Let me take you on that walk, between a mother and a daughter, translated…
After leaving Penghu, I’d made the trips back once every year. And, the set itinerary of my trips home would include holding mom’s hand, strolling down the Zhongzhen Road in the city of Magong in the early evenings, then, we’d find a teashop, to sit and watched the people going to and fro. Mom’s sight is failing, and only when I’d returned back home, she would be willing, to go out in the early evenings for the strolls.
I’d once read a metaphor on a tour guide, that the Zhongzhen Road of Magong City was like Ximenting of Taipei. “This is an exaggeration!”, my mother was ecstatic after I’d told her my reading about this on the tourguides. Although, Zhongzhen Road was the most populous street with the shops, but it was only, 200 meters long; but during my middle and high school years, this was, surely, the place to be, a place we’d gone, to hang.
For my mother who’d married over from Tainan, what did it mean for her, to take that stroll down Zhongzhen Road? Back when my parents were younger, they’d lived close to Zhongzhen Road, the Central Street, with four hundred years of history, and perhaps, Zhongzhen Road was a place where they’d gone out on the dates to, the road was paved with my parents’ memories of love shared hidden there.
Last time I’d gone home, it was the summer, the tourists flooded in; I’d held my mother’s hands tightly, had a hard time, making it through the crowd, and mumbled, “This is not the Penghu I’m familiar with now, so many people, it’s, so annoying!”
let’s go for that stroll…not my photo…
But my mom answered, “It’s good the street is populated, and, this is the only time this street was full of people through the year.” She’d smiled and told, “I’d finally understood what your grandmother meant, “I’d rather live in the cities, watched the crowds as I aged, than to live in the loosely populated countryside, and grow old and die alone.’”, perhaps, this would be something I can never come to understand, residing in the big city of Taipei.
I think, as the urbanites got used to the life in the cities, and hollered how they are to move into the countryside, perhaps, it is, hard for them, to imagine the life of solitude for those living here! And perhaps, that, is why we should all take advantage of our current state of mind and being, just like how I’m, walking with my mother, with her hand in mine, down Zhongzhen Road, the happiness from this, that, is what’s real!
And so, you’re, making memories with your aging mother, and, it’s a hard to come by opportunity, seeing how you only return home but once every year, so naturally, you’d, wanted to take advantage of the time you are back home, to spend more moments with your own mother.