JinTuan - A Jotting

Even now, I still cannot clearly say what “jintuan” actually is.

Was it golden glutinous rice wrapped around red bean paste?

Or a rice cake dusted with soybean powder?

In my memory it has no fixed shape. It is only a name, a sound, held between my grandfather’s lips as they slowly grew cold. It became his last gentle and stubborn wish left to the living.

At that time none of us understood. My mother could not drive. Food delivery was nothing like it is today. So that afternoon, the two of us were like clumsy actors pushed onto a stage by fate without warning. We had no script, only one line in our hands: “Grandpa wants to eat jintuan.”

We took a few stops on the subway. Within a ten kilometer radius of home, whenever we saw a decent pastry shop, we went in. With a hope that was almost overflowing, we asked:

“Do you have jintuan today?”

I remember one shop most clearly. The owner was a big man in a white apron, busy putting away steaming bamboo baskets. The air was full of mist. Without even looking up, he answered,

“Jintuan? We stopped making that long ago. It is some old Ningbo thing. Nobody eats that now.”

Then he finally looked up and saw our blank and disappointed faces. His tone seemed to soften a little. He added, “We only have qingtuan here. But you picked a bad time. The qingtuan is sold out too. It is not even Qingming Festival. Who would eat qingtuan now, let alone jintuan.”

His words fell like a cold piece of iron. Yes, it was not Qingming. But for us, that day felt even harsher than Qingming. 

My grandfather’s life always seemed entangled with this kind of misplaced regret.

When he was young, he was the “pride of the family” everyone talked about. There had been a chance for him to work at a branch campus that everyone said had a bright future. But under all sorts of persuasion, he chose to stay at the main campus, which people called more solid and reliable. “It is more stable here. Better for a teaching job.” The adults said that. He believed them. Then fate took a turn. The branch campus flourished. The campus he stayed in slowly faded. So his whole life became “only” that of a university professor.

As a child, I thought “only” was polite modesty. Later I realized that in that one light word he carried so many evenings of unspoken sighs and unfulfilled ambition. Even so, fate still stuffed other things into those cracks. Because he stayed in this city, he met my grandmother. She probably would not be considered a good wife or good mother in the usual sense. She had a quick temper and sharp words. There were storms and edges in her nature. But she gave birth to my mother. My mother is an excellent daughter and later an excellent mother. She clumsily fought with life, yet tried very hard to make the bumps and bruises of the previous generation hurt me a little less.

Sometimes I wonder. If my grandfather had left for that other city and that promising campus, maybe my mother would not have been born. Then I would not be here writing these words.

Yet this thought experiment cannot win back the chances he lost. It also cannot dissolve the regrets that stayed with him. It only makes the calculation more confused. Light and shadow twist together. It is impossible to say clearly whether he came out ahead or fell behind.

That day in the hospital, I was still in second grade. I had no idea what “life and death” really meant. When my mother called from the hospital, my first reaction was a small secret delight. I did not have to attend math class that day. I had not yet memorized my multiplication tables and I was afraid the teacher would call on me.

A child’s thoughts are so selfish and so honest.

The ward smelled sharply of disinfectant. My grandfather lay on the bed. His breathing was very weak. My mother took my hand and whispered, “Go and squeeze Grandpa’s hand.”

I froze. I did not know what illness he had. I only had a vague fear that it might be something contagious. In that moment, I invented a childish but firm logic. As long as I did not touch that cold hand, death would remain something adults talked about, not something that truly happened to me. If I never reached out, Grandpa would not leave.

So no matter how my mother encouraged me, “Just pinch it for a moment,” “Just touch him a little,” I stood rigidly in place. My fingers curled tight and refused to move.

I believed that this refusal could buy us more time.

Things did not go as I imagined.

He passed away that very night.

