(This is an excerpt from 'The Path Not Taken', the last paper submitted for En 101.)
My grandmother sits on her La-Z-Boy alone in the living room every night, watching a Taiwanese TV series she cannot hear or comprehend. She is 90, deaf and illiterate. I, my sister or my parents would sometimes sit beside her, doing things we find important. She would then explain to us (or what she understands from the visual details of) every event of all three hundred episodes in the entire series, which generally has no plot. Sometimes we would listen. She narrates the characters’ roles and their conflicts and issues, and somehow, as if her stream of consciousness has found its way to her sea of memories, she starts talking about her life back in China—her foster mother, her stepbrothers and stepsisters, the farm she worked on, my father as a baby. She raises her voice thinking we could not hear her, because she could not hear herself. Sometimes we would listen.
Ooooh I remember you telling me about your ama last summer. About how she loved telenovelas! :)) Your essays rock.
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