sheep year

As we hiked through my ma’s hometown yesterday fresh off the bus and laden with heavy bags full of clothes for ourselves and vitamins to give away, I asked her if coming back to NanFang Ao makes her miss her childhood. She said, ‘不會! (NO!) It’s not such a great place!!!” 

It’s been three years since my last visit. Many things are different. Chinese New Year used to be a grand event - red ribbon and lanterns festooning the streets and traditional cakes and snacks sold in every stand by the road. Every night leading up to the new year you could hear firecrackers going off outside, loud and startling like gunfire being opened again and again. Now it seems you would hardly know that there’s any cause for celebration. I’m told that people are less interested in going home for the holiday and nowadays prefer to go on vacation instead. The biggest change is that my grandpa no longer recognizes me. He asked ma who I was and whether I had ever come here before. She showed him the baby picture of me that hangs in the house and said that I am that baby, and he pointed at the picture and said but this one is small, and pointed at me, and this one is big. He sits in a reverie and then occasionally bubbles up with stories that never happened, like how my aunt is trying to become an OB-GYN but no one will hire her because she is so small, or how there is a bank across the street that has so much money it’s all over the floor and no one knows about it, how his uncles are all alive and well into their 100s, and how he was once hit by a car and left for dead in a cave but a child found him and noticed that his finger was moving and took him to the hospital. 

There is an Indonesian girl in her early 20s who lives in the house. She comes from a very big family with little money and was sent abroad to work and support the family. She’s already worked here for three years as my grandpa’s caretaker and is planning to work here for three more before going home and getting married. This is the first time I’ve met her and she’s extremely sweet, has learned a little bit of Chinese in her time here, and I can’t imagine working as hard as she does. At 6am she is up cleaning the house and the rest of the day she spends every moment by my grandpa’s side, helping him walk, brush his teeth, and eat and sleeping in a bed by his at night. I feel a sense of guilt and estrangement to see someone else taking care of my grandpa while I either watch or am absent.   

There is also a rambunctious lady called A-su who originally comes from the south but married into this area and comes by every day to cook and help take care of the house. Yesterday she took me on a tour around town in her rickety old car that smells like mold and has one of the passenger-side windows held in place with mailing tape. She dropped me off in front of a friend’s store and told me to go in and pick whatever snacks I wanted while she parked the car. I went in and it was a store full of dried and canned fish. She told me about how she once found a very large hermit crab and kept it as a pet and showed me the beach where she would let it take walks once a week. It lived on fruit for about 6 months and then suddenly died. At the harbor she showed me what kind of fishing boat she and her husband used to own, before his health began to decline and he passed away. She says when her son was recently married they slaughtered 15 pigs for the event but that she was too scared to watch and didn’t go over until it was all done. In the evening she came back from checking on her grandson, running up the stairs and declaring it was time for us to drink and set out cans of Taiwan Beer. This morning she took me to pick up chickens from her classmate (I later found out they met in her weekly fortune telling class). Her classmate is an artist who lives in a nearby town and brews drinking vinegar in thousands of large ceramic jugs in the yard and her husband has a few hundred free-range chickens that he raises. The classmate had a headscarf on because, A-su told me, she had a fight with her husband and shaved off all her hair and moved to a monastery for a few months.