By Daniel
During my gap year, I had the opportunity to visit my grandmother and celebrate her ninetieth birthday, an occasion I hadn’t been able to honor since COVID-19. I can still vividly recall her holding up flashcards, patiently teaching me my first few Mandarin characters. As I grew older, I began to make sense of the stories from my childhood: how she used to peer into the windows of local schoolhouses during brief respites from farm labor because her family could not afford losing a source of income. Back then, I assumed her narratives were universal and felt they were boring: that everyone in the world shared those same traditional values used to discipline their children.
This time, however, I didn’t merely visit her; I journeyed back to the very village my father and uncles grew up in, where they once had to travel by boat for an entire day to take the entrance exam for the nearest high school. Along the way, I saw the vast rice fields where once the only way to get through was by boat. When we arrived, I saw the brick-and-mortar houses that had stood there for decades and the side of a building with rusted shades that were the remnants of the demolished classroom where my grandparents used to teach.
As I walked in the alleyways, a few local villagers stopped to observe me, eyeing me with subtle caution and curiosity. When I told them the names of my grandparents, their eyes lit up with recognition, and they began speaking so rapidly in the native dialect that I could barely comprehend them. They regarded my grandparents as esteemed teachers, but more profoundly, as virtuous people who devoted their time to helping others. One of the elderly women was so thrilled to meet me that she guided me into the home of an older gentleman who had been my grandfather’s close friend and colleague. Listening to these stories of my grandfather, my mind drifted toward the physical toll of that devotion: my grandmother’s irrevocably swollen joints, battered by years of washing her three sons’ clothes in icy winter water. It made me immensely proud to know that decades after my grandparents had left the village (and exactly 19 years following the passing of my grandfather), they were still remembered for their service to others and their moral integrity. I recognized then that their willingness to endure hardship so their children might thrive was far more profound than I had ever grasped.
It felt surreal to “return” to a place I had never previously visited, for it was a journey traversed by two generations; the route that required an entire day by boat for my father to reach the high school he attended now takes half a day by plane for me to travel from Vancouver to Durham. Returning to the very place that forged my father’s journey, I began to perceive the uniqueness of the lessons my grandmother once imparted and to realize that they were not mere clichés, but lived truths and wisdom.
