My Grandpa & Grandma: A Life | Looking Back at the Second Sino-Japanese War & Chinese Communism
This commemorative article is written by my father and serves as the main source of information for my previous article, Remembering Grandpa & the War the World Forgot (Unit 731). The text has been translated into English from its original Mandarin. Paragraph breaks have been added for clarity. I have inserted some explanations of cultural contexts.
Grandpa passed away at 3:53 PM March 29th this year, at the age of 98. He was born on June 26th, 1929, which is considered very old in the village. There were two other elderly women of his generation. He was the eldest in the village. Nevertheless, it's still a regret for us, because we had hoped he would live to be 100 and set a record as the first centenarian in the village. But fate did not grant our wishes, and he himself was unwilling to cooperate.
A month or two before his death, Grandpa suffered from severe edema, loss of appetite, and extremely low blood pressure. However, he refused to cooperate with the doctors' treatment in the hospital. He would pull out the IV drip, throw away the prescribed medication, and repeatedly complain that dying was so difficult, insisting on going home to die rather than staying in the hospital. When we visited him, he only said he wanted to go home to die.
Because he was deaf, and we were worried he couldn't hear us, I wrote him a three-page letter, which he tore up. He even gestured with his hand as if he were slitting his throat with a knife, saying he would commit suicide if he wasn't discharged. The hospital, at their wits' end, eventually persuaded us to take him home.
