Trip to Guiyang----A Symphony of Three Generations Part II 1
Time is magic. When I was a small kid, one year felt like a lifetime, and I had
to wait for 365 days before another new year began with the same old furniture,
the same old bed, the same old cartoons, and the same old two-room home where I
had many a dull hour alone waiting for my parents to come home from work. If time was crawling like a worm back then for a small child, it is now, as the child has grown into her twentiesh self that has a career to pursue, flying at a speed so alarmingly fast that too often a year passes unnoticed, and that different
memories are sometimes mingled together so that it would be quite hard to tell
which one happened in which year or if it is just some imagination that produced
those memories. I can't tell, for example, if I hated Grandma saying to Mother
, "For your daughter's sake, you'd better take good care of yourself." "What could you possibly do when you get too old to take care of her?" "You know how much I am worried about your health!" Or was it my imagination that made me remember that way?
It was remembered as that in my first trip I'd become annoyed and upset when overhearing those loving and caring remarks to Mother, who received care and love from her parents the first time in decades. Those remarks were like knives, piercing me back into cruel consciousness that I was the one who was totally different from other daughters and had ruined Mother's whole life, and thus crushed any
hope Grandparents had on Mother. For the first time in my life I realized that
I was hurting people I barely knew. Hurting them as an invisible knife.
No, the knife was visible. Every time Mother was too busy feeding me to remember to eat herself, there was sadness in Grandma's eyes, into which I feared to look. I could see the same old sadness in those grayish eyes when Mother was required of great strength to help me with physical training upon which I used to bear little thought of what an energy-consuming task it could be for a woman on the right side of 50.
It was with many tears and heartaches that when back home from that trip, I finally accepted reality and began to seriously consider what I could do to blunt those knife-edges.
Three years passed and I found myself in a situation of being the knife again with edges only sharper and more hurtful as all of us were three years older.
I was three years older, but still unable to leave Mother's care. Mother was three years older, and more spots appeared on her face. Grandma was three years older with her back bent even lower. Grandpa was three years older, and had come
down with the Parkinson's disease. With Grandma's usual sorrow for her daughter having a life more difficult and financially wretched than those of her siblings, I was hit by a new remark from Mother: "No matter how old you are, you will
always want your parents alive and well with you, because they love you more than anyone else in the world."
Since then I had begun learning to understand and love her. In this attempt I gradually came to realize what responsibility meant and how life could be both rewarding and disappointing. I was driven further away from my juvenile self that
contributed to harsh words, irrational conflicts, and selfish tears against a woman who was left quite alone emotionally and was given a worst ordeal any mother
could not think of.
"My dear can make earnings in US dollars!" It'd been over a fortnight since we
arrived here for the third time in seven years, and still Grandma would "accidentally" slip this comment in her speech whenever she got the opportunity. "More
than [your cousin] earns. And he went through years of schooling while you didn
't even attend school." But I could still detect that same old sadness in her eyes when she saw Mother, now with neck and back problems, attended to my needs,
whereas there was pure happiness growing on her face when she talked about my eldest cousin, who now got himself a good job and a sweet girl-friend and what is
most important a strong and healthy body trained in the army.
I am only a few months younger than my eldest cousin, who came home for the seven-day holiday on February 5, 2008, two days before the Spring Festival. He visited Grandparents and us that night with his parents. He hadn't changed much from my memory of him seven years ago, when I first met him in high school uniform.
We were both shy and quiet at that time, losing every opportunity to talk with
each other. Now sitting opposite to us was a handsome young man in a black overcoat, with Grandma's arm in his right arm and Grandpa's hand in his left palm,
smiling as they talked avidly about the work, the girlfriend, and the future plans.
A curious feeling crept on me as I looked at this sight. We would have grown up
together and become very good friends. But now he is totally a stranger to me
and with whom few topics could be shared. It would have been me who brought in
a large bundle of flowers and hugged the old couple and took their hands in mine
and began our warm conversation. But the couple could do so much as to touch my hands to see if I had enough clothes on. I would have been able to hold my cell phone in one hand to demonstrate its functions to my mother, or simply hand her a glass of water, like he does to his mom, had I not been chosen to be different.
Never in my life had I been more aware of what could not be traced back once lost and gone.
To be continued....
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