The journey of Baby Plant is one that everyone participates in. One aunt has already looked up the T.S.A. airline regulations around domestic plant transport (“As long as you put it under your seat or in the overhead bin, you’re good!”). Later, another aunt helps me pack the plant in a tall, stiff paper bag to protect its fragile leaves during the flight. All of this draws my family closer around me, even as I prepare to leave them again for California.
My gung gung never traveled much after immigrating from China. The last big trip he made was up to Lake George for my wedding, a five-hour drive from Long Island with my grandmother when they were both well into their 80s. (“They must love you a lot to come this far,” one of my aunts joked.) But flying Baby Plant across the country feels as if I’m bringing him with me on a grand and whimsical adventure.
Have plant, will travel.
I take photos of Baby Plant on every step of the journey: buckled in the car that takes us to J.F.K., on the X-ray conveyor belt at airport security, at the gate, in the window seat on the plane to San Francisco. I text updates to my mom and aunts and uncle and brother and cousins, and they text delightful notes back: “You and Baby Plant have a safe trip home”; “Tell the flight attendant no food for me thx but I’ll have some water for my plant”; “The big question is whether Baby Plant will get along with his siblings”; “That plant needs to be named Stanley” — after the children’s book character Flat Stanley, who travels the world as a foldable, mailable passenger, making new friends everywhere he goes.
Because my grandfather tended toward quiet, we all loved to make him laugh — a triumph, because any smile or laugh from him was seismic. This plant-based adventure would have pleased him. After all those years in America, he rarely uttered a word in English. A few months ago, I summoned up my Cantonese and my courage and told him that I thought he actually did understand English, that he listened to everything we were saying about him — and that he only pretended not to. He looked at me for a long moment. Then he burst like a dam, his shoulders shaking with laughter.
I think about his hands, exceedingly gentle and patient. Once he told me about what it was like to fold fortune cookies, fingers bandaged against the scalding circles of dough, quickly shaping them before they hardened. As he talked, his hands moved by memory. Every month until the end, the guy cut his own hair, using three mirrors. Those deft hands manifested soy-sauce chicken and wok-fried lobster, the stuff of legend. And of course: the dracaena.