I read a story from VICE a few days ago. The story talked was about a common issue but people hardly take that into consideration, which is what can the younger generation do to offer parents better lives. I am going to translate this story into English and talk about my viewpoints on this story.
Elder people always say that the only thing they need is more accompaniment from their kids, but the protagonist of the story, Yin Ping isn’t satisfied with this answer. “accompany would never be enough.” She said, “No matter how many times I visit my mom, she is always sad when I left.” All the research is telling us that accompaniment is not the only thing elder people need. What they need is actually quite similar to us, which is esteem and self-actualization. While accompaniment is more like a drug. They get high when they use it, but nothing would change after that. And such accompaniment addiction makes them humble in front of their kids, which is not the author wanna see.
Yin Ping is an artist living in Beijing. Her home town is a small town in Sichuan. She went back home in 2015, and she found that there is a retailer purchasing the handcrafted woolen hat made by a local woman. The retailer buys these hat at such a low price that there is almost no space for profit, and then sell these hat with a 5 times higher price in another place. Yin Ping was quite angry, but her mom didn’t. Her mom said that the most common way to kill time for women in the town is to play real money poker, but she simply doesn’t want to lose money, so she chooses to do something more useful.
She didn’t want her mom’s time to be purchased cheaply by those retailers. So one of her friend pretend to be another retailer, and constantly purchasing these woolen hats from her mom. She also encouraged her mom to be creative. No matter how strange the hat seemed to be, the “retailer” will always appreciate her mom’s new creation and purchase them anyway. This kind retailer not only makes her mom much more confident in doing this job but also in other aspects. She never signs in any of the paperwork, since she always felt her husband is the leader for the house. While after she has income by selling hats, she can sign her name or making small decisions in the home.
On the other hand, instead of throwing them away, Yin Ping actually collected all the 300 hat her mom made in one year. “I felt like every time I looked at these hats, I can feel my mom’s passion for the job, and how happy she was when she can finally do something valuable.” Yin Ping even held a show for her mom’s hat. To her surprise, there were actually people expressed their willingness to buy these hat. At the same time, many other women in her mom’s home town also want such a good “retailer”. Finally, Yin Ping decided to become an actual seller for all the handcrafted hat from this town in an online shopping site.
In 2017, One of Yin Ping’s friend saw these hats, who is currently preparing the 2017 Woman’s March. Her friend found that these hats are actually kind of similar to the pussy hat they need, therefore she invites Yin Ping and all the women in that small town to make the pussy hat for them.
For the woman in the small town, they probably have no idea what pussy means, but when they knew that their hat somehow related to the U.S. president, they were proud.
What Yin Ping did actually make a huge difference in many aspects of these woman’s life, and it was also inspiring in many senses, but I want to concentrate on her original motivation: Making parent have a better life. Yin Ping’s parent born in about 1960s, and they have experienced the cultural revolution in their teenagehood. Social revolution planted the idea of being part of a larger community deep in one generation’s people’s mind. They believe that they are not individuals who have personal wills, but a trivial component of a larger community, such as their family, the small town, and also the country. After suppressing their will for most of their life, they have no idea what to do when they are along except asking for accompaniment.
I think maybe there should be an education for elder people. When they are confused about modern society, or cannot find a way to be happy, someone should be able to teach them to get used to new rules for new society, and really have the ability to control their own lives instead of infinitely rely on the children.