Meet: Aunt Yanxian

Aunt Yanxian is the third oldest of my grandparents’ eight children. Like her two older siblings — Aunt Peici and Uncle Zhaohua — she also went into medicine and specialized in pediatrics. She used to work in Shilong but is now retired and lives with her husband, son, and daughter-in-law in a condo in Shenzhen, which is about an hour’s train ride from Guangzhou. She spends her days applying her pediatric knowledge to her adorable granddaughter (which is to say totally spoiling her). She is very warm, jovial and, like the other women in the Zhu clan, boisterous.