Mom and Dad and Shanghai

I’m spending most of the Chinese New Year holidays riding around town on my rickety bike taking pics. And I’ve finally gotten around to posting some pics of my apartment (before, during and after renovation): here.

My parents said something interesting about my apartment when they stayed with me for about two months, towards the end of last year. They said that even though I live on a historic street, in the old French Concession, in a lane built in the 1930s, surrounded by local Shanghainese families, they didn’t feel like they were living in China. Maybe it’s the way I did my place -- I didn’t follow the Old-Shanghai-full-of-teak-and-a-Thai-Buddha-head school of decorating lane houses, and kept things fairly neutral. Anyway, now the pics are up.

Speaking of my parents and their recent visit, I found out that they each have some childhood history with Shanghai.

My grandfather on my mother's side was born in Nanjing but grew up in Shanghai. My mom still remembers their old home near what is now known as Yuyuan Garden, and has vivid memories of climbing up narrow wooden stairs to their third floor flat. During my parents' recent stay here, my mom actually found the place -- it's now occupied by migrant workers and will probably be torn down soon. The current occupants were nice enough to let my mom walk through the building, and sure enough, that narrow staircase is still there.

After going to Taiwan with her family as a six year-old, my mom continued to live in Shanghai's shadow. Her father told her about his favorite Shanghai sweets, taught her how to make Shanghainese dishes, and took her to stores opened by Shanghainese emigres in Taipei. When she was here a few months ago, she had great fun going to the local markets every morning and buying all the produce from her childhood memories and cooking way too much food (and contributing to my current midriff largess).

My father also has some brief but significant personal history in Shanghai. He grew up in Anhui Province with a dozen brothers and sisters. His family owned land, but they were dirt poor, and my father studied his way out of the village. When he was seventeen, the Communists were about to overrun the country, and his father (a military judge in the Kuomintang at the time) decided to move most of the family to Taiwan. (A few of my father’s siblings stayed behind in China, mostly kids from my grandfather’s first wife. The ones that stayed behind really suffered during the Cultural Revolution, being landowners. And yeah, a guy could have a couple of wives back then!) My father wanted to follow the family to Taiwan, and the best way to do that was to join the KMT -- he got in primarily because he was a decent student.

On the escape route to Taiwan, he stopped in Shanghai for a week, and as luck would have it he ran into a schoolmate from Anhui while walking around Shanghai. My father had no idea what he was going to do once he landed in Taiwan, and asked his friend about his plans. His friend told him that he planned to enter the military university to study medicine. My father thought being a physician would be cool, and sure enough, after he landed in Taiwan, he took the entrance exam and got in. From there on, he became a doctor, met my mom, then a 20 year-old nurse, and they got married after he beat out a couple of other suitors.

("Your dad never said much", according to my mom, and "wore pointy shoes, had a weird haircut and played strange music too loudly." This was the product of my father studying in the U.S. for a bit, where he picked up fashion, shoes and opera. Despite these fey tendencies (and now I know where I get my fey tendencies), my mom married him. "I was a pretty gal", my mom says, "and there were more boys than girls in those days in Taiwan, and a surgeon was also chasing me, so your dad was lucky to have me!", as she likes to remind him from time to time.)

I didn’t know much about my parents' pasts in Shanghai until some dinner conversations during their recent stay. I don’t know why they didn’t talk about this stuff before. I think it has to do with being locked in to familiar familial roles. The last time I lived with my parents, I was in high school, a know-nothing pimply faced teenager. And I think that’s the way my parents kept thinking of me for the past 20 some years until they came to Shanghai last year when, maybe for the first time ever, they saw me as an adult. They lived in an apartment that I bought and own (well, not really, I'm enslaved to HSBC and that scary mortgage), they came to my company Christmas party and saw me in my role as a working stiff (my mom said to me after the party, slightly surprised, "I think your company people actually like you", well gee thanks mom why is it a surprise that I’m somewhat well-adjusted?), and they saw me come home after some late nights out with my friends (and beer on my breath). In their eyes, this time around, I was no longer the snot-nosed kid that they have to look after, but (somewhat of) a responsible adult who does his own dishes and laundry. (Well, ok, figuratively speaking, since my ayi actually does my dishes and laundry.)

And I in turn saw my parents as more than parents, for the first time. They were no longer just mom and dad who constantly nagged about cleaning my room and taking vitamins and getting flu shots and why I don’t come back to California and get a steady 9-5 job with an hour for lunch, maybe with the gub-ment cos it comes with a nice pension. I saw my mom as not just a mom, but a friendly, out-going, talk-to-anyone and try-anything-once woman with a joy for life that won over my Shanghai neighbors. I saw my father as not just a father, but a man somewhat insecure in retirement and so damn cheap that he prefers to walk than to pay 2 Kuai/US$0.25 to ride the bus, until he found out that he can ride for free as a senior citizen, and then he took buses everywhere but still complained every time he had to take a 11 Kuai/ US$1.30 taxi!

I guess it took both me and my parents looking at each other as adults across the dinner table to have our first adult conversations. Kind of silly how it took 20 some years and me moving all the way to Shanghai to get to this point. But hey, life is funny, what can you do.