From the Front Page Sections, translated…
“She’d looked at me, not knowing who I was, but she’d recalled her love for me.”, the director, Tien-Lun Yeh who’s extremely close to his maternal grandmother, a little over a decade ago, found his grandmother to show signs of Alzheimer’s, and she’d progressed very quickly. During the latter stages of his grandmother’s Alzheimer’s, once as Yeh was clipping his grandmother’s nails, he’d started talking to her about the issues he’d faced at work, he’d originally thought that his grandma wouldn’t remember a thing, but his grandma told him, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it for you!”, it was shocking and moving to Yeh, because back then, his grandmother had forgotten his name, just knew, that he is a director.
Later on, every time his grandmother saw Yeh, she’d asked him, “How are things going?”, what’s more interesting was, she’d also grilled him, “When are you going to propose to Ms. Bai?”, turns out, Yeh worked with Chien-Huei Bai from a long while ago, and it seems, that the two of them performing on screen together had, stayed inside his grandmother’s mind.
Yeh said, older adults with Alzheimer’s are like children, and, although there are moments of warmth, but mostly, it’d caused the families to get agitated, anxious, even angry. Yeh admitted, that he’d once gotten mad at his grandmother, because she’d forgotten she’d taken her meds, and kept asking for her med, and insisted that she be in charge of the medications, Yeh became flustered, and angered, and his heart ached, started crying and screaming at his own maternal grandmother, “Why are you like this?”
“At the moment I got angry, I felt regret, because she’s just demented, and, it’s useless, getting mad at her for it.” Yeh believed that the heart that the families carried to care for the demented elderly is very important, that they’d needed to, “go along first, then, turn them around”, to not negate the elderly’s word, and, humor is definitely needed, to resolve the conflicts.
His grandmother died last year on the second day of the Chinese New Year, back then, Yeh’s film, “Da Dao Cheng” was playing, Yeh had set a fuller schedule for himself, to use work, to divert his attention from losing his grandmother. And, his grandmother had, passed away peacefully, it’d made him feel, that she’s, finally free.
A lot of stories of his grandmother, Yeh had, incorporated into the series of “Smiling Food Shop”, and, as the show was being filmed, the actors and actresses called him the “director who’d cried the most”, because every time the show started shooting, he’d be reminded of his grandmother, and couldn’t help himself.
In order to get inside the minds of the demented elderly persons, Yeh took the entire acting crew to a foggy mountain for the filming, it’d made the actor, Long kept calling out his wife, and children’s name, but he just, couldn’t find them at all, Yeh told, “It’s just like they have fog in front of them, can’t know who is who, but, they still all remembered their love for us all.”
And so, this is the way a man honors his grandmother who passed away, he’d gotten inspired from interacting with his own demented grandmother, and found a way, to put forth the scenes in the shows he was directing, to help bring about more knowledge of the illness to the public.
Life, the Obstacle Course 