Table for Three

 If you could magically have dinner with one person who is living and one who is not, whom would you choose and why?

I would choose Ernest Hemingway for my first dinner guest, because of the grey of his clouds and the briny smell of the Seine. Always his works evoked Paris, and rain. In 1965, he put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I want to ask him why he did it. I want to know why he waited until then, and how he lived with shadows for so long.

I want to tell him that A Moveable Feast made me want to try to write someday.

I want to watch him get drunk.

For my second dinner guest, I would choose my paternal grandmother. She has absolutely nothing in common with Hemingway. In fact, she doesn’t even speak English, so imagine how awkward the conversation would be, what with a tipsy Ernest Hemingway and a stoic old Chinese lady who knows only how to say “yes” and “no” and “more soy sauce”.

Awkward or not, I would choose my grandmother because I haven’t seen her in years- not since I first read A Moveable Feast. She would sit in silence, fiercely proud to see her blood come so far, to sit with a literary genius like Hemingway. She wouldn’t understand him at all, but I think Hemingway would understand her. She, too, lived through a world war, and was almost shattered by it.  Disillusionment is a language they both speak.

And I can see how her careworn hands would stroke my cheek, the way Hemingway’s strokes a wine glass.