Wendy's Cherry Farm

A temperate breeze signals the arrival of spring in Shanghai. 春风, spring wind—not quite warm enough to slightly ease the tension in your eyelids, but also not cool enough to leave a soft twang across the highest points of your cheekbones, a memory of its nimble yet elusive agility. 

“You see your name here? On the bottom right, inscribed in red. If your name is red, it means you are still alive.”

Three characters, inscribed vertically. The lineage ends with me. For the first time, I closely inspect the curvatures that create my name—the way some strokes politely make way for others and the way others cross paths with an aggressive, yet intentional decisiveness. If you look closer, you can see the characters create divots in the stone, divots filled with a bright, glossy crimson. 

It is silent. My father is silent. My gaze shifts towards my grandfather’s photo at the center of the tombstone. I can only make out the shadow of his countenance—an open mouthed, toothy smile. My name, inscribed in that oversaturated, high chroma red, forcefully occupies my peripheral vision.

“I’m going to wait in the car. Take your time.”

I nod. It is difficult to ignore the indescribable discomfort tickling the back of my throat. My grandfather’s face, distorted by the fog of time, and my name, ever so clearly inscribed in that obnoxious red, both vy for my visual attention. The wind stirs again, its timbre slightly muted, pressing against the air with a soft resistance rather than coaxing reluctant blossoms from their winter sleep.

I crouch down, knees pressing into the damp grass, and run my fingers over the grooves of my name. The stone is rough, but the red is smooth, almost wet, as if it’s still drying. My throat tightens, and I swallow hard. It is not grief—grief is a prickly, stubborn burr that you can’t throw up or digest. I feel my body begin one of its most primal processes in order to sustain itself—pharyngeal muscles tensing, esophagus constricting—yet this time without a target, without purpose. The exertion compensates for a foreign object that isn’t there, stimulating an empty, complex kind of shame. A body performing grief without its substance, a ritual without belief.

I stand abruptly, brushing dirt from my hands, the grit clinging stubbornly to my palms. The wind stirs again, and this time it carries something sharper—not a scent, but a fragment, a sliver of memory that feels almost, but not quite tactile. It’s the weight of his desk under my elbows, the wood polished to a dull sheen by years of use, the faint grooves where his wrists had rested. The sound of his pencil comes next, not just a scratch but a rhythm—steady, deliberate, the anchor in a storm. My fingers twitch at my sides, restless, as if they remember the weight of a pencil, the way his hand would sometimes close over mine, his calloused fingers guiding my strokes firmly.

I close my eyes, and the wind shifts again, carrying with it the faint, metallic tang of graphite and the dry, dusty smell of paper—the kind he kept in neat stacks, edges aligned with military precision. The memory unfolds, like a sketch taking form. I can hear the soft rasp of his 4B pencil, the way it bit into the paper, leaving lines that were both confident and tender. And then, I am there—sitting beside him at the old wooden table, the sunlight slicing through the window in thick, golden beams, catching the dust motes that hang in the air. His laughter fills the room, not loud but full, the kind that began deep in his chest and rippled outward in warm echoes.

“Not like this.Your stallion is too rigid.”

“阿爹, you’re being picky. It looks exactly the same as yours.”

My grandfather’s gaze scanned over my horse critically, his bright, toothy smile replaced by deep forehead wrinkles and narrowed eyes. He took my pencil and pointed it at my horse (who I had very ingeniously named “猫咪”, or kitty cat). 

“Look at the hind legs on mine, now look at yours.The legs themselves may look the same, but the feeling is different.” 

My gaze bounced between the two drawings. I lacked the vocabulary to articulate how my horse’s image felt visually and viscerally lacking, but still, I sensed the disparity. My nose scrunched in confusion. 

“Why does your horse look so much…cooler?” 

阿爹 let out a hearty, bellowing laugh. “He does look cool, doesn’t he? 迪啊, look at the way I softened the shadows to create contrast. Doesn’t it look like he is emerging from the shadows, riding off to victory?” 

I pouted. He was right, and I didn’t like it. “Tell me how to do that 阿爹, tell me how to make my horse look cool like yours.”

My grandfather smiled. “Art is more than what you see. It is also about what you feel. When 阿爹 served in the army, I had to learn how to ride horses. I can recall crossing a battlefield on the back of a stallion clearly, and I will be able to recall it every time I put my pencil to this paper”–he tapped his 4B pencil against his sketch, prompting a smattering of soft graphite flakes to settle gracefully onto his drawing– “When you draw something, you want to create an imagination of something greater. Can you imagine it,迪啊? Can you see what I see?”

He deftly ran his thumb over the contours of his horse, and suddenly I saw it: a stallion galloping swiftly–muscles rippling, hooves thundering. Each graphite streak whispered of wind-whipped manes and triumph, transforming flat lines into a three-dimensional diorama of power and grace. 

Seven year old me went to bed that night dreaming of 阿爹’s heroic feats on the battlefield–unsheathing his sword, besting his enemies–all with his cape flying cinematically against swelling orchestra music. Seven year old me also didn’t know that China had been using guns since the end of the 13th century, that the battlefield was already an anachronism, a story reshaped by time and imagination. 

But it didn’t matter. I open my eyes to see 阿爹 smiling at me, eyes smudged like smoked glass yet brimming with a quiet, sharp sincerity. 

It is soundless. The wind had retracted, making way for the thumping in my ears like the strokes make room for each other in 钱—almost, but not quite touching. I bring my hand to 阿爹’s portrait, tracing the hazy lines across his face with the same decisiveness as the strokes in 文, where lines overlap with a kind of quiet confidence. And I feel the heaviness in my heart gently supported by 阿爹’s poignant, yet impenetrable sincerity, like the way the 辶 carries the 由 in 迪—steady, unyielding, a radical act of balance.

I feel it—the texture of the paper under the right side of my hand, the side that inevitably ends up grazing against the sketch paper. Keep your wrists raised. You will dull the drawing. It’s not nostalgia; it’s something sharper, more immediate, as if the memory has bypassed my mind entirely and settled in my bones. I think of the craftsman who inscribed my name on 阿爹’s tomb, bent over his worktable, diamond-tipped point carving minute, rhythmic divots into stone. Scritch, scritch, scritch. As he creates imprints, he sculpts around what will remain—each stroke a deliberate act of taking away to reveal something essential. The crimson that fills these is the liminal territory between, the pause between inhale and exhale where neither action exists but life continues.

The emptiness in my throat, the restlessness in my heart, the hazy contours of 阿爹’s face that buzz with the clarity of his laugh all chart new pathways in my memory—not unfilled but precisely hollowed, shaped by the contours of their surroundings. Vacant pressure is not grief’s failure, it is its evolution; the body’s knowledge that some absences can only be defined by their borders, never by what they contain.

In 阿爹’s drawings, the shadows weren’t merely darkened areas but passages into depth—places where form emerges from formlessness. His stallion galloped not because its delinations but because of what he allowed to remain unclear—what he trusted the viewer’s eye to complete, what you could only sense in the gaps between certainties.

I run my fingertip along one character of my name, feeling how the stone resists until suddenly yielding to the carved channel. Legacy, perhaps, is not about what’s preserved but what’s excavated. We do not continue through what we leave behind, but through the spaces we create for others to inhabit with their own becoming.

The wind returns. I straighten, brushing stone dust from my fingertips. Spring is nothing but absence rendered visible: winter’s recession, revealed in strokes of green and warmth. I walk away carrying both his presence and his absence, like characters inscribed in stone that mean nothing until a finger traces their emptiness, until red fills their grooves, until the wind finds precisely what to move against.