Reflections | The wise, frugal grandmothers who ruled China before the disastrous Dowager Empress Cixi
- Tear-jerker Thai film about a dying grandmother makes columnist think of his own, and of China’s wise, frugal grand empress dowagers
A TikTok trend has film-goers filming their reactions before, during and after watching the movie How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies (Pat Boonnitipat, 2024), a Thai tear-jerker about the relationship between a young man and his dying grandmother.
Much as I fought against having my emotions so shamelessly manipulated, I succumbed to a tear or two, despite not having much luck with my own grandmothers.
My paternal grandmother is virtually a stranger to me. Widowed in her twenties, she was a schoolteacher until she died in her early fifties, before I turned two. She gave me my name, a legacy of hers that I’ll never change or add to.
Things are more complicated on my mother’s side of the family. My maternal grandfather had four wives. His principal wife died before I was born, I never saw the third one, and I’ve met the fourth one twice. My biological grandmother was the second wife.
I never liked her. She was a mercenary, hard-as-nails woman whose affections were doled out according to the amount of money she could get from her children, and later on her grandchildren, in exchange.
As I get older, I’m beginning to understand that her grasping nature, manifested as favouritism, might have been informed by her own poverty-stricken past, but try telling that to a child whose cousins with wealthier parents received gifts of expensive toys and fancy sweets, whereas all he got was a keychain picked up at some airport.
