The Tamesis
In late summer of 2024, my mother was transferred to hospice after a brief hospitalization. She only had a week or two to live. I immediately returned home to Los Angeles from New York and prepared for her passing. The trip lasted five months.
My day starts at 5am when the Slack switchboard lights up. Before the house started shaking, I worked to the sound of birds chirping outside. Once on the East Coast, lunchtime has calmed down and I’ll go to the kitchen, make breakfast for Dad, review any errands or chores that need to be done, and prepare a Hong Kong-style thermos of Yin Yang coffee: loose Ceylon tea, brewed with boiling water, mixed with strong black coffee, then topped with evaporated milk until thick and creamy. This was the one thing she had always wanted.
By mid-afternoon, I would close my laptop and call my dad. “She slept most of the day and didn’t eat much,” he said. I would open the refrigerator, which was always full of leftovers—food I’d made myself, as well as prepared foods sent in by friends from church—and collect samples in Pyrex containers. We never know what will appeal to her limited appetite. In the car driving to the hospice, I would see the same strip malls and storefronts I had passed by in my youth, many of which were now faded and empty.
My father, brother, and I have begun sifting through her stuff, knowing she will never see most of it again. We brought her more precious heirlooms, hoping she would tell us their provenance. Most jewelry is too old and expensive to be worn in a hospice. One item caught my eye—a floral cloisonné bracelet that her mother once wore. My mom isn’t particularly sentimental, but she let me snap it around her wrist. By then she was so skinny that whenever she raised her arms, they would slide down to her upper arms.
The three of us did what we could. My somewhat fussy but always considerate father would sit with her for most of the day to receive visitors and stay up to date on medications and status checks. I am the task bunny and garbage disposal in the kitchen. I cook, clean, mentally inventory food and containers, and eat anything that needs to be thrown away soon. My brother is a handyman, support tech, and back-of-house shift worker—he fills in unexpected openings. When my organic, nutritious and insulin-friendly suggestions were rejected, he always ate sweets or fast food. Any moment that cheers her up is a winning day.
Several times, when the hospice was quiet in the evenings, I tried playing the oak Baldwin piano in the common area. I would play something she knew—something she liked. What initially drew me to the piano was my mother’s excellent but limited playing. When I was seven, she sensed my interest, raised money for tuition, and then drove me weekly to my teacher’s house, deep in the winding hills of Palos Verdes Estates. As I progressed, she would leave unfinished scores on the piano—music she didn’t have the patience to learn on her own—and gently guide me. The last pieces she put before me were two Chopin nocturnes.
My mother was the second and eldest daughter of seven children. She grew up in a three-bedroom apartment in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s, with her grandmother and the occasional live chicken waiting its turn. Her parents ran a printing shop for newspapers and Buddhist periodicals. Her father is a photographer, photo editor and typesetter, while her mother is a proud and beautiful face in the operating room who can also make her children behave with a look or a word. There was intense sibling rivalry in the apartment, which shaped my mother. She hates conflict and keeps to herself, dutifully helping with the cooking. She learned to tune out distractions and patiently wash, soak, marinate, gut, scale, eviscerate, split and chop—learning and practicing a craft passed down from generation to generation.
