Digging Through My Grandpa's Notebooks (Pt.1)
An 80 years old man’s discreet emotions and the son who lost his dad at 45
Author's Note: For my first substack post, I asked a simple question that had no specific answer: "Can we change the future by changing the past?" prompted by confusion while living in post-COVID China. But now I realize it was really more of a personal question…
I had a hard time creating a night routine until recently. Now, almost every other night around midnight or 1 AM, I type up my grandpa's old notes on my new keyboard. The pages of his notes have turned yellow with time. I start where I left off the previous night and copy what's on the page into a Word document. I type away late into the night, pretending to be a hardworking secretary from the 19th century.
Tonight I have a document that dates back to 1980, almost two decades older than me. It is my grandpa's application letter to be a part of the Communist Party, his fifth attempt. His previous tries were in 1960, 1966, 1970, and 1975, respectively.
His main reasons for rejection were taking a flight in 1949 with his family, which was considered too capitalist (I’d assume), and joining the 三青团, a nationalist youth league that fought against the communists from 1938 to 1947. Both of these actions were considered to be major moral failures (per the words in his application letter).
He wrote regretfully and passionately, as someone who is truly remorseful about his past and wants the best for the greater good. It reminds me of a climate activist's redemption letter to Mother Earth, or a son who accidentally stabbed his mother. He also used the words "fear" and "love" frequently to describe his relationship with the party.
When transcribing them onto a fresh page as hard facts, in the back of my mind, I wonder if he had seen it coming, that I would become his "secretary." He left a box full of writings in at least 20 notebooks, hundreds of scraps on the back of receipts, all left untouched by my aunties who focused more on how much money they would get once selling the house. I wonder if my grandpa ever thought that I would inherit his belongings and type out his life stories, and would he still have written as truthfully as he did in his diaries?
Transcribing raw emotions is not an easy task, and neither is reading them as a granddaughter. It took me six months to work up the courage to be near the box, as I feared that it possessed a part of his spirit (which is likely still present), and that intruding on his most intimate thoughts might change who he was to me.
For example, here are some things I found it hard to believe that an 80-year-old man would do:
As a writer, he too has a love-hate relationship with his editor:
晚会上孙桂芳三次邀我与她伴舞，令我很尴尬。过去我对她是敬而远之的。
At the party, Sun Guifang (editor) invited me to dance with her three times, which made me very embarrassed. In the past, I kept my distance from her out of respect.
He still copying love poem with burning passionate language:
“那爱是喷涌的岩浆，是汹涌的海水，是无垠的苍穹，让我们一生融化、淹没、覆盖。“ （卫寅利）
“Love is like gushing lava, surging seawater, and boundless sky, melting, submerging, and covering us throughout our lives.” (Wei Yinli)
He also complained about my cousin being cold to him and swore to never see her again. He used the phrase "热脸贴冷屁股" (hot face stuck onto cold ass), not a normal thing that a loving grandpa would say. I'm just happy to find out that I am not the only one who grew up hating my cousin from time to time.
That's when I started doing this grandpa trivia thing with my dad, where we would take turns saying sentences like, "Did you know my grandpa was named after his brother who died as a baby?" or "Did you know he used to be a high school teacher?" or "Did you know he initially studied civil engineering?”
Sometimes, when I asked my dad a question, he responded with an excited face, like someone who had actually prepped for a quiz. Other times, he would say "that one, I actually don't know" and listen patiently. On occasion, he would say with a gleaming eye, "I sometimes think you and your grandpa have a psychic connection," and remain mischievous when I asked him to elaborate.
He volunteered to be assistant secretary for this operation, and we worked together quite well. When I returned home at night, he sat next to me with his reading glasses on, ready to help. He could decipher certain scribbles of my grandpa's that I could never make out, and vice versa. He worked quickly, and I tried to keep up on the keyboard. Sometimes he got excited and spat on the paper, I told him to calm down and keep working. All in all, he earned his title.
As we squinted our eyes to recognize grandpa's cursive handwriting, both his and my memories about grandpa were refreshed. It was as if we were standing at the bottom of a huge snow mountain, preparing our way up to discover buried treasures along the way.
I quite like the new routine. It's a therapeutic act. It's comforting to know the words on the yellow pages don't smear easily as they do when freshly written. They are crisp like chips, and sometimes they can cause skin rashes from the amount of dust they've collected. But with each type, they seem to come to life a little.
