My Very 'Ordinary' Shanghainese Grandma

No. 48

Greetings from Chinarrative:

In this issue, we feature Jinghua Qian, a writer and editor living in Melbourne on the land of the Kulin nations. Qian uses a moving Twitter thread they posted to celebrate the life of their extraordinary grandmother in Shanghai, who passed away in December last year.

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My Very 'Ordinary' Shanghainese Grandma

By Jinghua Qian

My grandma—my Ahbu 阿婆—passed away in December. I was disconsolate to lose her, my grief compounded by the agony of distance. I read a friend’s poem about mourning his mother and I felt jealous at their proximity, at the visceral intimacy of touching the corpse and carrying the ashes and washing the sheets.

Ahbu wouldn’t get that from us, flung out in diaspora, dislocated.

Likeness of the author (right) with their grandmother (left). Courtesy: Jinghua Qian

The last time we spoke was through a brief video call, two days before she died. I’d sent my friend and former Sixth Tone colleague Kevin to get some paperwork from Ahbu’s doctor so my mother could get an exemption from Australia’s coronavirus travel restrictions.

He held up his phone to Ahbu in her hospital bed in Shanghai while I waved from my flat in Melbourne. The last photo I have of her is a screenshot from this call. She’s bundled up for the winter in a purple down jacket and I’m smiling in a t-shirt, the summer sun streaking across my face.

The travel exemption came through but Mum still wasn’t able to make it in time because of the shortage of flights.

I posted a long Twitter thread remembering my grandma, and the extraordinary times she lived through. Her life (1929-2020) spanned nearly 100 years of immense upheaval in China and she survived it all with resilience, dignity and optimism.

When I hear the phrase “century of humiliation” and imagine its antonym, I think of my grandma, staunch, humble and enduring. I think of her ethic of care, her sureness that dignity is something you create and nurture and hold inside you.

I received a lot of lovely replies on Twitter, with many commenting on Ahbu’s remarkable life, and of course, I think she’s extraordinary. But I know she would describe herself as a very ordinary old woman.

There are countless old folks like her whose stories are often disregarded as sentimental nattering but it’s worth listening. There’s a whole untold history there.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

I want to tell you about my grandma. She died last week in Shanghai. It’s devastating that none of her kids or grandkids could be with her at the end. Mum had just got an exemption to travel the day before but there were no flights + she would’ve been stuck in hotel quarantine.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

Migrants are sorta used to this: the only kind of grief I’ve known is the kind that smashes through you while you’re waiting in line at the visa office. But this wretched year adds another layer to it. All year I’d been promising I’d see her soon.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

Ahbu was 91. She’d lived through the wildest times. She was a staunch feminist, a meticulous doctor, frugal, ethical, tenacious, strict with herself, widely respected, and the sweetest, softest person. She was easy to love.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

She didn’t always get me and I’m sure I didn’t always get her, but I learned so much from her. How to take your work seriously but do it humbly. How to find delight in whatever circumstances throw your way. I’m not that good at that one, but maybe I’ll get there.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

Ahbu didn’t know her birthday – with 11 kids, her family didn’t celebrate them, plus they used the Chinese farming calendar then – so when she was asked for a date of birth, she decided on X days after International Working Women’s Day.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

Her mother (my great-grandmother) was illiterate and fought hard for her daughters to be educated. She’d seen her father lose the family farm to his opium addiction and now she was a servant in her husband’s household. She wanted her daughters to be independent.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

Ahbu’s dad didn’t see the point of educating girls so her mum invested her dowry (buying grain at harvest then reselling it in the winter) so she could pay their school fees herself. It’s astonishing to me that this was even possible, and that she dared to be this defiant.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

So Ahbu managed to finish school and go to college. During the Japanese occupation, her high school moved to a monastery in the mountains. She decided she wanted to study medicine after being sick with malaria.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

She joined the PLA, working and training in military-run hospitals around the country and then ending up in the obstetrics department of a civilian hospital in Shanghai. She did her undergraduate degree in the late 1950s, after my mum was born.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

(Incidentally, my grandparents all graduated uni in Shanghai, the other three at Fudan University and Ahbu at First Medical, which is now part of Fudan too. That puts them in an extraordinarily privileged minority for their generation, anywhere in the world.)

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

(Like I’m impressed and enchanted by my great-gran’s obstinance but it was just not possible for most women born in the 1920s to go to university. Both my grandmothers’ opportunities are as much the result of wealth, luck and geography as anything else.)

