Mingyu’s modest apartment is about thirty minutes away from Lee’s hotel via subway. Upon arrival, the two of them enter in their socks to keep the carpet clean but just as importantly to avoid waking Chuntao. She is an early riser on weekday mornings, having a long commute to the orthopedic clinic on the outskirts of Beijing where she works. Lee is immediately impressed by a large oil portrait of a man who turns out to be Mingyu’s maternal grandfather, Honghui. It takes up much of the wall space across from the stove in the small kitchen.

“Painted by a true artist,” Mingyu whispers with obvious pride. “Both a sculptor and a painter, she was my mother’s favorite sister. When she presented this to Chuntao and me as a wedding gift, we all praised her for so fully capturing my grandfather’s ‘wizardly’ vibrations. My aunt said she had been inspired to do some portraits like that one when she attended one of the last poetry readings my grandfather gave.”

“Oh?” whispers Lee. “I did not know you had a poet for a grandfather.”

“I think my grandfather had the makings of a poet long before he actually wrote any poetic words on paper. He started taking it seriously only after he retired. For much of his previous adult life he was what you would call a veterinary assistant, working mostly with farm animals, not much with pets.”

Mingyu smiles broadly and crooks his forefinger, gesturing two or three times as he leads Lee over to a small space that functions as a living room, with a gray-checked sofa just wide enough for two to sit at the same time. On the wall above the back of the sofa hang three framed original prints with lines of poetry in Chinese characters hand-brushed in black against a light-gold background. “I have my favorites,” whispers Mingyu.

“Are any of them translated into English?”

The smile on Mingyu’s face grows wider. “The one I favored most as a child has been translated—by me! This one.” He points to the center frame on whose creamy-bordered cloth-like paper are not only the poem’s characters in black but also a sketched image in both light and dark shades of what is apparently a special type of ink or charcoal, an image of a . . .

“Is this poem about a cow?” Lee asks.

Holding a hand over his mouth to keep his laughter from waking his wife, Mingyu bobs his head up and down. “Seems so, Lee,” he says. “Remember that my grandfather worked with farm animals. Let me get the English for you. It will make good reading on your airplane when you return to Boston!” He disappears on tip toes into another room that Lee presumes is the bedroom. There is the slight scratch of a drawer being slowly pulled open. When Mingyu reappears, he is holding a sheet of white paper sealed within protective plastic. “My grandfather reacted sternly when I told him this was my favorite children’s poem. He insisted that he had never written a poem thinking it was for a child only. Would you like me to read it for you? Very quietly, of course. Chuntao is sleeping.”

“Yes! Please read! Both his work and yours! Quietly, of course.”

So Mingyu reads quietly, first from the Chinese on the framed print on the wall, then from the sheet of paper with the translation of Grandfather Honghui’s poem. “You can take the poem to the airport,” he whispers. “Read it during your flight and wonder if my grandfather had been drinking his favorite wine while composing it.” His near-silent laugh lasts a long time.

I walk under the moon, not looking up,

Much more interested in looking down

Toward shadows on the lake beneath Heaven’s soft light:

Changing colors reflect down from my shiny purple gown

Silhouetted arms look like legs, my ears resemble horns!

The watery shadow’s shapes make my body seem a cow!

I open my mouth, breathe out a smooth moo . . .

Then honor my little song with a bending bow . . .

Light echoes strangely, like sound off my clothes,

Makes the painted cow down below start to glow,

Darker than lavender, although lighter than black,

I lean over even closer to the magic shadow show.

But so sad I become to stand up straight

And observe my new cow-self disappear.

“I’m only me,” I whisper through tears,

“No purple horns, only old man’s ears.”

* * *

As the flight attendant nears to offer beverages, Lee prepares to lower his tray table. But before lowering it and then having to almost immediately raise it again, he first leans down to the carry-on bag under the seat in front of him and rifles through its contents, looking for a poem. Surprised, he discovers that Mingyu has cleverly inserted a letter between the not-unexpected protective plastic sheets.

My Mentor Lee,

I wish you had been able to meet Honghui, my mother’s father. He was my original “mentor.” More simply, he raised me (and my older sister) after my mother died. (My father had vanished long before that.) You and your “Five Why’s” approach to auditing business processes around the world would have interested him. (He might even have written a poem about “Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?”)

Grandfather Honghui died at my sister’s apartment—died on the day after his 100th birthday. I had hoped to have been there the day before to participate in the birthday ceremony with my sister and some cousins. However, as you might remember, the winter snowstorms in the northeastern U.S. that year were frequent and severe, and my flight from your office in Boston to Beijing departed about eighteen hours late. So Grandfather Honghui was one hundred years and one day old when I arrived.

