Recently I’ve been thinking about my grandmother, mother of my father. Only sometimes, that is. She was a very short peasant woman of few words. As a matter of fact, she was illiterate and lived a rather isolated life in the countryside. Apart from cooking food (even the extent of that is very limited - the ingredients available to a poor peasant woman were scarce in those years), doing domestic chores, and maybe cultivating crops or keeping poultry (I do not have clear memory of my childhood visits to their house in the village but I do vaguely remember a pig), she didn’t do much. Especially after my parents moved them to the city, away from the people that spoke their language. I was raised to speak standard Mandarin, and my grandparents only spoke dialect (and a very rural version of that). I never had any conversation with them that’s beyond food, weather and how is everyone doing. And I never considered that strange.
My grandfather, father of my father, was a tall and you could even say handsome man. He naturally assumed the role of the head of the family, even if his two adult children had clearly outgrown him. It was a custom in China, more then than now, more in the rural areas than in big cities, to respect, obey, and even worship your parents (or father). He couldn’t read, but he had authority within the walls of the family. He had authority over my grandmother. She did whatever he asked, without exception and without complaint. Outside the family he became vulnerable, because who would listen to you if you haven’t earned it somehow. After my grandfather died, my grandmother was alone. She lived alone in our previous apartment, closer to the city center, closer to us. My mother seldom went to visit her, and I never considered that strange. My father and I went to have lunch with her a few times a week. She would cook lunch (mostly noodle soup), and we would eat lunch. Maybe a few words would be exchanged, but she never managed a follow-up question beyond “how’s school”. Everything is fine, I would say. I never bothered to elaborate, maybe I thought she didn’t deserve an elaboration. Sometimes we invited her to have dinner with us, and she would walk fifteen minutes each way. Taking the bus was a waste of money for her, as everything else. She never asked for anything. She just quietly existed. I never knew what she did in all those years that she lived alone in that old apartment. She didn’t read, didn’t watch much TV (she couldn’t follow everything in the news or TV series), didn’t have friends to hang out with, didn’t have any pastimes, didn’t have a religion. Every time I went there, after we finished lunch, after the usual brief exchange had been made, we just sat there, quietly, so quietly that the passing of time became evident and then unbearable. Then we said, we gotta go. She always kept a mild smile on her face, enough for me to presume that she was not unhappy. I also never knew her name. I think her full name was only mentioned once in my entire life and it was never given any significance. In those times in some parts of China, the name of a married woman was insignificant, almost irrelevant. I only knew her family name was Wang. My other grandmother was a respected doctor, educated and authoritative. Her name carried so much weight because it was remembered by every person she helped and every prescription she wrote. But Ms. Wang had no name, and that was fine by everyone. Nobody gave it a second thought. Nobody thought it mattered, what the short peasant woman with a rural dialect wanted. I took the plane for the first time to fly from Beijing to Tianshui for the funeral of my grandmother. There was a parade in the far countryside close to where they used to live. It was not a proper cemetery, but my grandmother was buried beside my grandfather. On the way to the grave, according to the village custom, the relatives must cry as loudly as possible for as long as possible. My father and my aunt were walking behind the coffin, followed by other distant relatives I didn’t know. I remember my aunt and another woman crying extremely loudly, almost grotesquely, until their tears were dried up or maybe there were no tears to begin with. I couldn’t bring myself to cry, not for display’s sake anyway. But I was sad all the same. Losing someone is not easy, no matter how quietly they existed. Exactly how much love does one have to have to be able to respect everyone equally?
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