Prologue: I know I’m supposed to write about someone in New York, but a phone call with my grandma caught my attention. Instead of a single story, I guess I want to capture the sequence of impacts from a single historical event on her life. I’ve always known the stories she told me since I was very young, but listening to them once again with a new attitude, a set objective and a phone line distance was a provoking experience. And I wish to share this with all of you.
My grandma was a typical girl with a relatively rich background—well, at least for a while. She was the youngest among four girls. Her family had a business in Chinese wine making, but unlike those greedy landlords shown in the Chinese soap dramas, her father and the generations before him had worked out a trust-worthy reputation. They were respected by the town, and her life was happier and simpler than most of the people at her age, who often had to worry about the next meal while eating this one. Of course, this changed dramatically when the downfall of China arrived.
She was adopted by one of her close relatives. When the Cultural Revolution came, the red guards took away all the properties from her house. The story gets complicated here; she often stops for a while, acting like I don’t want to know what happened to her parents. Sometimes, she may let a couple words slide through her mouth, but oftentimes that is not the case. So, after gathering the “couple of words” for a while, I think that even though her parents were not hurt physically, they were going through some emotional ups and downs.
Anyway, so she was adopted along with her three older sisters, and with three more cousins, the seven sister-flowers made up the youngest generation in the family. They all changed their names (first and last) so that they could be safe. She never told me how exactly would her name affect her, but I guess it was a pretty big deal at the time.
Then the story jumped to her life as a student. She was hard working and was very smart. I can often sense the pride in her when she talks about her experiences in school—academics only. Now that I think about it, I never heard anything about her childhood friends or events related. It was always one sentence through her school life, maybe in the end a couple of sentences about her sisters. Even during the interview, she didn’t say anything more. Did she censor them on purpose? I don’t know, but she always did it so naturally that I forgot to ask her for the little details.
At the time, she couldn’t choose her own career, so she became a chemical engineer. She always said to me, “…I realized later when I went to the office of Dr. Zong (a close friend of hers who studied Chinese medicine, I call him Zong Ye-ye) that I was more suitable for a doctor. All the senses a doctor needs—he always told me that I have them all…” When I asked her why she didn’t change her career, she answered, “It was too late. I was good at being a chemical engineer, though. I chose it only because one of my uncles was doing this, but I found it interesting, so I put it down as my first choice. At the time, you have to put down your top three career choices, and the government would choose it for you. Many people didn’t get their first choice, and a lot more had to work in an area they didn’t choose at all for the rest of their lives! Plus, chemical engineering was a very hot choice—I was lucky enough to get my first.”
So, as her nature pushed her, she soon became the best within the factory. She worked on several projects, and successfully completed every single one of them. However, because of her background, she was unable to achieve further in her career. She often faced problems with her boss regarding the supplies and the procedure of experiments. One time, she succeeded in developing a big project on her own, but someone else stole her work and replaced her in getting the leading position. Of course, she was angry, but there were nothing she could do. Luckily, all the people in her workplace recognized my grandma as the best. Well, actually, my grandma never told me this part, but from her expression, I knew that they respected her for her personality and her work. I guess that was why she didn’t complain at all and continued to work as she had before.
When I was younger, every time she told me these stories, she sounded like she was talking about somebody else. But this time, when I heard these stories once again from a distance, I realized one time: it wasn’t that these events didn’t affect her; in fact, they impacted her so much that she had to depart herself from her own life to avoid showing too much emotion. That was the only way she could tell the stories—from a third person perspective.
I especially like your comment about her talking in the third person.