About a hundred years ago, my great-grandfather went to Shanghai, which was still a little harbor at the time, and started his business. After he successfully formed a big shipping company and made a large profit, he funded one of the first private elementary schools in the Shanghai district. My grandpa, whom I always call Waigong, was the third oldest in this family. Compared to his bigger brother, selected by the Chinese government to study abroad in the USSR, and his bigger sister, who intended to be a teacher, Waigong didn’t shine academically before his high school career. However, when Waigong entered high school, he, in his words, “magically” got to be a top student, passed the college entrance test, which only had a four percent passing rate at the time, and got into the best university in his district. After he got into college, he was the class president. After he graduated as a physical chemistry major student and started working for a while, he became the district manager of Baosteel, a Chinese steel company with about 30,000 people. Now, after he retired, he actively took charge of the retired people’s association for his company and the alumni association for his university. While writing all this down, I tried to picture somebody with all these credentials without associating them with Waigong. What appeared in my mind was a tall man with wild ambition in his eyes, who was always looking for opportunities to gain another title.
My grandpa, however, looks the total opposite of that—at the age of seventy-six he looks like any elder college literature professor—tall and lean, gray squared-shaped glasses, and grizzled hair that reflects the sunshine. He has a habit of taking a dark-colored handkerchief anywhere in his black briefcase so he doesn’t waste tissues. When receiving marketing calls that my mom and I would just hang up on, Waigong will carefully listen to what the person says and reply with a friendly, “No thank you.”
When Waigong was young, the company in China was in favor of people who focused on working diligently and not showing off, which differs from the mainstream office culture now. When Waigong first started to work, he actively chose to go to the company’s factory located in Dongbei, one of the coldest places in China, since this particular area lacked people with rich academic knowledge. During the winter, there were very few food choices. The three most common foods on the table were white cabbage, white carrots, and white rice, this group nicknamed “three white” in Dongbei. For somebody who had grown up in Shanghai, a city near the sea that provided rich and high quality food choices, Waigong would need to face a table of cabbage and carrots cooked in different styles every day. Also, due to the extreme cold in Dongbei’s long winter, the ground would usually be too frozen to safely drive, especially late at night. Waigong always liked to stay in the factory until it was totally dark outside. Then he would walk back. When I was little, he would make up a story about the wolves in Dongbei’s cold winter: “Qiqi [my Chinese nickname], if you don’t go to sleep now, I will call the wolves to eat you! They would just put their front paw on your back, just like a friend. If you turn, then you’re gone!”
He kept eating “three white” and walking in those chilling nights back home for several years before his hard work was gradually recognized by the leadership of the company. They saw the extra work he did and the fact that he didn’t actively talk about his diligence. Once his brightness was seen, he was quickly given more and more responsibility since the managers knew that Waigong would treat every part of his job seriously, no matter if he were publicly honored for that effort or not. These experiences made Waigong very pure or in some way naive. My mom constantly tells him that the world is changing and he shouldn’t be so sincere and take everything so seriously. Every time, Waigong just smiles.
When I was in elementary school, I started to take a math Olympics class in the third grade and Waigong, who was a STEM major in college, decided to be my extra tutor. I would see him prepare for teaching me: he sat at the table, wearing a pair of gray glasses, reading and copying the words from my notes. Then he would ask me to go through the concepts with him and do questions that he personalized for me—questions he made up after carefully reading through all the sample questions and playing with all the numbers and symbols. I always remember reading his way of writing 2, which was so unique; it looked like a combination of a semicircle and an L. Also, he not only went through all the concepts and questions himself before working with me, but also, as somebody who seldom interacted with a computer, typed every lesson I learned into very organized documents. When the class was getting more and more complicated, he spent more and more time sitting in front of the computer. Sometimes, in order for him to find one right symbol to insert, he would search for several minutes. When I entered fifth grade, it seemed like this job was becoming a burden that he wasn’t able to carry—he would actually sacrifice his sleeping time in order to finish typing his sessions in time. As a nearly seventy-year-old grandpa, he even temporarily lost a chunk of hair due to the little amount of sleep he got. By then, in confusion, my mom asked him to stop the sessions. She complained that he was too hard on himself. Waigong just smiled.
When I got into middle school, Waigong was at the age to retire. But he decided to keep working for the company with a fairly good title but less salary. He still went to work five days a week. He still woke up at 7 a.m. so he could get to the company at 8 a.m. He still took his job very seriously. Once, he took me to his office, and I saw layers of documents on his table. I saw him sit at the table, in the gray glasses he wore when he helped me with math, reading and taking notes on all the pieces. Afterward, I ate yogurt in his office and accidentally spilt it on a piece of the document marked “urgent.” That’s almost the only time in my memory that Waigong got mad—even when he was angry, he would just keep saying, “How can you do that? That makes me disrespect the person who wrote this!”
During weekend time, he would even work extra hours. When my mom asked him to eat outside, he would reply that he had no time since he needed to work or organize activities for the retired colleagues. My mom still didn’t understand him. She told him that he should be easier on himself and not work so hard since he was no longer the manager. Waigong just smiled.
When I got into high school, Waigong was still working. He still wore his gray glasses and wrote that special 2 whenever he took notes. He still smiled all the time. I found that he was almost always happy.
Once I asked him why he didn’t work less diligently since he wasn’t paid very well. He said, “Isn’t finishing the job in the best quality a basic feature? I don’t like to think if it’s worthy or not since that takes more energy than just doing it.”
Once I asked him why he didn’t just hang up a marketing call since it was such a waste of time. He said, ”Qiqi, think about that, if you were the person whose job is to make marketing calls, would receiving hanging up all the time make you feel bad? Their jobs are already hard and they are probably not earning a decent salary. So why don’t we be a little bit patient and give them a thank you?”
Gradually, I started to understand why he was the person who got into college when the competition was so intense, why he became the leader in the company, why he was always willingly doing work. I see him in his gray glasses. I see him walk toward the company at 7:50 a.m. I see him smile.