If Hollywood is anything to go by, grandmothers are supposed to be sweet, grey-haired little ladies who enjoy knitting and pulling their grandchildren into warm embraces as the smell of freshly baked choc-chip cookies wafts from an oven.

The grandmother I grew up with – my Ma Ma – lived with my father in the next suburb over after my parents split up. She was a hardy, pragmatic woman with a dirty sense of humour who loved mahjong, burping loudly after drinking beers, growing melons, force-feeding us and power-walking around the neighbourhood in bargain-bin sneakers she found at the department store. (She is one of
the most badass women I have ever known and I’m honoured to be her granddaughter.) And while I loved my Ma Ma, I wondered if my maternal grandmother, my Por Por, far away in Canada, might be different.

I’d only met my Por Por once, when I was four, and I remembered her cracking jokes and having a croaky, low voice; the rest I was left to imagine for myself. When I was 11, my mum told me she and I would be travelling to Canada to visit Por Por, now in her late 70s, so I began obsessing about the kind of relationship we might have.

“Can you love a stranger?” I’d ask my mum as we prepped for the trip. “Because I feel like I love Por Por already and so much I could burst!”

Once we arrived in Toronto, I was much more reserved, shy around this matriarch whose language I couldn’t speak and who had so many grandchildren I wondered how she might possibly be interested in getting to know one more. Beyond that, I wasn’t feeling like myself. I was moody, often for no reason, and I felt incredibly lonely being away from my siblings. While I was stuck in a foreign country in the dead of winter, they were together in sunny Australia, eating ice blocks and going to the beach.

I wanted nothing more than to leave Canada, so I withdrew into myself, threw tantrums, played computer games for hours on end, gave my mum and Por Por the silent treatment, and felt inexplicably lethargic no matter how much I slept. (I didn’t know this, but I was about to get my period for the first time ever.)

Things were not as I’d imagined: where I wanted the kind of kinship my friends had with their non-Asian grandmothers, I found awkwardness and an inability to communicate (my Por Por couldn’t speak English and I speak broken Cantonese). I resented her and ate the dinners she lovingly prepared for us in silence. I’d leave meals angry, then feel deeply contrite.

“I had never spent Christmas away from home, and gift-giving is our family’s way of showing love, that we know each other intimately enough to make or purchase meaningful presents that the other person can treasure.”

“I feel bad for being mean to Por Por,” I tearily confessed to my mum one evening as we drifted to sleep. “It’s OK,” she cooed. “Por Por had seven children. Por Por understands.”