The Diary entry of its entirety is here:
Diary today July 22 2014Today I read a weixin post from a “Beijingren” account, the blog post was roughly called “Stories of my grandpa and me” or “the two of us–grandpa and me” it was a long post separated into two parts. Taking about an hour to read each, if read carefully.
I spent the evening crying, I couldn’t believe the parallels in the story. At the end of each section–he was brought up by his grandfather, unlike me, was really abandoned by his mother, who didn’t want him after the divorce, and his father took his sister and relocated to the South. So in a colloquial style that he puts down his life as a child with his granddad. At the end of every section, he would say: “He was 88, I was 16” Or “He was 99, I was 27.” And the unfairness of having 72 years between them. The way he wrote it though was colloquial, and the way he described sleeping in the same bed with his grandpa (as had I!) and how his grandpa would tell him all the stories of people who lived in the hutong; including the crazy woman who went crazy because her husband left with their child. And the other stories and people. The colloquialism is that he usually falls asleep, and doesn’t realise that he is falling asleep, and sorta takes this old person for granted.
I remember that I had just had a maxiao and putting the fingers and hands on my face and how much it stung, on the unders of my eyes, and underneath each nostril. I was crying hard. Because the guy was describing from the age of a couple of years to the age of 28, which is a long time. The grandfather gets older and older, and he goes to live with his dad when he is 12, and his granddad visits, and he comes back during the new year. And he goes abroad to study and gets older, and you don’t realise how much time has passed, but they’re probably still essentially in the messy, real relationship but also a relationship that’s not especially deep. It’s written playfully, and it feels playful, but the years have passed. Maybe essentially we don’t change, and