Translated…
When my mother was still living, all of us, siblings, made a pact, every weekend, we’d tried, to make the time, to head home, to eat a meal with her. And, as we’d returned home, we’d also, bring the week’s worth of old newspapers, bottles, my mom would then, separate them, then, send the items to a nearby recycling yard; as we brought the kids back, she’d used the money she’d received from the recycling materials to treat her grandkids to cookies, drinks, that, was the happiest time in her life.
One day, my older brother called, said that when he’d gone out for his morning runs, he saw my mom, sorting through the things that someone else left by the side of the road; my older brother told my mom angrily, if the neighbors saw, they’d thought that we weren’t treating her kindly enough, that she had to make a living off of picking up recycling materials. He’d wanted me to talk to my mom, to ask her not to do that anymore.
I’d phoned my mother, asked her what had happened, my mother said, that modern day people are really wasteful, the things that could still be used, they’d thrown out. She’d told me, that when she was younger she’d carried coal for people, didn’t have shoes to wear, walked barefoot, on those pebbled roads. “Something that someone no longer wanted, I just took it home, washed it, so it could be reused again, what’s wrong with that?”
As I’d heard, my heart went out to her. She’d once carried my older brother, and dodged the bombs, and, my brother was born, in a shelter too; she’d normally had yams as her diet, only when she’d gone through her month’s worth of recovery after birth did she get rice, to make into porridge. How could we bare, to blame her, who was from such a hard time.
My mother’s been gone for a little over five years now, and now, I’m using the electric fan that she’d picked up from the junk yards, ancient in style, the colors faded, but, the wind that came from it is still very cool; the alarm clock on my headboard was tossed away by someone else, it’d not called as loud anymore, but, the hands still worked. So many years already, and I still couldn’t bear to throw them out, just because they were left, by my mother.
And so, you’re holding on, to the things that your mother had left for you, and, at the same time, you’d picked up her attitude of using something until it breaks, that, is how parental influences pass down to the next generations.
Life, the Obstacle Course 