1 . My doorbell rings at 11 a.m. On the step, I find an elderly Chinese lady. She is small and slight. She holds a paper carrier bag in her hands.

I know this lady. It is by no means her first visit. Her daughter, Nicole, bought the house next door last October. Nicole, who is currently in Shanghai, has apparently told her mother that I am having heart surgery shortly, and the result is that her mother has decided I need to be supplied with meals.

I know what is inside the paper carrier bag — a stainless-steel container with a meal of rice, vegetables and either chicken, meat or shrimp. This has become an almost-daily occurrence.

Communication between my benefactor (恩人)and me is somewhat handicapped by the fact that she doesn’t speak English and all I can say in Mandarin is “hello”. Once, she brought an iPad and pointed to the screen, which displayed a message from Nicole telling me that her mother wanted to know if the food was all right.

“Your mother just can’t be bringing me meals like this all the time” I protested. “I can hardly reciprocate by cooking something from my native land, like roast beef or Yorkshire pudding for her” I said.（22）

“Oh, no,” Nicole said. “Don’t worry about that. She has to cook for the family anyway, and she wants to do it for you. You can call her Wing, which is her surname.”

The tenant in my basement suite is a university student who speaks Mandarin quite well, so with her help, I have found out that Wing is 68—13 years younger than I am — and that she lived through the Cultural Revolution. For my part, I was raised in wartime Britain.

So here we are, two grandmothers a world away from where we were raised, neither of us able to speak the other’s language. But the doorbell keeps ringing and there is the familiar paper carrier bag, handed smilingly to me by Wing.

Right now I am working on some more Mandarin words—it’s the least I can do after such a display of kindness.

“Thank you” is, of course, the first one, which somehow seems inadequate.