First Song

小兔子乖乖

I grew up in the neighborhoods of suburban California, but I was brought up under the wings of my two Chinese grandparents. My grandma and grandpa came to the United States from their small hometown in Sichuan, China back in 1997 when I was born. It was the first time they had ever travelled outside China, an elderly couple in their 60's who left everything they knew back home to take care of their granddaughter halfway across the world. My grandparents didn't know the customs of America, so they recreated their own Chinese environment at home and raised me in it. My earliest memory of a song is a Chinese nursery rhyme telling the story of a rabbit who is told not to open the door no matter who is knocking, especially when mother is not home. My grandma would sing it with me as I read the lyrics off a nursery rhyme book, and that intimate memory is what I look back on now and cherish, because it is in those moments where all the cultural and generational differences between my grandparents and I disappear, and only feelings we are experience are ones of tenderness and love as together we share the tune of that youthful rhyme.