Two days before the funeral, my mother wrote a eulogy. She practiced it again and again in our living room. Each time she read it, she cried. I sat to one side and listened. My heart felt stuffed with cotton. Strangely, I did not cry. It was not until we stood in the funeral hall, surrounded by white flowers and black clothes, that everything changed. My mother read the eulogy in front of all the relatives and friends. Her voice tried very hard to control itself. When she reached the last word and her voice fell, the hall became so quiet that only breathing remained.

In that moment, it was like a string snapped. I suddenly understood that it was over.

The eulogy had ended. My grandfather’s life had ended with it. He would never wake up again.

My tears broke through without warning.

According to custom, we had to walk around the coffin once.

I walked very slowly.

My grandfather lay in a crystal coffin, dressed in his best suit. There was a faint smile on his face. He looked more peaceful and healthy than when he was alive. But I knew this peace was arranged for the living.

When I reached the place near his head, I stopped.

I stared at his face and tried to look as hard as I could. I wanted to carve every line of it into my memory, as if remembering harder could drag time out for us. My vision blurred with tears, but I did not want to blink. I was afraid that if I did, he would already be further away.

The road to the cemetery was long.

I walked behind my mother and aunt, my hand in our nanny’s. She probably wanted to comfort the child who would not stop crying. She gently joked, “Are you acting in a play? Are those fake tears?”

I could not stand that sentence. I cried even harder.

It was not a performance.

It was a tide of emotions that arrived late. Fear, guilt and a kind of regret that I did not yet know how to name.

After that, my walk to school each morning did not change much. My grandfather had never been there in the morning anyway.

But the walk home after school was different forever.

From the school gate to the FamilyMart on the corner was only a few hundred meters. Yet some unseen piece had been quietly dug out.

Before, my grandfather always waited for me there. In wind and rain he stood by the door. He would take me inside to buy a Kinder Surprise egg. That was the little climax I looked forward to every day.

Sometimes I would get a toy I did not like and puff up with anger. I would twist his arm on purpose. His skin, already loose with age, would gather where I pinched. He would laugh like a child who had done something wrong.

I threw all my bad luck onto him without any sense of fairness. It was as if there was someone in the world who would never mind being blamed.

Now each time I passed that convenience store, I could not help thinking.

If I could give him all my good luck in life, what would I trade for?

If I could pay in advance with every question I ever got right on a test, every winter when I did not get sick, every moment when a teacher praised me.

Would that be enough to buy one small thing?

Perhaps it could make him open his eyes one more time and look at me.

Perhaps it could let him actually taste a single bite of jintuan.

But life does not make deals like that.

No “if” can repair an “already gone.”

No amount of understanding I gain afterward can erase the fear and retreat I once had.

Even now, I still regret it.

I regret that on that afternoon I could not find a golden, sweet and sticky jintuan for him.

I regret that in the hospital room, when he reached out that cold hand, I did not place my small, warm hand in his and hold on.

The jintuan that never reached him and the hand I never held have become two permanent blanks in my heart, standing side by side.

Like the name “jintuan,” they have no clear shape or taste. They simply rest there, heavy and quiet, at the bottom of my memory, in every still afternoon when I think of him.

My grandfather has been gone for many years. Life keeps pushing forward.

The subway lines are still the same.

The pastry shops on the corner have changed their signs.

The shelves of the convenience store now carry newer snacks.

My route home from school has turned into other routes. I no longer need anyone to pick me up.

From time to time, on some random afternoon, I pass a dessert shop and see neat rows of qingtuan in the glass case. My heart sinks a little.

I know they are not jintuan.

Yet they remind me of something I never found. Not a pastry, but a small wish that was never completed. A wish that is now forever too late.

I no longer rush to give this story an optimistic ending.

In the world of adults, many regrets are never healed and never fully explained away. They simply sink slowly to a cooler place inside the heart and stay there with other memories.

Sometimes a smell or a casual comment brings them back up. They feel like a pastry that was supposed to taste sweet but reaches the tongue with no flavor, leaving only a dull sourness.

Maybe jintuan was originally very sweet.

For me, it has only one taste now.

It is called “too late.”