A one and a half year old child was suddenly crying, while the train was leaving. My mother was a child born during the time of the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution had a big effect on Chinese people. The government tried to prevent people from working or studying in China, and they even wanted to catch and imprison the intellectuals. At that time, my grandparents were part of the intellectuals in China, so they kept escaping in order to save their lives. When my mother was a baby, she had to separate from my grandparents and live with my great- grandparents. However, my mother’s older sister always lived with my grandparents. My grandparents’ escape to Xi’an has had a deep influence on my wonderful mother.
The distance caused my mother and my grandmother to become more apart. During the Cultural Revolution, my mom lived with my great-grandparents. My great- grandfather died early because of heart disease, so my great-grandmother became only the person that lived with my mom in that period. When my mom was in primary school, her teacher told the students to introduce their moms, but my mother didn’t have any impression about her mom. When she stood up and tried to tell the classmates and teacher that her mom was a beautiful woman, she started crying. After school, my mom went back home and asked my great-grandmother where her mother was. My great-grand mother just said to her that she needed to wait for her to come back because her mother was busy at work. From that day, my mom never mentioned her mom, even when the students sneered at my mom that she didn’t have mother.
As time went on, my mother grew up, and her sister and she both got a good education in their school, but they had educations from different schools and they had different life style. My aunt always lived with my serious grandmother, and my grandmother hoped my aunt would be a good engineer. She made my aunt go to many English, math and chemistry classes, but my aunt didn’t like them. Even though my aunt became an engineer in China, she never felt happy about this major and it made my aunt crazy. My mom grew up with her grandmother who was a kind woman, and she just hoped that my mom can everything whatever she liked, so my mother chose to major in math because she liked it very much. When my great- grandmother died, my grandmother picked up my mother to go back home and lived with them. However, she didn’t want my mom to learn math, and she just hoped my mom would be an engineer like her sister. My grandmother practically ignored my mother because of this decision.
When my mom went back home, she should have felt comfortable. However, everything between my mother and my grandmother was already lost, even the love. My grandmother was a woman who was serious, and she wanted everything in her life to match her desire. She wanted her daughters to be engineers and get A’s in every course; she even controlled my mother and her sister’s lives. Twenty or more years ago, my mom met a man, and they fell in love with each other. However, my grandmother always interfered. She always said that my mom could do nothing or even that my mom was stupid. My mom never felt sad about that even though her mom didn’t love her. She just listened to my grandmother and never dated that man. My aunt didn’t follow her mother. When she found a boyfriend, she just escaped with her boyfriend to America, and went away from my grandmother because she couldn’t stand her mother controlling her life. When my grandmother became old, my mom still lived with my grandmother, even though she already had me. My mom knew she hadn’t obeyed her mom for almost ten years, and she needed to obey her until my grandmother died, even if my grandmother didn’t have any love for my mother.
At the end of my grandmother’s life, my aunt didn’t go back China to take care her, but my mother did. She always felt tired because she tried to look for a good hospital to treat my grandmother. When my grandmother was almost dead, she told to my mother that she felt sorry for my mother, and that she never gave my mom complete love. When I was a child, my mom always told to me that my grandmother was the most beautiful woman in her heart and she loved her mom very much. However, she also told to me that she hated the occurrence of the Cultural Revolution because it changed her life. I am proud that I have a great mother. She has given me a great life lesson that “Love among kinship never disappears.”
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