My Nana

I was born in a small county named Yan’jin in the center of China. Most people lived their whole lives there and never move. My parents have four kids; I am the second oldest one. When I was a kid, my parents had a wholesale business. They were so busy that we met them only at dinner. After dinner, they returned to the store and slept there instead of home. It was my grandmother who took care of us. We called her Nana, which gave us a warm feeling.

Nana had a nice personality, and she was very thoughtful and warm-hearted. She loved our family very much. Besides that, she always gave a hand whenever our neighbors needed help. As a person who never went to school in her whole life, Nana was really smart. She could do complicated calculations faster than a calculator. And she did everything fast and good.

At that time, people wore handmade shoes, which required a lot of work. Nana made shoes for the whole family. What a huge workload! She made shoes by heart and our shoes were always the most beautiful in our neighborhood. Whenever our neighbors saw the shoes that we wore, they would come our home to borrow the paper patterns of those shoes. Sometimes, she did paper-cut for us. Whenever she did that, all of us sat around her, looked at her and thought that maybe she was doing magic. (a magic trick)

In traditional Chinese culture, children are supposed to do what they were told. But Nana gave us enough freedom. We could do what we interested in. As a kid, sometimes we don’t know what we need to do. There are things that we didn’t like but we need to do. For example, we didn’t like to go to school, because it was boring. We had to sit in a room all day and no pets, no flowers, no trees and no fun. Even like that, Nana never pushed us. She had her own way to do that. Every day, Nana stood at the front door and gave us an apple or a candy before we left home to school.