02/16/24 - One Year Anniversary!

Today is the one year anniversary of Chinese Doom Scroll!!! Oh my gosh, what a journey it’s been! I can’t believe I’ve lasted a whole year! And I can’t believe how much support I have gotten from so many amazing people! I want to give a special thanks to OmgPuppies in particular for being such a wonderful spellchecker for me! I spent some time this week looking into my earlier posts, and I can’t believe what a mess some of them are. Honestly, it’s unbelievable this many people got through those posts.

To celebrate the occasion [and also because I’m currently at a friend’s wedding and I’m looking for tiny scraps of time during the day to type away in], I thought I’d share some stories from my personal life. Or that of my family’s, because to be honest, my dad’s had a much more interesting life than I ever will.

For example, there’s the closest he ever came to death, when he was two years old. At the time, both my grandma and my grandpa worked in the fields, and they couldn’t watch a two year old. They tried asking my great-grandma to watch him, but she wanted babysitting fees of 50 RMB per year. For a sense of scale, my grandma and grandpa’s combined yearly income at the time was 80 RMB a year. Obviously, they couldn’t afford that, so my grandma had no choice but to take my dad to the fields and just kind of…let him wander around.

And one day, my dad managed to find these beans by the side of the road—I’m not entirely sure what it was, or that it even was proper beans, but they swelled up when they met water. And he proceeded to eat as much of it as he could.

And sure enough, he got impacted bowels.

My grandma took him to the local village clinic, and to their credit, they diagnosed the problem right away, and they told my grandma that she had to take my dad to the big city where they can do surgery on this problem.

The nearest big city with a proper hospital, by the way, is well over two hours by high way from my village. Except back in the day, the highway didn’t exist. And back in the day, cars certainly didn’t exist in this part of the world either. It would’ve been several days walk on foot. Assuming my grandma can even figure out how to navigate all the way there, given she’s never been before.

“That’s just not gonna happen,” My grandma said, “Can’t you fix it here?”

“Ma’am, this is literally just a doctor’s office. All we can do is prescribe iodine and put bandages on people. This is, like, not even remotely sanitary conditions.”

“But he’s going to die anyways, right? He’s not going to survive the trip to the big city. I don’t even know how to get there. Can’t you at least try?”

Somehow, she managed to talk them into it. So this madman of a village doctor actually held my dad down to a table in an ordinary doctor’s office (built out of stone and mud, with dirt floors and everything), and cut into him, and removed the beans in his guts, all without anaesthesia.

And my grandma had to sit outside the door, and listen to my dad scream and curse all through the surgery, and that is how my grandma found out that my dad knew swearwords.

He went through a long, painful recovery process, where he couldn’t eat for a solid two weeks, and had to have his wound excised many times due to infections. To this day, he has an ugly, snaking, ginormous scar across his stomach. And for a while, my grandma was just sure he wouldn’t make it. But he did!

And when I was a little kid, I asked my mom how babies were born. I guess she didn’t want to give me the birds and the bees talk, because she just told me that babies grew inside people’s tummies and then, when it was time, a doctor cut them out.

So until I was like 12-years-old, I was absolutely convinced my dad gave birth to me, because my mom doesn’t have a scar on her tummy, but my dad certainly has a baby-sized scar on his!

On the topic of medical shenanigans in China, I got very sick when I was little too. I was practicing piano that day, like I have to every day, and just kept screwing up on very simple mistakes. My mom got more and more frustrated until she realised I was burning up with a fever. So she was like, “Ah, just go to bed then.”

Then in the middle of the night, she woke up to the bed shaking. She looked over to see me having a seizure, foaming at the mouth and everything. She hopped up and took my temperature, and it has risen to 41.5C in the night.

Panicked, she calls my grandma and was like, “Oh my god what do I do!?”

And my grandma reassured her, “It’s okay, calm down. First, let’s check for ghosts.”

“Ghosts?”

“Yeah, a lot of fevers are caused by ghosts. Here’s what you do…”

She taught my mom the ritual for checking for ghosts, and my mom performed it, and got back on the phone like, “I checked. There aren’t any ghosts.”

“Okay, then it’s a medical problem, you need to take her to a hospital.”

Because all my grandma’s superstitions are very practical. Doctors can’t deal with ghosts. You have to call a monk for that. And monks can’t deal with viruses. You go to doctors for that.

Not all my stories have to do with medical mishaps though.

When I was little, I don’t know if it was the internet or what, but some farmers around my village got the idea to copy what western farms will do sometimes, and put up a sign and charge people 20 RMB to go pick their fruit. The idea is, you get a much better price than wholesaling to a supermarket, you don’t have to do any of the work, and whatever people leave behind, you can still sell as normal to a wholesaler.

Well, uh, turns out, you can’t do that in a rural farming village surrounded by other farmers. My grandma called up all her relatives, and we all went as a big entourage. And these old ladies are already professionals are harvesting their own fields. They’re laser accurate in picking out the best produce there. And in a single afternoon, we took everything worth taking on that man’s land.

After we got back to my house, they started in on the work of cleaning all the produce, while I went to play in the yard. And I distinctly hear my grand-aunt go, “Whose bag is this? It’s filled with fucking garbage? Who the hell picked these wilted veggies and bruised as fuck fruit? Are you blind?”

And I hear my grandma quietly go, “I’m pretty sure that’s Molly’s bag.”

“……..Oh. Oh wow, she did such a good job! Look how much she gathered!”

Although everyone praised me for being a hard worker, I was never invited to any of these trips again.

Although there aren’t always silly farmers doing “pick your own” deals, there is a back hill to my village that’s thick and forested. My grandma (and whichever of her relatives and friends are free) go up into the hill every week to forage. Apparently, this was a thing they did back in the day, when it was necessary for survival. But now, they just do it for fun? My grandma’s favourite it this type of…tree leaf, and to be honest, I have no idea what kind of leaf it is. All tree leaves look the same to me. I’ve tried asking my grandma what it’s called, and she just told me “山菜” (mountain veggies). It’s slightly bitter, but very refreshing, and it tastes fantastic fried in lard and put into a bun.

And every time, my grandma is like, “This is what we ate during the famines~ Except we didn’t have lard, obviously. We just ate these boiled in water~ They’re tasty though, aren’t they?”

And I am like, “Are you- Are you actually nostalgic for the famines?”

And my grandma is like, “Oh no, like starving isn’t nice. But at least these greens are pretty tasty. You don’t see me getting nostalgic over tree bark or mud, because there’s nothing redeemable about them.”

And it just amazes me how…resilient people in her generation are? Well, I suppose the non-resilient people wouldn’t be around anymore for me to talk to. But if I had went through years of famine, to the point that I was reduced to eating tree leaves, I don’t know if I could ever stomach them again in my life.

Once again, thank you, everyone, for all your support and your companionship! Let’s do this again next year!