My grandma is quite thin and short in my impression,the reason for that should be her malnutrition during her childhood.
It is heard that my grandma was taken care of by her relatives because of early death of her mother,hence,we may imagine how disadvantageous situation she was in at that time.
Moreover,as a girl,at the end of a feudal society,she could not be given more opportunities to education.She has to follow all discriminated rules,e.g, Guojiao (bundle your feet to curb them from growing in order to show a girl’s beauty).
She does not read even one single word,thanks to scarce budget in her family,and unfair social moral ethics.
I am not able to find out much about her marriage with my grandpa,however,considering arranged marriage was too prevailing in China,I dare to say that she even does not meet my grandpa before their marriage date.
In traditional rural areas,birth to a girl is not a happy thing,because they think the girl does not have any duty to take after her parents when she get married to her future husband.
When a girl wants to get divorce with her husband,then her parents’ community would feel shameful.Therefore,as the saying goes:"Once you get married to a dog or a rooster,you should be his wife permanently",girls have few choices in terms of their life tracks from today’s perspective.
My grandma has to bear all sadness and unhappiness,thanks to rude even slightly authoritarian grandpa.Many times,I heard about my grandpa bullied even beaten my grandma when something happens wrongfully even if that fault is from external factors.
In front of these cases,my grandma would secretly cry,afterwards,she has to continue serving the family with her best.
Naturally,sometimes,I helped her refute against my grandpa’s unreasonable complaints.I always remind myself that bullying a woman is not worth praising.
Like majority of Chinese female peasants,my grandma has been busy with different types of work in any single day.She feeds many pigs,buffaloes,hens,ducks and other livestock,after all,this is an efficient way to increase household income.
Whether it is hot summer or chilling winter,she has to bring tools to cut enough food for these living animals.It is highly likely that she would talk to pigs or hens with her own language,in her eyes,eating more is much better.
The repeated action has been her habit,accurately speaking,natural response.Hence,she complaints to me she feels uncomfortable with changed lifestyle when we persuade her to enjoy “her retired life”.
Here,a quoted sentence should be quite suitable that is “we all are institutionalized in Shaw shank jail”.
My grandma’s fate is never decided by herself because conventions prevent a woman from navigating her direction of life.
In her childhood,she has to follow her parents’ decisions;In her adulthood,she has to follow her husband’s decisions.When she could make a free decision without consideration of her husband,she has lost the ability to make a decision.
This may be called a process of education,slavery should be a reflection of her road.Her environment leads to her bearings,finally,her mindset has been misshaped.
There are some people like animals,enjoying being educated to be a slave,however,some being forced to behave like a slave.
Almost all cases in her family are controlled by my grandpa,what my grandma does is to listen to her husband.If I use some exaggerated words,I prefer to say grandma is treated as a tool to equip her host.
Low social status of women in old Chinese society is much pervasive,this is similar to many civilizations in the world.
My grandma’s daily life is regular,we can easily guess what she will do next step.From early morning,she gets up to cut grass for buffaloes,and collects wood for cooking,afterwards,feeds hens and roosters;
At noon time,whether scorching sun rises or not,she should be removing useless grasses in farmland,cultivating land and planting new seeds for a big harvest next year;
In the evening,she prepares for pigs’ food,sometimes,she would sit outside for a short rest.Regularity and repeat-ion have been a symbol of rural women in traditional Chinese communities.
She also feels tired,she also wants to retire for a while,she also looks forward to promising future,but she has to continuously work until she becomes sick so that she really could not move a little bit.This is not a complaint toward the cold traditional society,it is a disclosure of reality.
My grandma’s memory is strong enough,even if some negligible things can not be out of her eyes.She always tells us which date my parents and my uncles is,while asked why she could do it,she smiles at us to say this is a mother’s duty to remember her children birthday.
Pitifully,her children could not understand her love to them,it is not surprising that when she is secretly crying in a corner due to misunderstandings on her from her children.
In a relatively poor family,scarce resources owned by parents are distributed,many children protest against unfairness,even though parents have a fair scale in their hearts.This is the background on which I say that the poorer the people are,the worse their characters are.
My grandma died of infarction of the brain without any signal.When we returned to our home in the evening,I called my grandma at a place near home,but only a weak voice from my grandmother came.
After arriving at the gate of my home,I cried loudly,because I got sadden by the situation in front of me.She fell down,however we called her,no response came to us.
I could imagined that even though she tried her best to respond to us,she could not control her body to implement the order properly.We sent her to her bed,where she had been staying for one week more till her death.
Those days,I cried too much,I could not forgive myself for I was not able to save her.From this case,I avow to myself that I must develop a professional medical scientist in our family.
I could not bear any one more hit like this,I questioned Chinese national health care system.It is possible to say I felt frustrated with health system,because unfair medical policies among her citizens lead to elimination of disadvantageous classes.
I care about social security programs,in my views,government should play a vital role to provide safety to her citizens without any conditions.
My grandma likes to tell us stories which should be told by her seniors.She likes to play riddles with us,when we do not know how to answer them,she always asks us to guess firstly.
All stories about our parents,uncles and aunts are shared by her through storytelling.Without words,oral history is the best way to record what has happened.She has never gone outside once,but she vividly presents things interesting around her.
Our dialects and traditions are inherited via generation by generation,so,we do not lose our special cultural elements at all.Many people prefer to run for mainstream culture at the cost of local conventions,hence,they easily get themselves lost.
She is just a common woman from a remote even backward village,however,she follows some high standard moral ethics in our culture.Diligence,loyalty,wisdom and respect are her tags,she explains what a society is like via real practice.
My grandma has been living in a relatively poor century.She has a special inclination that she collects left remains for reuse,stitches broken clothes for reuse.
She seems to do whatever she can do to reduce wastage,so that she can use it next time.This is not her inborn quality,but her environment forces her to behave like that.
The impact of environment on her is too heavy,from her decision,we can easily infer how about her life environment.For example,in Chinese rural areas,if a woman is not industrious,then her reputation would be harmed and spread to other communities.
In her years,it is much difficult to migrate to other places due to low-level development of transportation and urban areas.
Therefore,when a woman’s reputation gets affected negatively,she has to bear all burdens,eventually,she has to become more industrious and hard-working.
It is a network fabricated by familiar people,naturally,everyone highly knows about each other,it leads everybody to behaving well in order to avoid embarrassment once they meet each other some days.
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