Today we get stuck in traffic on our way to watch Billy Elliot at the Stratford Festival, three and a half hours allowed for time to play through videos of my niece’s cute antics over the years, to tease out why my uncle didn’t attend my cousin’s wedding so many moons ago, to paint pictures of office politics, how we react in the face of racially-charged micro-aggressions, to flesh out the outrageous extent of my grandpa’s dalliances, to mimick my other aunt’s lovingly-intended insults at my professional and personal life choices in an audience with my parents and grandparents, and to reaffirm the importance of unapologetically finding and following our own paths.
My aunt teaches me that EQ will always win over IQ, I tell her about the Chinese saying of 塞錢入你袋 - “stuffing money in another’s pocket” - which is a common practice of giving unsolicited advice / minding other’s businesses for them depending on who you ask. She tells me how motherhood softens her daughter, but also that she feels such liberation as each child graduates and marries. She explains her previous desire to travel giving way to fulfilment from community involvement - the lessons she learns and the perspectives she gains from volunteering at a soup kitchen. She shares her own struggles to forgive, and at the same time roundly rejects that our elders are meant to or will ever be role models: her own sister may love her eldest daughter, but she will always favour the younger, brighter one and she will never let the other forget this.
I love listening to this woman, I only hope that she feels more than responsibility in imparting all this knowledge.