A few months after I turned twenty four, I returned to my grandmother’s home in Hilton, New York for the first time since I was fourteen. A refugee of the Cambodian Genocide, she resettled in Rochester in the 1980s and later remarried an American firefighter, whose presence has long been controlling and emotionally distant. Though my mother—her only surviving child—has urged her to move to Rhode Island to close the distance, my grandmother has remained in Hilton, bound by obligation and isolation.

I’ve mostly known her from afar: occasional visits, mailed gifts, and video calls during dinner prep, where she and my mother switch from English to Khmer to tell stories and secrets. After learning she was dealing with depression, I made the trip to Hilton alone, hoping to see her situation more clearly and lift her spirits. Though the house was the same, I noticed what I hadn’t before: her repressed grief, expressed through the care she gives to her plants, sewing projects, and memories she arranges throughout her home. In these small acts, I began to see her not only as my grandmother, but as a woman—something I could finally recognize, now that I was one too.