Advice from our Ancestors
By Vincent Leung
6 minute read
Rules of being an Asian child:
Listen to your parents, no matter what.
Take your shoes off at the door.
Never date until university and then as soon as you graduate, get married and give your parents a requisite amount of children for them to dote over.
The rest of the rules are really just about drinking warm water, wearing warm clothes so that you don't have to turn on the heating, and then drinking warm herbal soups for medicinal purposes. Very temperature-based rules.
…OH! and haggling for literally everything you can.
…
My grandparents had a lot of these sorts of rules that they lived their lives by - an accumulation of a lifetime of practiced experience. Things had to go in the right places. Fix things, rather than buy things. Keep using things until they are ragged, sweating the small stuff so you can save for the big stuff (which you would wait until there was a discount for anyway...and then it was a 50/50 whether you'd actually buy it).
I didn't have the traditional 'wow my grandparents are spoiling me' type experience - I had the 'practicing violin for an hour every day is for your own good and I'm TIMING YOU' type experience. My grandma had iron-clad rules that served her through a war, a harrowing migration, navigating a strange new (white) world, and successfully looking after herself way into her 90s. Her discipline had worked for years, and that’s how she would care for us. That discipline was love.
There’s space for a sixth love language, right?
When I got to university, my 婆婆 ('Po po' - i.e. grandma) gave me a lot of advice:
‘Make sure you go to class and attend everything you can. - don't go out too much because you need to study hard.’
‘You need to know people to do well in law! It's all about relationships. - make sure you're making friends, but STUDY REALLY HARD. - you can't fail either otherwise no-one will hire you.’
‘Don't date - you'll lose focus on your studies!’
Can you see the trend?
I always thought the advice was so outdated. Sure, I'll study for exams, but looking around, it wasn't the only thing people were doing at uni. They were joining clubs, skipping lectures, and still passing their exams. Reading and writing wasn't the only way to go about things anymore, and dude - I needed to find a girlfriend!
I watched as more ‘traditional’ Australians lived life in the world and enjoyed their lives, instead of being packed away in hushed libraries and grim tutorials. The only sliver of joy I had was feeling superior to everyone who hadn’t studied all semester cramming at the end of it.
Still, I discarded most of my grandma’s advice. I mean, I still studied (I'm not an animal) but I discounted the rest of it because I didn't think she really knew what she was talking about.
I considered it...the stuff you say. Rituals. Like when I learned how to say 新年快樂 (Happy New Year), 身体健康 (Stay Healthy), and 龍馬精神 (Have the energy of a dragon and horse COMBINED) at Lunar New Year to get the red packets - it wasn’t the meaning I was learning, just the words to unlock the reward. I thought the advice from her was just regurgitated from a book or something, rather than passing on her actual experience, and I would provide the expected 'yes 婆婆 of course I'll do that'.
It was only in the last weeks and months of my grandma's life that I sat down to dive deeper into her life. We had heard a lot of snippets about how she survived the Second World War and the Japanese occupation, but I got a lot more stories that were, well, understandably racist. She was one of the first Asian women who worked in government in Hong Kong, and she uprooted her whole life to migrate to Australia to follow her kids. She was a wonderful woman who went out and got what she wanted - a woman of action that I wish I had got to know a lot better.
But she never went to university. She was lucky to be able to study at high school, but further study wasn’t an option. She spent a lot of her life as a secretary, but used her razor-sharp mind to constantly analyse the world around her. She refined her English in a strange new land, she mastered a little corner of the stock market for her own little nest egg, and in one of my favourite stories, she made her own slingshot to scare off a black goose that kept coming into her backyard. She didn't take any shit, and held as many grudges as she could because she hated being taken advantage of.
The advice she had given might not have been specifically built off her own experience, but she had the smarts and courage to just…work it out. The practicality of taking charge of your life and sorting it out was what I was missing as a heady teenager thinking I knew it all and that ‘she’d never understand’. Uprooting your life and striving to make a better one in a new country builds character, and though the risk is harsh, the reward is worth it.
I'm sure your parents and grandparents have similar stories of struggle. The sacrifices they made, and the opportunities they never had - they live through you. They're trying their best to help you get through things, and often, they'll reveal pearls of wisdom you never really thought about.
…
Grandma told me to care about relationships, and I think about the wide network of friends and colleagues I have now, and how instrumental they are in helping me travel through life.
Grandma told me to study hard, and yeah, I've got a pretty good job off the back of that.
Grandma told me to get a girlfriend and...okay, well two outta three ain't bad.
The accumulation of advice and a lifetime of experience helped her within her context. She was a hardy, street-smart woman that lived to a ripe old age of 93, and if she successfully lived so long, then she'd be damned if she didn't pass on her life’s learnings. I was too young to realise how to understand the sentiment behind her words, but I do now.
Call your grandparents if you still can. Ask them about their lives. Think about how their advice to you holds up in new contexts, rather than dismissing it out of hand.
And drink some warm water. It's good for you.
