Memento
Of verdant grasses sealed by dust and gusty wind, the mud that once was boulder and firm, the decadence of pines and thorns, and fragrance penetrating the chasm, a newly carved imprint of my grandfather’s bare feet became visible to the ground that held his solemn gravity. Just as the weight of the present deepened the crevices, so did my birth.
My grandfather, a barefoot doctor during and after the Cultural Revolution, left us the day I was born and knew me as no more than a stranger; whereas I could see him clearly through my mother’s tireless descriptions. I, therefore, classify his presence in the family as “mythical”, which my father and brother could not agree more upon.
Historically, my grandfather was chained to the Cultural Revolution and became part of the “lost generation” — the barefoot doctors who, after a few months of training, served the revolution for ten years, but soon faded into oblivion and were replaced by “real doctors”. My mother’s fragmented memories, however, bring back to life a flesh-and-blood, who lived in fervor and endless hope, but instead of being forced to, he chose to be a barefoot doctor in an unheard-of, bygone village, remaining barefoot until his death, dedicated to treating his people for snake venom and epilepsy, and leaving behind an extraordinary legacy of life-saving extravagance.
Why was barefoot the recurring sign of my grandfather’s past?
In search of clues, I went through a plethora of documents and archives just to study barefoot doctors. I came out empty-handed, realizing “barefoot” was not literal (as shoes were shockingly invented ten thousand years ago), but was a state of being — a revolutionary populist idea of being grounded and connected to the earth (soil) and its people. By reading tales akin to my grandfather’s, I was drawn to conversations with people standing on the same land only at different times.
Dating back to 8000 years ago, when writings hadn’t been created yet, my now-to-dust fathers would have told me the very finding of rice, how each dust-like grain was the beginning of our kind, how the old saying “every single rice counts” was so much more than just a saying.
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Go even further, my ancestors’ livelihoods would have spread like dandelion seeds, not just because they were nomads or hunter-gatherers, but simply because their stories circulated off the beaten track.
I suspect that my fathers would have lived in a borderless world where race, gender, MBTI, and any of the traits we value today would have been ignored because of a shared humanity. My fathers’ lives, before they knew it, became tales. At the end of the day’s work, when the dawn engulfed the teeming hills and rivers they saw as their world, they would gather around the sparks and hearths in a smaller refuge, the warmth and comfort of a simpler yet more ferocious time. To kill time, the elders preach aloud every famous adventure, every struggle to live and hunt and build. They thanked God, the earth, the winds, the moon, and the sun for the bounty of harvest and food, and for their very existence as they were the first to see how vulnerable life was. Only in that moment of looking back, their life seems to pause, and it was only during the darkest hours that the young men were kindled to live for something greater.
My grandfather’s revelation of returning to barefoot after a rollercoaster-like revolution constantly reminds me that one can follow the flow of history and join the grand narrative or pursue an ardent life and craft a new tale, one worth sharing around hearths, one unconfined by time.
“Maybe Grandpa’s still here”, the 6-year-old me wondered.
“I doubt that”, said my brother.
“No, maybe Jiaxuan is right, as long as I’m here, your grandpa will never be forgotten”, said my mother.
Now I go barefoot.
