My Grandpa: Yiayia

I am going to finish off my family series by blogging about my grandpa. Although there is another candidate, my sister, to blog about, I find I have nothing to say about her. She is a good person, but beyond that, I just do not know her at all. I do not want to do injustice to who she is, so I just skip her altogether.

Just like my Grandma, whom I call "Niangniang", my grandpa is also not my real grandpa. To be precise, he is my real grandma's brother-in-law. I call him "Yiayia". If I have to summarize with one long phrase, I will say "Yiayia" is a person I used to hate when he was alive and now began to understand the appreciate, although a little bit too late.

Why I hated Yiayia is a little unclear now. When time passes by, people tend to selectively remember all the good memories while tossing away the bad ones. This presents a delimma to me. Shall I "objectively" reconstruct my memories? If yes, how much is doing just to the reality? Well, I have to give up on pursuing a pure objectivity in order to write the following blog. It is up to my readers to selectively believe or discount my memories.

Yiayia was an able person. Before the Communist Party took the power, he owned several texitle factories and had a couple of real estate properties. He should be labelled as "capitalist" after 1949, but somehow he "voluntarily" surrender his properties to the government and became a small official of "United Front". I guess he must be smart, otherwise how did he know to swing with political wings and emerge intact. Of course, Yiayia had some hard time during the Cultural Revolution, a fate you would not be able to escape if you were a capitalist in some part of your life. But he was all right in the end and retired honorably in the 1980s.

Yiayia was tall and handsome. He dressed in suit, though cheap, most of the time when he was healthy. I believe he knew that he was good-looking and very confident about it. Even when he was old, he still had black hairs well combed, a rarity in China. This must have facilitate him in business earlier, but it also helped him with a personable style in social interactions. People liked him, probably a lot. When I was a little kid, I liked him too. He would walk me in the street, go to parade, have a sun-bath in the colding morning, watch a movie, buy comic books. At a time when my parents were either too poor or too stingy to spend much on children, Yiayia was my refuge. When I was too little to understand how hard the money was earned in my town, Yiayia protected me from learning the hard reality too early. He had the magic of fulfilling all my requests, although I believed my requests were probably modest. By the way, one historical moment was that Yiayia had the first TV in the neighborhood. It was a 9-inch black-and-white. I remember the first night, we took the tv in the frontyard and it was packed like a small movie theatre. Yiayia got an amplifier for the TV, which made the screen look bigger but distort the picture.

I have blogged about my parents. No bad feelings, but my parents were timid and conservative. In comparison, Yiayia was everything my parents weren't. Yiayia was adventurous and did not fear about anything. I did not learn much from him, sadly, but his presence made a HUGE different in my life, a conclusion becoming clearer and clearer as I grow up. He isolated me from all the stresses typical in Chinese households. (Look at my sister, who lived with my parents. She was also timid and conservative, afraid of negative comments and always complaining. For her, dreams were a luxury that never comes true. For me, I am still dreaming even now.) Yiayia must loved me. He and Niangniang never had their own children. This probably made me receive a disproporationately large share from motherly and fatherly treatment from them.

Then I began to grow up. Everything changed. I became very critical of everything. I viewed Yiayia as an oppressive figure in the household. He always bossed Niangniang around. Niangniang was to go shopping, cook, clean and decorate the house, and he just sat there reading newspapers and watching TVs. Niangniang believed that's her fate of the marriage, and I tried to "educate" her to believe otherwise. In retrospect, Yiayia probably lifted Niangniang out of a hard life and offered her a life of middle class for the rest of her life. It might be justified to say that Niangniang was graceful and wanted to return the favor. People were limited by their times, as now i know. When when I just began to rebel, I hate that so much that I began to hate Yiayia. I thought he was just lazy and fool Niangniang into a subordinate position. An selfish reason also emerged. I wanted Niangniang's attention, but Yiayia was my competitor. I wanted to watch TV, but Yiayia often wanted to watch another channel.... Ok, that's all the reasons I have about why I hated him. I admit that they were so insignificant, but I surely did not give them a thought. As I would say, I was also trapped by my times.

