There was a kopitiam down the road from what used to be my grandfather’s house, a place I've known all my life. Its name is Kim San, which means Gold Mountain, which is what the United States of America used to be known as during the Gold Rush. Chinese immigrants, lured by promises of mountains of gold and prosperity in San Francisco, left home by boat and train and ship in search of abundant gold in valleys of northern California.
Sometimes I wonder how different our lives would have been if my great-grandfather had gone North instead of Southeast, but I suppose it was not his choice to make amidst the migrant flows coming from Southern China, spreading across the world.
In my second year of college, I headed West towards California, in search for this alternate future that could have been mine. It was around this time in my life that I had started seeing my grandfather everywhere. Months after his death, glimpses of him flashed between the carriages of a moving train on the opposite platform in the New York subway. My grandfather’s shadow dappled on the unfeeling face of my father in the moments when I hated him the most. Every mango tree I encountered – and in Malaysia, these were many – was a twin of the one that grew outside my grandfather’s house. I thought about how, in another life, my grandfather might have looked out from his porch and shouted for me to join him in witnessing those branches as they carried their green fruit straight up towards the evening sky. In truth, our eyes had never met when he was alive, but in death I saw them everywhere.
I found myself thinking of him again on a hill in San Francisco watching the sun go down over the Golden Gate Bridge. In this moment, I was overcome with the incomprehensible urge to cry. How many generations have passed since the first human chanced upon those glittering waters? I was stunned by the way the entire bay seemed to glow under the setting sun, the way it was elevated into something I now know well enough to call transcendence. Like it was aflame, the bridge turned golden. The sun washed every tree in bronze. Sunlight suffused everything - every rock and tree and blade of grass, every atom of my self - with the most ineffable warmth. I knew, then, why they called it the Gold Mountain, knew why so many have come and gone in pursuit of it, how a man might lose his mind for it.
I thought of the quiet kopitiam down the road from my grandfather’s house that had nourished my family for so many years, and wondered if it would still be there when I got home. Now that I had found its namesake, it felt like that corner of my universe was on the verge of disintegration. After all, in the harsh presence of the original, the derivative must necessarily be destroyed, to be torn apart for its inadequacy.
Comparisons made themselves known again when I was touring the Getty Villa in Malibu a year later. The speckled Italian tile in the entrance foyer so closely resembled the cheap mosaic of my grandfather's living room, I forgot how to breathe. I forgot that I was in Los Angeles, forgot the significance of Persephone’s pomegranates, the sharp, cutting smell of grass being mowed on the impeccable lawns, forgot everything except that one grey and rainy evening when my grandfather came in from the garden with a collection of fat and worming caterpillars to show us. How we screamed, running up the stairs to the first landing where we peered out from behind the bead macramé curtain with morbid fascination, watching the bugs squirm their way across the speckled tile of the living room. There were no bugs permitted in the sterile bounds of the Getty, but it was the same orange and green scattered across an expanse of white, the same coolness that reached up through the soles of my feet in the afternoon heat.
In the moments when there was such a thing as boredom in my childhood, I would press my cheek to this very floor, staring out into the expanse of tile for what seemed like forever. Hours were in search of some discernible pattern amongst the specks of orange and green and black, something that would give order to the small universe I inhabited. I grew warm with the tile – or perhaps it grew warm with me? – until the world went blurry and disappeared altogether.
Staring at the tile once again, I wondered: if I stayed there long enough, would I hear the voices of my family ringing in my ears? Would my uncle come down the stairs with a demand for me to run to the kopitiam to get him his afternoon tea? It felt like my aunt was just beyond my sightline, waiting to burst in through the foyer entryway with my cousins and their massive dog. Maybe this time, my grandfather would know me. Close your eyes, and you can hear everything you can imagine. In this blurry double-image of my life, he would have thought of me, just a little.
In the echoing halls of a stranger’s villa, all I wanted to do was scream. Overcome with an inexplicable frustration that the two parallel universes I occupied had come into forbidden contact yet again, I was disgusted. A glitch in the matrix where the fabric of reality was particularly thin, but where nothing had changed, and where nothing would ever change, as surely my home was sinking into the murky Straits of Malacca and the glittering waves had crashed on the cliffs of the San Francisco bay for hundreds of years before my individual arrival.
The derivative, this word that rings in my ears. The derivative we have taught ourselves must mean to be less than, being that upon which four generations of my family had built a life. The imitation that has served us faithfully, that was real, that was, was, was – But that would never be enough. We make friends with our delusions, and my grandfather was mine.
My uncles and cousins, losing themselves in some fever dream of mining Bitcoin, have convinced themselves that the need to expand their already insurmountable wealth is a cause worth destroying the planet for. There is a look in their eyes, in the same way that I think men went wild with dreams of gleaming golden mountains during the San Francisco Gold Rush. It takes four generations to go from enslavement to madness, and somehow I found myself at the tail end of this spiral, surrounded by visions of my grandfather that never existed even when he was alive.
On that cliff in San Francisco, it felt like the world around me was burning. Over the wind, I thought I heard the sound of my grandfather calling my name. Closing my eyes, I allowed myself to believe, just for a moment, that I mattered enough to be chosen for his haunting.