Archive for the 'Family' Category
October 27 2008: Three Part Series: My Mother
Filed under Asian-ness & Family with 11 Comments
Part two of a three part series. Read part one here.
My mother was born the eldest of three children at the height of the Cultural Revolution in a small village in the middle of nowhere. Situated somewhere between the cities of Ningbo (an industrial city) and Shanghai, her village has no name, known simply as “the village” to those native to it. Nowadays due to the spread of globalisation, it’s a lot more advanced due to the newly constructed highway direct to Shanghai (a two hour drive, as opposed to the former six hour drive), but in my mother’s day, it was nothing but a number of one-room shacks in farming land. The occupation was farming - from dawn to dusk, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
Living as remote as they did, they were largely untouched by the atrocities that occured in China in the sixties and seventies. As a poor peasant in a poor peasant family in a small village far away from any substantial authority of the Party, she was immune to much of Chinese history of the sixties and seventies, though she can still remember the city youths sent down to the countryside for reeducation, as well as the public condemnations and executions of the few ‘intellectuals’ within a three kilometre region. These intellectuals were primarily schoolteachers or those with more than a basic peasant education - with the suppression of these people, the education of the country youth was stunted. Millions of people of my mother’s generation suffered a lack of formal education as a result.
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October 26 2008: Three Part Series: My Father
Filed under Asian-ness & Family with 13 Comments
This is the first in an intended three-part series about my parents, how they grew up, how they met, and how they live now in Australia. Today’s entry will focus on my father, the next on my mother, and the last on them as a couple, them as parents. After all, to understand the person I am now, will require you to have some understanding of who my parents are.
My father was born the thirteenth of the fourteen children my paternal grandmother, my “nai nai”, ended up bringing to the world. Seven of the fourteen died before they reached the age of five, including my father’s younger twin sister. To this day, my father maintains that instead of having died in the measles outbreak that killed three of his siblings, his twin had been given up for adoption by his parents to a wealthy couple with no children of their own.
“Wealthier” however, is a subjective term. To many of us living in affluent countries, we think of ‘wealthy’ as having money to spend on frivolities, to having a large home, a luxury car. To my father and his family, ‘wealth’ in the slums of Hong Kong in the sixties was simply anyone who could afford to have a private bathroom in their home.
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October 21 2008: QOTW: Finders Keepers
Filed under Family & Fashion & Q.O.T.W. with 27 Comments
My father gave me a ring today.
Granted, due to the extreme frugality of my parents, it wasn’t exactly a ring they purchased. Rather, my father found it on the pavement when he was out grocery shopping - one of those freak “hey, look what I found, finders keepers!” incidents. Needless to say that if it had been something of great value (e.g. something more than a cheap piece of costume jewellery like this - which would cost a maximum of $50AUD), my father would have handed it in to the police station, but for something like this, there’s hardly any point.
As I’m the only young woman of his acquaintance (or, so my mother would hope), I was, through necessity, the only possible recipient of this ring. My mother is now encouraging me to purchase some good quality pieces of jewellery (e.g. made out of platinum) for a long-term investment, for though my wardrobe is bulging with clothes, I own only a couple of pieces of costume jewellery because I prefer having liquid assets.
Question of the Week: What’s the best example of an item you’ve randomly found on the street (or elsewhere)?