The Secret Pattern
February 18, 2025 at 01:51AMIn this beautiful and subtle essay for Granta, Aube Rey Lescure returns to Shanghai, China, for the first time in 15 years. As she visits with her mother, father, and grandmother, she observes China today, festooned with influencers livestreaming their activities, a place where everyone pays for goods using their cell phone. She considers this modern present with a not-so-distant past in which things were far, far different for her grandmother’s family during the Cultural Revolution.
We lie side by side in bed and scroll through photos on her phone. I ask Nainai to tell me the old stories. She’s told them before, but I’ve forgotten. She says her older brother was beaten to death at the age of thirty-three during the Cultural Revolution, when working as an accountant and refusing to lend money to agitators. He left behind four young children and a wife, all of whom came to live with my grandmother. My father was just a child when this happened. The wife remarried nine months later, but her second husband froze to death on the street soon after (my grandmother isn’t sure how). Nainai says she only figured out last year how her own mother died. One winter in the 1970s there was warning of a great earthquake. Villagers were told to sleep outside in the courtyard, and in the state of emergency no one had food rations to replenish. First, Nainai’s mother said she didn’t really have an appetite, and no one thought too much of it, but for the next seven days she really ate less and less. ‘And I didn’t force her to eat. No one forced her to eat. The seventh day I held her hand at night and it was ice-cold. The next day she drew her last breath. It was only later, when reading about people going on hunger strikes, that I finally figured it out. She went on a hunger strike.’
‘Deliberately?’ I asked.
‘She was seventy already. We didn’t have enough food. She didn’t want to be a burden.’
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/17/the-secret-pattern/
via IFTTT
Watch