My Grandmother and the Canine Detective
My grandmother, who is ninety-two, has moved three times in her life. She was born in a small town in the province of Shandong, China, and, when she was twenty-three, she took a boat to Shanghai. When she was sixty-three, she moved to Sydney, Australia—where I was born—and then, when she was eighty-five, came with me and my mother to New York. There are a few similarities across these places: all three are port cities—populous, but not the capital—that grew fat off the trade of an eastern coast. Another constant in her life, at least in the past twenty or so years, has been the Austrian police-procedural television show “Inspector Rex,” which is about a crime-fighting dog.“Rex” débuted in 1994, the year I was born, and ran for eighteen seasons over the course of twenty-one years. A standa...
