It was a prayer come true.
Since we left for Africa, Zhou yeye (Grandpa Zhou) had always been on our hearts and minds. As an frail, 80-year old busker on the street who walked with a limp, lugging a broken bag of items wherever he went, we wondered who would take care of him while we were away.
Yet, through the kindness of a few angels, Zhou yeye received love and care from passers-by like yourselves, who sometimes even wrote to us through my blog to send a message of love and a thoughtful photograph with him to say, “He’s well. He says hello and that he is praying for you all.”
Since we returned, moved and hopped onto a new bandwagon of events, we never passed by where he was anymore. On the days we did, he was not there.
As Christmas drew nearer, I wondered how he was, especially since just months ago, I got a phone-call from him saying he had just been discharged from hospital from a bad bout of pneumonia. It was a lovely university student, a stranger, who had contacted me through Facebook to ask me to call her back because Zhou yeye urgently needed to speak with me.
Years ago, on our last day of our first trip to Canada to get married, I remember praying to have a chance to meet the homeless man on a wheelchair, R, whom Cliff had cared for during the cold winters in Toronto, where he grew up. It was a slim chance, since many of the homeless had been chased away by the authorities from the usual parks. But that morning, I prayed, and there R was, in his wheelchair, shocked, relieved, and happy to see Cliff with his new wife.
That gave me courage to pray to see Zhou yeye again soon. And what better way could God have answered my prayer, when, on the way to see my aunt in the east on Christmas Day, we saw Zhou yeye right there in the same corner he has been at for years.
A man with few expressions, his face lit up like a lightbulb when he saw us.
“Wai Jia! Cliff!” he said in mandarin.
“Merry Christmas!” we said, with a warm packet of food from a Chinese stall 2 streets away, filled with his favorite vegetables, beancurd and silken egg.
As we sat down with him and listened as he shared songs and stories, it felt like we had never been away.
For so many years, Zhou yeye had taught me so much about loving the poor. This time, was no different.
Months ago, when a passer-by helped him to call us, we had invited him for lunch with us. No, was his outright answer.
Assuming he must not have missed us, or that he wanted to spend more time making money (as was his answer previously), we were disappointed.
Yet, as we opened our hearts to listen to him pour out his grievances, we discovered that because his sleep had been so disrupted, he could no longer wake up earlier than noon, and has since had to miss lunch every day.
How quick we are to be impatient with the poor, because we just don’t understand.
As we passed him a warm packet of dinner, I was relieved to see he had another packet of food stashed behind him, assumedly from another passer-by.
But relief slowly faded into a bruised smoulder when I opened it to find deep-fried chicken wings. With his dentures, there was no way he could have eaten them. As a frail elderly man, he needed balanced, nutritious meals, not convenient junk food- even more so now as he could no longer wake up in time to attend the free lunch meals for the needy in his neighbourhood.
How quick we are to dole out our version of help to the poor, because we just don’t understand.
It was Cliff who reinforced this lesson to me, as he recollected how much he learnt during a Christmas outreach to the needy in wintry Canada, as many of the poor shared how touched they were by their gifts, except they couldn’t eat any of the apples or hard fruits they were given, since many didn’t have teeth to do so!
“If anything happens to you, who are the doctors and nurses going to call?” I asked, knowing he would fully understand the context of my question.
A few months ago when he was feeling so unwell at a train station, he shared with us he could not get any help from passers-by, and thus had to take public transport to a public hospital himself, even though he was dizzy and weak. He knew he could have fainted.
As I passed him a piece of paper with the numbers of his overseas family, our numbers and 2 other numbers of passers-by who had become his friends, he held it with his life, saying, “Yea, I know they’ll find this on me if I’m admitted. They’ll help me call someone.”
Before we left, I asked if he still prayed and believed in God.
“Of course!” was his jaunty reply. “Today is a celebration of the birth of Jesus, right? Yes I believe! I have had trouble attending church because of my insomnia, but you know, He is alive in my heart. And I will see him soon! Next year after you both leave Singapore again, I may not be here when you return… But I will be with Jesus in heaven. That will be wonderful.”
How quick we are to make assumptions about the faith of the poor, because they don’t have the spiritual infrastructure, community or theology we do.
Simple faith is all they have, and simple faith is all that is needed, really.
As we prayed for Zhou yeye, we parted knowing we each had left indelible marks on one another’s lives.
How quick we are, in our own presumptions, to assume our friendship would not stand the test of time nor distance. But we just don’t understand, do we, that God is the one who has knit our lives together.
However far apart we are or have been, we have been woven into the tapestry of a spiritual community called Family.
Merry Christmas and a Blessed New year, Zhou yeye.
*If you see Zhou yeye on the street, a heartfelt hello would be so appreciated by him. If you can spare a few minutes, please ask if he’s okay, if he needs any help, and if you can buy him a nutritious meal from a Chinese rice stall 2 streets away… His favorite foods are spinach, steamed egg and tofu, anything warm, soft and chewable. He would so appreciate your company and love. Thank you to all of you who have stopped for him <3