We were reunited over a wonderful afternoon meal prepared by my sister from foods left over from the birthday celebration the evening before. My grandfather died peacefully in his sleep that very night.

My sister told me that he had known for a month or so that he was approaching the end of life—and feeling “ready to die.” There was more than one cause underlying his death, but the primary immediate cause was related to emphysema. Grandfather Honghui had been a heavy smoker throughout much of his adult life. One of his doctors told my sister that the hundred-year-old lungs had deteriorated to such an extent that in places they had the texture of cheap tissue paper.

At the time of my marriage, he was smoking two packs of Pagan Forest tobacco each day—his favorite brand since his teen-aged days as an “apprentice” to a farm-animal veterinarian. But Chuntao made a difference. My grandfather liked my wife immensely. He said more than once that he was happy for me that I had “made such a marriage with such a wise young woman.” She was the only person he would listen to with seriousness regarding physical health benefits he could still receive if he were to stop smoking. (If my sister or I tried to bring up the subject, he would actually close his eyes, silently smile, and turn his head.) It was partly Chuntao’s patience, but mostly it was her credibility as someone with professional training in various aspects of the medical field that he respected. Despite her patience and her knowledge, she was never able to get him to give up tobacco entirely; but to the surprise of my sister and me, during the last year of his life Chuntao had succeeded in reducing my grandfather’s habit to four Pagoda Forest cigarettes per day: one before breakfast, one after breakfast, one after his afternoon meal, and one after his evening meal.

The morning after he died, my sister took me aside and claimed that Grandfather Honghui had told one of our aunts that he was intending—was planning—“to say good-bye to this earthly life” on his 100th birthday. Then she told me further that he had “waited an extra day” for me to get home so that he could give me a farewell message. And on that day—that day I arrived a day late, one day too late to celebrate his 100th birthday, that day when we reunited over left-over birthday foods—he told me things regarding his perspective on what it might have meant to have “survived” for a full century.

He was an intermittent practitioner of—or at least subscriber to—attitudes related to the basic tenets of Taoism. Grandfather Honghui had told me many times before that while he found it hard to have faith in a “personal god” who would respond to prayer, he believed there was some kind of “creative spirit” in the universe, something a person could “tap into,” something that wanted all living creatures—including farm animals as well as human beings!—to fulfill their unique destinies. When I tried a little bit of your “Five Why’s” approach for looking for “causes,” all I would learn from him was that he had been most aware of this “creative spirit” when working out what he called “the artistic problems facing someone who tries to make a poem.” He said he was most “pleased” when he “surprised” himself by discovering words that captured some part of what he recognized as his own unique “presence”—some sense of  satisfying . . . destiny. It sounded so esoteric to me . . .

But on the final day of his earthly life—a day which I did not yet know would be the final day of his earthly life—he told me about the Purple Cow poem. “I know it is your favorite of all the poems I showed you,” he told me. He was speaking in Chinese, of course, since his English language skills were limited. There were some ideas he could express in Chinese that I would have difficulty expressing to you, Lee, in English. But he wanted to tell me something about that poem before he died. And I want to try my best to “translate” at least a little of what I think he wanted me to understand. He said something like “You liked that poem as a child. I know you like it still. I wrote it as a grown man. I am still a grown man, just a very old one. I have an older man’s appreciation of what a young helper to a veterinarian was maybe thinking about when he first learned that Hindus in India believed in reincarnation and decided cows were sacred. After thinking about it for a summer, I decided that Hindus and Taoists could get along. I had learned to treat cows as though they were sacred. I decided that if reincarnation turned out to be true, and I were given a choice, I would ask to come back in another life as a cow—hoping that I would be treated as sacred.”

Regarding my wife, he said, “Chuntao treats me as if she believes I am sacred. She treats you, Mingyu, as if she believes you are sacred.”

And next he told me something resembling a joke before he went to sleep for the last time. As I was about to close the door of the little bedroom in my sister’s apartment, he smiled and said, “In the unpredictable future, maybe you and Chuntao will retire and go live on a little farm. If you do, be kind to the cows!” He waved his hand and laughed softly—a laugh that sounded suspiciously like a snore.

So what I want to say, Lee, in case this past week of working together turns out to have been the last time we will see each other—since I do know you are thinking about retiring from Intercontinental Computing Solutions . . . I want to confirm that I think you have always been kind to the cows.

Moo to you,

Mingyu