By the third day of spring break, our apartment in Shanghai was closing in on me. Again.
Boarding school offered labyrinthine hallways, big dorm rooms, endless schedules. Home cornered me with a single corridor, the smell of oil from the kitchen clinging to the curtains, my grandfather’s tools spread across the living room table like they warranted more space than the furniture.
I shrunk at that table with my myth textbook open, supposedly annotating a passage from the Odyssey. My teacher had made us linger for weeks on the part before Odysseus ever appears: the “Telemachy,” where a boy grows up in a house that doesn’t feel like his own. I underlined a line about Telemachus watching the suitors ruin his father’s hall and wondering if any of it was his responsibility.
I knew exactly where my own suitors lived. They hummed two floors up, in the makeshift beehives my grandfather had pieced together on the balcony. He’d tried, more than once, to drag me into his schemes — “Come carry this box,” “Help me mix this fertilizer,” “Hold this frame while I nail” — but I always had something more urgent: a quiz, a group chat, an essay on heroic archetypes. The bees were simply one more intruder in this cramped space. A constant humming I studiously ignored.
My grandfather wiped his hands on a rag and shuffled over. Our downstairs neighbour stood in the hallway, holding a shirt speckled with small, crushed bees. “Do you know anything about this?” she demanded. “Bees. They crashed into my laundry. Dozens of them. Someone in this building must be keeping bees.”
The words hung there as I stepped closer, seeing the tiny yellow and black dots clinging to the fabric. My grandfather’s face didn’t change, but I saw his eyes flick, just once, toward the ceiling. Toward the second-floor balcony.
Now the neighbour narrowed her eyes. “Old Wu ahhh,” she said, “you’re always dragging strange things into the building. It’s you, isn’t it?”
My grandfather opened his mouth. Before he could answer, something in me pulled backward, as if someone had grabbed the loose thread of my life and yanked. In that heartbeat of silence in our doorway, memories unwound in unruly tangles across the floor.
I remember annotating the opening of Book One of the Odyssey on the flight back from school. Telemachus sits in his father’s hall trying to understand who Odysseus was from the stories strangers tell him — secondhand heroism, nothing he could touch. My teacher had written in the margin: How does a son know his father through objects instead of memories?
“Hey, why are your chairs all different?” my best friend Chris demanded in our Palo Alto home, running his hands over the uneven grain of our dining table. His voice seized me, and I found myself four years old again, a few days after I watched my grandpa drag them in from the alley. The shame rubbed hot on my face. I couldn’t tell him that my grandfather had scavenged them from the dump, so instead I muttered something about them being “special” while my face burned. I peeked at my grandfather, who was in the corner of the living room, tinkering with a broken clock he’d found yesterday, his calloused hands moving with quiet purpose. The mismatched chairs, the clock guts laid out on a dish towel, my grandfather’s small satisfied hum as he worked — together, they whispered something about the kind of man he was, something I couldn’t yet name.
He never told me stories about himself. He left me furniture and junk to figure it out.
“Eat, come on, just one more piece!” My grandfather’s voice filled our entire apartment in Shanghai and snapped me out of zoning out in the dining room, as he threw another piece of pork into my already overflowing bowl. I was chubby, stubborn and ten, glaring at the mountain of food I could never finish.
He had just returned from Nanchang with three suitcases and four boxes — a full wild hog he’d hunted himself, chickens, pigeons and more he’d bought from friends’ farms. He claimed food sold in Shanghai was as polluted as the air. Our refrigerator strained under the weight of his generosity, and now so did my plate.
“I’m not hungry anymore,” I protested and pushed the bowl away.
“You’re still growing taller; you need calcium and protein,” he insisted, pushing it back. His eyes, usually twinkling with mischief, turned serious. “You don’t know what hungry is.”
I rolled my eyes when he turned away, annoyed by the way he watched every bite I took as if my growth depended on this single meal.
Old men in the Odyssey tell Telemachus stories of storms he’s never seen. My grandfather told me stories of hunger I’d never felt. Both of us were too young to understand them. I only knew the boredom of chewing when I was already full, and I decided he was hopelessly dramatic.
Another fragment, another story I didn’t know how to read: a man acting as if starvation might walk in at any moment, even in a city overflowing with convenience stores.
