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February 14, 2014

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Honoring my parents’ lives of simplicity, thrift

AS soon as I turned on the hot water tap in our hotel room so my father could brush his teeth, he instinctively turned it off, as he would in his own less-heated home. He was afraid of waste.

I turned it on again and he filled a tiny cup by only a third.

That was last Friday, a chilly morning in Yangzhou City.

In the afternoon, my nephew and I helped my father take a shower in the hotel. He only took a very short one, but still asked, “Did I use too much water?”

My 87-year-old father was a career physician who devoted his life to saving lives in war and peace. In his own life, frugality rules. He lives to save.

During our short stay in the hotel from February 6 to 7, he recounted the hard life in the 1950s when he was stationed in Tibet. That partly answered my unspoken question: why savings had become his second nature.

During a military mission in 1958, a bomb launched by bandits landed at his feet. It didn’t detonate, but his shoes were destroyed and he was nearly deafened in one ear. He picked up some long grass, wrapped it around his feet and marched on.

Another time he was in a battle near Er’lang Shan (Er’lang Mountain), almost 3,500 meters above sea level in Sichuan Province. For more than a week, all he had to eat was a handful of peanuts. He had to climb the steep mountain several times to treat wounded troops.

Today, “Ode to Er’lang Shan” — so popular in the 1950s and 1960s —  remains his favorite song. He would often sing the first few lines for us:

 

Oh, Er’lang Shan,

You rise as high as 10,000 zhang.

Everywhere there are giant rocks,

And wild trees and grass.

 

Oh, Er’lang Shan,

Though you’re 10,000 zhang high,

The PLA is iron-willed.

Though difficult it may be,

We will build a road to Tibet.

(1 zhang equals 3.33 meters)

 

My father was stationed in Tibet for six years as a military doctor. After his back was injured in an avalanche, he was placed on a stretcher and evacuated to Yangzhou (my hometown), where he would help found a local hospital.

As the hospital’s president from the 1970s to the 1980s, he (and the rest of our family) lived in a small apartment identical to that allocated to other doctors — a situation unthinkable in today’s world of privilege and craving for status. For more than a decade throughout the 1960s and 1970s, our family of six was cramped into a room of around 50 square meters.

My sister was born in 1958, while my father was far away from home. When he finally returned to Yangzhou to see his daughter, he found her  virtually starving. He himself was hungry, so he bought two buns, but gave both to my sister.

Racing for food scraps

In the 1960s, we had a better-off neighbor whose family could regularly afford pork and poultry. They often threw some leftover chicken or duck bones into trash bins — and my sister would race mangy dogs to get the food scraps. That was how we lived for a long time.

My father belongs to an old generation of Communist soldiers brought up to sacrifice their own interests to serve and save the people. Today my father is no longer poor, but material comforts have no attraction for him. Old clothes, creaky furniture and worn out pots and pans are part of his daily life. And that was the case for my mother as well.

I went home during the past Spring Festival. I had expected my family to put on some new clothes, as is the tradition, but when I arrived on the eve of Chinese lunar new year, my parents greeted me in the same cheap, shabby clothes they had worn for years.

Then I went into the kitchen, hoping to do some cooking for my parents. All I saw were worn out pots and pans that had been used for decades, the oldest being a soup pot inherited in the 1970s from my grandmother. Over the years, my sister and brother had bought many new cooking utensils for mother, but for her the worn out pots were good enough.

We had a wonderful time together during the Spring Festival. Everyone in our family was present, and food prepared in those old pots and pans was simply delicious. My mother praised everyone for being the people they are today, and said she was proud of us.

I left Yangzhou for Shanghai on February 3. At 7:30pm that night, I called my mother to say I was safe and sound back at home. She was very glad. The next morning I received a call from my brother, saying our mother had collapsed from a blood clot in her brain. I rushed back to Yangzhou.

Mother passed away on February 6, a cold and clear day, after  emergency surgery to remove the blood clot. The operation was successful but she then suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage.

For many years, my mother suffered an irregular heartbeat and had taken anticoagulant drugs to prevent blood clots. These blood thinners are a double-edged sword: they ease the blood flow but the blood may become so diluted that bleeding becomes a problem, especially in the case of surgery.

Mother was gone, all of a sudden, leaving us in a painful search for what messages she might have left us. When we opened her dilapidated wardrobe, what met our eyes were cheap clothes that had been worn year after year. When we sorted through her financial notes, we found that she had saved all the money I had given her as new year gifts over the previous decade or so. We also found that she had bought two small gold plates engraved with auspicious characters — gifts to the future babies of my niece and nephew.

None of us had known this. Confucius said that someone is a junzi (a person of noble character) if he or she doesn’t care whether others know of his or her good deeds.

Mother was one of the best traditional Chinese medicine doctors in town in her day. I remember that when I was a child, many patients would visit my mother simply to say a few words of thanks. Their friendship was not expressed in money terms, but in heartfelt gratitude from good human beings.

On February 8, in our final farewell ceremony at a memorial center, my brother held a picture of our mother. Suddenly a middle-aged woman among the mourners for another deceased soul approached us and said, “She was a good doctor!”

We didn’t know this woman, but she must have known our mother.

 




 

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