The situation deteriorated. After I went to middle schools, I became more firm about my world view and tried to debate with Yiayia, unsuccessfully of course. Then I stopped talking to him altogether. I feel I want to cry now. If you want me to name one of the biggest regrets in my whole life, it is not about my unfruitful love episodes or waving decisions about my futures, it is this. If my life could be repeated again and that I am allow to change one thing, that is it. I should've talked to Yiayia. I am so sorry, Yiayia.

Yiayia passed away in 1998. It was a winter morning, when I was at home during my sophomore winter break. He was sick for a while and had several surgeries. While I was doing something, Niangniang shouted, "Songhua, your Yiayia passed away." I did not feel anything that time. I just followed Niangniang's instruction to approach his bed, held him up and change this funeral clothes. He was a stiff as a piece of wood. I hadn't look at him closely for a while, but now I noticed that he was so skinny. His face contained little muscle or fat. I could see the structure of bones underneath the skin. All the ailments took his livelihood away for a while, and now he finally was gone. I did not cry then, and did not cry for several days. I guess people must've thought I was weird. I thought so too. The funeral came. I dressed up in the line, looked down to his dead body. Memories began to come back and I realized that's the last time I saw him, dead or alive. I started to cry so hard, as if I had never cried for a person dear to me before.

As like my dad, I believe Yiayia was also trapped in a wrong era or place. Without the context, you can easily believe he was a middle-class person in the US. He was cool, at least when he was young. He liked to socialize and nice to neighbors. He grew a large variety of flowers and his knowledge about them were not common for an urban resident. During the spring festival, he liked to try different types of fireworks, even the most dangerous ones.

I am writing this blog on a mission: to finish the family series and to understand myself better by digging on the family history. The finish on Yiayia sounds perfect, because it persents many ironies to me. He was the role model that I should've grow up to be, but I never managed to learn much from him. He was the one I hated and loved in an alternate fashion, the reason of which was still elusive to comprehend. When he was alive, I was at a battle with him; and when he was gone, I realized that I was the biggest loser in the battle.

My life is full of irony; compared to the ironies with Yiayia, however, everything else is insignificant. If I really learn something from the relationship with Yiayia, it is this. Taking care of the people who care about me. Human being is lonely in the root, and that's why friendship or love is overvalued, for a good reason. I used to take the caring for granted, as if I deserved all the attention simply because I am smart or I achieve things. That's all bullshits. Being lonely for quite a while, I realize that, only too late. Just think about the time when I stopped to talk to Yiayia. How did he feel? Did he feel betrayed, disappointed, or depressed?

This is the first blog ever that makes me cry when I am writing it. I know, I know. It did not help to change what I did and how hurtful it was to him. When I am writing it, the firework came. it was the eve of Independence day. I watched the firework, thinking it might be your shining smiles up there. it is as colorful as your life, as briliant as your mind, quickly disappearing in the sky, as if reminding me that you were gone, probably too quick for me to appreciate your existence. Well, that's life. Blogging will not send a message to an Internet God who deliver news to all souls, and my regret is just like a sigh in a sea of shoutings, soon to be forget without a trace. But does it make a difference to me? Yes. I never realize that I am so regretable about not talking to you until I wrote it down here. I hope you had forgiven me before or would forgive me now. But it does not matter any more. It follows with the biggest irony of tonight: My regret does not change a damn thing for him, but it did make me feel better, as if I was sorting through the jungle of my life. Is it selfish after all? That's a million-dollar questions without an answer. Maybe it is, but Yiayia, I hope you will forgive me again on this. Inreturn, I want to be a person like you: adventurous, generous and unfearful. That way, your gifts would live on, and I would be a better person too. A better person, indeed. This is probably what you saw in me when I was little anyway. After some unnecessary detour, I hope I am finally back on track.