in those long, long months in which you knew that the soul of your grandmother was already gone but she, somehow, in a cursed way, remained here in flesh. You feel relieved that you no longer have to suffer by watching her suffer. Then you feel guilty that you have the audacity to be relieved at her death. Most of all, the silence tricks you into feeling that you are the only one.

But when you endeavor to break the silence, you realize that it is no easy task, either. Your family likes to keep its matters private. Disagreements behind closed doors never make it past the front steps of the house. Some things, your mother always tells you, are not meant to be shared beyond the household. That is just the way things are. After all, in Chinese culture, the face of the family cannot be lost, and appearances must be kept up. Therefore, you, who tells the secrets of this family, you are a traitor. You have betrayed the family, you have betrayed your grandmother, and most of all, you have betrayed yourself, your morals and your values and your story, by selling this story for judges to approve and colleges to admire.

My house is silent now. A dim lamp illuminates my desk, messy and unorganized, and I sit before the tangle of thoughts that I just finished putting onto paper, thoughts that I don’t quite understand yet. The house is completely still, and the lamp is the only light left. There are no sounds—no shuffling of slippers against the kitchen floor, no nightly conversations, nothing but silence, a silence that only succeeds in highlighting everything that is gone now. I try to break the silence with the sounds of my typing. I try to break the silence with the sound of my voice, the sound of my voice as it tells my story. My grandmother never got the chance to tell hers—hopefully I will get the chance to tell mine.