The pain

It's been a curious week, from the "John" the psychotic student, to my own operation, to a busy "recovery" with medical leave at home, to feeling unwell at the company Christmas party on Friday night yet receiving the "Supreme Award", to picking up my in-laws and spending all of yesterday as they marvelled about trees. It's Sunday before the last few days of work and I've already slipped into holiday/rest mode because very little else has been my usual work schedule.

On the recovery, I'm still sore and swollen, TMI: still rather constipated and needing metamucil to relieve my belly, but I'm sleeping well and cutting back on the painkillers. Today is the day when the bandage should come off the wound, but I'll leave that till later in the day. I was hoping that things would be less painful by now but I was probably too optimistic. I slept well in anticipation of the surgery perhaps because I didn't really have time to think about it deeply.

As mentioned before I enjoy the company of my in-laws. My father-in-law has always enjoyed communicating. He has always tried to make conversation; his father A-Gung, is the same. And he would make a good language teacher if there was ever a Qingyuan dialect Cantonese class. He grades his language down and is patient when he listens. He has found a way to understand me despite my bad tones, or overly creative way of expressing what should be simple things.

He is curious, too. He was looking all over our bookcase and spotted all the Chinese literature I had. One book caught his eye, a book on Chairman Mao which is incidentally banned in China. He has been reading it slowly but surely since he arrived. "Is this accurate?" he asked me this morning. Asking that of me who believes there aren't really accurate books, only perspectives and interpretations is not that fair. I told home it is probably not completely accurate but the books about Mao in China aren't either.

Reading it and talking about the topics opened a can of worms and led to my mother-in-law relating some stories from the past that Christy hadn't heard before. They had lived through the revolution and the Cultural Revolution so it isn't a surprise that there are some dark tales - one just assumes that most of them have already been told. Christy didn't know that her parents had seen people beaten to death in front of them. I guess it doesn't come up at the dinner table or when watering the crops. As she sometimes is bothered why her parents aren't "brave" to try new things, it is one of those realisations that hits you hard. Doing different things that made you stand out could once be a reason to be suspected and perhaps even killed.

One other uncle they talked about this morning was the village drunk when I was there. I saw him whenever I went to one village. He was married to an intellectually disabled woman, which always seemed just a bit too "arranged". They had some smart children though. I'd never known him sober. Apparently he was the rebel smart-alec, the kind who might say dangerous things for a laugh. When things got serious during the Cultural Revolution he had more than his fair share of "struggle sessions". It's impossible to know the details but it's a sad post-script to his life that someone that  might be written off as a "village drunk" had more pain and suffering that most people could probably handle before drinking himself into that state.