family and stuff
I only just learnt more about one of my grandfathers. He and his elder brother were orphans. Their last remaining parent, the father, died when they were 8. They made a living off picking animal excrement on roads to sell because that made good fertilizer. Eventually his brother stayed in China to take care of their farm there (because if you don't, it'll become somebody else's) and he migrated south to look for a job, and then helped many of his kinsmen while they were here, even with finding them spouses. He sent the earnings back.
He was much older than my grandmother so I never got to see him. I heard that he first saw my grandmother eat tofu, thought, "what a frugal woman!" and decided to go for it.
That was one more piece of news that is added to the family history, I suppose. I want to write a period fiction based on my family's experience, mixed up with fragments from other people's experiences in oral history, because those were more "real". Basically, the subaltern studies of my grandfather's age showed that they were pretty fucking poor and living in horrible conditions. According to my dad's accounts, he never drank soda except at New Year's, and it is only during new year that they would get to eat meat.
In other words, there has been a phenomenal growth in material well-being over the last thirty to forty years, give or take.
When he was in his 20s, he got married, but his wife died, and he re-married in his thirties.
I imagine that this is, for most of my contemporaries, hard to imagine. Many have MUCH younger parents than I do. And many have English-educated parents. At any rate, the educational standard for my father's school was appalling, from accounts that he said, so honestly at some point I feel like society definitely owes this smart man something.
What many people disregard about education and equal access to GOOD education (that is preferably free, because cost is a huge barrier) is that it levels the playing field. It may cause a degree inflation, yes, and is in contrary to the current elite's interest. But that is, I'd hate to say this, bourgeoisie thinking and it is definitely against my personal principles.
If my grandfather's still alive, he would be 99, and his elder brother would be more than a hundred years old. So I guess they're my connection to the early 1900s, or even late 1890s.