This is, the traditional Chinese beliefs, that should be, thrown OUT!!! From the Newspapers, translated…
My originally independent, able-bodied mother had a stroke, plus she’d begun to stutter when she spoke, being outgoing and social, she was, greatly impacted, was hospitalized for two months, and became unhappy, we’d hired a nurse’s aide from Taiwan to look after her, my mother not only refused to eat, she’d also refused to go to physical therapy, the nurse’s aide complained endlessly about our mother, it’d made my siblings worry, not knowing what they should do.
As the eldest sister, although I am working, and getting paid the highest, but my kids were all grown, without the economic burdens, and my mother is in her eighties, I’d not had enough time to spend with my mother, it should be me who looks after her; but, as I’d gone to the hospitals to stay with her a few days, being mildly demented and still very strong-willed, my mother saw that it was her own daughter, she’d not given me an easy time, she’d acted, even MORE spoiled compared to when she’s in the presence of someone else.
I’d left home at a younger age, and started living on my own, rarely had any opportunities to interact with my mother, without any experiences in caretaking, seeing how she was going against everything I tell her to do, I’d worried that I might not being doing a good enough job looking after her, and gotten the blames, I’d almost become a patient myself. After my siblings consoled with me, “having the offspring to look after the parents may not be the best ways, we don’t have enough space at home, hiring a foreign nurse’s aide, it’s best, that we sent mother to a facility, and we won’t get labeled as ungrateful.”
There are the clean and transparent windows with great lighting in the facility I’d sent my mother into, my two unwed younger sisters who lived closer would gone to visit her after work, to give her massages, and I’d felt more at ease, returning back to Taipei to work, and although, the fees of the nursing home isn’t cheap, but the five of us siblings each took on a little over $10,000N.T.s, and we can still get it covered, and my mother was comfortable living there, with the proper medical staff, putting us to ease, working hard, paying the fees, we’d reduced our worries by a lot, and, it’d not affected any of her children’s home life either.
So, this, is an alternative perspective on elderly care, it’s more fitting, to send the elderly parents into a nursing home facility, they may get more of the socializations they’d lacked in the facilities versus living at home alone, because there are people their age they can connect with, and yet, this is a huge taboo in Asian countries, as none of us, Asian offspring wanted to carry the names of being “unfitting” as children, not looking after our own elderly parents.