Mom, Can You Come Home and Spend Time with Me? The Pleas of a Child

From the Front Page Sections, translated…

A place of no more than 200 ft², with almost NOBODY living there, just Red and her grandmother…

Behind the rays of the setting sun was a darkened household, a confine, made possible by the walls, with the cracks all over them, a bed, a couch, a small round table, an old television set, along with clothes, hung, all over the places, this, was home to Red, who is in the third grade, and her grandmother.  

When Red was only six months old, her father died abruptly, of liver problem, one dark night, her mother left home, and never came back, and Red had been raised by her grandmother to date.  The seventy-something elderly woman set up a road side fruit stand, to sell the fruits, to provide for them both, putting up with the heat from the sun, as well as the wetness from the rain too, to make what measly amount, to keep them both alive, and, most of the money earned from her fruit stand goes to pay for the debts Red’s father left behind, from their house being auctioned off by the banks, and the $5,000N.T. a month payment may be quite easily met for regular families, but not so much so for Red and her grandmother.

As Red was growing up, she’d often asked her grandmother, “Why does mom not come back to visit us?  Where did she go?”, it’d made grandma believe that she needed to take even better care of Red.  And, as Red grows up, she started to understand, that her mom was away, because of life’s hardship, and so, she’d stopped, inquiring her grandmother about it.  But, in the nights, Red would call out to her mom in her dreams, and this made her grandmother’s heart wrench.

Unlike how the regular children are all looking forward to the summer days off, to children from less fortunate backgrounds, they don’t have the continued cares and concerns from the school teachers, or the interactions with the classmates, these children became lonelier, and even more helpless.  The Child Welfare League estimated, that fifty-seven percent of children, when they’re on break, they’re not under adult supervision, nor would there be adults, cooking them their meals either, that they must rely on themselves, this sort of difficulties is six time HARDER than the regular children. 

And so, because the parents HAD to work, to provide for the families’ wellbeing, livelihoods, put food on the tables, etc., etc., etc., these children ARE being sacrificed, and, many of these children are just, left with the grandparents, and so, you see a ton of these cross-generation childrearing practices in current societies.