When I was younger, Mama always told me that Grandma was stubborn. Whenever I did something Mama didn’t like–not eating the vegetables on the dinner table, refusing to clean up my room–she would remark: “You’re just like your Grandma. Too willful and stubborn for your own good.” I never really knew what she meant by that, though. The only side of Grandma I’d seen was the sweet, loving grandparent, quick to splurge on a Christmas gift or tend to my needs. She was ever-joyous and quick to smile, and whenever we visited her home in China—after cutting a trail through all the packages and junk lying around—we’d find her on the couch, or in the kitchen, and her face would light up under all her layers of bushy white hair.

“Huang lao hu!” (Yellow tiger, the name she’d given me). “Huang lao hu sheng ri yao shen me ne” (What do you want for your birthday?)

I had, of course, always been instructed by Mama never to take much money or gifts, a direction that my sister blatantly ignored.

“Wo bu zhi dao” (I don’t know), I would always respond, partly because I really didn’t know and partly because I didn’t know what was acceptable.

“Bu zhi dao bu xing a!” (You can’t not know!) She would hound me for the rest of the day about what kind of gift I wanted, or she would take me shopping to try to pick out something, or as a last resort, she would try to stuff money in my pockets outright.

(“Leave it on the table,” Mama would sigh, shaking her head).

In hindsight, this was my first taste of her stubbornness. A sweet taste, to be sure, even though it could annoy the hell out of my mom. But it wouldn’t be until eighth grade, after my family had moved to California from China, that I would begin to realize the extent of it.

In eighth grade, Grandma decided that she wanted to move in with us. She’d been in Washington, D.C. for four years, living with my aunt and her family. I never really knew the motives behind her decision, but I also didn’t have much reason to give it thought. I knew Grandma wanted to become a citizen, and the rest seemed obvious: Grandma wants to live with Mama, support the family, get to know her grandchildren better.

Over the next few months, life in the house changed noticeably. For one, Grandma was given the master bedroom, and Mama came to sleep on the top bunk in my room. And although my sister’s and dad’s living conditions didn’t change as much, the home environment certainly did. The business of the house now meant that having the bathroom to yourself became a privilege, rather than an expectation. Dad was constantly reminded of his lack of Chinese, managing to smile through our Mandarin-dominated meals together and understanding just enough to know when he was the subject of conversation.

Those first few months held a lot of shuffling around as we tried to find a rhythm in the new adjustments that had become our life. I learned to get to bed before 10:30 pm so my mom could get some sleep before her early-morning wakeups. She figured out how to climb down the bunk quietly so I didn’t wake up in the morning. We took turns in the room, and I got comfortable studying at the dining table. The job of driving Grandma to her English lessons and helping with her homework fell on Dad, who was happy to help. We became accustomed to an extra person living in the household. But there was no getting accustomed to Grandma.

Grandma, we soon realized, brought China with her when she decided to move in with us. Over the course of the next few months, she hiked all sorts of broken-down, rotting couches or chairs into the house, insisting that they were good for use. She sprouted a garden in the backyard with her reused water from washing the dishes or showering, and with fertilizer she got from digging out the household’s food waste. Whenever we dared to go in the backyard, the smell of rot quickly drove us away. She let it be known that the kitchen was her space, that when she was in the kitchen, the kitchen followed her rules. And what was once my mother’s impossibly clean cookspace became a landfill, where remnants of diced onion, carrot skin, or specks of pepper sat on the floor. Soaked paper towels found their place on the counter by the sink, used and washed again for re-use. The fridge, once neatly organized, became a stockpile for a nuclear shelter: meat on meat stacked at random, week-old leftovers shoved behind piles of lettuce. It became a puzzle to find your ingredient of choice, and I’d occasionally discover a misplaced snack that I bought months ago, digging through all the clutter in the freezer.

