by Jiaxi Jesse He

In high school, I’d make a pilgrimage to the Dallas Museum of Art every month.

On those Saturdays, I rose early, timing the hour-long train ride to arrive just as the museum opens. I’d cut past the Basquiat, Church’s Icebergs, and the infinitely Instagram-able Monets—a line already forming—until I arrived at a bench tucked away in the museum’s American art section, where I sat quietly in front of Lighthouse Hill, a 1927 painting by Edward Hopper.

The beauty of Lighthouse Hill lies in its tensions: buildings cast in sinister shadows. Rolling, green hills
that are anything but verdant. The sky an ominous blue. The streak of red—or is it russet, or plum, under certain lights?—in the grass, like a wound. It may sound strange, but I used to spend entire afternoons contemplating this painting, trying to parse what Hopper had meant, why such a simple, Maine landscape spoke to me so clearly of my grandmother. My 奶奶.

My 奶奶 was born in the same year Hopper completed Lighthouse Hill. As Hopper’s painting was passed around wealthy owners and galleries, my 奶奶 grew up through civil war, watched neighbors disappear to Unit 731, and lost her husband to the Cultural Revolution. By the time the Hopper was acquired by the DMA, my grandmother had also landed in Texas to raise me and my three siblings, after converting to a foreign religion in a foreign land with foreign freedoms.

My 奶奶 never visited an art museum. In Texas, she spent her time cleaning and cooking her signature pork chive dumplings, or spending her days in front of American TV, the volume turned off, while a Chinese radio broadcast blared in the background. She did not speak much.

When she died, halfway through my sophomore year, it felt like I’d lost part of myself, the Chinese part, the part that connected me to any kind of past. I sat at the dinner table knowing that, for the first time, I wouldn’t be eating food cooked by hands that had gone through war; said my usual prayers before realising I no longer needed to say them in Chinese; understood that I would now have to listen to myself chew through my food and my grief, both of which felt painfully American, without Mandarin radio blaring in the background.

There are so many things I’d like to ask my 奶奶. I’d like to ask her what she dreamed of becoming as a little girl. I’d like to ask her about the family members who died before we had the chance to meet. I’d like to ask if she ever had a favorite painting.

I don’t have my 奶奶 anymore. But I do have Lighthouse Hill, which, in its own strange way, evokes her spirit. In its darkened windows, I see my 奶奶’s silence, an unspeakable past she tried to protect us from. In its deep, blue-black greens, I see her work, an endless noise of scrubbing and cooking and watching that kept her from stagnating. In the painting’s light—gash of cadmium at the lighthouse tip—I see her insurmountable hope, the love with which she led our prayers before every meal.