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

Ahbu married late and my Ahgong wasn’t her first love. She’d had a romance that ended for political reasons – not a good look for a naval officer and Party member to marry a woman from a bad family whose grandfather had been executed.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

Ahbu and Ahgong had a really incredible relationship. In 1950s China, they were lucky to choose each other, but I think they also consciously chose to have a different kind of partnership from the patriarchal families they’d grown up in.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

I mean my grandpa was still the head of the family, but their marriage was much more equal and respectful than most (even in China now, I’d say) and certainly more than anything they would have seen modelled. They worked things out together, they let their kids have a say.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

When the kids were young, my grandma volunteered for a work assignment on a collective farm near the Siberian border. She was there for years and Ahgong stepped up as the primary parent.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

That shouldn’t be so remarkable but he’d barely met his own father, who basically absconded after conception, took a second wife and pretended for decades that Ahgong and his mum had never existed.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

When I stayed over at my grandparents' place as an adult, I’d hear them whispering to each other in the morning so as not to wake me up. They always had so much to tell each other, even after nearly 60 years.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

I remember once Ahbu was mad cuz Ahgong wanted her to stay home with him instead of going to some meeting. (This was recently, decades after they’d both retired.) She was furious that he wasn’t taking her commitments seriously. It was really nice to see them argue?

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

Ahbu was absolutely devoted to her work. She always had horrifyingly graphic obstetrics stories to share. Her colleagues loved her, as did the sent-down youth she’d looked after on the farm.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

At the collective farm, she trained barefoot doctors. She put together a makeshift surgery, sterilising instruments in a steamer, so she could perform Caesareans for the local villagers who needed them.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

People came from many miles away on horse-drawn carts to see her. Sometimes people would even ask her to look at their sheep and cows as there was no vet around, so she just did what she could with birthing calves.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

My grandparents’ flat was often full of visitors they’d taught and mentored, who called them Doctor X and Teacher X. (Keeping names and dates vague here for privacy. Also I only ever called them Ahbu and Ahgong anyway.)

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

As well as being an obstetrician trained in medical science, Ahbu also studied traditional Chinese medicine and was forever trying to feed me some disgusting muddy herbal stew that would be good for me.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

I was pretty stubborn about not drinking muck but her acupressure guidance has helped my sinus issues and I swear by her Chinkiang vinegar cure for sore throats.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

As attentive and painstaking as she was as a doctor, Ahbu was a really sloppy cook. I loved her for that. She just did not care about food and would make one large soggy stirfry and reheat it for days. She loved premade meals. First person in line for discount frozen dumplings.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

One delicious thing she did make was pork zongzi. And being incredibly frugal, she would wash, dry and reuse both the leaves (if they weren’t torn) and the string. Yes, there would be bits of string dangling from a sock hanger in the staircase.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

She loved to read. One of my favourite photos is of us both curled up on the sofa with our paperbacks. Often I’d visit my grandparents and we wouldn’t really talk, we’d just read side by side.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

I’m really grateful that I got to spend so much time with her in the last few years, after Ahgong passed away and I moved to Shanghai. Even if a good chunk of the time we spent together involved me troubleshooting something on her tablet.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

Usually it would be that she accidentally turned her camera from selfie to rear-facing, or changed text input from handwriting to Pinyin.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

Ahbu didn’t know Pinyin, it wasn’t created until the 1950s. Her Mandarin was also heavily accented and very idiosyncratic: my grandparents are part of that last generation of mainland Chinese people who were tertiary educated without sounding all Beijing.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

She didn’t know how to get online until a few years ago but she picked it up pretty quickly. Another fave photo is of her showing off her high score in that Tiao Yi Tiao game. She also started playing mahjong fairly recently, after her sister and brother-in-law moved in.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

We disagreed on a lot of political issues. I would try to get Ahbu to be more aware of misinformation and propaganda, but it was hard to argue with her, because she just fundamentally believed that people were good, that bad things only happened by accident.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

In her mind, she’d survived all the bad times – the Japanese occupation, the Cultural Revolution – and now things were better. The government provided for her in her old age. Hardly anyone was starving. Girls went to school. No war, no famine.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

I didn’t want to disabuse her of her late-life optimism; what purpose would that serve? And she was born in an entirely different world, nearly a century ago. Her life gave me hope that things would transform just as radically in my lifetime.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

Her life would have been unimaginable to her parents. She showed me that you can invent your own pattern for anything, make it real, make it home. And also that it comes with its own pain: a family spread thin over three continents, out of reach.

Jinghua Qian @qianjinghua

Years ago I interviewed her about her memories and she told me, ‘The important work is exactly the things that are frightening and mysterious and unfamiliar.’ She also said, ‘There’s nothing bad about dying when you’re old.’

Contributing Chinarrative Editor: Isabel Wang