I blamed my grandma for my longevity. She swore by fermented cabbage and sea cucumbers and lived through fifty generations of our family before leaving us for the heavens. I was thirteen at the time, and though she was more accurately an ancestor than a grandma, I clung to her whether that was on her walk to the grocery store two hours away or while she sat outside watching the shadows of our house grow and shrink as the sun rose and descended. She told me I’d inherit her longevity because it was always the least ambitious children who lived longest. 

Several years later, she left like a breeze slipping through the crack in the window. Her material possessions were distributed among us according to her spreadsheet. Each row computed the value of each item and each column marked the name of a relative who needed the most money at that stage in their life. I received nothing besides her hair ribbons which she wore like a doll in her childhood photos. 

Years after the friends I grew up with had died, I remained dedicated to my routines: a hike up the mountains in the morning, a freshly brewed cup of coffee, several hours at the computer in front of a Bloomberg terminal, sporadic naps throughout the day. Even after my granddaughter died from brain cancer and my great-grandson scattered her ashes in the ocean, I watched on like a cactus potted at the edge of a table, watered sporadically, undying. Like my grandma, I stopped aging, the length of my telomeres frozen in time. She’d left before I was old enough to understand that longevity held a different definition for us.

My descendants called me Auntie because their parents found it too difficult and tiring to explain why my hair remained sleek and black while their bodies began breaking down like Jenga towers. I babysat most of them while they were kids, and once they became adults, I split my investments into their college funds, the contributions magnifying each year with my profits. I had a knack for investing. Grandma did too. 

Every decade or so, the urge for companionship would rush in waves. I pegged it up to hormones, although my body had long lost its ability to give birth, my reproductive system expired where my physical shell did not. I had a few flings—never longer than five years, which was when they started wanting more than I could provide: marriage, families, a vow to never cart the other off to a senior center and instead drink ourselves to our grave with wine and a bowl of unhulled sunflower seeds. More families meant more deaths and I already had too many to keep track of: funerals every week, baby showers every other week, a constant stream of bank notifications as allocated funds got redistributed to the rest of the living members. 

I often wondered how my grandma knew when the right time was to leave, and how she managed to exit so gracefully. She used to walk through graves I failed to recognize. I’d follow along after school, discarding my studies and staring at one gravestone after another, trying to find the ones with the most interesting carvings—the turtle-shaped tombstones or the ones embellished with soaring dragons to carry their souls safely—but my grandma never watched the graves. Rather, she tilted her head upward to the ginkgo trees and walked with light steps, an old lady disguised as a fairy. She’d walk from one corner to the other and circle the neglected rose gardens that extended from the graveyard, the roses incapable of blooming. Then she’d do it again until I got tired  and complained about aching feet. It wasn’t until my eighties that I found the graveyard interesting and matched my grandma’s pace and duration, silent as I wound through rows of stones. In front of each one, I’d spend minutes, maybe hours standing motionless, trying to pry free a memory hidden beneath thick layers of brain fog. Sometimes it took days to dig them free. 

“You will be like a willow tree,” my grandma once told me. My mother believed this was a compliment: that I’d grow up graceful, elegant, and strong. But my grandma never handed out compliments. Only  observations and premonitions. Even when we celebrated her birthday with hand pulled noodles and strawberry chiffon cakes, she’d shrug it off, add a line to the tally she kept in a small pocket-sized notebook, and obediently slurp the bowl of shou mian my mother cooked her. My grandma later told me she’d prefer something Italian like ditali: short, cylindrical thimble-like pasta that she could spoon out without the mess of slurping, each piece cut as short as possible while still maintaining substance. She claimed all the long noodles were excessively drawing out her life. But my mother hated Italian food—“everything tastes like tomatoes and cheese, acid and old sock.” 

*

My first job was as a waitress at the local Hunan restaurant. I floundered with dishes and forgot table orders, and my mother stopped ordering takeout from the restaurant because she was embarrassed to see me working. I supposed her idea of willow trees didn’t grow in dimly lit rooms scented by fried dough, fermented soy, and chilli peppers. My grandma visited once a week on Thursdays at 3 pm right before the workday lunch discount ended, not because she needed to save money, but because she disliked waiting in line during peak hours. She’d request me as her server, order a tea and a plate of cold vinegar jellyfish salad, and leave me and the rest of the staff each a tip of fifty dollars. If the restaurant was quiet, and it normally was at that time, my manager allowed me to join my grandma. My grandma rarely had much to say, so I’d complain to her about my mother and the latest threats she’d brandished at me, to which my grandma would reply, “Don’t worry about her, she’s trying to make sure you won’t end up like her. And you certainly won’t, because you’re like me.” 

