Category: Granny Project

Taking a child away from her parents

This is quickly turning into a situation where I don’t want to write at all… where the inertia not to write at all is starting to take over.

I made this screenshot last week, when I was watching the film Philomena and there is a scene where Philomena has her child taken away from her (by the evil nuns), and last weekend when I was in a historical town in northern China called Jimingyi I talked about how I no longer talk to my parents. We were at a lazy susan and someone went around the table to ask about everyone’s relationship to their parents. When it came to me I wanted to be honest, and so I said that I don’t talk to them anymore. I wonder if this is related to them leaving me with my grandparents.

Coincidentally, the lionizing of my grandma, making her a picture of perfection to me over all of these years, hasn’t helped. It made it feel as if she was my only family. That I only had her no one else. And everybody encouraged this fiction. So much so that when my grandfather died I felt like I had lost a parent, at sixteen.

something negative about grandma

We grew up idolising this woman, this maternal head of the family household.

One of the things that I want to do to keep track of, is the awful things that she tends to say to me, and the rest of the family, so I don’t see her as an ultimate martyr and or some sort of saviour person. Of course I think the savior figure that she plays in my life is due to her being my primary caregiver as I was growing up– actually that’s putting it lightly. The most important years of my life, she was the only one who was there for me.

But there are a few things that she doesn’t do well at all. For example she definitely sees us as wandered. And I don’t mean wanderers in the good sense. I mean more like 流浪汉 līulānghān– and this might be because she was one herself. She had traveled from Malaysia to China, and in some ways got abandoned there, or I should say, here. So in some ways she now sees people in the same way, so she’ll make little stabbing remarks to that effect. Because it’s Chinese New Year (which is actually just New year), there is a surplus of dumplings because the aunts made them. So I went to get them on 初二 chū’er or 初三 chūsan, and she was looking so amazing and healthy.

But the next thing that came out of her mouth was, “After you’ve finished the dumplings, you’ll be back to eating crumbs again.”

It was actually pretty shocking to hear. What did she think of me? Did she think I was some kind of vagabond?

In a funny, weird way this also intersects with one of my therapy sessions. One of the hardest things that my therapist had told me was that I saw myself as a vagabond- a līulānghān. That that was the way I saw myself.

Was my grandma the same? Did she see herself this way because she had left her entire family behind in Malaya?

I guess when I wanted to write about the things that my grandma did to upset me, it turned into something much wider-reaching, and wide-ranging.

Posting something is better than nothing

Perak is the county that my grandma grew up in

In 2010 or 2011 I took a trip to Malaysia with Joel. I visited my grandmother’s family– one sibling was still left, in his nineties– who she hadn’t seen since she was 15. She had no contact with them until the Opening Up of the ’80s when she was finally able to take some organised tours back to Malaysia. But she never made it back to the small town where she was born, as a Malaysian-Chinese baby, daughter of immigrants from Guangdong. Her grandfather was a labourer who migrated.

She never saw herself as fully Chinese, but always in conversation with her identity as part of the diaspora. She also tried to prove that she was fully Chinese, and went further than a lot of people, who had grown up here, to prove that.

This note was from that trip in 2010 or 2011, and it was written in the hand of the brother of the man her sister (her only sister, who was born after she left, I think) married. They took over the pharmacy shop that her sister had run in the county of Perak, and I think this is their address, written in that old hand.

Losing her in pieces

It was her 98th birthday yesterday. In the house I was taken to when I was born (and grew up in) I bought her some flowers that was lost on its way to the house– on the back of a motorbike that transported everything to Beijing city-dwellers these-days. The courier had taken it to the the opposite house of the Inner Mongolia Building (内蒙古大厦), which was the humungous building that was constructed about ten or fifteen years ago which blocked off our hutong. Before that there was only one way to get in, and it was straight through the hutong, except all that had changed now.

When the flowers arrived, it was time to go– to a friend’s in the countryside. But the look on her face was worth the trip, and getting the flowers. She was born on December 22 in 1920 or 1921 on the Lunar calendar, but she now celebrates it both in the Lunar and the Gregorian calendar.

Random post

Today’s random post of old Chinese memorabilia will include a pin from inside the Potala Palace, which I got in 2008—ten years ago now.  And the second one is an old pin from 北京师范大学, or Beijing Normal University. It looks really old, so it’s possible that it’s from a long time ago, like the 1980s. My grandfather, whose name is Liu Mo 刘漠. His birth name was actually Liu Ren’an 刘仁安, but because it was fashionable at the time he chose a different name as an adult. I am assuming that the reason he chose Liu Mo is because it sounds like Flowing Ink, or 流墨, and also because the second character, Mo, is 漠, the character for desert, and at the time, he would have lived in the desert… because it was Yan’an, and the year was likely to have been around 1935- around 1938. 

Continue

I feel like my grandmother project is getting so large that it’s almost impossible to categorize everything, so the only way I have of doing it is to start small. 

I like this photo right now because I think it was the second summer of my three-year Bachelors degree. I was bad in Beijing, which I had been going back to every year since I left at the age of 7. Even writing that, “at the age of 7”, is strange, because it’s been something I’ve been saying since I was, probably, 8. The phrase almost means nothing. 

So, today, I’ll just post this photo.