In the hot still air we stretched rice paper

over his parents’ tombstone. With charcoal,

I rubbed. As pennies give their patterns to paper

and pencil lead, white words coalesced

on the paper. We read some of the Chinese,

but not the incorrect word my father found.

I stepped back. In Chinese I said,

“Goong Goong, Po Po, sorry I did not come earlier.

We were in Europe when you died, Granpa.

The week you died, Grandma, our daughter was born.

The kids are twenty-one and eighteen, off in college.

“The three of us still try to speak Chinese,

Tlui Eep,the Toisan Hwa you taught us.

Even my lo fan wife understands.

I hope you are proud of us.”

Thon said his daughter wanted more

than to live in an Oregon commune,

so he paid for her to go to the U.

Now, he and Betty take care of the grandkids,

entertain neighbors from U.S. Steel, old

friends who lost a son in Vietnam

and then their hips and knees.

I thought about my Salt Lake aunts and uncles,

how they changed starter motors,

went to war, college, university, law school,

how we all cooked, washed chopsticks

by rubbing them together in dishwater

and dried them by rolling them, chattering,

in a dishtowel, like mah jong blocks.

Now, all except Thon have moved away.

None can decide if they want

their names on the back of the stone.

We found and rubbed Great-grandfather’s stone

too, the herbalist who swore there

was opportunity in an old mining town,

Park City. When Granma got off the train

from Washington, D.C., she cried.

After the War, Thon cooked in a Chinese restaurant

in Salt Lake until Georgia said, oh yes,

she remembered him, the one who picked his nose.

So he dug for ore, summered in Alaska, California,

Nevada, his life the universe of rocks and minerals

narrated by his compass, transit, and altimeter.

This stone we traced now, a fine-grained one

he chose, durable. Becoming the past,

preparing for absence.

“Keep busy,” Dad tells me,

when I cry about our son leaving.

“Let’s prepare our wills,” he told Mom

when he was eighty-four. “Get ready.”

He saw all of us go to college

while he cleaned clothes and read.

I never knew his father, who

went back and didn’t come

back to these Golden Mountains,

which rubbed him the wrong way.

—Daryl Ngee Chinn