Hands and Feet

by Di Yin Lu

   I remember my grandmother by her hands and feet. Not because there is anything wrong with the rest of her—my grandmother aged gracefully—but because her hands and feet are her most striking features.  Against her willowy frame her broad hands with the bulging knuckles look like a mistake.  Her disproportionately small feet would be more fitting on a baby than on a grown woman. But despite their size her feet have carried her through wars, her hands have worked her out of poverty, and I admire them.

     I can see her now, a slim girl of twelve, stifling a scream with her hand as her mother crams her feet into a pair of three-inch-long shoes.  According to turn-of-the-century Chinese mothers, men will not marry girls whose feet are bigger than their own hands, such feet aren’t ladylike.  I hear the soft pitter-patter of my grandma’s feet as she paces along a wooden dock, waiting for her husband to return from Burma; the hollow rapping of her fists against police department doors, after Red Army soldiers arrested her husband during the communist revolution.

     I see her fingers flying as she pulls a needle in and out of silk handkerchiefs, splashing the white surface with brilliant threads that grow into ducks, flowers, and calligraphy. Grandma pawned her needlework for food after the communists took her husband to jail, and kept her sons from dying of starvation at a time when gold wasn’t worth more than the cracked floor boards beneath her feet.  I see her feet, bruised and swollen from walking in a pair of old cloth shoes from one pawn shop to another.  I feel her hands grow coarse and stiff from dyeing threads in the winter.  But she keeps walking, and sewing, and selling.

     I feel her fingers slipping a thin jade ring onto mine the morning before I left for America.  The pane is delayed because of a thunderstorm, and my parents are busy talking to their friends on the other side of Gate 86.  Grandma leans heavily on her cane, holding my hand, the one with the ring on it.  I can remember feeling her hand tremble, and asking her to sit down because I knew her feet hurt on rainy days.  She squeezes my hand so hard the ring left an imprint on both our fingers.

       I look through photographs and see a grandma who is fading away.  Her eyes caved deeper and deeper into her face, and her skin slackened until it looked like it would tear apart at a touch.  But that is not how I will remember her.  My memories of grandma are of faltering steps, of strong grips, and of soft, hand-embroidered handkerchiefs.