Chapter 4

If the noise in the early hours was merely physical torture, then the psychological control Grandma displayed in the days that followed truly showed Elisa what it meant to "kill a person by destroying their spirit."

Grandma had a terrible habit—she loved to pour out her sorrows to people.

Every day after work, the moment Elisa walked in the door, Grandma would appear like a ghost at her bedroom door, leaning on her cane and looking at her with the most mournful eyes. Out of politeness, Elisa could only grit her teeth and help her in to sit down.

Then Grandma's "performance" would begin.

"Ellie, dear, my heart is so full of bitterness..." Grandma always opened with that same line, and then began to recount, over and over, how hard it had been to raise five children.

"Back then, to pay Uncle Warren's tuition, I washed clothes in a hole in the ice in the dead of winter—the frostbite on my hands rotted right down to the bone. When Uncle Nathan got sick, I carried him more than ten miles through the snow to the hospital... And what came of it? I gave them my whole heart, and now that they're bosses and managers, they turn around and despise me, this useless old woman who won't die."

As Grandma spoke, her cloudy eyes watched Elisa's reaction. Her voice was full of accusations against her four sons, and the details sounded terribly tragic—every time, they made soft-hearted Elisa's eyes redden, and she would join in, cursing her uncles for being heartless.

Yet at the end of every complaint, Grandma's tone would always slide, with eerie smoothness, into a strange turn.

"Our Ellie is the most devoted of all. Grandma didn't dote on you for nothing." Grandma would pat Elisa's hand and sigh. "By the way, Ellie, you're a big boss in a huge city like Metro City. You must make tens of thousands a month, don't you?"

Elisa's heart lurched, and she answered warily, "Grandma, it's nothing like tens of thousands. The cost of living in Metro City is high. After I pay rent there's not much left—just barely enough for myself."

Grandma seemed not to hear Elisa's explanation, and went right on. "That's true, young people spend a lot. But you know, the other day your Uncle Warren's daughter came back home, and my, what a spectacle it was! I hear she just holds some ordinary job in Capital City and makes over thirty thousand a month. She bought her grandmother a mink coat that cost more than twenty thousand dollars! When her grandmother put it on, everyone in the whole complex said how blessed she was..."

At this point Grandma paused, her eyes sweeping over Elisa's cheap online-bargain pajamas, and she sighed faintly. "Of course, Grandma doesn't crave those vain things. As long as you all give me a bite to eat and keep me from freezing to death in the street, I'll be thankful to heaven and earth. After all, it's my own bitter fate that I never got such a successful granddaughter."

Words like these were like fine needles steeped in venom—on the surface not a single ugly word, not one direct request for money, yet they pierced Elisa's pride and her guilt with perfect precision.

She never asked Elisa for money outright, but by setting her cousin's "mink coat" against her own "bitter fate," she sent Elisa a crystal-clear message: You earn so much every month, and even your cousin spends twenty thousand on her elders—if you don't spend money on me, then you're unfilial, you're just as selfish as your four uncles!

Elisa felt a suffocation she had never known before.

To prove she wasn't the "good-for-nothing, unfilial" granddaughter Grandma described, Elisa started buying things for her like a woman possessed. Imported calcium supplements, an expensive cashmere sweater, even a massage chair that cost half a month's salary.

But no matter what Elisa bought, Grandma would never show a satisfied smile.

When she got the cashmere sweater, Grandma would say, right in front of Ida, "This color's far too gaudy—makes me look like an old hag. But Ellie meant well, and she'll be upset if I don't wear it." Then she would turn around and stuff the sweater into the bottom of the closet, and go on shuffling around the living room in that ragged old padded coat, hinting to every visitor who dropped by that she had no decent clothes to wear.

As for the massage chair, she wouldn't so much as touch it. At the dinner table she would say, in that snide tone of hers, "How can a machine feel as good as a real pair of hands? A machine is cold as ice. Back when your third aunt was still here, she rubbed my feet every night... Never mind. What's the use of talking about it now?"

Elisa gradually came to see that Grandma's words were always full of winding twists and turns. She was forever using the excellence of "others" to belittle and beat down Elisa's family. She never made a demand outright; instead, through endless complaints and comparisons, she forced you to guess at her wishes and to keep pouring in money and effort to please her.

It was an extremely sophisticated form of emotional exploitation. She didn't need to cry poverty, because she had already succeeded in molding you into someone who owed her a debt.

The days dragged on in this crushing oppression until the twentieth day.

If Grandma's treatment of Elisa was only a soft blade to the spirit, then her treatment of her own daughter, Ida, was a merciless psychological strangling.

Ida was an extremely devoted daughter, but the long exhaustion and mental strain had made her whole person look ten years older.

After Grandma moved in, Ida not only had to wait on her three meals a day, bathe her, and change her clothes, but also had to endure her ever-shifting temper.