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Elderly citizens need care in familiar settings of warmth and contact with children
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LAST weekend, in a telephone conversation with my sister in Beijing, we talked about a teacher surnamed Tong, a septuagenarian pensioner now living in Tianjin.
She used to be our teacher at a junior middle school in a border region in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and I still keep my diaries (as part of assignment) from that time, marked in red with corrections and encouragement from her.
She was a loving teacher, and I think that was the highest compliment we can give to a junior middle school teacher.
Tong’s pension is less than 2,000 yuan (US$317), little more than the official minimum wage in big cities today.
One of her daughters gets by doing odd jobs at a canteen, but we both agreed that Tong has a happy old age, for she is visited regularly by her three children.
Not everybody can dream of such comfort and contentment in their old age, even in villages where, until recently, tradition reigned supreme and the winter of old age could be warmed by the presence of children and grandchildren.
Today, many villages have been deserted, populated only by the elderly. In a village in Hunan Province, some elderly people are thinking of taking their own lives because they do not want to be tortured by illness or be a burden to their children (“The villagers who look forward to suicide,” December 14, Shanghai Daily).
Their children have left for the city and may never return.
Postponed retirement
In light of market forces in which we have invested our total faith, the aging and elderly are an inconvenience, for they can no longer play an active role in the production-consumption process. Still, they provide a livelihood to a number of fraudsters who take them in with fake cure-alls.
The elderly do not survive on bread alone.
The proposal to postpone retirement is very controversial. It might be unfair, as some suggest, for younger people waiting to be employed, but voluntary post-retirement employment does promise to help relieve the loneliness of old age.
During a recent trip to Japan, while having lunch during a conference, I found myself next to Tataru Aso, president of the Fukuoka Airport Building.
In answer to my inquiry, he talked about the many elderly Japanese citizens in uniforms who could be seen directing traffic outside, using batons. Their compensation for this service is insignificant compared with their pension, Aso explained, but the seniors feel usefully employed.
“We cannot possibly do this, can we?” Aso made a gesture of strangling himself with his own hands.
Home-based medicine
Aso also discussed the government’s wise strategy of subsidizing home-based medical services, a move that has the benefit of at once containing skyrocketing medical expenditures for seniors, and making medical services more accessible.
According to a report in the Oriental Morning Post on Tuesday, home-based medical services are now available in 74 percent of the residential communities in Shanghai, and full, city-wide coverage is expected by the end of next year.
In designing services for the elderly, cultural traditions must be respected.
According to an analysis in Wenhui Daily on Monday of the experience and conclusions about long-term old age care in the West, long-term nursing care is not regularly provided even in countries in southern Europe, where family connections are tight.
In Spain in 1994, 54 percent of people above the age of 80 lived with their children or relatives.
In an agrarian society, which China still is, there used to be no clear demarcation of the time when an elderly was pronounced “useless”. My grandparents, all peasants, worked well into their last years.
On reflection, I am more sympathetic with my wife’s paternal grandparents, all pensioners in their 80s, whose chief diversion now is sunning themselves on the doorstep or playing mahjong.
If anything, humanity requires that we do not isolate our elderly citizens and abandon them to loneliness and fear.
At least in China for now, that can only happen in an authentic family context.
Therefore, there must be systemic provision allowing our elderly people a view of not only clean water and green hills, but also their children.
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