But what really drove through to me the fact that life had changed was the day that my best friend Angus and I decided to have a sleepover at my house. We were both immigrants who had moved from China in seventh grade (he from Taiwan, I from Hong Kong), and had hit it off at school with our common backgrounds and taste in video games. One weekend in eighth grade, when Mama was on a business trip, we decided it’d be fun if he came over and stayed the night. And I’m sure we had fun that day, gaming and messing around, but I can only remember one scene from that evening. It was night, and Angus and I had gotten in bed, turned off the lights, and were about to fall asleep, when the door suddenly opened and the light switched on. In the doorway was Grandma, in her checkered nightgown and halfway through brushing her teeth, with bloodshot eyes and toothpaste dribbling down one side of her lip. She stuck her right pointer finger at a bewildered Angus like it was a bullet out of the barrel of a gun.

“NI!” (YOU!), “NI ZEN ME QIOUNG MEI DI FANG ZHU MA” (ARE YOU REALLY SO POOR YOU NEED TO SLEEP WITH US?!)

Over the next ten minutes, my sweet mental image of Grandma soured as she hurled insult after insult at Angus, who looked like he was about to cry. I’m sure she would have continued if it hadn’t been for my dad, who stepped between them and gave Angus a chance to escape. That was the last time Angus came anywhere near my house.

Over the course of my high school career, Grandma would find fault with two others, seemingly at random. First, with my close friend Andy, whom she violently accused of stealing spoons from our house and selling them. He never visited again after that.

The second was with Dad. Dad, who had dedicated so much time to driving her around, or teaching her English, or helping with her garden in the backyard. Except, when things began to “disappear” from her room, who could she blame but the only one of us she deemed an outsider? During my junior year, my time at home was inundated with mediating arguments through a language barrier, figuring out the best way to translate “thief” and “scoundrel” along with many other choice words. And when talking didn’t work, physical barriers were all we could resort to. That was the reason we eventually got locks on the doors of our rooms.

All these were points of contention whenever Mama could summon up enough energy between work sessions to try to talk things out with Grandma. But talks never got through, were never productive, and often turned explosive. And if the house was a warzone, the kitchen was Grandma’s battlefield of choice. Throughout middle school and much of high school, I would often wake up to shouting in the kitchen, or get home from school only to be in the center of another argument.

There were times when it all became too much for Mama. Overwhelmed by the chaos of parenting and being parented and discussing only to argue, she found peace in her walks around the neighborhood. These were the times when my Aunt would call me and ask how I was doing. She understood what it was like living with Grandma, and had experienced much of the same: the arguments, the accusations against her husband. She praised me for being brave. I didn’t feel brave. I felt helpless.

It was easy to say that Grandma ruined our comfortable life as a family, that her presence had thrown our lives into chaos, and my mind often harbored negative thoughts like these. But unexpectedly, a part of me found myself trying to empathize with Grandma, too. What kind of life must Grandma have lived, to be so adamant in her ideals? Mama, also, often tried to justify Grandma’s behavior, explaining to us that her actions were a product of her extreme upbringing. From what Mama had told us, the only thing I knew about Grandma’s past was that she had grown up during the Communist Revolution, and that her then-wealthy family had had their possessions redistributed for the “good of society.” A single fact. So out of curiosity, I called Mama and asked her about Grandma’s life growing up.

Grandma was born in 1941, during the capitalist era of the Chinese government. She was the eldest child of two and granddaughter to an extremely wealthy businessman, who at that time “owned half the town that they lived in.” Her grandfather was a merchant who’d gradually made his wealth trading salt and other minerals. His surname was Huang (yellow, which is why my Grandma took to calling me yellow tiger). Grandma, being the eldest daughter of a rich family, was given everything as a child: an amazing wardrobe of silk dresses and shoes of the current fashion, or any meal that she desired (she would refuse to eat meals she didn’t enjoy, Mama told me). Her mother, who had trouble walking, was even carried around in a palanquin¹.

According to Mama, this was one place where Grandma’s temper may have come from; as a child, she believed she deserved everything and that everything should go her way. She simply didn’t know a world where that wasn’t the case. That is, until 1949.

