What’s your mother’s maiden name?

What’s the name of the street where you grew up?

First thing on a damp Sunday morning, and yet again I’ve forgotten the complicated password for this health app I like. It lets me quiz doctors, but first I need to retrieve my sign-in details. That means answering a string of questions as I sit here nursing my tea. It’s like this with most of the apps on my phone — passwords and prompts calling me back to my roots, to people and streets that no longer exist. I’m identified by umbilical ties to my past. A past made present on a string of words that have become code. 

Ghosts don’t make appointments. They can appear at any moment, unpredictable and uninvited. I’m about to plunge my spoon into the bright pink flesh of half a watermelon — big, succulent, inviting. But before I scoop out the centre, my hand will pause. Something flutters inside me. Growing up, I was taught to offer the best parts of the watermelon to my grandfather: I’d slice it carefully, offering each piece to the elder members of my family before eating a small slice myself. Now each time I eat a watermelon alone, starting from the centre, I feel a twinge of guilt at the indulgence.

Mid-morning, I stroll to Hyde Park, humming as I go. The tunes come unbidden: old revolutionary songs that my mother used to sing to me. Earworms that have burrowed deep into mind and memory. I can still hear her voice, so pure. It’s like mountain air, a crystal pool: she phrases each lyric beautifully. Most of the words praise Chairman Mao, but their literal significance has long since faded into history. Now they have an afterlife as soothing lullabies, inseparable from the sweetness of my mother. A wisp of nostalgia is wrapped around each line, tugging at my subconscious. They are also a reminder: I’m a child of Mao’s regime, with all the baggage that brings.

I break into a jog around the lake. Closer to the bridge, I want to stop. But then there’s my grandfather’s voice in my ear, chanting. The military cadences urging me on.

In my studio, as the light catches a thin, rose-colored ribbon, I’m transported back to my room in Xi’an. On those dark evenings, years ago, holding up a ribbon of just this kind against the lonely yellow bulb that hangs from the centre of the ceiling, watching the diffused iridescent light dancing across its gauzy surface.

Sound, colours, smells — they’re the keys to my memories, unlocking the door to my emotions, taking me between worlds. Long after factual memories fade, an emotional trace persists, much as the lilac flower still knows how to open even after it’s been snipped from the tree. Like an emotional formula, each input from the present triggers a blast from the past.

A sweet potato, with its tender and almost rosy fragrance: grandma.

A child’s bonbon: the candy-scented eraser I kept on the end of my pencil when I was 12 years old.

The ding of a bicycle bell: my grandpa pushing his bike as he returns from work to our courtyard late in the afternoon.

A white and indigo pattern: my mother’s cotton shirt.

The graceful sound of a flute: the instrument my mother played, so silvery and ethereal.

A faint trace of the Lancôme perfume she wore,  a gift from me. Those notes of lychee and jasmine: my last memories of her.

It’s at once a blessing and a curse that the simplest sensory triggers convey us into the deepest recesses of memory, the very depths of emotion.

***

Yesterday, with Christmas two weeks away, I bought a small pine tree from a temporary stall on Gloucester Road and put it in a pot — the sole decoration in my empty flat. I can smell its sap, crisp and tinged with warm spice, but it’s the shape that keeps snagging my attention, reminding me of the paper cutouts we once hung. Its colour is straight out of a traditional Chinese painting, a craggy landscape peppered with dark evergreens.

Christmas evokes nothing in me. Or at least nothing warm, nothing rich. It was a fairytale I never lived. But the festive season can always be counted on to make a person think of home. In recent years my home, now on the other side of the globe, has only been accessed digitally — visits in the virtual world.

I call home often, and my grandma fights my grandpa for the phone. If I ring when she’s out and she comes home while he and I are mid-conversation, she’ll hurry up the stairs, demanding her turn, and he’ll cry out, ‘Old Gao, slow down, slow down!’ 

Grandpa always likes to learn new things, so he was quick to get to grips with email, way ahead of my father. No one can match his curiosity, an eagerness to hear about everything we’re developing at MENG. When I email with model shots, colours or prints, he acts like a communications centre, funnelling news to the eager ears and eyes of my grandma, my father, and beyond.  Every member of my extended family is impressed that I have made a mark in a country 5,000 miles away. Impressed by the eldest granddaughter of the Zhang family.

‘First thing when he gets up, he checks his email,’ my grandma tells me, ‘and he’s mighty disappointed if there’s nothing waiting for him from you.’