I liked the mind-numbing routine of working in a restaurant: the physical activity prevented my mind from wandering, and instead I exerted just enough mental energy to get orders correct and appease customers.  Later, with some of the nontrivial funds my grandma funneled into my bank account as her “inheritance,” I learned to trade options and quit my job. 

“I knew I was right, you were always such a smart girl,” my mother said after I paid off her mortgage and remodeled her kitchen with white cabinets and a marble island. 

“You should thank Grandma,” I said. 

“Who?” She asked. Alzheimer’s grip on her mind grew tighter by the day. I worried she’d remember my grandma in the wrong light. I wasn’t smart; my grandma’s money did all the heavy lifting.  

“It’s ok, forgetting and dying are all the same,” my grandma said after I relayed my concerns. 

And then my mother died, and several decades later, my grandma left for good. I’d moved from country to country since then, trying to outrun the generations of family members that spread like river capillaries. From afar, I pushed my descendants’ careers along with disguised investment money and nudging their leadership chains. The thing about living as long as I had was you started to know everyone, each relationship a tangling of mutual connections that, though I had attempted to seclude myself, manifested strong and glistening like spider webs. I seeded my descendants with ambition, barricading this curse deep within my body. 

*

When enough time passes, you grow numb, but you also grow observant. I learned this after my first daughter died from postpartum hemorrhage that the doctors failed to detect before sending her home. She complained of dizzy spells but by the time we sent her back to the hospital, it’d been too late. We chose not to sue the hospital because money wasn’t a problem, and none of us wanted to scratch further at the wound. Her husband ended up taking the baby and moving closer to his parents, but I remained close to where my daughter died. I was afraid I’d forget the way she laughed at my inability to use the latest digital payment apps or how she cooked shin ramen with milk even though the lactose wrecked our stomachs. To be fair, I nearly did forget her smile and eyebrow crinkle, though the memories stayed with me for the first two hundred years which surely couldn’t count for nothing. 

I’d forgotten the faces of all my romantic partners. Even my first love, whose stuffed rabbit “Rabby” I kept at my bedside. I could only draw generic assumptions based on the stuffed animal: he must’ve been the sentimental type to cling to a plush into adulthood; he must’ve been kind and caring; he must’ve enjoyed cuddling because stuffed animals were built for that. I struggled to recall much beyond an echo of a kettle whistling early in the morning before I’d fully woken, the image of a tray of two steaming cups—one matcha and one coffee—delivered to the bed. My later romances manifested as increasingly muddled recollections, leaving me incapable of attributing images—not just faces but also names—to people. There was the one who tore apart the master bedroom on a quest to smoke out the lurking bed bugs, but I only remembered the brown dotted stains on the sheets and the diatomaceous earth dusting our furniture. There was the one who shared a feast on injera and ater kik, our fingers coated in mashed peas and lentils and our shirts stained sunburn-red from spices. But I could not tell you which lover enjoyed eating with their hands instead of chopsticks, or which lover’s last name I gladly took on only to discard decades later. 

Even the ogre of a man who forced me to have sex with him without a condom evolved into a nebulous blur. The only reason I remembered was because the sex had been so horrible I thought I’d give up all material desire if it meant avoiding that experience again. Anyway, I couldn’t have children anymore even if he wanted them, and sex had become a physical chore. I still enjoyed other physical aspects of life—warm teas, the sweetness of a summer-ripened tomato. But as the years passed, my lovers felt increasingly like children, wrapped up in their net worth, checklists, or existential crises. I’d go into autopilot dealing with them, and eventually decided to stop dealing all together. 

My grandma believed that longevity was neither a blessing nor a curse, but rather a responsibility. For what, she never said. She kept herself busy enough, and my mother said that before my birth, my grandma sat on the board of directors for several large companies. She quit everything after my birth though. 

“For all the things you’ve done wrong—dumping your first baby in a trash can, setting fire to the house to claim whatever pennies your husband would leave you from life insurance—this makes up for all of it,” my grandma told my mother whose crimes were boundless, and my grandma’s power to dig her out of the repercussions equally endless. I never resented my mother for committing those crimes though—I was grateful she decided to keep me alive and blamed myself for her pettiness that had aged her several decades beyond her physical years. 

“You can’t pity people like your mother. They’re not your family if you choose for them not to be. Once your family is so big you’ve lost track, you’ll see. You can always afford to pick,” my grandma said. “No one has an infinite capacity for compassion.” 

My grandma took me to live with her after my mother died from a gun wound. She’d been shot in the crossfire of an altercation between motorcyclists, the bullet piercing through her car window straight through her head. 

