Love Letter to Grandma
The Doctor, Entrepreneur, Philanthropist, Cancer Survivor, and Misogynist
Chapter 1 Grandma
The birth of her first great-grandchild brought immense joy, and it seemed to have taken away any bitterness left from last Chinese New Year. After not being able to visit my grandmother for three years because of the pandemic, I was elated to spend time with her. However, my planned four-day visit had to be cut short due to a very heated vocal confrontation that broke out between me and my then 88-year-old grandma.
Before you judge, I must tell you what led to the encounter. The heated exchange occurred after my grandmother started incessantly ranting about her son deserving everything and my mother, nothing. She then made unfair comments about my mother's filial duties, claiming that she was no longer "a good daughter" because she was no longer obedient like she was when she was a teenager.
I had heard these comments thousands of times before, but for the first time ever, I raised my voice and decided to stand up to the family tyrant.
My family has always joked that we're a matriarchal family. We're loud, social, assertive, and, some would say, aggressive, and when it came to grandma, mom and I always showed her the utmost respect.
Grandma, by all measures, was the big boss.
She was born in the thirties in Hunan province, an industrial province in China and home to Mao Zedong. She lived through the land reformation, the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, and the economic reform and opening up. For anyone familiar with modern Chinese history, it's safe to say that the last century or so has been one of the most volatile and disruptive times for the country.
The Wang family was very well connected and respected locally. From an early age, the siblings were taught literature, how to waltz, Russian and to play musical instruments.
Grandma’s father graduated from one of the country’s best universities, Wuhan University, and studied English. Her aunt often accompanied Zhang Xueliang, the prominent Chinese military leader, to grand dances. Grandmother’s mother graduated from the same university that Mao attended, and was best friends with the late Chairman’s niece.
When grandma was little, a servant carried her on her back to a private school. Back then, not many people were educated, let alone women and girls. At that time, only 0.1% of people in China attended university. Because of this upbringing, she loved to read, and was fortunate enough to attend one of China’s top medical universities, where she met my grandpa.
Even though grandma grew up with such privilege, she seemed to have an inferiority complex. She was always told that she was second to her brother, the heir to the Wang family, who went on to have three daughters and cursed his wife for not delivering a princeling.
In the 1940s, 土改 (Land Reform) was introduced, a mass movement led by Mao that redistributed land to peasants, denounced and punished landlords, and promoted socialist transformation. Under the land reform policy, landlords were forced to hand over their properties. That's when her family fled their three-story mansion. Soon after, everything they owned was taken by previous servants. Every aspect of the entitled life they knew was turned upside down. During that period, the previously privileged and respected squires were treated as “过街老鼠，人人喊打,”: rats that everyone threatened and chased down to beat.
Grandma and her elder brother were able to finish their education before the family tragedy hit, and went on to become a doctor and a professor of engineering. Their younger sister never finished university, and was sent to the far west countryside, as part of a nationwide initiative introduced in the 50s called “上山下乡” (Down to the Countryside Movement) that sent privileged urban youth to mountainous areas or farming villages for reeducation.
What was left with the siblings was their perseverance, desire to do good, and an outdated belief that sons were better than daughters.
Chapter 2 Unfairness
After graduation, my grandparents moved to Hebei province in northern China, a few hours away from Beijing, simply due to the fact that growing up in the south, they had never seen snow before and wanted to experience it. Shortly after, my uncle and mother were born.
For more than 40 years, my grandpa worked as a neurosurgeon at the provincial hospital while my grandma specialised in cardiovascular disease. During that time, their life was predictable, with the government providing food vouchers, capped salaries, and free education.
Grandma keeps a blog on Jinritoutiao, an app created by Bytedance, the parent company of TikTok, where she writes about health and wellness, medical findings, and sometimes her personal life. Over the years, this 90-year-old blogger has published more than 350 articles and amassed more than a thousand followers. In one of her entries, she posted a picture of my uncle and mother standing in front of their grandmother holding a chicken, captioned “The thoughts evoked by a photo from 50 years ago.” Grandma wrote that she lived in a small two-room apartment that had no doors. On the street where she lived, there were ten such flats in a row, with a public toilet at the end of the road. For cooking and heating, they used a coal stove. Every household had to collect water with a bucket and store it in a tank for daily use. There were no TVs or telephones; they would simply enjoy each other’s company.
In the backyard of their humble two-bedroom brickhouse, the family cultivated grape vines and raised chickens. While the family was not impoverished, they were definitely not living in abundance. Eggs and meat were reserved for special occasions, and mother never owned a piece of her own clothing until she was in her teens, mostly wearing uncle’s hand-me-downs growing up.
Grandma rarely talks about that period of her life, but I get the impression that she was the happiest then.
