Trip to Guiyang----A Symphony of Three Generations Part II 2
Lost and gone are also those 22 Spring Festivals we should happily have spent with Grandparents. New Year celebrations in my childhood and most of my adolescent years are remembered as boring, bleak, and bitter ones that always took place
in a dingy dim small apartment with just three people present: Father, Mother,
and me. I should consider myself fortunate, though, when taking into account there are many orphans and paupers so poor that it is impossible to have stomachs
full at this festive day. For Mother and me, nevertheless, the Spring Festival
for 2008 was most anticipated and special, considering that it would be the first and may well be the last opportunity to celebrate this grand traditional holiday with this extended family.
The temperature remained low, but as Grandma wisely put, "Man's always the conqueror of Nature," both power failures and sleet had stopped a few days before the
New Year's Eve here in Guiyang. All kinds of prepared food were sent in by Aunts and Uncle, who spared us of the efforts in making purchases at the horribly jammed Wal-mart. Would there be anything else more wonderful than having a 24/7 power supply, a good variety of "New Year food", and a dear family of 13 people?
In this sense of well-being, we were carried to February 6, the last lunar day of 2007, sooner than expected. I woke up late as usual, and found that it was as
normal as any of the days in the year, except that the picture on our bedroom wall portraying my great-grandparents disappeared and that on a small wooden table in the living room there were placed four strings of burned incense and before
them three plates of fruit and meat as well as a cup of white liquor. Grandpa
told me these were for the Great One. By traces of the incense's scent I walked
to the other bedroom and saw the framed black-and-white picture resting on a bed-side table and that in front of it were fruit and meat and two cups of liquor.
Behind the old wooden frames was an ancient-looking couple, the male smiling benignly with a cap on his white hair and the female looking quite stern with many wrinkles on her forehead. It was very clear that Grandma had her father's eyes and cheeks but her mother's lips.
The bereaved in this very picture happened to be the source of my fear during my
first trip. For a young mind, death means ghosts and monsters which will come
out from their hunting places when the night falls. And that ghostly old photo
was just placed beside the bed I slept. There was one day when I couldn't stand
any longer and told Mother this secret; the picture was then secretly removed to the closet in Grandparents' bedroom.
On the very first day of this trip my eyes rested on the picture the moment I walked into this bedroom for sleep. Strangely I felt a sense of geniality rather
than fear. Now standing right in front the frame and looking down at their eyes
, I wondered what their lives could be. What impression did they leave on my mother when she was a little kid? What kind of people were they? How did they raise my grandma? Were there any disputes and fights between them as in today's
parent-child relationship? Did they understand each other? What did they experience and how did they look at their experiences? But I will never be able to find the answers, will I, just as they did not get the chance to see how their children lived or live the later part of life, how they suffer from "senior loneliness", how they became grandparents, how their children work and help them with
basic necessities, and how they raised their grandchildren and see them using cell phones, the Internet, and high-tech toys, getting educated in universities, and refusing to come back to see their caretakers, who will become only a framed
picture some time sooner or later, like their parents, like their grandparents,
like anybody else on our blue planet.
Suddenly I felt glad, happy, thankful for these long stays with my grandparents
to see what they were like, to hear some of their experiences, to feel their feelings, to be involved in a tiny fragment of their 78 years of life, and to know
them as people who cared and loved my mother more than anyone else in this world
.
Time ran exceptionally slow with a prospect that a new year feast was awaiting us at a fancy restaurant nearby. With a simple lunch wore on the afternoon, when
every family member arrived and the small living room was suddenly alive with chatters and laughter, as if someone had just tuned in to a vivacious TV show! Some were either onlookers or players of Mahjong, which was a game so attractive
to my eldest cousin that he could sit there for hours on end, but so boring to me, that I finally gave up learning the techniques after a few minutes of being patiently taught by my aunts. I was not alone. Uncle spent a whole afternoon lying down on the sofa, completely ignorant of the noises over the Mahjong table,
and Mother, though interested at first, lost her patience in the game when she realized that it might not only burn her money but would also damage her neck and
back. In the end she turned out to be a waitress for the rest of the family.
To be continued....
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