Grandpa
Grandpa passed away last week. I won't be able to attend the funeral in LA, and so I'm preparing a note for one of my sisters to read at the memorial service. And so I've been thinking about his life - the wars he lived through, his days as a general, fighting through bleak, cold winters (and the many impatient hours I spent with him half-listening to his stories); his arrival to the States, his years working humbly as a custodian, though he had been a headmaster in Hong Kong. He had a temper - I saw that a little bit, but mostly heard about it from my father and my aunts and uncles. He made mistakes as a husband and as a father, but he also quietly bore with much. He loved to write. When we were younger, we would write letters to him and receive responses in his trembling, austere script. He did calligraphy as well. They were never as good as those of my maternal grandpa's, but they were far better than anything we could hope to aspire to. When I was taking phot