Happiness Is a Choice You Make by John Leland

Author:John Leland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

EIGHT

The Lessons of Ping

“I’m older, I have to make myself feel good.”

We never talk about dying. What’s the use? When you get old you have to die. We go downstairs and play cards. At our age, you should prepare yourself.

—Ping Wong, ninety

Compared with Fred, who had done everything to reach old age financially secure, Ping Wong had almost nothing. She spent her working years earning below minimum wage in a doctor’s office in Chinatown, and retired at close to eighty with no savings, relying on Supplemental Security benefits of just seven hundred dollars a month. Three decades after moving to the United States from Hong Kong, she still spoke only rudimentary English. Her husband and two of her sisters were dead, and her only son had been murdered in a department store in Canton, China. Even after two hip replacement operations, the arthritis in her back and legs made it painful for her to walk.

When I met her in her well-kept apartment near Gramercy Park, she had only one complaint: old people who complained too much.

“People complain about their health, or they say, today I have to see the doctor,” she said. “Many of them are like that. Most of them, to tell you the truth. They think if they complain, others will have pity, but I think it’s the other way around. Who can help you? A little pain—just take it and make yourself stronger. Take a deep breath. Try everything to heal yourself.”

At eighty-nine when we met, she had cobbled together a life that was better than she could have imagined. She had a ridiculously cheap apartment in a ritzy part of town; a home attendant to do all the cooking, cleaning, and shopping, courtesy of Medicaid; food stamps and meals on wheels; and a daily mah-jongg game with fellow Cantonese speakers right in her building’s activities room. For the first time in her life, she had ease and time to herself, with her needs met and no responsibilities toward others. She was never lonely because she always had friends around. Compared with the decades she spent working, raising a family, and nursing her dying husband, she had more financial security and fewer worries. “We’re enjoying our life,” she said. “Though we’re not rich, we live a decent, better life. I can buy what I want, even expensive wool. Before, it was very difficult to get it.”

The lessons of Ping began almost as soon as I met her. She seemed to be constantly translating them from one language to the other, pronouncing them one time in Cantonese, another time in English, teasing out different nuances in each. She viewed old age as a life stage like any other, in which “you must try to make yourself as happy as you can.” Everyone will get old, she said. “It’s a kind of experience. You have to keep yourself up all the time. Don’t think of all those miserable things. Think all beautiful things, like when you were young, and how you enjoyed yourself, and like me, my husband, how good he was.

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