A couple of years after Grandpa passed away, when Dad was eleven or twelve, Uncle was two or three, and my two aunties in between, there came heavy snow in our village right before Spring Festival. It was still snowing badly when Grandma was about to cook the New Year's Eve dinner, and she found the water jar，the kind of large round pottery container sat in the kitchen to store drinking water, was empty. In normal weather, Grandma would have carried water from the pond nearby with a pair of water buckets. But at that moment, under that kind of weather, the only practical way to get water was to carry some with a waterbowl. And that was what Grandma did. Grandma walked gingerly to the pond, which was about a hundred meters from our house, and got the water. But when she turned back with the bowl full of water, she tripped into a snow covered ditch where underneath the snow, water was running. Her cotton wadded pants were soaked up to her knees, and it took her quite a while to get out of the ditch. Grandma went back to the pond and got the water for the second time, and she managed to carry it back home, successfully this time.
It was in the mid 1950's, when even very rich people in the country side around the middle reaches of the Youngtz River wouldn't have had a spare pair of cotton wadded pants or anything alike. Grandma took off the water soaked pants and put on single layered pants. Without any heating system, it was freezing even in the kitchen. Hiding her tears from the kids, Grandma cooked the richest dinner of the year. She then sat by the table, only to watch her kids eating.
Today is a New Year's eve too. I had watched three movies posted by friends in the forum: A Christmas Without Snow, The Homecoming: A Christmas story, and Anna Karenina before I started to teach my son to make dumplings for dinner. While showing my son the nuts and bolts of dumpling making, I couldn't help picturing how Grandma had cooked their New Year's Eve dinner and recounting all the hardship she had gone through. My younger aunt once begged Grandma to buy a dad for her when she was four. Many people had tried to convince Grandma to give up all or some of the kids and find a man to remarry. But My Grandma had not only raised the family single-handedly, but also sent three of the four kids to school (my older aunt actually went to school for one year, but I rounded it to zero now), and let the boys remained in school until they had no further schooling to turn to. I then imagined what if the father in the movie The Homecoming had never come home, what if Anna Karenina had lived one day of my grandma's life, what if a Karenin kind of father had showed up at that New Year's eve in our house -- even if only for that New Year's Eve, what if ...
I had been quite annoyed when my hu*****and turned down our invitation to do the dumpling making "class" together. Minutes after those "what if's" had lingered in(on?) my mind, the only feeling left with me was thankfulness. I felt so grateful for the fact that my son has a father to turn to, at any time. Looking at the wrappings of all different sizes and shapes and the flat dumplings my boy was making, I smiled, with tears in my eyes.
-- revised Jan 2 2013 at 15:12 PST
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