Staying alone, a personal choice or…?

After several friendly encounters with elderly people yesterday, our team revisited Fu Cheong Estate for more stories. It was a sunny and hot afternoon: on the way to the estate, we worried that the heat would drive the elderly away from the streets. However, it seems that the park area was quite breezy and shaded from the burning sun.

We wandered around the park looking for an elderly to talk to. Sitting there alone was an old man. He sat silently on the bench and looks in front. It is like any typical “old man sitting alone on the bench” photograph. Unlike other old guys with slippers and undershirt, he wore an old but tidy white shirt and trousers. He looked at us and we thought we might just try and chitchat a bit with him for a start. “Have you had your lunch yet?” — that’s how the conversation began. As expected, he was a bit shocked and withdrawn at first, and gave us a puzzled expression. We introduced ourselves as university students curious about the community and the needs of them.

It took a while for him to feel comfortable talking to us. It’s my first time to take up the role of an interviewer. I was quite nervous but soon realised my nervousness will border him more. Most of the time, he spoke slowly in broken sentences and quietly like a whisper. He didn’t show much facial expressions while talking about his retired life but was slightly more enthusiastic sharing his past in the tough time. “It’s just like that” , “It’s okay, what can you expect?” and “I’ve get used to that” are his catch phrases. He seems so indifferent about his life but at the same time showed signs of uneasiness when speaking of his family. The only thing we know is that he was living alone without much contact with his family living in Hong Kong Island.

Obviously, the distant relationship with his family contributes to his loneliness. However, I was not sure whether I should go deeper into this topic as it might bring up unhappy memories and hurt his feeling. I believe it takes a longer time to built up trust and relationship with a person. Someone describes the process as peeling off layers of the onion and I totally agree with that. This one hour of chatting is just the beginning of collecting the life story of a lonely person like Grandpa Liu. It requires patience to break through the loneliness in mind and the passive attitude towards building up relationship.

Another thing that I have noticed is that Grandpa Liu, like other elderly people that we have talked to, seems rather reluctant to join the activities/ classes organised by elderly centre. First, these regular classes restrict how they want to spend their time. Second, they are not interested in meeting other elderly people. Whether they just enjoy being alone or they are skeptical of befriending with other people is still unknown to us. Hopefully, it will give us hints on how connections within the neighbourhood could be made.

From my experience in the past two days, elderly people are willingly to talk about themselves, maybe they are just waiting for someone to care about them…

We visited Grandpa Liu again to check the story with him the other day. We called him by phone and he happily agreed to meet us. He was sitting on the same bench in the same posture when we arrived. While we were checking the story with him, he became more willing to talk about himself. And surprisingly, we found that we have totally misinterpret the situation of his loneliness!

When he mentioned about not having much contact with his family yesterday, we thought that maybe his children did not care about him. However, we have discovered today that he actually does not have any child, and that he is not close to these relatives. Because of the early death of his parents, he had get used to without a family. In this sense, family is actually not his source of loneliness.

In fact, when we asked him about meeting new friends in the neighbourhood, he was not interested in the idea at all. He mentioned that getting to know other old people would cause more troubles for himself as they might constantly ask him for help. The responsibility accompanied by friendship is too big for him to bear. That’s an interesting and insightful thought that we haven’t noticed before. It becomes clearer that he is alone because he is afraid to build up relationship within the community.

From this experience, my thoughts on how a relationship takes time to consolidate is somehow proved to be right. I am glad that we have the chance to talk to Grandpa Liu again and understand his life more.

He actually smiles more today as well!:)