A Story of Bear Grandma

Every night since last Friday, I have been reading about the massacre.  Sadly, journalists start to cool off.  But I truly wish that we do not put this behind so fast.  We should hope for some good things come out of this horror, such as establishing more stringent gun control laws.  I am so disappointed to know some people in this country have such a strong resistance to better gun control laws.  I am so worried about the fact that in this country, 9 out 10 people own a gun!  Guns are so deadly, why they should be carried around by people whose jobs have nothing to do with guns?  I am from China and used to seeing that guns are carried around everywhere, but those are carried by security providers, such as the police, who are trained to use guns safely.  Chinese army soldiers are not allowed to access guns unless they are at their training fields.  It's scary to think about guns in this country really.  Last time I went a dinner party and met one of the guests carrying a hand gun.  The party had plenty alcohol, what if he drank too much and then lost his control...It bothered me quite a bit.  Not only did it bother me that someone carries a gun to a alcohol-served gathering, but also this mentality - why in the world some people feel so strongly that they need self-protection at friends' party where only friends are invited?!

Anyway, let's take a break from these serious issues, shall we?  It's holiday and I am in a relatively relaxed mood.  I wanted to tell you a story which haunted me for life.  Consider yourself warned. 

My brother and I grew up without seeing much of our parents.  Mom and Dad had always been very busy with their jobs when we needed them the most.  They both were members of The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which means on the top of working full time, 6 days per week, from 7:30 am to 5:30 pm, they also needed to go back to work after dinner, say around 7:30 pm to 10 pm or later.  The nightly meetings were for those special CCP members to learn government's top secrets or to study The Works of Mao in order to build a strongest socialist country in the world - the biggest ambition of Mao.  Sorry, I mean Mom and Dad went to have their brains washed nightly, pretty much like every religious person here in the U.S. who goes to Church every Sunday.  Except my parents worshiped Mao, instead of God.  They were absolutely devoted to follow Mao's CCP party to march towards ultimate happiness!

China as a country was quite poor 40 years ago.  Majority of the countryside did not have sufficient electricity.  Imagine that you need to pass one whole night without electricity here?  Well, let me tell you, that was our life almost every night at that time.  When night comes, older kids would lid oil-lamps or candles to do their home works.  The younger ones including me would just play hide-and-seek until we saw absolutely nothing outside.  

It was then I came to know Aunt Tang, my nightly "Mom".  She was a very diligent and kind woman who worked every night to my knowledge.  She sew buttons on clothes.  Aunt Tang had 4 kids of her own, two girls older and one boy and one girl younger than me.  Since Aunt Tang's husband was also a CCP member, he was not home at night either.  Aunt Tang and her children thus were a perfect sitters and companies for my older brother Bing and me*.  After dark, Bing and I would come by her house sitting or lying in a big bed beside Aunt Tang's working station together with her younger children who often already fell in asleep at that time.  Bing and I loved to listen to her endless stories and I also loved to watch her sewing buttons.  Night after night, her stories never failed to keep us entertained.  She knew so many interesting stories that Mom and Dad never seemed to know, classic Chinese folk tales, European classic children stories, maybe even few American ones.  I believe I know of pre-Disney versions of Mulan, Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping beauty, and Mermaids from her.

One of the stories that I heard from Aunt Tang is "A Bear Grandma" that every little Chinese of my age would know.  It has many versions with small differences - you can google with these words: 熊外婆的故事.  As I said, it has haunted me for life.  Test yourself and see whether you will be scared.

Here is goes.

"I am going to visit grandma and I'll be back until morning, so you two be good at home.  Don't open doors if anyone knocks.  There is a bear in the forest and she often comes to hunt children when their parents are not home.  So, remember what I said.  Do not open the door!"  The mother told her two children, Lan and Hu, while they were eating dinner.  After the dinner, she left home and shut the door tightly behind her.

The bear was hiding under the window at the dinner time outside, so she heard all what the mother said to Lan and Hu.  As soon as the mother left, she went back to her cave, put on some clothes and a hat to cover her fur and then came to knock on the door.

"Xiao Lan and Xiao Hu, open the door, please.  I am your Grandma and your Mom told me to come to look after you while she is away."  The bear said. 

Hu was excited so he ran up to the door and ready to let the bear in.  But Lan was a bit older and more cautious.  So she asked the bear before letting Hu to open the door, "Grandma's voice is a lot prettier.  You sounded rough."  

The bear said, "Oh, that was because I caught a cold."

Lan then asked the bear, "Could you put your hand in and let me check." and then she opened the door just wide enough for the bear to stick her hand in.  Lan touched the wrist of the bear and said, "You are not our Grandma, because she has a jade bracelet." 

The bear went to the crop field and got a long bean circling around her wrist to made herself a bracelet.  And then she came back said, "Oh, the bracelet was on the other hand.  Here it is."

Lan checked and confirmed that the bear had a bracelet so she let her in.  While Lan was offering the bear grandma a chair to sit down, the bear refused.  "Grandma hurt the back and cannot sit on a chair."  The bear said to Lan and requested for a cage with holes.  Lan gave the bear a chicken cage.  The hear sat on the top of the cage and let her long tail sticking into a hole of the cage.  This woke up the chickens inside.  

Lan and Hu asked why the chickens were making noises.  The bear said, "Oh, they are just like you happy to see me here."

Lan was still a bit skeptical so she went to light a lamp.  The bear said, "Oh, grandma is very old and the light would hurt my eyesI"  So, she stopped Lan. 

Then it was time for bed.  The bear and Hu slept on one side and Lan slept on another.  

