My Mother

My mother's life is a story itself.

Mother was born during Qin (Ch'in) Dynasty, when the Dowager Empress Xici was in power - seven years before China became a Republic. China became a Republic in 1911.
she was orphaned when she was six or seven. She and her widowed mother lived with the extended family. 
I do not know how my grandfather, her father, died. What of? What did he do? I have no picture of him.
She escaped from bound feet because of her forward-thinking uncle, Number Three. Number Three was like a father to her.
I was told that she had wanted to be a teacher, but my grandmother would not let her leave home. She had a high school education. She was not particularly well read but well spoken, she was good with math, and excelled in sewing and knitting. She was a good manager of a large household.

She and my father married for Love, which was quite unusually in those days. You would say that she married well - she married the First born of a wealthy family. 

All through her life, there were riots, revolutions, and wars (wars between war-lords, wars between the revolutionaries and the dynasty, wars between communism and the republic). She went through Japanese occupation, World War II . . .
Throughout her life, she had many, many ups and downs. But she never talked about it.

Mother was in her early eighties when I went to see her in Hong Kong in 1987.

She was frail but not totally disabled. She had had a minor stroke.
I found her in an old folks' home, in a very congested area of Hong Kong.
She lived in a room not much bigger than my walk-in closet in the U.S. All her worldly possessions were in that tiny room.
She had some sort of a hot pot which she used to cook chicken soup with ginseng, a supplement to her meals at the Home. Her eyesight was very poor, she was legally blind with macula-degeneration. She was wearing a beautifully knitted white vest which she made for herself not long before I went to see her.
She could knit even when she could not see.

There were some ten or twelve women in that home. The home was privately run. I did know if they had any trained nurses there or not. Most likely not.
Mother did not like to live in the dorm like area, so she had a room of her own. Though it was small, it was at least hers.

I was in Hong Kong for a very short time.
I went back to see her again at the beginning of l989, after she had a massive stroke. She was not able to move or talk then. 
Mother had lost her husband, seven of her thirteen children, and alienated most of her other children by then, namely two of my brothers and my sister. 
With the help of mother's cousin, I had the very unpleasant task of taking care some of her personal matters for her - preparing for her death in a manner. 
She could not talk, but I could see the anger and the sadness in her eyes. She was no longer in control of her life.
I returned to the U.S. after a short stay.

Mother passed away four months later.

                                 Fu      father   mother  me   2 ahmas

                                        mother            me