A Good Fall by Ha Jin

our only child, so we’d thought it would be good to stay with him. Now I wish we hadn’t moved. At our ages—my wife is sixty-three and I’m sixty-seven—and at this time it’s hard to adjust to life here. In America it feels as if the older you are, the more inferior you grow.
    Both my wife and I understood we shouldn’t meddle with our grandchildren’s lives, but sometimes I simply couldn’t help offering them a bit of advice. She believed it was our daughter-in-law who had spoiled the kids and made them despise us. I don’t think Mandi is that mean, though beyond question she is an indulgent mother. Flora and Matt look down on everything Chinese except for some food they like. They hated to go to the weekend school to learn to read and write the characters. Matt announced, “I’ve no need for that crap.”
    I would have to force down my temper whenever I heard him say that. Their parents managed to make them attend the weekend school, though Matt and Flora had quit inscribing the characters. They went there only to learn how to paint with a brush, taking lessons from an old artist from Taiwan. The girl, sensitive by nature and delicate in health, might have had some talent for arts, but the boy was good at nothing but daydreaming. I just couldn’t help imagining that he might end up a guttersnipe. He wouldn’t draw bamboos or goldfish or landscapes with a brush; instead, he produced merely bands and lines of ink on paper, calling them abstract paintings. He experimented with the shades of the ink as if it were watercolors. Sometimes he did that at home too. Seeing his chubby face and narrow eyes as he worked in dead earnest, I wanted to laugh. He once showed a piece with some vertical lines of ink on it to an art teacher at his school. To my horror, the woman praised it, saying the lines suggested a rainfall or waterfall, and that if you observed them horizontally, they would bring to mind layers of clouds or some sort of landscape.
    What a crock was that! I complained to Gubin in private and urged him to pressure the children to study serious subjects, such as science, classics, geography, history, grammar, and penmanship. If Matt really couldn’t handle those, in the future he should consider learning how to repair cars and machines or how to cook like a chef. Auto mechanics make good money here—I know a fellow at a garage who can’t speak any English but pulls in twenty-four dollars an hour, plus a generous bonus at the end of the year. I made it clear to my son that a few tricks in “art” would never get his kids anywhere in life, so they’d better stop dabbling with a brush. Gubin said Matt and Flora were still young and we shouldn’t push them too hard, but he agreed to talk to them. Unlike Gubin, Mandi aligned herself with the children, saying we ought to let them develop freely as individuals, not strait-jacket them as they would back in China. My wife and I were unhappy about our daughter-in-law’s position. Whenever we criticized her, our grandchildren would mock us or yell at us in defense of their mother.
    I have serious reservations about elementary education in the United States. Teachers don’t force their pupils to work as hard as they can. Matt had learned both multiplication and division in the third grade, but two months ago I asked him to calculate how much seventy-four percent of $1,586 was, and he had no clue how to do it. I handed him a calculator and said, “Use this.” Even so, he didn’t know he could just multiply the amount by 0.74.
    “Didn’t you learn multiplication and division?” I asked him.
    “I did, but that was last year.”
    “Still, you should know how to do it.”
    “We haven’t practiced division and multiplication this year, so I’m not familiar with them anymore.” He offered that as an excuse. There was no way I could make him understand that once you learned something, you were supposed to master it and make it part of yourself. That’s why