The FINAL generation that actually fulfills their filial piety duties, observations, from the Front Page Sections, translated…
Awhile ago, I’d made it back to my home in Yunlin, went to visit my third aunt who’s bedridden, and seeing she, who’d been ill and bedridden for long, cussing herself, and blamed how she was, dragging her children down with her too.
Her three children retired from the police force, and public offices, lived in Yilan, Kaohsiung and Hualien. These past few years, the three brothers had taken turns, heading back home to look after their mother, to fulfill their filial piety duties, and helped their father in his eighties with the burdens of caretaking of their mother. With the economics of the three sons, if they put the money together, it would be no problem, hiring a professional nurse’s aide for my aunt. But their elderly father was totally against the idea, reason for where they lived wasn’t very populated, if the foreign caretaker couldn’t adapt, there would be the problems with the offerings on the firsts and fifteenth of the lunar calendar months, and besides, with the cultural differences, the language barrier, he didn’t feel comfortable. as for sending his wife to a nursing home, that was what their father was set against, no need to mention it.
There’s this saying, if you’re ill long, all your offspring won’t be kind to you. What’s rare was the three brothers could’ve retired off easy, but, because their mother got ill, it’d turned things upside down for them, year after year, the workload in caretaking accumulated, but, the three of them rarely complained at all. The second son said, that his eldest was more neurotic, whenever it came his turn to be at home to look after their mother, he’d lost sleep for a few nights before he was due back, it showed how much stress looking after their mother was for him. And he is a good cook, and when it came his turn to stay with his parents, they wouldn’t have to order the meals out.
On the day I left my cousin, he’d walked with me outside, and started making fun of himself: “it’s said, that our generation was the last generation that fulfilled the filial piety duties to our parents, and we may well be the first generation, ‘abandoned’ by our own offspring.” Yes, as those born in the fifties and sixties, we already knew it, we don’t dare hope that our children will look after us as we’d done our own elders, just hoped, that when we grow old, we’ll, find that place of comfort to live out the remains of our years.
Because this next generation, my generation, the children are more self-centered, and, they wouldn’t follow the rules of filial piety like our parents had, and, because, many of us had weathered through the things, that gave us the rights, to NEVER take care of our own aging parents too, and so, this generation before my own, are left alone, to look after themselves as they grow older…and the elders still can’t blame us for it, because you never took care of us, so why the FUCK should we take care of you, huh???