A Story

My grandfather used to call me “the college girl in the family”, because I am the first and only female in my father’s side of the family to attend college. My grandparents live in a village in rural China, where for a long time, women were not meant to be educated. “Smart women are hard to control” they said. My mother told me that the first time grandpa visited my parents after I was born, he pulled my father to the side and told him to find an opportunity to have another child. Of course, there could be no second child in my family because of the one child policy at the time. For a long time, I wondered just how much I disappointed grandpa simply by being a female, and it kept me up at night. I silently blamed him for making me wonder.

My father, however, did not buy into the stereotype. He is the first generation of his family to get out of the village through education, so he knew that for anyone, education can be best opportunity in a lifetime, as long as you worked hard enough. He never told me to hold back at school. I always knew that he would not tolerate underachievement in academics. It seemed harsh at times, but now that I look back, I am grateful that he taught me to value my own education. I loved school and learning ever since I first started elementary school. Going into college, I chose to leave my family and move to the United States to pursue a better quality education and to see a broader horizon of academia. I knew since my first day in college that I would not want to stop after my undergraduate study. I craved more experience and opportunities in Biomedical Engineering research, even though choosing to pursue a Ph.D. is not the easiest decision for Chinese women of my age.

Today in China, fewer women are denied education; however, a new trend has arisen – I call it the “higher education shaming” of women. Female PhDs are often seen as a weird and eccentric population, and are thought to be “un-marry-able” and abnormal. They appear in jokes, usually degrading ones, about left-over women who are single and over 30 years old. Rather than celebrating the academic achievements of a daughter or granddaughter, the families of higher-educated women would sigh and worry about their dim marriage prospects.

These family members do not include my parents. Much like me, my mother is also the first woman in her family to attend college and eventually get a Master of Science. Also like me, she had a father who was a strong advocate of education. She and my father were nothing but supportive when I decided to pursue a doctorate after my undergraduate study. I was not content, though; I could not help but wonder what grandpa would say. Have I done well enough to prove myself as worthy? Have I compensated for my gender? I was not even sure if those were the right questions to ask.

I visited grandpa in a local hospital this past summer. He was ill with stage four lung cancer, accompanied by weakness of the cardiac muscle. His heart was struggling to pump enough blood to his extremities, causing his skin to appear a dark purple color. Grandpa was lying in bed when I came in his ward; he immediately stood up when he saw me. “Come and sit down” he said and tapped the side of his bed. He asked me how I was doing, whether I had to “speak English to everyone, everyday”, and whether I could “ask the school to send me back home soon”. Then, after a brief moment of silence, he asked me when I planned to get married. I told him that marriage is not in my life plan any time soon, and that I wanted to study more. He looked at me for a few seconds, comprehending what I had just said. “Well,” eventually he opened his mouth again, as he put his hand on my shoulder, “I am so happy and proud”.  Something in my heart became ten pounds lighter at that moment. I went on to tell him that I was working on cardiovascular research in my lab. He pointed to his heart and said that it would be great if I could make him a better one.

That was the last time I would ever see my grandpa.

Families can be hard to understand, even with the proximity we have with them. I never quite understood how grandpa thought of me and my gender. Was he still disappointed that I am a girl despite my good academics? Did my good grades somehow eliminate his negative view of women? Or was his change of attitude only applicable to me? Maybe I will never truly forget his first reaction to the fact that I am female, but I loved him nonetheless. After all, it is rather useless to blame one person for a systemic stereotype, but I do hope that the recovery from a societal disease can start with as few as one mind.

Disclosure: I wrote this essay 4 year ago while applying for graduate school. As difficult as it was to write, it also felt self-indulgent to put it into words and to share it. So, thanks for the platform and the community!

Here at BU,

Han