I learned my grandfather died in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, somewhere between Los Angeles and Tokyo. A text arrived in the plane’s whirring, slipping past all the miles of metal and clouds to glow quietly on my screen.

I was sipping green tea that tasted like warm hay. The flight attendant paused, scanning my face, as if deciding whether to take away my cup. Across the aisle, a woman sobbed into a blanket while her earbuds leaked the sound of a Korean drama. Grief at 37,000 feet felt illegal, like smuggling liquids through customs. I was strapped into my seatbelt, my sadness forced to stay seated for the duration of the flight.

My grandfather’s name was Hai. It means sea. He used to say salt cures everything: wounds, fish, grief.

When I was small, I believed this. I sprinkled salt on split lips, on mosquito bites, into bowls of soup that smelled of star anise and ginger. He watched me over the rim of his glasses, nodding his approval, while the ocean rustled outside his apartment window like a restless child.

On his cassette tapes, he read me Chinese fairy tales, his voice rising like incense smoke. He paused between each line as if weighing every word. Even now, when I close my eyes, I hear him saying my name the way it was meant to sound, each syllable precise as a brushstroke.

When my parents and I left China, we carried two suitcases, a rice cooker, and a plastic jar of dried fish. At customs, they asked what we were bringing. My mother responded: only what we need. But I wanted to declare everything—the taste of white pear syrup for a cough, the smell of roasted sunflower seeds, the way my grandfather folded the newspaper to read just the crime section, leaving all the joy and gossip untouched.

Instead, we wrote: clothing, gifts.

***

In California, my mother tried to turn our kitchen into a memory of her father’s. The rice bubbled on the stove, red dates floating on the surface like drowned jewels. She refused to speak English at dinner. She made me recite Tang poems between mouthfuls of bok choy, as if rhyme could stitch a continent back together.

But even the rice felt different here—too dry, as though it had been harvested from dust rather than water.

***

The year my grandfather fell ill, my mother started waking at three a.m., staring into her phone, the glow painting hollows under her eyes. She’d mutter into WeChat calls, voice clipped and polite, saving her real worry for later, for the bathroom, where she ran the faucet so no one would hear her cry.

One night I found her scrubbing the kitchen tiles at four in the morning. The smell of bleach punched me awake.

“Ma, what are you doing?” I said.

She kept scrubbing. “I’m cleaning the ocean off the floor.”

I wanted to tell her that’s not how it works, that the ocean was inside us by now, pooled behind our ribs, salted into our blood. But I stayed quiet. I poured her a glass of warm water and pressed it into her hand.

***

When my grandfather’s funeral came, my mother flew alone. She said I had school, that plane tickets were too expensive, that funerals are no place for children. But the truth is, my mother did not want me to see how people in China grieve.

In my mother’s village, they hire professional wailers—women who scream and beat their chests until their voices crack like ceramic. My mother told me this with a certain shame. Grief is private, she said. Not a performance.

Still, she mailed me a photo of the funeral tent: red plastic chairs, rain hammering the nylon canopy. Everyone wore white headbands, except my mother, who looked out of place in a navy raincoat she’d borrowed from her cousin. In her hands, she held a small wooden tablet with my grandfather’s name. Her hair clung wet to her cheeks. Her eyes were squeezed tight, like she was refusing to look at how small the world had become without him.

***

When she returned, my mother carried my grandfather’s ashes in a red lacquer box no bigger than a lunch pail. She held it on her lap during the car ride home, afraid it might break or spill.

I asked her what they’d done with his clothes, glasses, and cassette tapes. She shrugged. “Distributed. Burned. Left behind.”

My grandfather used to say the ocean is patient. It remembers every shipwreck, every dropped coin, every drowned prayer. I think of all the salt he left behind, scattered like breadcrumbs across the Pacific, and wonder if grief is just the ocean trying to reclaim what belongs to it.

***

I dream about him often. Most nights, he’s standing ankle-deep in seawater, tidying the horizon into neat squares of blue paper. I call to him, but he only presses a finger to his lips. When I wake, my pillow smells faintly of my grandfather’s canned peaches, though I haven’t opened the jar in years.

