Nursing home visit raises questions of elder care

By Wan Lixin
0 Comment(s)Print E-mail Shanghai Daily, February 22, 2013
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[By Zhou Tao/Shanghai Daily]

[By Zhou Tao/Shanghai Daily] 



 

On Saturday, two days before the new school term began, my son and five of his classmates armed themselves with brooms and dustpans and marched to a facility for the elderly in the middle of a neighborhood opposite the school.

Under the supervision of their parents and grandparents, they were going to "do a good deed," as part of their assignment for the winter vacation.

Simple as "doing a good turn" appears to be, an eminently good deed is best done publicly, collectively and with political or social-welfare overtones.

It put me in mind of a similar assignment I had decades ago during a winter vacation. How to assertively execute a manifestly good deed hung so heavily on my mind that it nearly spoiled the vacation.

But kids sweeping the floor in an elders' home certainly has the makings of a good deed.

I used to pass through that neighborhood daily, but it never occurred to me there was such a care center. Unlike a school, which can be noisy, these places are often unnoticed.

When my son and his contingent arrived, around a dozen elderly people were sitting in their wheelchairs basking in the morning sunshine, quiet and passive.

A manager by contrast was vigorous and profuse in her thanks.

The facility had received quite a few good samaritans from my son's school of late, and there really was nothing to be done in that immaculately kept courtyard.

But one shrewd mother quickly espied a long-forgotten 10-square-meter concrete space under a pergola covered with grapevines. This would be the stage to showcase the kids' capacity for charity.

It took the kids one hour to sweep the area that would have taken a typical cleaner just five minutes.

The climax of the trip was, no doubt, when the kids posed with the elderly citizens, with the parents eagerly training their cameras on them.

It was a moving sight of contrasts: the freshness of early bloom and the withering of age. I regretted that I hadn't taken my camera along.

In a subsequent chat with a middle-aged man who was visiting her mother there, I learned that this was a privately run institution where monthly expenses amount to 3,000 to 4,000 yuan (US$476-635).

That's way above the average pension, but it's situated in the middle of a downtown neighborhood, and just 15 minutes' walk from a hospital.

By comparison most such public institutions for the elderly are located in the suburbs, being long priced out of downtown area by soaring land prices.

Recently there has been quite some talk about the care of the elderly.

That had never been much of a problem in traditional extended families where the patriarchs held almost despotic sway and filial impiety was a cardinal sin.

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