Charlotte Cheng’s I Miss You Most (2024) opens with a young girl moping at the dinner table, in front of a steaming bowl of seafood stew. As her concerned parents look on, she stares at her bowl and thinks:
I miss you most at dinner
When seafood stew is served
What follows are similar unrhyming couplets, at various places where daily lives are lived: the ocean, a game room, her bedroom, a mahjong table, a bathroom mirror, a family temple, a living room, and a photo display.
The words read like everyday tributes about shared moments in the daily mundane that become so precious in hindsight. The grandfather is an active person, scuba diving and playing video games and playing guitar. In the granddaughter’s memories, she is at the center.
Then the couplets change into more complex stanzas.
Through her memories of her grandfather, he is brought to life for her. He is present in her stories that she tells of him. She feels his presence in a hike in the mountains.
The writing has become a celebration of life, albeit not without mourning and not without missing, but also with experienced joy at the years of his presence and his many expressions of love and care.
The illustrations by Xindi Yan bring the granddaughter-grandfather dynamics to light and living color. The little girl is big-eyed and expressive and thoughtful. Her imagination is richly conceptualized and expressed.
Even though the focus is on the late grandfather, the little girl’s parents are ever-present and showing their concern for her, while giving her space to think, to express, and to grieve. Their presence also evokes the sense that they worked their relationships to enable the grandfather to be such a central part of the little girl’s life, which is no mean feat given the complexity of the world.
Charlotte Cheng’s I Miss You Most is about cherishing the scarce time that is constantly slipping away irretrievably. It is about how people pour their own lives into those of others, out of an abundance of love and concern. It can open a door to help children express their emotions around the loss of a grandparent.
While the shared time may have seemed ordinary, over time, they become unforgettable gifts and eternal moments. The shared time becomes indelible. The little girl sees her grandfather in the inborn kindness she herself shows to others. This insight is a profound observation of how she pays her grandfather’s love forward.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
