Something I couldn’t wrap my head around growing up was how my grandparents got to be old as they are.
Sure, I intuitively knew in an objective sense: babies become young people, and young people become working middle-aged people, and then they retire and get old. A year is a year for everyone; my grandparents just had a lot of them stacked up.
It was more, though, that I couldn’t possibly imagine the entirety of the experience that their lives had contained, the things they’d survived. I was raised hearing my grandparents’ memories of tree bark diets, childhood tragedies, revolutionary mayhem, workplace injuries; I spooned in accounts of halted dreams along with my congee during dinner. I was a preteen who cried over my math test scores: it was unfathomable to me that one could live through that much tumult and tragedy, that intensely, for that long.
One time, I asked my laolao1, 你是怎么活下去的? How did you survive? How were you so strong? And she replied, 就是这样的. That’s just the way it is.
Paul Crenshaw’s recent piece, on cancer and kindness, has been rolling around in my mind for the past few weeks. Central to his writing is the question of how one lives with hard things. How one reacts, how one changes.
There’s a lot of hard things in life. I learned this early on, bearing witness to my grandparents’ nagging pains and memories. But I’ve been personally hit hard in the last few years, with a series of family changes, health issues, and tough moves.
These experiences have deeply changed me, but I’ve found it difficult to articulate how: I definitely don’t feel stronger, as much as Kelly Clarkson may have preached it.2 But I do agree with Paul that going through hard things can make you kinder.
Some attempts below to articulate why I feel this way:
I was lonely in high school, hit by the double whammy of China’s lockdowns and three years of homeschool. Though I (thankfully) returned to my chaotic, extroverted self in college, I still struggle with lots of residual anxieties from that period.
I do find, though, that I’m more forgiving and perceptive in my relationships now: I’ve always dearly valued deep, quality time, but I now really appreciate small things that I sorely missed in HS: happy birthday texts, chatting in line at the dining hall, linking elbows with friends and making hearts in the sun !!
I also used to get really hung up on small things. Now, I take less fault in others, give more chances; I realized there was no reason for me not to, because that’s how I’d want others to treat me.I’ve dealt with chronic pain for the past two years, after a string of sports injuries. This has been really hard for me: I’ve had to give up things that I love to do, and fresh anger/resentment/frustration still bubbles up in me frequently.
A well-documented effect of athletic injuries is loss of confidence: one tiptoes around what gives them life, terrified of a repeat injury, and often it is that mental fear that actually sidelines them. I’ve been a textbook case: I closely monitor my energy 24/7; I frequently mentally default to declining social invitations, afraid I’ll become drained. It’s less living intentionally than living fearfully.
I’m trying to take it easier on myself and let go of my ego (unwillingly, I admit). I’m working on accepting who I am and what I’m able to do, instead of trying to become someone I’m not.
An upside too, I think, is that I’ve sifted out the people and activities that actually fulfill me: friends who I never pass up hangouts with, writing groups and builder’s collectives, toe dips in Ithaca’s gorges. I’ve found what makes my heart full.I grew up with an unsteady family structure — living alone with my dad most of the time, moving around a lot, rarely seeing most of my family. My mom says I was always a sensitive kid because of this: independent, but nervous. “老是想太多”。34 I do think too much, particularly when it comes to family and dating. But I’ve become very bullish on communication and feelings and reciprocity because of it.
Which is to say — in lots of ways, the things that haven’t killed me have not made me stronger. I’m full of holes. I have nagging feelings bouncing around in my mind, and sometimes they bubble over and overwhelm me (case in point: I cried alone in my apartment two nights last week). If there was an option for me to not go through hard things, I would take it.
But I’m more tender. More forgiving — to others, which has come more easily to me, and to myself, which has been the hardest. I’m fragile and kind, and I think they’re two sides of the same coin.
Unfair things are unfair, and hard things are hard. I admit I’ve always found the “beauty in the broken” rhetoric to be contrived, and now even more so. There’s no higher meaning to be found in my maternal grandfather’s experience being denied education, my grandmother’s strokes, my paternal grandfather’s achy knees, or my own pain.
But we go on. 就是这样的。We go on, with these things that don’t kill us. And we gain fragility, and maybe a little kindness too.
I’m ending this post by echoing Paul’s call for stories, something I find so important.
To my dear tea readers — what have you survived? How has it made you more kind? How have you put yourself back together, and how are you still broken? I’m here for the holes, the patches, and everything in between.
my maternal grandma, who has the same slightly-gummy smile, love for dancing, & throw-back-her-head-laughter as me; my mom says it’s like laolao’s genes skipped a generation.
laolao grew up in xinjiang boarding schools, forty girls to a room, with a father in the PLA who passed too young and a distant stepmother. i’ve heard her entire life story during our summer mornings pickling cucumbers together for breakfast: she repeats the same ones a lot, but that’s part of the charm.
i’m often saddened by the lopsided nature of experience retention: that stories, identities, names vanish so much quicker than they form. my grandmother’s name is 黄宏英.
i actually learned today that nietzsche first said ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ can i say that kelly clarkson is nietzschean now
always thinking too much
writing this reminds me of a meme i saw about the nervous overachiever kid → substack adult pipeline, and i guess i’m not beating any allegations here
beautiful writing! also, maybe kindness is and takes the ultimate strength. its the core message in most religions, and a defining trait in the wise powerful elders (think mr.miyagi) of our stories.
I’m going through my 4th knee surgery at age 23! It all started when I tore my ACL in 11th grade. My pains have taught me to be a kinder and more understanding person as well :)