***

Sometimes I wonder if grief can be inherited. My mother carries her sorrow like a secret, hidden under layers of polite laughter and overcooked rice.

One morning, she found me crying over the sink, clutching a damp dishcloth. She touched my hair, so gently that it made me cry harder.

“Why are you crying?” she asked.

“I don’t know how to carry him,” I said.

My mother nodded. “Neither do I.”

***

After my grandfather’s funeral, my mother started clearing out the garage. She opened boxes that had been sealed for decades, each labeled in her handwriting: Wedding Items. China Things. Maybe Useful Someday.

Inside one, I found my grandfather’s cassette tapes, the plastic destroyed by time. My mother took one, held it to her ear as if she might hear him breathing inside.

“Throw them away,” she said, but her hands wouldn’t let go.

***

I remember how he’d pour boiling water over tea leaves and say, This is how you soften bitterness.

When he died, my mother brought back a small pouch of sea salt from his kitchen. She said he’d wanted it sprinkled into his ashes, but she couldn’t do it. Instead, she keeps it in the cupboard, hidden behind the soy sauce.

Sometimes, when she thinks I’m not looking, she unscrews the pouch, touches her fingers to the salt, and tastes it.

***

At customs, the officers asked if we were bringing in any food, plants, or animal products.

I wanted to say: grief, in powdered form. A jar of old salt. A ghost who hums Tang poems in the dark.

Instead, we said: nothing to declare.

***

My mother tells me it’s strange how, after he died, she started noticing the ocean more. How the salt sprays the windows of the car when she drives along the Pacific Coast Highway. How the waves keep advancing and retreating, as though trying to write a message none of us can read.

“How can the ocean just keep going?” she asks me one day, almost angry.

I don’t have an answer.

***

The first time I scattered salt into boiling water after he died, I felt like I was feeding him.

The hiss of salt meeting water sounded like a voice, an inhalation. A yes.

***

I keep thinking of customs, of all the times I’ve stood in fluorescent lines, sweating under the eyes of officers who ask me:

Are you carrying anything that does not belong to you?

I want to say yes. I am carrying a country. A man’s voice trapped on magnetic tape. A language I can speak but sometimes can’t think in. I am carrying the ocean. I am carrying my mother’s quiet terror that we will forget him completely.

Instead, I say: No. Nothing to declare.

***

My mother and I visited the ocean last winter, the same beach where she’d once scattered my grandfather’s ashes. The waves clawed at the sand, leaving behind strands of kelp like cursive letters.

I asked her if she ever dreams of him. She said no, too quickly.

Then, softer: “Sometimes. But he never talks. Just stands there. Like he’s waiting for a question I’m too afraid to ask.”

***

I don’t know how to describe love curdling into caretaking. When devotion turns into a cage. My grandfather forgot my name long before he died. My mother tells me this gently, as though smoothing a crease from a shirt. She doesn’t say it to hurt me but because she needs me to know.

But I remember how he pronounced my name on his tapes, syllable by syllable, his voice trembling slightly at the end.

***

Some nights, I go to the ocean and stand barefoot in the cold water. I whisper questions into the wind, hoping they’ll drift across the Pacific, find him somewhere I cannot go.

Did leaving China mean leaving parts of yourself behind?

Did the sea steal syllables from the end of your name?

Do you still believe salt can cure everything?

***

I come home with salt crusting my ankles, the taste of brine in my mouth. My mother sees the wet sand stuck to my heels and doesn’t ask where I’ve been.

Instead, she presses a piece of paper into my hand. On it, my grandfather’s name, written in her handwriting, and under it, the character for sea.

“Keep this,” she says. “So he knows the way home.”

---

Allison Zhang is a poet and writer based in Los Angeles. An immigrant and bilingual speaker of English and Mandarin, she writes about inheritance, memory, and the quiet ruptures of daily life. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Midway Journal, Sky Island Journal, and others. She is the author of An Everlasting Bond, honored by the BookFest Spring Awards and the International Impact Book Awards.