I landed in Shanghai and took a high-speed train to Hefei. Before I left, I read an article on how the US-China trade war was affecting the price of soy. When I arrived in Hefei it was evening, and I was just in time for my nainai's 90th birthday dinner. I walked out of the enormous, near-empty train station to meet my uncle's car, and we drove to a family restaurant on a quiet street. When we brought out the cake, nainai's great-granddaughter, my little niece, offered her a plastic yellow crown with lights and helped her blow out the candles.

My grandfather wasn't present at the dinner table. Before I arrived, I had harboured some hope – not knowing the full extent of his dementia – that I could talk to him still, excavate his memories. But by the time I arrived, it was already too late. Mentally, he was long gone.

His name was Qian Feng, Qian as in "money", the family name I have inherited. He was born in 1925, in the year of the bull, on an impoverished farm in Jiangsu where they wove cotton and herded cows. He had six siblings and no formal education. Because he was always hungry, at the age of 15 he ran away to join the Chinese Communist party army, where he knew he'd be fed. He fought against the Japanese in the second world war, and was deaf in one ear because of a war wound. In the army, he learned how to write. From his illiterate, uneducated background, he became a professional writer, producing novels, stories and essays. This, a classic story of proletariat triumph, is one of the great origin myths of my family.

With my grandmother, he had five children. The first was born in 1953. Three of their children harboured ambitions to become writers; instead, those three went on to study medicine. Two, including my father, emigrated to the US. And then there was me, his granddaughter, born in a suburb of Los Angeles in a democratic country, in a completely different place and time, in the affluent, bourgeois west – and I wanted to be a writer as well.