Brain Stroke at Age of 93

Mom visited Washington DC April 2018 before going back to China.

I want to use some time to write about my mom. She is 93 years old this year. I ought to have visited her earlier this year but couldn't go because my wife broke her wrist. Now I am in the middle of an election, which consumes me on top of a full-time job.

A month ago, my mom suffered a brain stroke (brain ischemia) and lost most of her mobility.

I had been able to make video calls with her every day before this happened. I hope that makes me feel close to her. I know she didn’t feel that way. As my dad often told us, my mom put everything into raising me and my younger brother. For me, mom means home to go back to.

My mom experienced a difficult life from a very young age and witnessed too much during the Japanese invasion in WWII—only five of her ten siblings survived after the war. My grandpa, a first-generation railroad engineer in China, was escorting some important railroad equipment to escape the Japanese advance. But the Japanese army moved faster and caught him and his big family. My grandpa was beaten up by the soldiers. One of the soldiers stopped robbing money from my grandpa when five-year-old mom cried very loudly. My second uncle said my mom saved the whole family from starvation since that Japanese soldier must have regained his conscience when my mom cried. In the middle of China’s civil war between 1946–1949, Shijiazhuang, the city where my mom’s family lived, became the site of the first major battle between the two sides, with over 10,000 soldiers dead or wounded. My grandma died at age 39 during that time, and the remaining five siblings left the city and went to different parts of the country separately.

After the war, my mom taught herself the two years of elementary school education she had missed and was admitted into a technical school for railroad engineers. There she met my dad. After graduation, they were both sent to a faraway place called Jilin to work.