Pointless stories

I’m not that close with my relatives, though being a first-generation immigrant I often travel back to Taiwan – my home country – every year for Chinese New Year.

One time, my aunt invited me to dinner with her. It was a very simple affair: fish noodles at a local shop. My aunt is a light-hearted, cheery woman deserving of admiration. Her optimism about life most likely stems from the fact that she suffered from polio as a child and left her with deformed legs. One often looks at those less fortunate than us and think, “I could never be able to cope with that”; their courage seems almost alien to us.

We were chatting about fickle things that wouldn’t interest a boisterous male; she was cracking up about how my grandmother – in her old age and declining memory – had done something stupid again, I joked back, “I don’t want to hear this, why are you telling me these pointless stories?” And she said, again with a smile, “Yes, but you shouldn’t say that. Because after all, that’s what most of life is, just the small, sometimes amusing stories about the people closest to you.”

I was barely old enough to appreciate that back then; it’s stayed with me ever since.