In China, the first of October is known as “National Day,” marking the formation of the People’s Republic of China. On this day in 1949, it is said that Mao Zedong stood before a crowd of 300,000 people and officially declared the People’s Republic of China into existence (Encyclopædia Britannica, National Day). It was soon after this day that large-scale governmental changes began to affect the people of the country. Policies such as the Agrarian Reform Law of 1950, where the property of rural landlords was “confiscated and redistributed,” contributed to the hardship that was soon to fall upon Grandma’s family (Encyclopædia Britannica, Reconstruction and consolidation). In the new government’s eyes, Grandma’s family was rich, and, by extension, capitalist and wicked. They needed to be punished. In the ensuing months, their wealth and land were taken and distributed to the people, and they were sent to the countryside for “real” work. Grandma, at this point, was nine years old. In the countryside, she was enrolled in elementary school with classmates aged six to seven.

It was a sharp plunge; leaving their affluence and pleasant upper-class life for hours upon hours of working the quarry, or doing their own laundry, or foraging for vegetables, herbs, and lemongrass to feed the few chickens they owned. It was a hard life, especially for Grandma’s grandfather, who had worked and worked to build a good life for his family, only to be cast into poverty, to watch those he loved slowly deteriorate around him. Eventually, when sickness plagued his old body, he had a single dying wish: that he could once again experience the richness of meat. It was a wish that went unfulfilled.

Grandma’s mother, too, was ill-adapted to the circumstances that had been forced upon her. Hers was a body often racked by seizures, which, while less of a concern in a wealthy lifestyle, did not fare well when all hands were needed for work. Her passing was sudden, and it occurred when she was by herself washing clothes at the creek. A seizure struck her, and she fell into the water. Grandma was ten.

Grandma fell under the care of one of her aunts, who was already looking after three children. Despite this, her aunt treated her “as if she were her own daughter.” Grandma eventually graduated elementary school at the age of thirteen and was able to secure a spot in a nursing school through her family’s connections. It was here that she met her husband, Grandpa, who was in the army and whom she married at the age of twenty. They had four children together: Mama (the youngest), two other daughters, and a son.

For Grandma’s family, life was not at all easy growing up. For their family of six, they had a two-room house, with two beds. After Mama was born, she shared a room with both of her parents, and her three siblings all occupied the other bed. Everything was rationed: sugar, meat, oil, even soap. They had a few chickens in the backyard, but even the eggs were a luxury; saved for birthdays or when the kids got sick. “We always wished we were sick,” Mama said, “so we could get an egg to eat.” And there were days when they didn’t have enough food to go around. “When Grandma sent me to the market to buy soy sauce, I was so hungry that I would lick the bottle on the way back,” Mama remembers. They also lacked the modern day entertainment and comforts now common-place in developed countries. Radios or TVs were nearly nonexistent until the Chinese government reopened trade with the West. They needed to get creative to entertain themselves, going into the forest, or going to a friend’s house and hoping there was candy to spare. It was only when Mama was 12 that their community got access to a radio, and with it, many of the kids would crowd around and listen to the news or stories.

It’s hard for me to imagine that this was the world in which Mama and Grandma grew up. A world where everything was scarce, where there was no internet or phones, and where there was never enough to go around. I can see, now, where Grandma developed some of the habits and dispositions that she brought into our household: the need to save, to plant a garden, the natural suspicion of outsiders stealing our household’s wealth or taking advantage of us. In my eyes, it’s a miracle that Mama didn’t turn out similarly—that she understands this different way of living, and has become accustomed to family life here. But, looking at it another way, it makes sense that she would be so appreciative of the life that we have. In her words, “you compare your current life to what you’ve had. We grew up having no luxuries, so every little improvement brought happiness. Life gradually got better.”

To this day, Grandma still bears scars from the time the communist government stole everything from her: her comfortable life, her home, and her family. It’s the reason why she chose to live in America, far from the Chinese government. It’s the reason why everything in the house has to go her way, and it’s the reason why she tries so hard to take good care of us. In her actions, I’ve come to appreciate the work she’s done to make my family a reality, that she was able to push through such a shift in her life, such hardship, and give everything she had to help her family survive.

It’s amazing how, after all she’s been through, she’s still able to smile so freely and treat her grandchildren in such a loving manner.

 

Glossary

Palanquin: that thing where people carry you around. Isn’t that crazy? Accessed 17 Oct. 2024

Works Cited

1. “National Day.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 17 Oct. 2024,
2. Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 7 Dec. 2024,

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