Repeat After Me Read Online Free PDF

a part of this class I take.”
    “I’m so glad,” I said. I wondered if I should offer to come by and tutor the old woman, and I thought that I would like to. But maybe she and Xiao Wang cherished the recycled lessons. “I would be happy to help in any way I can.”
    “Thank you,” said Xiao Wang. She translated for her grandmother and then told me, “You can call her Nai Nai, which mean grandmother in Chinese.”
    “Great,” I said, “Thank you.”
    Then, to my astonishment, Nai Nai sprang up from the rocking chair like an action hero and set about putting nine plastic plates on the round table. Xiao Wang and I stood and tried to help, but she swatted us away. I thought of my mother’s mother, my Grandma Leah, setting her table until she died at eighty-seven, fifteen years after losing my grandfather. Her heavy silver forks curled up at the ends like flowers. She left those and three strands of pearls to me, treasures boxed up in my mother’s apartment.
    “We should sit at the table,” Xiao Wang instructed.
    I examined the dishes: dumplings, squares of tofu in a reddish-brown sauce, wilted green vegetables, bean sprouts, scrambled eggs and tomatoes, a drizzled stack of chicken strips, spareribs, cellophane noodles tossed with cucumber and carrot, cabbage in hot red oil, fried peanuts, a whole fish, and a bowl of soup with eggs floating in it, so thin they looked like tissue or leaves. Nai Nai handed Xiao Wang and me each a bowl of rice and a set of chopsticks. I imagined stabbing each individual piece of food with my chopsticks, revealing myself as the savage I was. Xiao Wang, always a hawk for social nuance and the smallest hint of anyone else’s discomfort, quietly got me a fork.
    “No, no, it’s okay. I’ll use these,” I said. I had used chopsticks many times, of course, but never under what I thoughtmight be the scrutiny of Chinese chefs. “When in Rome,” I said, stupidly. And then, “We have this saying—When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’”
    Xiao Wang broke into a polite smile, pretending she had understood.
    “This food looks amazing,” I said. She told her grandmother.
    “No, no, it’s nothing,” Nai Nai said, via Xiao Wang’s translation. “Eat more! Eat more!” She went to get tea and then stood over us, refilling our teacups every time we took single sips, and heaping more meat onto our plates. It was only when we had stuffed ourselves to the point of sickness that she took a modest helping of the tofu dish and picked at it delicately.
    I’ve noticed that old people in China are more vibrant than in the West. Every street corner in Beijing has a gym for babies and their grandparents, and everywhere you go, old people are hugging trees, stretching their legs, ballroom dancing, and skiing on stationary cross-country machines. Now that I live in Nai Nai’s country, I often wonder what her old age would have looked like here. She would have exercised with friends in the parks and been surrounded by people she knew, who spoke her language, vendors selling the ingredients she wanted to buy. Was she breathless with loneliness in America? My grandma was faint with it after my grandfather died; she stayed above water by coming to my mother’s four nights a week, by continuing to host Passover until it was physically impossible (at which point my mother and her sister did the Seder according to my grandmother’s instructions at my grandmother’s apartment). What would my grandmother have done in China? Or anywhere without us?
    Xiao Wang says no matter what Nai Nai felt about her own life in the United States, she would have done anythingto secure citizenship for Xiao Wang’s future children. She believed it was worth it,
it
being the diminished state of immigrants’ lives—in honor of the expanded possibilities their sacrifice created for future generations. It’s everywhere in New York, this sacrifice: in every biologist delivering fast food, teacher giving manicures, artist