In her late forties, my grandma decided to jump out of that comfort zone and open her own medical practice. Lacking institutional backing, she couldn’t convince people in the city to come see her, so she travelled tens of miles to visit patients in the neighbouring mountain villages, who had very few medical options.
She would bike into towns and small communities, or sometimes catch a ride with trucks hauling building materials into the villages. Despite the distance and lack of transportation, grandma did this every day for years. A trained cardiovascular disease specialist, she treated all kinds of ailments, including constipation, migraines, and menstrual irregularity, and even performed the duties of a midwife. Very quickly she gained recognition and trust, and built a reputation for being attentive, diligent and effective. Patients started travelling far and wide for treatment and she was able to take over a clinic in a village called Yangzhuang, and turned it into a temporary hospital.
In the beginning, the equipment was very limited. She and her team only had a few microscopes, some shelves and a cart. They treated patients in the local auditorium halls with bamboo sticks and sheets pinned to the floor to separate the beds.
From those humble beginnings, my grandma’s practice developed into China’s first privately operated hospital chain. In her early days of entrepreneurship, she conducted countless medical experiments until finally, grandma developed several series of drugs that effectively treated various cerebrovascular diseases with a success rate of more than 95% -- an achievement that changed her life.
Her clinic grew into a hospital which then soon expanded to other cities, including the capital of Beijing. By the time I was in my teens, I recall it developed into a medical chain that at one point included a pharmaceutical factory and 56 affiliate hospitals. Thousands of lives were saved, new heart disease medicines were created, all thanks to grandma.
Grandma never cared much for luxury or glamour, and she never learned to manage a business properly. Over the years, the affiliates spun off on their own, and she gifted shares to loyal partners. Mostly, she gave the majority of the business to my uncle. She now only manages the first hospital she founded and goes in daily to check on patients. She still lives in a small 2-bedroom apartment today because it is the closest compound to her hospital.
Over the past four decades, she has built schools, wells, clinics and temples and churches in underdeveloped areas of northern China. She also took in 80 kids affected by the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, sheltering them while their homes were being rebuilt.
For someone who grew up in communist China, she had an interesting fascination with religion. She never actively committed to one, and claims to have read the Bible, as well as the Quran, cover to cover, and continues to pray to Buddha every morning. Influenced by religion or not, Grandma was devoted to giving back to society. Outside the home, she was a saint.
Chapter 3 Reconciliation
I didn’t speak to grandma for nearly a year after the altercation. But as my due date approached, I wanted to share my joy and anticipation with her. Still hurt, I dialled her number. I was prepared for her dismissiveness, but I’ve also become numb as this same conflict has been an ongoing occurrence over the years between grandma and mom. I knew it secondhand all too well.
“Hi Grandma, how are you?”
“So, you’ve called. I’m well. Have you talked to your mom?”
“I just spoke to her yesterday. What’s up?”
“She hasn’t come see me in two days again, she’s ungrateful and she needs to know that her mother is more important than anything else.”
“Yes grandma, of course. But it’s a four hour drive each way from Beijing. She just went to see you, and dad needed her to go with him to the hospital for a checkup this week.”
“Ungrateful. This is why daughters can’t do anything right.”
Silence from my end, I held my tongue as I knew there was very little I could do to change the mind of a 90-year-old lady. I wanted to tell her about how my daughter was kicking more.
“Ok grandma, glad to hear you’re in good health. Speak to you soon.”
Over the thirty years of my life, it seemed like my mother was always striving for an unattainable goal – pleasing her mother.
Mom and dad moved to Canada in the early 1990s as part of a wave of Chinese professionals who were sent to set up overseas offices for state-owned conglomerates. Mom was told from day one that her mother’s business would be inherited by her brother, and she would not be involved in any managerial or financial way. She never wanted to put up a fight, and was content with what she had achieved on her own. So, our family immigrated to Canada, and did our best to assimilate.
More than a decade after we moved halfway across the world, grandma called one day. She threatened and scolded mom for not putting the family business first, and demanded that she immediately drop everything and move back to China.
I was only 15, and my brother was 8. My grandmother guilt-tripped my mother, and told her to leave us in Canada. China was going through another wave of regulatory changes on private-owned enterprises, and the hospital she founded was at the risk of a full government takeover.
Grandma told her daughter that all kids grow up and will eventually leave her, and even husbands are replaceable, but she had to be loyal to her mother, and the family business comes first. Mom didn’t seem to notice the contradictions in her statement.
Conflicted, my mother shut down her own business, and flew across the world back to her mother’s side. She didn’t bring my brother and me, because she wanted to wait to know for sure if a permanent move was feasible for the family. Or maybe she knew there was a risk that things would fall through.
