At sixty-eight, Grandpa went back to night school

The year my grandfather turned sixty-eight, he became a student again.

His family was poor when he was young and he had only two years of school, so the characters he knew were few. He farmed, he did manual work, and he got by without reading. Then in 2020 he discovered he could no longer get through. He couldn't read the words on his phone. He couldn't register at the hospital. He couldn't even buy vegetables without showing a health code. The one that went deepest was what his granddaughter said. She was five, and she brought him a picture book and asked him to tell her the story. He turned the pages for a long time, went red, and said, "Grandpa's tired. Tomorrow."

That night he told me, "Sign me up for a class."

I thought he was talking to make himself feel better. The next day he actually went to the community office to ask. The street office ran a free literacy class for the elderly, Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and the students were all old people like him. At sixty-eight, with the old schoolbag I'd used in middle school on his back, he became the most diligent student in the room.

His method was clumsy in a way that hurt to watch. In his character notebook, every character carried a mark only he could read. Beside the character for "thank" he drew a little stick figure bowing. Beside the character for "money" he drew a coin. He stuck notes all over the house: "television" on the television, "refrigerator" on the refrigerator, "granddaughter's room" on my door. He made a point of telling my grandmother that this last one was the hardest to write, which was why it got an extra note. In the evenings, doing his homework, his reading glasses slid down to the tip of his nose and he wrote stroke by stroke like a schoolboy. Grandma laughed at him. He said, with complete justification, "What are you laughing at? The teacher praised me."

Three months later he produced his first report card. He could stumble all the way through his granddaughter's favorite picture book, Guess How Much I Love You. He read from the pinyin he had penciled in above the characters. He got two words wrong. His granddaughter corrected two. The two of them sat squeezed under the desk lamp, one the student and one the teacher. My mother filmed from the doorway and nobody in the house said anything, because when Grandpa finished the last page he applauded himself.

The capacity to learn can slow down. It is when the wish to learn goes out that a person is truly old. Grandpa relit his at sixty-eight so that he could finish one book for a five-year-old.

On the last day of class there was a small ceremony. Each student read a passage they most wanted to read. Grandpa read the line on the birthday card his granddaughter had drawn: "Wishing Grandpa good health and happiness every day." He read it slowly and steadily, and when he finished he said, "Before, when I held a card in my hand, all I could see was the picture. Now I can see what the children wrote. That's better than anything."

These days he handles a smartphone more smoothly than my grandmother. He books appointments, scans codes, sends thumbs-up in the family group, looks up chess endgames. His character notebook is on its seventh volume, and the newest page has the words for "plane tree" and "fallen leaf." There are two plane trees outside his granddaughter's school, he says, and he has to know them so he doesn't go to the wrong tree when he collects her.

A few days ago, at a family gathering, he announced his new goal. He is going to learn brush calligraphy well enough to write his own name, so that at New Year he can write the couplets himself and stop asking other people. Everyone applauded. My daughter asked, "How old is great-grandpa?" I said, "Your great-grandpa says age is counted by other people. Whether you learn is up to you."