Whenever Keanu Reeves comes up on social media or in conversation, my friends instinctively joke “Oh, your cousin!” This triggers an eyebrow from other less-knowing members of the group who are mystified by the prospect they have been, all this time, kept in the dark about their knowing a close relative of Hollywood’s most loved film star, or it at least must be a peculiar bogus tale that links us. It is a story of equal parts comical and strange, all to do with my grandma, but it is only a small part of why she is always a figure of interest and curiosity in my family and wider group of friends and acquaintances.

 

Before I come onto this (tall) tale, it might be more valuable to step back a bit onto more general impressions I had of my mother’s mother when growing up and going to China for the first few times.

 

Raised in London, I was not brought up speaking Mandarin or Shanghainese. Some part due to my half-English parentage and schools in the 90s actively discouraging multilingualism meant my Chinese mother did not opt to teach me. Though she claims I was a stubborn non-learner. Not speaking their language had the obvious consequence of instant social and cultural removal from those of my mother’s side of the family, who could not speak English. My superficial gaze on my Chinese heritage meant what I could pick up was easily distilled into stereotypes, making for clear anecdotes. The first one was that I had a famous composer for a grandma, and a famous artist for a granddad. Both being from China, the word ‘Communist’ was often liberally attached, and as well as a smear of ‘propaganda’.

 

Their fame was quickly proven upon my first visit to China when I was a fledgling teenager. Photos allege I’d met my grandparents once before already, on their visit to London when I was a pre-memory-forming three-year-old. This coincided with the first time my dad met his in-laws, a mere seven years after marrying my mother. Though it’s hard to say what a memory is in the most general sense, it becomes all the more indistinct when you only gain one after being told what happened to you. I was told I brought my grandfather’s stick several times to his side, a very helpful toddler no doubt very empathetic to those with difficulties walking. Whether a confabulation or from a true basis, I have maintained a lingering impression of compassion and calm about my grandfather, and his walking stick seems core to his character; though this is sadly all I could gather in understanding or experience of him before he died a short year or two after. Therefore, my trip when I was 13 to Shanghai and Beijing represented the first real time that I was introduced to my now-only living grandparent and her esteemed legacy in China, which is as much of a testament to her as it is to the country’s ancient culture of revering their elders, a sentiment that seems to dissipate as it travels west.

 

This trip, made in 2002, was marked by certain things unique to the time and others universal to all my visits. The universals were my grandma’s high-rise flat in the French Concession, an art-deco exterior leading to her 10th floor oak-floored apartment with high ceilings, and a balcony that fed out onto a cityscape filled with the unpleasant bangs of leaded scooters, tradespeople negotiating and neighbours shouting, unnamed metal objects crashing; the caws of cockerels and anxious flurries of local chickens once more escaping a butcher’s hungry grip or a revolving tyre; the ubiquity of laundry, drab flags of urban existence, colouring the overall carbonic grey concrete strewn so recklessly and confidently to reform an entire horizon.

 

More particular to my grandma, rather than her home city, were the infinite visits to restaurants that seemed to open out secret banquet halls for our benefit, where we would dine on almost every occasion with the manager of the restaurant, or the hotel, or the historic venue. Each new venue would shine a lazy Susan to beat the record radius of the last. The number of animals served would despair a thousand vegans and shock an indecent number of carnivores. A single bottle of red, transported from France or Italy at a high price that matched its seller’s reluctance rather than its internal quality, would be pulled from a wooden box and poured between two dozen people who luckily all shared the same disinclination to drink it. This would all be accompanied with speeches that I did not need to speak the same language to understand were in devout reverence to my grandmother. Not infrequently they ended with an acapella round-table chorus of a march-like song, a live rendition of her Red Detachment oeuvre. There were of course, many photos taken at these occasions, perhaps almost as many as the number of cheers that erupted around the table every second sentence, all in good nature even if the salutatory custom had got somewhat lost in translation.

 

One time the photos extended to those outside our party. Some onlookers outside the Peace Hotel caught onto the fact my grandma was entering the building through an atypical entrance and turned all of their cameras to face our group, as a just-in-case paparazzi exercise. As a shy teenager, I smiled awkwardly at the cameras deigning me with proxy-celebrity status and noted this was unlikely to happen to most people’s elderly relatives, even if I doubted any had accurately recognised her.

