Grandmother's Cantonese

My grandmother spoke Cantonese to the vegetables. This wasn't unusual in our house. She spoke to everything — the stove, the television, the front door that stuck in humidity. But the vegetables got the most conversation, possibly because they didn't talk back, which made them her favorite audience. She'd stand at the sink, rinsing gai lan under the tap, and mutter to each stalk about its quality. This one: good, dark, worth the price. That one: pale, tired, probably from a box. She'd hold up a piece of tofu and announce to the kitchen whether it was the right firmness, and the kitchen would not respond, and she would proceed as if it had agreed. I grew up in Richmond, BC. The Chinese half — the half where the signs are in Chinese and the food courts serve congee at seven AM and the grocery stores sell things I couldn't explain to my school friends, like dried cuttlefish and winter melon and fermented bean curd that smelled like a dare. My school friends were mostly not Chinese. They ate sandwiches. I ate rice and whatever my grandmother had decided to argue with that morning. My Cantonese is the kind that makes my grandmother wince. I have the tones of a second-generation kid — close enough to be understood, wrong enough to be recognized as someone who learned it at home and not from a teacher. There are nine tones in Cantonese. I use five of them reliably. The other four come and go, like friends who show up when it suits them. She corrected me until she decided I was unteachable, which happened around age twelve. After that she spoke Cantonese at me and I replied in English and we understood each other perfectly, which is not the same as speaking the same language but is close enough for family. She died last year. Ninety-one. In her sleep, which is the good way, if there is a good way, which people say there is and I'm not convinced. I cleaned out her kitchen. The wok was black and seasoned by forty years of cooking and I couldn't bring myself to touch it for a week. When I finally picked it up, it was lighter than I expected. She'd made it look heavy. I kept the wok. I kept the cleaver, which is too large for my kitchen and which I use anyway. I kept the ceramic pot she made soup in every Sunday — the one with the chip on the rim that she'd had since Hong Kong, since before Canada, since before I existed. I cook with them now. Not as well. The gai lan doesn't get spoken to, or it does, but in English, which isn't the same, and I know it isn't the same because the food tastes almost right but not quite. Something's missing. Maybe it's the Cantonese. Maybe the vegetables need it. My daughter starts Saturday Chinese school next month. She'll learn Mandarin, not Cantonese, because that's what they teach. It's the wrong dialect and the right impulse, and my grandmother would have had opinions about this, and she would have expressed them to the nearest vegetable.