“I’m coming. I’ll be there soon. I’m coming.”
I repeated it into my phone on a crowded train, sounding like a maniac. It was the Monday before Christmas, and Hong Kong’s trains were still packed. I tried to control my shaking voice as people around me began to stare.
Every few minutes, I checked how far I was from my destination. At the station, I ran through the shopping mall looking for a taxi. Inside, I kept checking the time and repeating the same sentence.
“I’m coming.”
On the other end of the call, my grandmother was holding on to her last breath.
Earlier that day, I had gone into the city for a Lovable hackathon organised by a group of Hong Kongers who usually lived in San Francisco and were home for Christmas.
I left before it was over. I still remember apologising, my voice shaking, unsure of what I was supposed to do.
During that period, I was in and out of the hospital almost every day. In my family, Chinese tradition meant that the closest relatives stayed beside an elder around the clock as she approached the end.
It was the quietest period I’d had in a long while. Nothing moved at the speed of a hackathon. I was simply there. And whenever I wasn’t, my grandmother would ask for me.
When I wasn’t there, I was at home fighting with the VPN on my laptop.
No matter how much time you spend with someone you love, it never feels like enough. And no matter how long you sit beside them, some part of you still feels guilty for not being there enough.
We all show love differently. I wanted my grandmother to pass away at home. My mother wanted to keep her in hospital for practical reasons. We fought about it right up to the end.
“She’s a villager. She must pass away in the village.”
I kept insisting, convinced that I knew what was best for her.
I didn’t know what was best. Even when I thought I had made the perfect arrangement, the plan changed while I was away - according to my grandmother’s own wishes.
On her last day, when I arrived at the hospital, I kept apologising.
“I’m sorry I went into the city. I wanted to meet people from San Francisco.”
I couldn’t stop repeating myself.
“If you’re serious about building, you have to be in San Francisco.”
A venture capitalist had told me this many times, but deep down, I knew things weren’t aligned. I just couldn’t pinpoint why.
I wasn’t leaving things unfinished. I was looking for the missing pieces.
My grandmother seemed to hold on until my mother and I had finished what we needed to do. We met a half-deaf old woman who came to the same spot in a wet market once a year to pay my grandmother the rent. She took us to the farmland and showed us exactly where it was. Before then, I had only a list of numbers.
The old woman showed us a notebook, its pages yellowed with age. Across the decades, my grandfather, my father, and my grandmother had left their signatures and handwritten notes in it. This time, for the first time, I signed my name.
“Grief is the price we pay for love. The deeper your love, the deeper your grief.”
After my grandmother’s passing, Claudine, who had very kindly looked after my cats, reminded me of this.
Grief is lonelier than we can imagine. We grasp at every fragment of memory, trying to reassemble a person. We expect the world to carry our sorrow, but the world moves on quickly. We are the ones who remain inside it.
In that same quiet, I began going through her things.
My grandmother left behind more than memories. She was written into a digital archive documenting women’s cultural heritage across the Lingnan region: Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Hong Kong, Macau, and northern Vietnam.
She belonged to the last generation in my village to sing bridal laments. As I read through a book compiled by scholars, which she could not even read herself, I realised how a single song connected women across the villages of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. The stories my grandmother, my mother, and I carried began to align on a single map.
Sometimes I wonder whether my work in public relations encouraged her to speak openly to the media, or whether she inspired me to talk about the women’s side of our family story on a TEDx stage. The difference was that her voice was being documented, while I was trying to document our story in my own voice.
All the pieces started to come together.
Before moving to London, I spent a month travelling along the Silk Road, tracing the long arc of Chinese history. But I had never seen the technological heart of China.
If I was serious about building a technology company, I had to connect my future to where I came from.
One of the ideas behind the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area goes back to Chia-Wei Woo’s proposal for a “Hong Kong Bay Area.” Born in Shanghai, Woo went to the United States at 17. He later became the first Chinese-American to lead a major American university.
Now, the San Tin Technopole is being developed as part of Hong Kong’s integration with the Greater Bay Area. It sits in Yuen Long, surrounded by walled villages of the Tang Clan we belong to.
My grandmother spent her life remembering the songs that carried the memories of women like her. I spend mine building things that give me back my voice, so I can carry their stories into the future.
The venture capitalist had been right about San Francisco, but not in the way I first thought. I wasn’t looking toward just one bay, but two: the Greater Bay Area and San Francisco Bay. I was trying to continue my grandmother’s work through a different vehicle.
Everything that I wanted was what my grandmother wanted for me. She wanted that for me. She wanted me to have every opportunity she never had. She wanted me to have a choice.
I was her only wish.
Even if it meant making her own death harder for herself and easier for me, she did it. She held on. She made her wish.
I am her only wish.
With thanks to De Kai, the son of Chia-Wei Woo and a professor at HKUST, and to Aili Liu and her community for helping me see Shenzhen from the inside. Their work helped shape my own Bay-to-Bay ambition.