We laid my grandmother to rest in Atlanta this morning.
She was not ill, but she had said for months now that she was ready to move on. The lack of any fear of death gave her a mysterious power. She was practical, undaunted, to the end.
She was not ill, but she had said for months now that she was ready to move on. The lack of any fear of death gave her a mysterious power. She was practical, undaunted, to the end.
She came into this world on Christmas Eve of 1925 in China in the Yunnan region, born into poverty. Her mother passed away when she was four, and one of her sisters died young. She was raised by a stepmother who didn’t show her much affection.
She was not overtly affectionate herself but created a large and loving family in her wake. History need not repeat itself, we are not always those who raise us. One person can flip the narrative.
At 19 she had an arranged marriage to someone ten years older. My father, her second child, was born in China during WWII. Food was scarce under Japanese occupation.
When the Kuomingtang lost out to the Communists several years later they all fled by boat to Taiwan.
When the Kuomingtang lost out to the Communists several years later they all fled by boat to Taiwan.
She always thought it was temporary, that they’d return to China to live someday, but it wasn’t to be. Some forks in life are permanent, but we only realize it much later.
She spent the next forty years in Taiwan.
She spent the next forty years in Taiwan.
Then, because most of her kids had moved to the U.S., she moved to a new country one last time, to America, leaving behind familiar comforts to be somewhere she said she’d be deaf and mute (because she couldn’t speak or understand English).
She lived first in Milwaukee and then, to escape the cold, Atlanta, with my aunts and their families. In America she became a Christian, which made up much of her extended community. Finally with some free time to herself, she took up watercolor painting. She was very good.
A single life sped up is time travel. 94 years, spanning a world war and a turn of a century, beginning in one country and leaving from another on the other side of the globe.
Her body started to fail her more this last year, but she was happy to live long enough to overlap the birth of my nephew Kaden early this year. The oldest and youngest in the family, the outer edges of four generations, shared a few months of time in this world.
A life often tough, but throughout she was tougher. She didn’t choose all the circumstances of her life, but she always chose how she met them. That is a life in full.
FIN
FIN
My cousin scanned some of her watercolors.
