Questionnaire for My Grandfather / Kim Adrian

Questionnaire for My Grandfather is a quietly devastating essay that uses the structure of a questionnaire to interrogate what can—and cannot—be known about a man who shaped her family’s history. Each prompt becomes a doorway into memory, silence, and inherited mystery, revealing how the stories we tell about our elders are often built from fragments, omissions, and the emotional residue they leave behind.

The essay is a vessel for grief, curiosity, and intergenerational reckoning. It is a portrait assembled through negative space, where the unanswered questions speak as loudly as the answers might have. Questionnaire for My Grandfather offers a compelling exploration of how we reach toward the past—and what we discover in the gaps.