I stared straight ahead, and then down at the very textbook lying flat on the table, at Telemachus’s failed assembly where no one takes him seriously — too young to command the household, old enough to feel the weight of his powerlessness. In my notes I’d written: humiliated. Then crossed it out and wrote: invisible. The teacher’s question stared back at me: What does it mean to be powerless in your own home? I didn’t write what I was really thinking: that sometimes powerlessness looks like watching someone overfeed you and knowing you can’t make them stop.
My mind wandered to Telemachus finally leaving Ithaca to search for answers about his father. One line caught me: how he walks through his house “turning a blind eye” to what the suitors are doing, pretending not to see the waste. I’d reread it twice, uncomfortable with how familiar it felt.
I was fourteen when I’d perfected that same skill.
The balcony above our apartment had started to change. First came a few plastic pots. Then bags of soil and repurposed containers: a cracked rice cooker filled with dirt, a metal basin with holes punched in the bottom, old instant-noodle buckets with hand-drawn labels. Whenever I was home from school, I’d catch glimpses of my grandfather hauling up boards with peeling paint, a jar full of metal nails, a cardboard box and then disappearing again.
One afternoon, though, a foul smell drifted down the stairwell, thick and sour. It seeped under our front door and into the living room, where I was pretending to highlight my notes.
“Ugh, what is that?” I muttered, snapping my book shut. I followed the smell up the stairs, each step making it stronger, until I pushed open the door to the balcony and walked straight into it.
The balcony had become an ecosystem.
Flowers pressed against one another — yellow, white, a deep purple I’d only seen in pictures. Green vines tangled around a ladder I recognized from my abandoned bunk bed. Chipped tiles and broken plates of different colours served as trays beneath the pots, catching stray water. Along the wall, several wooden boxes hummed softly.
In the corner sat a bucket of what looked like rotting vegetable scraps: orange peels, wilted leaves, crushed eggshells melting into a dark slurry. The stench hit me.
“Grandpa!” I yelled. “What is going on up here?”
He appeared in the doorway behind me, wiping his hands on his pants, almost giggling. “Fertilizer,” he said, as if it were obvious. “Good fertilizer always smells bad at first.”
Up close, I could see that each box along the wall was cobbled together from planks of different colours.
I reached for a flower, its petals soft and cool under my fingers.
“These flowers aren’t for looking,” my grandfather said with a quiet pride.
“They’re for the bees.”
I looked at him, puzzled.
He lifted the lid of one box, just enough for me to see the honeycomb inside, vibrating with movement. The air above the hives was thick with the smell of wax and something sweet, not quite honey and not quite sugar, tangled with the sour note of the compost.
“The bees make honey for us,” he said. “But they also visit every flower in the neighbourhood. They pollinate the gardens, the trees, even the vegetables on balconies you can’t see. One secret garden feeding many others.”
I nodded, half understanding, half distracted by the thought of getting stung and the lingering stink of the fertilizer. It felt like another one of his projects that sprawled beyond common sense.
Now, in the doorway, these untangling memories collided with the neighbour’s angry voice.
“Are you the one raising bees?” she repeated. “They’re crashing into my laundry. It’s dangerous. It’s against building rules.”My grandfather inhaled, and I saw his shoulders rise. He opened his mouth again, slowly, like a man accepting a familiar blame.
The old me — the four-year-old with the burning cheeks, the ten-year-old rolling his eyes, the fourteen-year-old writing “weird bees” in the back of his notebook — would have stepped aside and let him answer. Maybe even blamed him too.
This time, I heard something else in her question. Not just annoyance, but the assumption that nothing coming from those bees could be worth the inconvenience. That anything strange must be useless.
He looked at me then, just for a second. In that brief glance, I saw the same quiet stubbornness that had carried chairs out of a dump in California, tens of suitcases of food across provinces in China.
It was the look of someone who had spent his whole life refusing to waste what could still give life.
“No,” I heard myself say. “We don’t keep bees.”
“They probably came from the park,” I added, forcing my voice to stay casual. “Or the construction site down the road. There are a lot of trees there.”
The neighbour frowned, unconvinced, but she had nowhere else to direct her anger. She muttered something about “people these days” and stalked off, bees still clinging to the fabric in her hand.
My grandfather closed the door softly.
For a long moment, we leaned against the walls in the quiet hallway. I stared at the faded paint on the doorframe, and we both chuckled. I caught a faint trace of wax on his sleeves, sweet and stubborn, the kind of smell you only notice when you finally know what it means.