When she arrived to help, her mother appointed her brother the CEO of the pharmaceutical group, and gave him millions in cash and equity of the hospital chain my grandmother built. She told my mother she was there to help the family, and she shouldn’t be greedy. She was given a salary of USD300/month, which was less than one-tenth of mom’s normal income. My father, working in his junior corporate job, could hardly afford our simple lifestyle in Canada. Mom was again conflicted, but she didn’t want to let her mom down. So instead, our family changed our lifestyle. I still vividly remember suddenly having to go to the supermarket at 8 p.m. daily with my dad and brother to buy bread and pre-made goods at an 80% markdown.
After six months, as all the legal battles on the business were settled, mom came home with tears in her eyes. She had successfully helped grandma preserve her legacy, but mom’s own business in Canada, that had taken years to build, was in ruins. I felt a stinging sourness in my throat, ten years later, as I learned about these details. I couldn’t have imagined the feeling of being so disposable, and being taken for granted by my own family.
It was then I realised how hard my mother had been trying to shield me from all this injustice, and that my mother does not get the same kind of love she has for me from her mother.
Grandpa divorced my grandmother after 40 years of marriage. Apparently, he never became comfortable with grandma’s success. Supposedly, he thought he was the better doctor, and therefore he should have started his own business and been successful, not her.
Supposedly grandma became more unhinged about worshipping her son, to a point where no rationale or logic could get through her. All she knew was that she had to get rid of anyone and everyone that could potentially claim a cent of her son’s entitlement.
Grandma is oddly proud of how she handled the divorce. Once she told me, on the day she was served her divorce papers, she thanked the lawyer, smiled politely, closed the door and went back to work. She said she has never cried about it. I guess she thinks this shows that she’s tough. Maybe she saw crying as feminine and weak, and those traits as one identity. So she made sure in everything she did that she was neither.
Eventually my uncle took over the majority of the business, and distanced himself from grandma. He put everything he could get his hands on under his name. My mother moved back to Beijing almost ten years ago to help with what remains, and continues to visit grandma bi-weekly out of duty, but is regularly insulted: “A married daughter is like water poured out of a bucket," meaning she’s no longer her family.
But mom always finds the best in every situation. She took on the opportunity and enrolled herself in a Master’s in Hospital Management at an Australian Medical School. She took courses, and expanded her network through weekend sessions at Peking University. She even finished her master’s thesis the same week I finished mine.
And despite all the effort, the success and even results mom has shown, sometimes grandma would still call me in the middle of my night, to tell me about how my mother should always put her and her family business first, and that her affection towards me or my brother are signs of her weakness and lack of loyalty to her.
Containing my resentment only became harder and harder. And the realisation that it is her loneliness and pain driving this behaviour only makes my heart ache more. After all, she spent most nights alone with her books.
In a culture where the child is born and is considered the possession of the parents, and it is their duty to make them proud, I thought mom had already done everything. In my eyes, my mother always put her mother first, and maybe that’s because she was always trying to prove her loyalty.
Chapter 4 Survivor
Grandma, now 90 years old, still appears as 86 on her ID card, as she paid a local agency to alter her age. To maintain her youthful appearance, she wears bright fuchsia lipstick and a corset, dyes her hair jet black, and I’m pretty sure she’s sought out Botox behind our backs.
Every summer since I could remember, we would pack up and travel from Canada to China, to stay with my grandma for the summer holiday. Every morning of those scorching summer days, my grandma would wake me up at 6 a.m., to accompany her to work.
“Grace, hurry now. Get dressed. Pack your Chinese textbook quickly.” Grandma would shout my name to wake me up, as she did every summer morning before she left for work before sunrise.
She would put on her pink suit, and then ask ten-year-old me to quickly get dressed. We’d arrive at the hospital, and people would swarm her with briefs and updates while I tagged along, thinking I was the second most important person in the room.
I made myself the office manager, and would sit at a computer, log into my Neopets account and pretend to be busy until my Chinese tutor arrived each day. That class was followed by hip hop dance lessons, held in a meeting room down the hall.
My grandma was my idol, and I emulated her every move. She would take me to fast food restaurants where my mother wouldn’t let me eat, bought me pretty dresses that were way too extravagant for a ten-year-old, and even had a driver chauffeur me around the city and buy me popsicles on demand. On weekends, she would take me to local hospices or old homes, to distribute blankets and coats to help the elderly prepare for winter. When I was older, she arranged for me to teach English to rural village children at the schools she donated and built.
I never thought it was weird to spend summers in a hospital. Walking by elderly people with tubes and IV drips attached to them didn’t faze me, nor did it strike me as odd at that time that my daily meals were eaten in the hospital cafeteria with people seven or eight times my age in medical gowns.
