Passing the torch: one generation to the next

Early in the morning, father sent me a message: "Grandma passed away last night. Your mother has decided not to go back." The news did not come suddenly. But I'm deeply ashamed at how lightly I took it upon hearing that the 88-year-old refused to go to bed one night recently, unless she was dressed for her passage to the other world.

She staged the same drama several times, annoying my second aunt - mother has four younger sisters and two younger brothers back in Chongqing municipality - who has been taking care of her since grandpa passed away in 1994.

Mother doesn't want to attend the funeral as she is vexed with her siblings' quarrels. The fourth uncle and sixth aunt, who live in the countryside, were unhappy as the second aunt sold grandma's old house to a neighbor for 3,000 yuan ($440).

I'd only met grandma a few times, and I didn't catch a word of her rapid dialect. Some 15 years ago, I went there for Spring Festival. In that cold, humid and foggy winter, grandma beamed at her offspring from all over the country.

When mother offered to get bean curd, grandma instructed us to go to a particular bean curd store and watch out if the man tried to steal our beans. Her seriousness made no sense to me. Nor did the dimly lit old house in which I had to fumble over uneven ground through the kitchen smoke and pig den.

Grandma seemed to live in another world.

Five years ago, when mother came to help with my newborn baby, we sat through long nights, trying to get the wailing boy to sleep. She recounted her childhood, with grandma and many other amazing characters.

It gradually dawned on me that although grandma was an illiterate rural woman, she had a strength that pulled the whole family through the most difficult years.

She had to be a wet nurse at the village landlord's home to support her family. "Luckily for me, grandma had plenty of milk after feeding that boy," mother said.

In between giving birth to baby after baby, grandma toiled in the fields while grandpa eked out a living loading salt, log and bricks at a dock by the Yangtze River.

Mother recalled that she was left alone in the field, playing with worms and grass. "When I was hungry, I just grabbed earth mixed with my own pee," she said, helping me change the diaper.

Grandpa joined the Party early on at the dock. Mother never elaborated on that but gave more emphasis on how he'd get drunk and wouldn't come home for days.

With little food, grandma suffered from gallstones and she would tumble on the ground, screaming in pain. Then it was my mother, barely 10, who had to climb the star-lit mountain path to find grandpa and the doctor for some medicinal herbs.

As the nation recovered from a 3-year famine in the early 1960s, mother could have been a tremendous help if she had stayed home. But grandma was adamant about sending her eldest daughter far away to a university in Northeast China for a better life.

Mother has been sending money every month to grandma for decades. Her fifth and seventh sisters, both teaching in Chongqing, have followed her example.

Grandma spent her last years deaf and content, playing poker with her old neighbors. Mother would yell into the phone: "Mother, I know you can't hear me, just say something. I'm glad to hear your voice."

At the funeral, hundreds of relatives, friends and neighbors attended a banquet of 60 tables. A fengshui master decided to place her tomb at a specific location near my grandpa's, so together they'd bless all their descendants.