I just got the book and the Toronto package! （<-- pls send me info about that one when you can：））This morning we met up at KAT's fave place in Chinatown for yummy rice rolls and congee. A super humid day in nyc!
So excited to read the book after hearing about it from KAT, too — but I'll enjoy admiring your packaging for another day before opening it haha. KAT, thank you again for bringing it to me, and for the lovely breakfast :) I loved chatting with you!
Y and I met in Chinatown and had a late breakfast together — we talked organizing & art & making things. I handed off the packages and am so excited for her to read _The Last Emporium_, which I started on my flight from Tokyo to NYC.
2024-08-04，22:27：
慢遞員KAT慢遞第二發：
今天早些，我去到和合石看望我婆婆的墓。整個夏天我都在為此焦慮，用我糟糕的粵語盡力穩當地編造創新的藉口（我要如何告訴出租車我要去哪兒？我怎麼能精確找到那墓？），加上我姨媽僅能和她母親證實的有限又極少量的訊息：她去逝的年份，她的名字。我姨媽上次去掃墓是在1969年，在她離開香港去美國前。長大過程中我唯一知道的是我婆婆在我媽只有四歲的時候去逝，因為子宮癌。姨媽跟我講，每一次她和我母親和她們的兄弟去完公墓，我母親就會生病。當他們爬公墓那巨大的山，她能“擺脫她身體裡的一切”，我姨媽這樣說，意思是我母親她吐了。這是我聽說的我母親的童年故事之一；她在我青春期時死了。這往事總是困擾著我，直到我自己走在和合石橋頭路上，流著汗並感到恐慌，企圖向任何人尋求幫助。這不只是小山丘，他們得爬上一座真正大山的山頂。我熟知這般比喻。
COURIER KAT 2nd DISPATCH：
Earlier today, I went to Wo Hop Shek cemetery to look for my po po’s grave. I’d been anxious about this all summer, inventing creative excuses that mostly centered on my bad Cantonese (how will I tell the taxi where to go? How will I ask for help locating the grave?) and the limited amount of information my Yi Ma could provide about her mother: the year she died, and her name. The last time my Yi Ma saw the grave was in 1969, before she left Hong Kong for the States. The only thing I knew growing up about my Po Po was that she died when my mom was only four, from uterine cancer. My Yi Ma told me a story about how every time she and my mother and their brothers visited the cemetery, my mother would become sick. As they climbed the giant hills of the cemetery, she would “get rid of everything in her body,” my Yi Ma put it, meaning she vomited. This was one of the few things I’d heard about my mother’s childhood; she died when I was a teenager. This story always confused me, until I found myself walking the grounds of one of the Wo Hop Shek Columbariums, sweating and feeling panicky and looking for anybody to ask for help. These were not hills; this was an actual mountain they had to summit. The metaphor was not lost on me.
A man named Ricky in one of the offices helped me; this caption is getting long, so I’ll just skip ahead to the part where, sweating into the paper he printed off for me of my (maybe) Po Po’s grave, I hailed yet another taxi per his instructions to take me up the winding hills of the cemetery into some of the oldest sections.
An hour later, weaving in and out of the rows of gravestones on the hillsides, I had found my Po Po.
(Calling my Yi Ma afterward to tell her about this — me talking with my limited Cantonese and her with her limited English — felt like this summer was exactly as it should have been. Any guilt I had for not “writing enough” or “learning enough Cantonese” or “watching too much Sex in the City” (???What??? I don’t know either) had evaporated.)
2024-08-03，around 16:30：
速遞員KAT和緩件號HQL-610至 613的慢遞員CHARIS一樣，是由JC向『展銷場』人肉慢遞網絡推薦的；在與大埔的一隻可愛的貓咪共住兩個月後，她順道到土瓜灣轉運站取HQL-628和HQL-631，然後在下周返回華盛頓特區的家，其間會去紐約探望幾天朋友
Courier KAT has, like courier CHARIS of dispatches HQL-610 to 613, been recommended to the LIGHT LOGISTICS network by JC; toward the tail end of a 2-month sojourn with a cuddly cat in Tai Po, she drops by the Tokwawan Relay Centre to pick up dispatches HQL-628 and HQL-631 before heading back home next week to Washington, DC with a few days to visit friends in New York in between