Grandma was a patient, too. In fact, she beat cancer twice. After two c-sections, she discovered she had a tumour in her uterus, so she had to have it removed.
When I was 11, she found out she had colon cancer. Of course, mom came to the rescue. Mom sat by her side day and night, through every single surgery. Mom donated her blood to grandma, every single time to the maximum allowable limit. Mom even passed out by grandma’s bed due to over-exhaustion and dehydration, after she had too much blood withdrawn. Dad carried grandma in and out of bed. I wiped her face, and brought her the puke bucket.
Even during the gravest of times, grandma wasn’t going to admit defeat to anyone. She took matters into her own hands.
To beat cancer, grandma underwent four operations and had major chunks of her intestine removed. She now no longer eats meat, and diligently follows a diet plan she devised herself.
Grandma often quotes a saying from Confucius, “没有生而知之，只有学而知之,” which translates to “No man is born wise; he is wise through learning”.
There were days when she told mother that she didn’t think she would make it but whenever she was having a good day, she would ferociously read whatever she could on how to overcome this demon.
She would research ways to battle cancer, and found holistic ways to supplement her medical treatments and promote her gut health. Upon recovery, she wanted to share her findings. So she published academic papers, articles and blog posts, and went on national TV to share her findings and treatments that worked for her.
Chapter 5 Motherhood
“She’s just like me with a big forehead,” said grandma about Isabelle. “She’ll be smart, no, brilliant like me.”
My daughter is three months old today, and I just sent my grandma a series of pictures of me and Isabelle. Issy, as we call her, was born at the end of the Year of the Tiger, a little Sagittarius with a feisty personality. You can tell, even at only three months old, she’s just like her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. She knows exactly what she wants.
I chuckled. “Yes, grandma, she’ll be smart, just like you.”
I think when Issy meets her taitai (great grandmother in Mandarin), I will tell her about all the goodness taitai has brought to this world. And hope that like me, Issy will grow to admire taitai’s strong will and determination. And maybe, just as my mother protected me, I will shield Issy from the pain and confusion that my grandmother has inflicted on my mother, and therefore me.
As I start embracing my own role as a mother, I truly see that we all have flaws. But in the eyes of our children, for a short period of time, we are all they know, and all that is good. And this has helped me answer a question I’ve repeatedly asked myself: why does mom keep going back?
My mother has heard her whole life that she’s less worthy. So she’s spent her entire existence trying to prove to her mother that she is worthy and loyal. I’ve accepted that for her, to find peace means pleasing my grandma. I’ve also come to accept that my grandmother’s flawed values are a reflection of her time, passed down from her own parents.
For the first 15 years of my life, my grandma was the person I aspired to become. It wasn’t until I moved to Beijing to work in my twenties that I began to delve deeper into the country’s tumultuous history. Only then did I realise what an incredible person grandma must be to achieve all that she has. And only through that deeper understanding of the culture and history was I able to find the maturity within me to respect her, and appreciate the traces of history within her.
Putting differences aside, I can only hope that I have achieved even a tenth of her tenacity, curiosity, perseverance and dedication to society. I continue to be in awe of grandma’s dedication to society, her commitment to self-growth and I bask in her sweetness when she sends me heart stickers, and her childlike innocence when she squirms with joy when I send her Japanese matcha treats. This incredible woman, against all odds, built an empire, saved lives, and influenced who I am today greatly.
Grandma often sends me her blog posts on WeChat, but I’m usually too impatient to read them. During maternity leave, I decided to finally read it through. I was surprised to find an article, hidden between a piece on gut health and the importance of deep breaths, titled “Three generations will always continue to learn and move forward with the times.” The article follows her own path in medicine and her continued self-learning in the field. It details my mother’s training as an engineer, how she established herself in the business world, and then taught herself how to manage a hospital. It finally goes into about my journey from finance to journalism, my journey to Hong Kong, and my drive, inherited from her, to keep pushing myself to be better.
It shook me.
Grandma is proud of us, and she sees us – her daughter and her granddaughter – as her legacy. It made me think of a beautiful passage written by Cheryl Strayed: “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend, or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humour, and loaded with promises and commitments that we may or may not want or keep.”
So, I continue to send grandma updates about Issy. I try to not let her inappropriate comments bother me.
I let her love me, and be proud of me, secretly, in her own way.
Grace Shao consults with MNCs and big techs on their strategic positioning and crisis management. She was a journalist in her former life, having reported and written for CNBC, SCMP, CGTN, Yahoo Finance, and many more. Grace likes to read and write about business, geopolitics, history, non-fiction, and character-led stories.
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