Relief and grief is a strange mix of emotions

My grandmother passed away two nights ago. She was 85. I am mostly relieved for her. She had dementia and had been in decline for many years. But as a friend who also lost a grandmother to dementia shared with me, relief and grief is a strange mix of emotions.

She was born in 1940, in a rural farming village on the outskirts of Haining, in Eastern China. She lived through a regime change, raising four children during the Cultural Revolution, the death of her husband, the demolition of her family house, the appropriation of her farm land, and the death of her first born daughter, who, to my mind, was also her best friend. The last event happened when her cognition and memory were already in decline, so I am not sure how much she actually knew. She sometimes would call her other daughter, when she visited, the name of the daughter who passed.

Like many village women of her generation, she lived through extreme poverty. She never went to school, nor did she learn how to read or write. At her best, she could recognize the three characters that made up her own name. She signed documents by stamping her fingerprint.

That a village woman like her would have a granddaughter who became a philosophy professor abroad, teaching and writing in English, may seem miraculous to an outsider. To me, this not only is a testament to the unprecedented economic and political shifts during her lifetime in China, but also tells a story of the sacrifices a family is willing to make for upward mobility. 

The family she married into, like many families at the time, was deeply patriarchal. She had four children: two daughters, followed by two sons. My father is the first-born son. The family poured all their meager resources into making sure that my father received an education. My father’s eldest sister did not go to school, nor did she learn how to read or write. His second sister did not continue beyond high school. My father remained in school throughout the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, repeating a year when he was a few points short on the high school entrance exam, and another year when he did not score high enough on the college entrance exam. He went on to attend a vocational training college that guaranteed him a job for life with good pension in the railroad police force. He married a woman with an urban Hukou*, and later managed to transfer his own Hukou to the provincial capital city due to his job. These are concrete, official evidence of him moving up in the rigid geographical and social stratification system in China.

*Hukou is a rigid household registration system in China with two types—rural and urban—and is designed to bind a person and their family to a place. There are very limited opportunities to change one’s Hukou, chief among them are marriage, university education, and certain jobs.

So I carried on my father’s journey of upward mobility. It would not have been me, if not for the One Child Policy that was in effect when I was born. My father desperately wanted a son, but he and my mother would have lost their jobs and be hit with a hefty fine if they had a second child. So a daughter would do. My parents poured all their resources into making sure that I received an education that they never received. My story is a story for another day.

My two grandmothers took turns to watch me after I was born, while my parents both worked full time jobs, until I was old enough to go to kindergarten. Sometimes my parents would send me to where my grandmothers were, to a small ancient town where my mom’s mom lived, or to the rural farming village where my dad’s mom lived. Sometimes my grandmothers would take turns to stay in my parents’ flat in Haining. My mother was always appalled by the state I was in after I returned from the village staying with my grandmother, full of frostbites and in dirty clothes, a feral kid that she did not recognize. But all I remembered was how freeing it was to ride in the back of my grandmother’s tricycle, through her cotton field.

I was a precocious kid, curious about reading and writing from a very young age. I was perhaps 4 or 5 when I was playing with another kid in my parents’ flat. My grandmother was watching us while doing laundry on the balcony. My new friend and I were trying to write down characters that we knew, and encountered one that we did not know how to write. He suggested that we ask my grandmother to teach us how to write this character, so we went to the balcony. To this day, I still cannot forget the mix of sorrow and embarrassment on my grandmother’s face, when she told us that she did not know how to write. I blamed myself for making her embarrassed, since I had known how much she did not know, but I simply forgot. I also felt embarrassed, in front of a new friend, that I had a grandmother who did not know how to write.

When I was about 11 or 12, the local government announced that they had plans for the land my grandmother’s house was on and the land she had been farming on, so her house was to be demolished and her land appropriated, in return for some money and an opportunity to rebuild on a nearby land. What was a family property with a big yard became three side-by-side neat looking “new village” style narrow terraced houses, one for my father, one for his younger brother, and one for his eldest sister (the other sister married outside of the village). My parents moved from their flat in the city center back to my father’s new village, and they took in my grandmother to live with us (my grandfather died of cancer when I was 3). There were some chats among the siblings about taking turns to take my grandmother in, but the turn-taking never matured, and my grandmother continued to live with my parents for close to two decades, until she became too ill.

Not long after, I started attending a boarding school in the provincial capital, but my grandmother was a constant presence when I came home for weekends and school breaks. When my parents had work, it was just the two of us in the house. My grandmother made sure that I was fed, so I had fuel for my studies. The most we talked about was what I wanted to eat. She would propose options, switch things up from day to day, and start cooking when I agreed to a menu. Her cooking was never fancy, but always fresh. I never got the sense that she liked cooking, but she still wanted to cook things that I liked. She even learned how to make an egg omelet dumpling dish from my other grandmother, because she heard about how much I liked it. I liked her version even more, but I never told her. Now that I am responsible for getting myself fed everyday, I realize how much cognitive labor it must have gotten into planning a daily menu for me.

My grandmother loved growing vegetables. Her favorites were sweet potatoes and corn. After she lost her farm land, and even in her 70s, she would still grow vegetables, mostly by a local river on a piece of unclaimed land. When she had surplus, she would sell her vegetables on the side of a busy road. Her children did not understand why she continued to farm, when she earned so little selling the vegetables. Since the land she farmed on was unclaimed, her vegetables would routinely get stolen. She continued to do it anyways until she was physically unable to. My dad later would help her harvest sweet potatoes. My dad now has a thriving garden full of fruit and flower trees and a rooftop vegetable patch full of bok choys and such, and I cherish my house plants very much.

It was a great fortune for her that all her children always lived close to her, and her eldest daughter always lived within walking distance. They shared a bond, two village women who the world around them seemed to slowly leave behind. When they were both alive and well, they would meet and chat almost every day.

My grandmother was not all about being in service to others. She fiercely wanted to be in service to herself. She was tough, and had a quiet sense of self-sufficiency. I imagine it was very difficult for her to watch all her autonomy being eroded over the years, first leaving her home and land behind, then relying on her children financially, then being unable to care for herself. She did not like having a carer. It was very difficult for my family to find a carer for her who would stay, until she was too weak to make things difficult.

My grandmother’s death hit me a lot more than I thought it would. Perhaps I felt that the life she lived could have been my life, had history turned out slightly differently. While I am relieved and grateful to live the life I have now, perhaps I am also grieving the friendship that I could have shared with her, and a different life she could have lived.

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