Translated…
Sixty years ago, when I just started out in high school, my mother told me that tonight, we would be entertaining my father’s new worker as well as his five family members. At supper, my father introduced us to each other, I felt, that Mrs. Wang was so pretty, she was truly a beauty out of the most beautiful area in China, from the Jiangnan Provinces, she’d left a deep impression on me.
Back then, we were living in a dormitory in a certain construction site in the southern regions, and the Wangs are about to move in next door to us, after my father retired, my siblings and I all worked away from home, and, the neighbors helped watched over my parents than we could. Twenty some odd years later, my father passed, my mother moved in with me up north, and the Wangs moved to the U.S., to live with their own children too.
Eight years ago, the Wangs moved back to Muzha, Taipei to live, my Uncle Wang who is ninety-five contacted us in a hurry, asked us to pay him a visit, and what he’d wanted to tell us was: in everybody’s views, my father’s position in the company was the easiest to embezzle the money from, but my dad never took a cent that didn’t belong to him. What awed him more was, there was a member of his subordinates who fell to gang related activities, and my father who was normally mild and gentle had used a ton of courage, and held high to his morals, to help him out of the situation, allowing his subordinate to still have a place at work, and gotten out of a dangerous situation.
Afterwards, I’d gone often to Muzha to visit, and, Mrs. Wang would always have the hired help who’d learned to cook the traditional dishes in Zhejiang, and packed it up in boxes for me to take with, just like how my mother would stuff my suitcases when I’d gone away to school to live.
Once I’d gone to visit my middle school instructor with a former classmate, and, on the way, I’d passed by the Wang’s residence, ‘d told her to wait a bit, told her that I’d not had a home to go visit for twenty years, that I’m going upstairs, to hug Mrs. Wang who is already in her nineties; she told me, that she’d not had a mother since a long time either, and wanted to go with me, to hug Mrs. Wang, who was a stranger to her, to find that warmth from a mother’s embrace back for just a small moment in time.
And now, I have nothing but silvery grays covering up my head, but there’s still a place, that can help me return back to my younger years, I’m truly blessed!
So, this, is the strong connection that one shares with her neighbors from her childhood years, and because of how similar the two families’ values were, that, is why they’re still maintaining contact even after so many years, because of this mutual respect the individuals in the families held for each other, they’d become, more like family members in the end…