In the middle of the night, Lan woke up and asked the bear why the bed was wet.  It was the blood of her brother Hu but the bear told her that was Hu's pee and Lan went back to sleep.

Soon Lan woke up again, because she felt a soft and long rope-like stuff tangled her feet.  It was the interesting of Hu, but the bear told her that was a rope that she used to tied Hu to her so that he won't fall out of the bed. 

Lan then went back to sleep and soon she woke up again.  This time, she heard some crunchy sound as if someone was chewing bones.  She could not go back to sleep anymore.  She was totally scared this time, and nervously asked the bear, " Grandma, what are you eating?"  The bear said, "Oh, I am eating some fried beans."

Well, I cannot remember how this story ended now.  If you are Chinese and interested in finding out the end, you can read it here.  For English readers, you are out of luck, because this story is so scary, nobody is willing to retell it.  To brief you here, Lan lost her little brother to the bear but herself did not die.  She had found many ways to escape and finally, she lured the bear to a well in the yard outside.  The bear fell in the deep well and died. 

Again, because this story is passed on by word of mouth, many versions exist.  So I only can tell you my version.  I wanted to tell my kids this story so many times, but I never managed to do so because they are only 5 and 3 and still are afraid of going to the toilet in the house alone.

___________
* Aunt Tang did not get paid to take care of us.  She did that out of her kindness - that was common in China.  We all helped each others out based on our kindness.  

Function of education

A school massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, Newtown, CT occurred last week.  We are sad.  We are grieving.  We are scared.  We are angry.  We are seeking for answers...

And the answers are starting to unfold: Adam Lanza was eccentric and an extreme introvert; he did not like any other human beings; his mother, Nancy Lanza, was out of her mind to keep guns at the places where her mentally ill son could access; she was wrong for taking her son with her to fire guns; for shielding him from the public, for trying too hard to make him "fit in" the mainstream, for not trying hard enough to get him helped by professionals...

However, we must remind ourselves this soulless killer once was a loving child.  We must understand that any children, regardless what type of the genetic makeups they are bearing, they should have been raised and influenced by a village of people.  Adam Lanza was like everyone else with a unique genetic program, which told him to act differently from the majority of us.  Just imagine if the majority of us had sufficient knowledge to recognize and accept the way he was, would he still have been eccentric to that extreme level?  Imagine his parents, school teachers, and whoever else that were mattered to him, had been equipped with some knowledge of mental illness so that they would have sent him to special schools to satisfy the special needs of his growth and development, would he have acted differently?  Imagine he, like most of us at that age, had been kept busy by his friends, would we have had a different outcome?

We have failed spectacularly at many levels as a human race.  We have paid, with a price we cannot afford!

Yes, I am talking about that we have all contributed to the massacre, one way or the other.  We have failed Adam and Adam-like people, time and time again.  We, the society as a whole, failed him.

It's us.  We are all responsible for what the tragedy, whether you admit it or not.  If we continue to pretend that the mass killing had nothing to do with us, we will continue to fail.  If we live in a fantasy wishing mass killers would not show up in front of us, the frequency of such tragedy won't go down.  We have already experienced too many of this mass killing, we truly don't need any more to learn our lessons.  We cannot afford to wait for another 50 years for the society to change itself.  We need to act now.

What can we do to minimize this type of tragedy?

First, don't freak out when you meet people who act differently from the mainstream.  Showing them your willingness to connect with them.  Making eye contact with them, smile to them, make them feel welcomed.  Come on people, have you learnt already that we are all unique?  

Second, try to get close to whoever you meet in your life.  Believe me, making friends with "normal" people is fun and interesting, but making friends with "abnormal" people is extraordinary and exceedingly exciting!  As a middle school teacher, I had first hand experience to be friends with the most difficult students.  What I had done was very simple, I do NOT try to normalize/neutralize them.  I did not impose my own standards upon them.  I was genuinely curious to try to understand why they did not live in the same moral standards as the majority of the others and what they felt and saw in others?  With repeated efforts, I did succeed to make friends with bunch of kids who were labeled as hopeless students.  But I must admit that I had never met anyone with similar level of eccentricity to Adam Lanza.  But this is not the point here.  My point is to get close to mentally ill people BEFORE they become ill!  Yes, I do believe making friends with everyone you meet is one of the effective way to eliminate hatred towards others.  

Those two steps are easy to follow.  The bottom line is not to alienate young kids who are different from the mainstream.  This world needs more Alan Diaz to hang out with Adam-like kids.  I know it would be so much easier to turn our heads another way, to get far away from them, especially it was Adam who alienated himself from the rest of us.  But we can do better as a whole.  We could have reached out to him through the mother, for example.  It's not nosy, it's our responsibility to make the the world a warm, loving, and caring place.

However, sometimes making friends with people like Adam when they are already 16 or older, it could be too late.  In this case, we still can do something about it, such as, 

Third, follow up to with your gut feelings.  If you feel someone with dangerous thoughts towards others and themselves, don't let your busy schedule to delay to act accordingly.  If you think that's not your business, you are irresponsible.  You need to take proper procedures to have them watched.  

Sure, we must limit the general population to access machine guns to eradicate mass killing.  However, in my opinion, that was only the surface of the problem.  The ultimate and effective solution is to improve general educational and emotional quotient (EQ) of each and every one of us by education.

It's time to remind ourselves that the primary function of education is to gain knowledge to understand our surroundings and ourselves.  Education opens our minds to understand and embrace people with different and non mainstream characters.  With this knowledge, we are able to love, support, and care for others in need effectively.

Remember, education does not start at the day a kid goes to school, nor does it stop at the time a person is out of school.  It starts at the moment a child is born and continues for life.