MY MODERN GRANDMOTHER Wu Fuchun
[Danish Version]	My grandmother was born in 1921, she will be 80 next birthday. She is short-sighted so she has to wear very strong glasses. She says it all started during the war with the Japanese. Her school didn´t have any proper educational material so in the evenings, she had to sit in the dim light of the oil-lamp and copy the school book sign for sign. Grandma doesn´t have her feet bound like so many other women her age, still, her big toes stick up in the air because she used to wear high-heels to make her look good when she was young. Grandma is an 'up-to-the-minute' person. There is a picture of her in her photo-album as a young woman where she is riding a bicycle. Over the last two years, she has become hard of hearing, so she often sits quietly on her own. I don´t know whether she is engulfed in memories from her past or whether she is pondering the future for her children and grandchildren. She might even be reliving the Springs of the last 50 years, first those spent as single and later those she spent as a married woman. An long life spanning four generations, what thoughts they must conjure up in her head?! Contact with Grandma is never predictable. As the daughter of her only son, I can see many similiarities between myself and her. Grandma started Training College at age 16 and then got a job as a music teacher in the primary school; I too began Training College at 16 and worked as a music teacher, though only for a short time. Grandma had always been good at speaking in public and I have won several prizes for excellence in the school speech and debate competitions. Grandma is also brave. When her school had to move to Western Hubei during the war, they came accross a boa constrictor on the way which was obstructing their access to a water spring. None of the pupils would go near the snake except grandma; she got rid of the 'long rodent'. She hardly ever went into air-raid shelters during the japanese bombardment, she just continued reading her book. As for me, I am far too willing to stick my hand into a bee´s nest........Maybe grandma loves me so much because I resemble her in so many ways. I know there are even more ways in which we don´t resemble each other at all, though that´s something grandma would never admit. This fine young lady got engaged to my grandfather who was an apprentice at the time. Why she did so, nobody knows -  was it because she was the daughter of a concubine or had it to do with the unrest at the time, we´ll probably never know! She stayed in the village from that day on and has never seen her parents since. I, on the other hand, had already visited several cities long before I ever started to think about getting married. Neither my parents nor my friends have been preoccupied with finding me a partner. In reality, I just can´t imagine myself in that role. When grandma married granddad, she lost the opportunity to return to the city. She concentrated instead on bringing up her 5 children, all the time living and working in the little village. After  working as a music teacher for a time and eventually becoming disillusioned with it, I was admitted to the Academy of Music and so I moved away from the small town where grandma had lived most of her life. Despite a family protest, grandma demanded to be moved to a nursing-home last year. Most of the residents are either widows or lonely old people with no next of kin. The family of the elderly are criticised for showing a lack of respect when they can put their parents in an old peoples´ home. But my grandmother with her big flock of grandsons has her own form of logic: "I have brought up my sons and they are all very good to me. Young and old do not have the same life-style and they do not speak the same language, so why shouldn´t they live apart? When I get settled into the nursing home, I won´t feel lonely." We had to agree with her. She is so right, so modern! When I visited her this Spring, she gently stroked my head and mumbled: "Good, good.....". I really don´t know what it was that was so good but she seemed to know herself what she meant. Maybe she was thinking about the differences and similiarities between herself and her granddaughter. Maybe she was feeling a little bitter about her own life which was drawing to a close. I replied: "Grandma, in this day and age, women have so many more opportunities for developing themselves so please, allow me to do for you the things you never had the chance to do yourself. Translated from Chinese to Danish by Hatla Thelle Translated from Danish to English by Maureen Eriksen
	Kvindernes U-landsudvalg,  Borgergade 14,  2. ,  DK - 1300 København K .  Tlf.: 33 15 78 70     Fax: 33 32 53 30    E-mail:  kulu@kulu.dk