A Long Wait

 

 

There is a scenic spot in Sha Tin, Hong Kong, where a stone looks like a woman carrying her little son and holding her oldest son. It is said that the woman stood there waiting for the return of her husband. After years of waiting they became a stone. It is called ”Amah Rock.” In the nineteen thirties, the Qing dynasty had fallen and the foreign powers invaded China. China was suffering from internal and external troubles. People had been in war and disaster for a long time and some of them tried their best to emigrate abroad. My great-grandfather was a member of this immigrant army. After more than two months of taking a boat, he finally arrived in Canada. Since then, my family have been waiting for the relatives who have emigrated to return. This kind of missing and waiting has never stopped.

The first long waiting story is about my great-grandmother. When my great-grandfather went abroad, he never came back again. My great-grandfather experienced the illness and death of her youngest child, as well as the responsibility of running the household and supporting the family. My father told me that due to the underdevelopment of medicine at that time, my great-grandmother’s little son died from a high fever. Though she was very sad, she was still strong. She kept her spirit up and took care of the family though the whole family was often bullied and treated unfairly without a man at home. Fortunately, my great-grandfather often sent enough money back for the family to spend. In order to make the family prosperous and increase the population, my great-grandmother let my grandfather get married at the young age of twenty. Since my grandfather was not mature enough and rebellious, my great-grandmother needed to help him to run the family. My great-grandmother spent her whole life waiting for her husband, but she didn’t wait until the end of her life. This was a sad and tearful history of the immigrant family.

 

The story of waiting didn’t stop, and my grandmother went through the same fate. My grandmother experienced her husband’s wrongdoing and departure. My grandfather, without his father’s advice at his young age, became very rebellious and addicted to opium and spent much time in an opium den. Every day she persuaded and waited for her husband to get back on the right track, but it did not work. My grandmother felt hopeless and depressed, but she had to take the burden of looking after the old and the young. Since my grandfather had spent a lot of money on opium, my grandmother was living on a tight budget. Moreover, after the founding of new China in 1949, my grandfather who had done little things for KMT(Nationalist Party Kuo Min Tang, KMT against the Chinese Communist party of China in the civil war) during the civil war, quickly fled to Hong Kong, then a British colony. He feared that the new government would be bad for him. His departure was not a lifetime, but still more than forty years. When my grandfather went to Hong Kong, my father’s elder sister was still in the womb. Then my grandmother had to adopt my father to be her son because she had only three daughters. The family needed to have a son in those days. How difficult it was for a woman to lose her life support. When my grandfather arrived home from Hong Kong for the first time, he was in his seventies, from a young man to an old man with wrinkled face and white hair. I remembered that my grandma’s tiredness and missing turned into tears of happiness. I thought her waiting might be worth it.

 

For me, I would not let this kind of missing wait too long. I immigrated to the U.S with my son and husband last year. I left my hometown where I had lived for thirty years and my other relatives. For new immigrants, the difficulties are everywhere. First of all, I needed to be familiar with the environment and living habits. Then I had to find a school for my child. Since it was November when we arrived the U.S, many schools had already begun and they would not accept student that late in the year . My husband and I went through several schools and found one that could accept our child. The next step was to get a job. I fortunately found a part-time job. In addition, in order to fit in here, for a better life, I decided to re-enter school and learn English. I firmly believe that life will be better as long as I work hard, no matter where we are. The busy life did not make me forget my relatives in China. I miss them all the time, no matter how busy we are. I insist on getting video twice a week. I hope that in the near future, we can go back to China to visit our relatives.

As a new generation of immigrants, I don’t think I will be like my great-grandfather and grandfather. They left their family, their hometown and stayed away for a lifetime or several decades. Maybe they had a lot of trouble and bitterness in those days, but it is different now. In order to reduce the pain of longing, we can frequently contact our family in China by phone and We Chat. We can also go back to see them. We are far away, but the story of “Amah Rock” no longer happens in this generation.