My Grandma's Yard

When I was around four, I spent most my daytime with my grandma in her home in Zichuan, a small town of coal mines in eastern China. She lived in a ground-floor apartment with a yard, hidden behind shops along a main street. Most ground was floored with cement, especially the central part. My grandma was often in this yard: watering plants, cooking, putting quilts and clothes on the strings on sunny days, sweeping the floor, spilling some water to calm the dust, or feeding chickens and one time a hedgehog. She was busy and I was around. There was a small rectangular area of earth saved to grow vegetables like garlics and spring onions, a grape vine, and a pomegranate tree that I would climb to pick up; on the southwestern corner, there was a small and dark storage room; outside it, sacks of dead tree branches and empty plastic bottles piled up reaching the shed ceiling. My grandpa picked dry branches up from the street or parks to add fuels to our traditional cooking hearth (made of earth). It sat next to the southern wall in its mid (though we did have modern gas cooking appliances). Along the northern wall, big and small flowerpots lined up in rows sitting on low and high shelfs, connecting with the balcony and also my grandma’s bedroom.

She was, of course, taking care of me; but as you have read out, I felt I was accompanying her. She was taking care of the yard, the whole lively world, from the sky to the earth, and I was just part of it. In some spring afternoons, she would take out of jars and sacks of rice and millet, put some newspaper and rattan pans on the ground, and spread out grains to let out humid air and winnow out those very tiny worms. Showered by sunbeams, with our heads down, we soothed grains with our palms and picked worms out with our fingers.

Months before, I quitted the kindergarten. In some mornings, when my dad brought me there, I lied on the ground, refused to get up and grasped his trousers, not willing to going in. Surely, I was left and brought into the classroom, but I ran away, rushed to the front gate, and tried to climb over to escape. ‘Kindergarten’ means ‘children’s garden’ in German, but it was not own by children and there was no plant. The teachers, women in their twenties, thirties or forties, would say ‘we will watch well your child’ to relived parents every morning. ‘Watch well’ (kan hao) is an expression of ‘taking care of’ in Chinese. The teachers indeed cared us by ‘watching well’: their omnipresent watching surrounded me as a child, while I was eating, sleeping, walking, sitting and playing, when I was expected to look at my bowl while eating, close my eyes during the afternoon nap and look at my hands when sitting upright and putting my hands on the knees. Such watching was a performance of their duty of care, but for me, I was watched to be managed instead of to be seen. Sometimes, when I was zooming out, another child would nudge me to remind, ‘the teacher is watching you!’

Why do people have eyes? Why are eyes used for watching people? When over twenty years later, when I read scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa discusses the diffrent politics in optic vision and haptic knowing in Matters of Care, I suddenly recalled my grandma’s coarse and warm palm: she was lightly patting on my back in the darkness. She seemed to still be enjoying telling the stories of her grandpa and I was just by side, listening. Touch could be???? a In those time with my grandma, the light-touch freedom I felt in her care arose from her lively, busy and productive life (like a magician, she cultivated the yard). I did not occupy her life, her eyes and her hands. She did not try to ensure me to eat a lot, sleep a lot, learn a lot, but just left the food, beds, the yard and her, all around me. She cared me by living with me. And naturally, she gave the space around her to me. I inhabited the space together with her.

Though the yard was much smaller than the kindergarten, every corner of the yard unfolded to me as I lived in it. The accumulation of unimpressive moments with my Grandma expanded the small yard to become my land. Sometimes I felt time does not exist. There were sunrises and sunsets, but I was given so generously enough time to just stare at a cactus or sleep until I wake up naturally that time was not a thing in mind. By comparison, in the kindergarten, time restrained me: I was supposed to be in a fixed place—my bed or my seat— at a certain time. The campus in the kindergarten was as liminal as that of the teachers’s watching. The vantage vision with distance, was projected onto me with a finite expectation to follow the daily schedule. In some sense, my feeling of the two spaces were both twisted by the way how I experienced time, respectively shaped by my grandma’s living with me, and the kindergarten teacher’s watching me.