My grandma’s main house stood at the top of a mountain range, overseeing the city below. But she took me to her childhood home instead, a farm where all equipment remained man-powered and the only renovation was the plumbing system since even my grandma couldn’t withstand the allure of a porcelain toilet and bidet. “The only good modern development humanity has accomplished,” she claimed.   

It was only until several decades after she departed that I suspected she’d probably been trying to keep me disinterested in material life. Without someone to inherit the longevity, she’d never be able to leave. I couldn’t fault her. Toward her final days, she seemed more tired than she’d ever been, dragging her feet as she walked, leaving bowls in microwaves, and forgetting the date even though the calendar hung on the wall with big black letters. 

I lived alone in a one-storey house with tall ceilings and enough windows to let sunlight touch every corner. It had one bedroom and a study that I rarely used, and the backyard faced an upward mountain slope that coyotes and rabbits would frequent. I liked mountains: they changed more slowly than I did, and I could return to one like an old friend. A gardener visited once a month to tend to the palm tree and crane flowers growing against the fence. He accidentally swatted down a few hummingbirds thinking they were bugs, and although I might’ve fired him a century ago for the offense, it had only happened once and I liked how he finished his tasks quietly and took his payment from the cash I slipped under the doormat. The gardener was my only frequent visitor, and despite our lack of verbal communication, his presence reminded me how other people operated and what social cues they’d adopted. I had no intention of receding completely from society despite the exhaustion that came with it. I still had to keep myself up to date with world news, a tribute to my grandma who tracked news like gossip and tabulated her findings on graph paper and later spreadsheets to predict the trajectory of her finances. Money was a fun, reliable game to her.

When I was fifteen, my grandma liked to show me her binder of receipts collected over the decades and point out the price fluctuation of each item: how chicken became cheap, eggs expensive, sneakers a fortune. I possessed no concept of money at the time and flipped through the receipts to trace the store brand logos or handwritten letters. I thought they looked cool and tried to guess the store’s atmosphere from the designs. My grandma never remembered the stores or staff. She told me to focus on the numbers because the “only game you can play with this kind of lifespan is the market.” I tried my best to understand the patterns but it was difficult to parse meaning from faded slips of paper without her guiding me, and my grandma spoke infrequently, as though she expected me to absorb the contents of her brain through proximity. 

She’d once taken me to a temple with entombed emperors inside, gold statues and incense surrounding the room, bowls of peaches and Fuji apples placed in front of each praying Buddha figure. She complained that if the heavens had been more creative and thoughtful, we’d reincarnate with new bodies every lifetime rather than be imprisoned in these static shells. She even tried to bury herself in the mausoleum to see if laying near the emperors would sweep her soul up with theirs. I had to call security to pull her out of a tomb and get her to leave with me. I was too young to travel home alone, and only she carried the money and train tickets back. I swore never to do such a silly thing, even though, several generations later, I dug a hole in the backyard and attempted to bury myself. But digging such a deep grave requires a hefty amount of physical labor and strength that I lacked, so my nose poked out from the earth and my great-great-granddaughter dug me out. 

My grandma claimed her obsession with burials was normal. “You crave what you can’t have,” she’d lecture. “We are trees who’ve branched so far that we seek to touch our roots again.” My grandma’s roots were in the winters of Shenyang, where she once ran around with numb fingers and dangled slivers of meat in front of stray dogs. 

“The AR stuff is good enough,” she shrugged when I asked why she never visited home. But she rarely used the headset that the company she’d invested in helped create. I used it more often than her because I enjoyed walking through clouds, traversing the ocean bottom—anything beyond my physical boundaries.

Not that I still used those headsets. That stopped after I turned two hundred and fifty, while I’d been wandering through what the company described as God’s Play, a virtual enticement where you could extrude land and split oceans according to your will. I’d been so engaged in the gameplay that I missed a call from my doctor about an odd lump in my mammogram, and she showed up at my front door sweating and crying, worried I’d die. I told her not to worry and left the country. Doctors who cared too much were the hardest to shake off, and I didn’t need labs questioning my inability to die.

By the time I turned three hundred, very few of my descendants knew about me. I preferred it this way, unlike my grandma who ensured every remote blood relation had a record of their immortal ancestor. “Family traditions must be passed on, and how can you find the next blessed daughter without informing them such a thing exists,” she had said. I only told my daughter once when she was twelve years old because the dishonesty ate away at my heart. Whether she allowed the information to trickle down the generations was up to them. Occasionally though, I’d feel an irrational giddiness when the doorbell rang and I could hear a girl whispering at the front, and instead of finding the annual Girl Scout troop member holding a catalog of cookies, I imagined someone in the spitting image of my grandma announcing she was here to set me free. 

About the Author:

Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Find her at https://lucyzhang.tech or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.

Feature image by Mohamed Hassan on Unsplash