A Touching Story about Family
After drifting for an entire afternoon, I was exhausted and stopped at a small stall by the creek to fill my stomach. The stall owner was a limping old man who smiled faintly but said nothing. His face was weathered, and the lines on his forehead were particularly deep, suggesting he was over seventy years old.
I sat on a nearby rock and started eating. The weather was getting cooler, and there were noticeably fewer tourists, leaving the old man’s business quite slow.
The old man sat on another rock, carefully or perhaps clumsily pressing the keys on a brand-new Nokia phone he pulled from his jacket pocket. He pressed a few keys, thought for a moment, and occasionally let out a chuckle. Was he winning a game?
Suddenly, the old man looked at me and asked, “Can I ask you about a word?” Only then did I realize from his voice that he wasn’t that old. He shyly added, “I’ll only be sixty next year!”
“What word do you want to ask about?” From the corner of my eye, I saw that he wasn’t playing a game but was sending a text message.
The old man said, “Ao, as in staying up late.” He couldn’t speak Mandarin well but knew a few characters and could use the stroke input method.
There was no place to write on the rocks, so I directly helped him type it on the phone. Glancing at the message on the screen, it seemed to be addressed to his children.
The old man didn’t feel embarrassed at all, just gave a sheepish smile and said, “I’m just clumsy. A young man in the village taught me how to use it for several days, but I still can’t get the hang of it.”
With no business and no rush to go home, we started chatting.
The old man’s wife had passed away early, and he had seven children, all working out of town and still unmarried. He felt he owed them a lot, but they held no grudge and each sent him sixty yuan a month from their hard-earned money.
The old man had never spent a cent of it and saved it all in the bank, naively hoping to use the money to help his children buy houses and get married. In spring, he was busy with farming, and during the summer and autumn, he pushed a tricycle to the drifting area to sell roasted taro, corn, water chestnuts, and tea eggs.
Though there were many tourists, there were also many vendors, so his income wasn’t substantial, but he seemed quite content.
The phone wasn’t bought by the old man, nor was it a gift from anyone; someone had dropped it while drifting. There were no saved numbers in the phone, and after waiting for a month without a call from the owner, he decided to keep it.
“I had long wanted to buy a phone. Last Mid-Autumn Festival, my second daughter came home and found me passed out in the courtyard from exhaustion. My son said he wanted to take me to live with him, worried that no one would know if I got hurt or sick. I refused.
My daughter said I at least needed a phone to report my safety daily. Phones are so expensive! I told them if I had an emergency, I’d ask a neighbor to call the village committee for help.”
The old man shrank back timidly and asked, “Picking it up doesn’t count as stealing, right? It’s not illegal, is it?”
I reminded the old man that if the lost item was of significant value or high cost, not reporting it to the authorities was indeed illegal. However, this phone was worth no more than seven or eight hundred yuan, and since the owner hadn’t called, they probably didn’t care about it.
The old man had trouble saving a message again. He stored the messages he wanted to send to his seven children in the drafts folder, each message over two pages long and mostly similar in content:
The first sentence always said, “I am very happy and healthy today”; the second sentence always asked, “How are you doing today”; from the third sentence onward, each was different, containing bits of family news and interesting stories from the city and countryside; the last sentence was always the same: “Be good to yourself, be good to others, be a good person, and don’t be afraid if anything happens, you still have Dad!”
A warm feeling surged in my heart, and I asked him why he didn’t send them. He said, “I’m afraid I’ll think of more to say later.”
I laughed, “You can always send another message!”
The old man shook his head, “It costs ten cents per message. Sending each one costs twenty cents. I’ll wait until it gets dark to send them.”
The way poor people express love is often humble, yet the emotions they convey are just as pure and true! Text messages are such a small medium, but the old man condensed his love for his seven children into seven messages, making it seem vast and boundless!
Thank you for reading! ” Sitestorys “
