My grandfather kept a notebook in the drawer beside his bed. It was not a diary. It held names, mostly—neighbours, cousins, the woman who sold fish at the morning market—each written in careful characters, as if a name were something that could be damaged by carelessness.
我外公在床边抽屉里放着一个笔记本。那不是日记。里面大多是名字——邻居、表亲、早市上卖鱼的妇人——每个字都写得认真，仿佛一个名字是会被粗心弄坏的东西。
One afternoon in January, while he napped, I opened it. A page near the middle had been torn out, leaving a ragged edge. The names on either side were still there: Uncle Cheng, Aunty Mei, a teacher called Mr. Sun. The missing page had no shadow, no outline. It was simply gone. I turned the page over, hoping for a trace of pencil, a phrase that had pressed through from the other side, but there was nothing.
一月的一个下午，他午睡时，我打开了它。中间偏后的一页被撕掉了，留下一道参差不齐的边。两边的名字还在：成叔、梅姨、一位姓孙的老师。缺掉的那页没有影子，没有轮廓。它就是不见了。我把那页翻过来，希望能找到一点铅笔的痕迹，一句从背面压印过来的话，但什么也没有。
When he woke, I asked him what had been written there. He looked at the drawer for a long time. “A bad day,” he said finally, and then asked me to peel an orange, and I did, because he had taught me how. The orange left a smell on my fingers that lasted longer than the answer.
他醒来后，我问那里原来写着什么。他盯着抽屉看了很久。“一个糟糕的日子。”他最后说，然后让我剥个橙子，我照做了，因为他教过我怎么剥。橙子的气味留在我手指上，比那个回答持续得更久。
The next week I tried again, but gently. I brought the notebook to the kitchen and set it beside the flour. He was making osmanthus cakes, a recipe he claimed to have learned from his mother and then changed so many times that it belonged to no one else.
接下来那一周，我又试了一次，但很轻。我把笔记本拿到厨房，放在面粉旁边。他正在做桂花糕，他说这方子是从他母亲那里学来的，后来改了太多次，已经不属于任何别人。
“Was it a recipe?” I asked. He measured sugar into his palm. “It was a song,” he said. “Your grandmother sang it when the cakes came out of the oven. I wrote down the words because I was afraid of forgetting them.” He hummed four notes, stopped, and hummed them again.
“是食谱吗？”我问。他把糖量进手心。“是一首歌，”他说，“你外婆在糕出炉时唱。我把词记下来，因为我怕忘掉。”他哼了四个音，停下，又哼了一遍。
I wrote the notes in the margin of a new page. He watched my hand and corrected one character, then another, then said the third was close enough. We baked the cakes. They were too sweet. For the first time, I understood that the torn page had not been lost by accident; he had removed something he could not bear to read. He said the last line was not for singing, only for remembering, which made no sense to me then.
我把音符记在新一页的页边。他看着我的手，改了一个字，又改了一个，然后说第三个也差不多了。我们烤了糕。太甜了。我第一次明白，那页不是意外丢的；他撕掉了自己不忍再读的东西。他说最后一句不是用来唱的，只是用来记住的；那时我完全不明白。
In March, the notebook gained a page in my handwriting: the song, the recipe, and a note saying who had remembered what. My grandfather read it and laughed at my characters. Then he asked me to sing, and I sang badly, and he joined in on the second line.
三月，笔记本里多了一页我的字迹：那首歌、那方子，还有一句说明，记下谁记住了什么。外公读了，笑我的字。然后他让我唱，我唱得很难听，他在第二句跟了进来。
His memory is not a library with shelves in order. It is more like a house at night, with different rooms lit at different hours. Some evenings the kitchen is bright and full of names; other evenings only the hallway is on, and we sit there together. I have learned to knock before entering, even when the door is open.
他的记忆不是一座书架整齐的图书馆。它更像夜里的一栋房子，不同的房间在不同时辰亮着灯。有些傍晚厨房明亮，挤满名字；另一些傍晚只有走廊亮着，我们就一起坐在那里。我学会了进门之前先敲门，哪怕门是开着的。
I no longer try to reconstruct the torn page exactly. What I can do is sit with him while the lights come and go, and write down what is said. The notebook is fuller now than it was, though one page is still missing. That seems honest. A life is not a complete document; it is a story told by whoever is still in the room.
我不再试图精确复原那撕掉的一页。我能做的，是灯亮灯灭时陪他坐着，把说过的话写下来。笔记本现在比以前厚了，尽管仍有一页缺失。这似乎是诚实的。人生不是一份完整的文件；它是一个由仍在房间里的人讲述的故事。