Last year on Chinese New Year I went back home to visit my parents and before I got on the train I bought a mask because the government had announced the COVID outbreak the day before. Then, to everyone’s surprise, 2020 began and the closure of the city was swiftly implemented, and because of this, I stayed with my parents for 6 months — the longest I had lived with them in 10 years — since I left home for my BA.
The biggest change was that I started to realise I didn’t know these two guys that well anymore. They were getting older, not just in looks, but in thinking. they were starting to think about retirement, starting to worry about pensions, even the house was getting older, the taps were becoming less responsive and the floors were starting to creak.
I’m thinking now that maybe you don’t know your parents that well, from the beginning, maybe they talked about bits and pieces, but you didn’t work with them, you didn’t understand what your parents were like in other people’s eyes. I mean, they were your parents as soon as you were born, but what about before that? How did they meet, how did they get together, “How many girlfriends did your father ever have?” You never know.
I also found some of my own belongings in my parents’ house, items that came from my own time as a kid — diaries from my childhood that were relished by my parents (and read aloud in public, mentioned to relatives. 😡No privacy at all!), but the stories seemed to be someone else’s, the funny, strange stories of a strange kid. I looked through one of my movie afterthoughts (I think it was a class assignment) and I watched Back to the Future, and I basically retold the plot and then some of the marvels at the plot. The last line got me thinking for a long time — “If I could go back in time, what would I do? (with a lottery number, of course!) . What I actually thought of when I read that line was that it had travelled over ten years to the present, taking me back to that moment — the day I wrote it, the scene in the city I was living in at the time, a small town in central China, not south, not north, not have central heating in winter, and I must have written this with an electric heater. I remember the black pencil chalk on my sleeve, the little cold noses when you touch it. In fact, these are unique memories, or memories of our generation, as the old city was replaced with a brand new one long ago because of the rapid changes in China’s cities.
It also reminds me of my grandfather, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and got lost in the place where he had lived for over a decade. The worst thing about having someone close to you with Alzheimer’s is that
You feel like that person is slowly vanishing from the world
They start to forget the people around them, the things they used to do, the people they know, where they live, how they dress, and finally leave…
I remember visiting him and seeing him in a hospital bed and still can recognising me, even though he was having trouble speaking clearly. he remembers me working in Beijing and saying in an indistinct voice that he was always proud of me.
But soon these began to fade…
That is a pretty bad experience for people who love them, and also themselves. When you start to say goodbye to the world, even if you don’t want to. Waking up in strange surroundings, living with strange people, even you are living there for many years, knowing them for whole life. Eventually, you start to forget yourself, forget the whole world.
So, Who are you?
The memories define who you are.
- When you grow old, what memories do you want to take with you?
- When you leave, what do you want to leave behind?
- When we all start to disappear, what do we want to pass on?