 

More unique to the time was a perspective of a changing China. Shanghai was once the bike capital of the world. For a country that currently holds the annual record for highest carbon emissions this is a faded memory. During all daylight hours one could find the streets filled with the rusted frames of bikes packed in such dense rows of slack-to-chicly dressed commuters it put the Netherlands to shame. Cars were in the distinct minority. I took a photograph of the scene and remember winning a photography competition in art class the next term. It wasn’t hard to take, it was everywhere. Past the bicycles, we exited the city one day to pay our respects to my grandfather in the ‘celebrity’ cemetery. Here we came across people my mum referred to as peasants, a term that is appropriate for Chinese country labourers, and not necessarily some Feudal hand-me-down.

 

As I walked with my parents, a group of three women stopped dead in their tracks. We passed them but they made no attempt to hide turning back to point at me, then my mother, then my father and back at me again. Unlike records about Amazonian tribes discovering white people for the first time, I was in this case at least a semi-recognised being. And this type of singling out happened a lot even in the city. In the lifts of buildings, I would be stared at, particularly if I were with my mother who would kindly translate (“She looks like a doll!”) and the public shock of my ethnic hybridisation became a part of the daily experience.

 

The cemetery itself was reserved for respected members of Chinese society. We rode upon a limo-extended golf cart to be dropped off at a bronze statue, forged into a giant disc with two embedded human forms, easels and instruments. These forms were in my grandmother and grandfathers’ full body likeness. It is a luxury to be able to plan and approve your own post-life arrangements, though at my age found it unnerving to see one’s death bed and own death statue whilst still viable. We paid our respects to my grandfather, and it was evident not many larger monuments existed in testament to the neighbouring deceased.

 

Every element of my first visit to China and to see my grandma, with whom I could exchange the simplest of niceties, “Shenti hao ma?” (How is your health?) “Xie xie, che baole” (Thank you, I’ve eaten enough) went to prove in my mind that I had a secretly very famous grandma. Secret, because no one would have a clue in England. In my teenage hyperbole I used to say my grandma was the most famous person I knew, because a billion Chinese people knew her songs, but it wouldn’t have taken a billion fans to have topped the charts of my known famous people list.

 

All this happened without me really knowing what exactly she did, or what her life was really like to have offered her this esteemed status. My knowledge of Chinese history was limited to knowing a philosopher called Confucius had a thin beard and constructed proverbs, and the Cultural Revolution involved Mao convincing a lot of children to gang up  on older adults who wore glasses, and to destroy books and any indicators of cultural superiority, including my mum’s family instruments and art.

 

It wasn’t until a later trip to China that my grandma received a shipment of her published autobiography that I noticed it was a pretty sizeable volume, and it was going to be hard understanding the provenance of all this success and fame from my mother’s retelling alone. Hence, I encouraged my mother to translate some of the story so I could at least embellish the threadbare and superficial impressions of what was so abundantly obvious to be a life of historical and cultural importance. What I had seen was the fruits of her success: widespread acclaim and a position of societal respect – after all, her 90th birthday was televised on the state channel with one of China’s most famous presenters MCing the event.

 

Was all this pomp and ceremony being made in deference to her work as a Communist composer out of blind allegiance to cultural contributors of the CCP? Of course, it is a great deal more that I was only to properly discover from reading this biography and working on the translation with my mother for the past year and more. Every life has stories no one can know, let alone tell, apart from their experiencer, but it is so rare that these stories expand not just over a near century of huge political upheaval, but in a position of such societal significance throughout.

 

To read this book was to discover that my grandmother was a courageous explorer into regions of China once unknown to me, her inquisitive and intrepid nature bringing her into contact with individuals and cultures far removed from her own; to hear her musical talents were discovered at such a young age is to also appreciate how long lasting the impact of her film composition has been on the country’s cultural heritage and politics; and finally it was to empathise with her young rebellious spirit calling for an end to injustice and sympathise with those near to her who suffered such tortured fates.

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Whilst it is still through the story of Keanu Reeves that my grandma would be most often seen in the West. My mother showed me that he visited her flat in Shanghai as his kung fu trainer for films was her colleague so he invited him to visit a famous film composer. I posted it to amuse my friends and it was immediately caught by celebrity photo hunters on Instagram as final proof that Keanu was in fact Chinese – a fact we had all been waiting for – because here he was, in his family home with his grandma. Immediately I dispelled this notion wherever I saw it, and demanded the reposted photos be taken down, but not before they racked up thousands, then hundreds of thousands of views, in many iterations, until it was unstoppable, and celebrity articles were written on the colossal finding. Now the truth is out there, he is not in fact my cousin – but it doesn’t stop “Keanu’s grandma” as a search term coming up with a very happy photo of them both, in which Keanu knows all about my grandmother’s rich career and unfortunately, she has no idea about the Matrix.