Grandma's stories

My grandma is an excellent story-teller. She used to tell all sorts of stories, some fictional, some from her own life, every afternoon after school when I was growing up. She doesn't tell as many stories now, and she doesn't tell bed-time stories to me anymore. But she still tells stories from her past. Chinese people from my grandparents' generation had it rough when they were young. Many of them went through at least two wars, one against the Japanese and then the Chinese Civil War. While my grandpa fought in the army, my grandma retreated (or fled is more like it) with the Kuomintang Party to Taiwan in the late 1940's, being pregnant and having to carry a one-year-old son, an elderly mother and some relatives along with whatever possession they could take. It's impossible for me to retell what my grandma has told me over the years. The experiences she went through are more dramatic and unbelievable than Hollywood war-time movies. They witnessed history-making of such significance as the shift from Qing Dynasty to the Republican to the Communists. They were part of that history-making. They are the real people who had to suffer and endure real hardship, hardship that people my generation cannot even begin to imagine. What's sad about people like me is that we have such wimpy tolerance for trial and suffering. We take the comfort we have for granted, having forgotten that real people like my grandparents fought and suffered and bled for this comfort.

God has blessed me with such wonderful grandparents and being able to live with them (or near them) for most of my life. I get to witness and experience history second-hand through them. If you have elderly people in your lives, ask them their stories. There is great wealth of history. There is much to glean from their extraordinary experiences. And what better way to spend the afternoon with grandma?