My Uncle

My uncle passed away.

The relationship between my uncle and I has never been very close. My father left his hometown to attend university, and had never stayed in his birthplace for more than a week after that. In all these years, I met my uncle in less than ten occasions. Our families took a short trip together. We went to his home during the Chinese New Year holiday on a couple of occasions. And he traveled to Macau during his vacations on another couple of occasions. Besides that, I couldn't even remember when and where I had met him.

The most memorable image of my uncle is the family photo my father put on his desk. That photo was taken right before he left home for university. They were 18 and 15 respectively. When I was still in school, I took postcards or letters written by my father to the post office and mailed them to my uncle every two or three months. And every two or three months, I found postcard or letters written by my uncle in our mailbox and took them to my father. When letters were replaced by telephones, my father would pass the telephone to me and asked me to say happy New Year or happy birthday to my uncle. I had nothing more to say after those phrases. But he was always repeating the embarrassing thing I did as a baby boy. I didn't remember any of those and wasn't thrilled of being constantly reminded of that either.

My father and my uncle look like identical twins. However, I really couldn't find anything else that suggested that they share the same genes. My father went to university, got white-collared jobs in major cities across China before settling down in Macau. My uncle never finished high school and spent the rest of his life in the countryside he was born. While my father is immensely patriotic and always in touch with current events and in support of the government and political leaders, my uncle acquired most of his happiness like the rest of the men in the village, through alcohol and tobacco.

Sometimes my father would tell him to drink less alcohol and smoke fewer cigarettes, and he would ask my father what’s the point of living on this earth if a person was not allowed to enjoy life.

My father often tell us that Mao Zedong's new China allowed poor kids like him to attend university free of charge. Otherwise he would not be able to achieve his Chinese dream of a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. My uncle blamed the rule of providing only one free education quote to each family by the communist regime took away his opportunities and hope. Given his talent for music, maybe he could become an instructor at a music school or even a professional musician at an orchestra.

I took him to a Lang Lang concert in Macau a few years ago. He later told me that it was the best moment of his life.

My uncle was always telling my father to give me more music education. He was deeply disappointed when he heard that I still couldn't read the musical notes. He was much more passionate about music than his routine day job at a money-losing state factory in the village. Unlike my father, who doesn't even have a CD player at home, my uncle played at least five instruments, and was considered an expert in certain kinds of Chinese folk music. He composed a few songs. But they were never published.

My father believed in hard work and nothing else. My uncle is superstitious and dreams of winning the lottery every day. At the end, he did win the lottery, sort of. After he retired from the job he always hated, he made a small fortune by giving private music lessons to the rich kids in the village. The jackpot came when the abandoned family farm land was taken away by the government to make room for highways, somebody sued collectively and he was rewarded a lot of money in compensation. He built a four-storey house for himself as reward. Although it was in a remote village in rural China, the breathtaking scenery surrounding the place made me feel like he was living in paradise.

Less than a year after he moved into his new home, the bottle and the nicotine had finally taken its toll. I visited him in the hospital during his final weeks. Once again, I couldn't find the right words to say. He told me how much fun he had with me when he visited my family in Macau - the food, the sightseeing, the concert.

I could hardly hold back my tears.