“Come-Saw” (2)

Bob Choi

3 April 2012

Just about all my socks had got holes in them. It felt weird with my big toe sticking out when I put them on. I was eager to do something about it. Grandma was great at sewing, but she couldn’t thread a needle on account of her poor eyesight. That’s where I came in, with my perfect vision and steady hands.

Ten years later…

I left Hong Kong to attend college in the United States when I turned twenty-one. At the end of my first year, one day after the final exams were wrapped up, I received a call from my sister. Grandma had died of complications from a hip fracture she sustained when she slipped on the floor two weeks before.

“Why didn’t you call me earlier, sis? I’d have wanted to see Por Por! I’d have wanted to attend the funeral service!”

“I’m sorry we didn’t tell you earlier. We knew you were very close to Por Por. It all happened so suddenly. We knew you were in the middle of your final exams and we didn’t want this to distract you.”

We didn’t talk long. There was nothing else to say. Besides, international calls were very expensive in those days. My family meant well. The exams were a convenient excuse. The truth was we were very poor at the time. I was attending college on a full scholarship, but we needed to save and scrape to come up with money for my textbooks and room and board. There was no money left for anything else. I could not have afforded to fly home to see Por Por even if I had known about her accident.

For hours, I sat on the edge of my bed thinking of grandma, her kind voice, her wrinkled face and her silvery hair. I missed the time we spent together and all the things she had taught me. I missed you so, Por Por! Then I recalled “come-saw” from ten years ago, the only English word my grandma said she knew. Could it be a real word? Could Por Por be right? I needed to know. She would have wanted me to find out.

Wiping the tears off my eyes, I reached across the desk where I kept my Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged. Fidgeting with trepidation, I flipped the pages to “com—” and scanned the columns of entries. I found no words that would even come close to “comsaw”. So there’s no such word after all! I felt relieved and oddly disappointed.

Well, don’t give up just yet. Por Por deserved more than that. How about “cumsaw”? I turned over more pages to “cum—”. Guided by anxious fingers, I hunted among the columns on the open pages, up and down and zigzag until I came to C-U-M-S…

And there it was -- snuggled between “cumquat” and “cumulate”-- a word I dismissed offhand ten years ago because I did not think an old, illiterate woman could teach me the only English word she knew. My heart skipped a beat or two as I read the entry with eager anticipation…

cum.shaw: noun (in Chinese ports) a present; gratuity; tip.

The only English word Por Por knew was not only real, it was a wonderful gem. She tried to show it to me, but I was too conceited and pigheaded to see. I’m sorry that I doubted you, Por Por! I’m sorry that I treated you unfairly! I had never felt as small as I felt on that day and henceforth.

Por Por had been dead for nearly forty years now. I have pictures of her that had faded, but I will always have “cumshaw” to remember her by.

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