During the pandemic, my mother kept finding reasons to chat with me, partly to make sure that being isolated alone away from home was not getting too miserable. She would save up small stories from daily life and tell them to me all at once, always with her plain, unvarnished judgments about what was right, wrong, foolish, or pitiful. The stories were ordinary, but the way she told them made them oddly memorable.
The Addictions of the Old
One day she told me that my grandfather, who had supposedly quit smoking long ago, had been caught sneaking cigarettes again.
Then there was my grandmother. Encouraged by my aunt, she had started using Douyin. My mother once walked in on her at night and found the lights off, my grandmother hidden under the quilt, still scrolling through short videos. “Your grandmother watches it in the daytime and at night,” my mother complained. To her, old people were becoming more and more like children.
A lifelong smoker returning to cigarettes, and an eighty-year-old woman secretly watching Douyin under the covers in the middle of the night—both are addictions. In some ways Douyin seems even more powerful than tobacco. Smoking at least requires tools and a place to smoke. Short videos need neither. They cut across age groups, and older people may have less resistance to them than young people who have spent years being soaked in the internet.
Games now have anti-addiction systems for minors. Cigarette packs at least carry the warning that smoking is harmful to health. By that logic, platforms like Douyin should probably have an anti-addiction warning for every age group.
I asked my mother, “How come you weren’t pulled into Douyin by your sister and your mother?”
She said, “The videos on Douyin are too stupid, and everything is a mess. I’ve been using Xiaohongshu lately. It’s quite nice for looking at cosmetics and outfit ideas.”
A small piece of market research from close range.
A Neighbor Who Loved Plants
My mother also told me about a neighbor in her residential compound, an older woman who was very good at growing flowers and plants. She was even older than my mother. When my mother went out for walks and passed her home, she would often stop to talk with her about gardening. They always had a good time chatting. “She was very warmhearted,” my mother said. “People in the compound liked talking to her.”
Not long ago, the woman said she was going to Qinghai for a week of travel. Before leaving, she told my mother she would bring something back for her. Some time later, people in the compound began saying that the woman had died.
At first my mother could not believe it. “That auntie was so healthy, and she was cheerful and optimistic. How could she just be gone? Was there a car accident during the trip?”
Later my mother found out that the woman had just returned from traveling when a blood vessel ruptured. She was gone almost immediately.
“I couldn’t sleep that night after hearing the news,” my mother said. “Why is it that good people don’t live long? Actually, we had met once more than ten years ago. She came to the company to collect scrap goods. Later her business grew, and she made quite a lot of money. Then she moved into our compound, and we met again and got close. I had made such a good friend. She was kind, always ready to help, and we chatted every few days. Now she’s gone just like that. In the end, everything comes to nothing.”
After reflecting for a while on the emptiness of life, my mother’s thoughts turned to the woman’s son.
“What I feel worst about now is her son,” she said. “His parents divorced when he was young, so he and his mother depended on each other. She told me she never remarried because of the child. And the son is a good person too, very filial. His mother loved flowers and plants, so he often went with her to buy things. Because of the pandemic, he recently quit his job in Shanghai and came back. It was just the two of them living together. He’s thirty-seven and still unmarried. Now that his mother is gone, what is he supposed to do?”
As I listened, I felt that my mother had placed herself inside the story. Even when the mother was the one who had died, what she worried about was still the son left behind. I put myself in that position for one second and felt a sharp discomfort, then quickly pulled myself out of it.
I tried to comfort her: “Meeting someone is fate. You met her and became friends—that was fate. Being mother and son is also fate. There is always a time when people part. No one should suffer too much for anyone else. Just live well now.”
Then I immediately changed the subject.
When Small Power Turns Mean
The conversation circled back to my aunt. She is a kindergarten teacher. My mother’s assessment of her is that she has spent too much time with children and has forgotten how to deal with adults. The leaders at her kindergarten treat her like an easy target, and she rarely pushes back.
A few days earlier, my granduncle had passed away. My mother and her sister went to Ningbo together for the funeral. After my aunt returned, the kindergarten leadership said that because Ningbo was out of town, she had to take a nucleic acid test. After the test, they said she had to isolate at home. Isolation would have been one thing, but this also meant her entire annual bonus would be deducted.
My uncle-in-law could not stand it and called the education bureau to complain. The bureau replied that Ningbo was not a sensitive area and required no special measures. It notified the kindergarten leadership and told them to cancel those demands.
Unexpectedly, this only made the leadership angrier.
Before the National Day holiday, the kindergarten issued a special notice: staff could travel to nearby areas, except for one particular city; otherwise they would have to isolate and test. This was obviously aimed at my aunt, because my cousin had just married into that city, and my aunt’s family had originally planned to go there for a meal during the holiday.
“I really didn’t think they could go this far,” my mother said. “If it were me, I would have gone straight to the leader’s office and sat there. If she ignored me, I’d go directly to the education bureau. This is bullying. Shanghai is fine, but Changshu isn’t? Guess what your aunt said. She said, ‘Forget it, forget it. I’ll leave my phone at home when the time comes. They won’t know where I went anyway.’”
This is basically a grown-up version of school bullying. Even the smallest bit of power can be used to make someone’s life difficult.
And there is another layer to it. Some measures may begin with a legitimate purpose. Quarantine and testing were necessary tools for controlling the pandemic. Phone location information is also only a tool. But if there are no boundaries on who can use these tools and how, then anyone holding a little authority can misuse them, and something designed for public safety can become destructive.
Of course, this is not a problem belonging to any one country. It is a problem of human nature. But in a normal society, people keep speaking up and keep fighting for their rights. When bullies are repeatedly made to pay a price, society has a better chance of becoming more normal.