The Last Word Is 'Mama': A Viral Essay on Dying Reopens China's Eldercare Argument
Answering a question about what dying people think about, the writer Liu Xuan posted that the answer is always one's mother — then described her own family's fourteen years of bedside care for unresponsive elders, and the argument with her own mother about whether having a child is the only pension that counts.
The question was asked on Chinese social media the way such questions are: does a person, at the moment of dying, think of their mother or of their own children? The writer Liu Xuan, who has a large following, answered without hesitation: one hundred percent, it is the mother. Then she proved it with her own family, and the post — shared thousands of times — has turned into one of the week's most discussed pieces of writing.
Her grandmother was declared by doctors to have "days left" more than two years ago. She is still alive, in the strict sense: she lies in bed, no longer recognizes anyone, cannot speak, cannot see, cannot move her limbs. What she does is call for her mother — all day, in the words of the post, like a body that has forgotten everything except that one word. Liu Xuan's own mother, "a little old lady" herself, cared first for Liu Xuan's vegetative father and has now looked after the disabled grandmother for nearly fourteen years. She says she has been trapped at that bedside too long.
The essay's unsentimental power is in the machinery around that bedside. Six siblings share the care of the grandmother, but one person must always be on full-time watch; the family tried hiring a caregiver, and the grandmother drove every one of them away. In the end one sister took over the bedside shift and the other five split among themselves the money that would have gone to a nurse. Liu Xuan's mother did the same years of work and took nothing, which Liu Xuan announces in the post with an affectionate, exasperated cry — greatest filial daughter, yelled through gritted teeth. What follows is gallows humor of a very Chinese kind: the family has repeatedly gathered around the bed convinced the end had come, only for the grandmother's breath to start up again, the mourners dispersing, several times over.
Then the essay lands on the argument underneath it. On a trip to Guangxi — possible only because another sister finally took the shift — Liu Xuan's mother showed her videos of the grandmother and said: you see, if you don't have children, who will look after you when you're old? Would an outsider be willing to do this? Liu Xuan's reply is the part readers have been quoting: without children, she said, she would die on the first day she lost capacity — not be ground down half-alive for a decade. Her mother laughed awkwardly and let the question stand unanswered. A second post riding the same trend asks whether the fabled life-flashing-before-your-eyes is real; the traffic on it shows how much the first answer made people think about their own final minutes.
The exchange crystallizes a debate China is having with real stakes. Filial caregiving remains a moral default, and it is daughters and daughters-in-law who overwhelmingly supply the hours — the same imbalance readers argued over last week when Weibo asked whether couples still need each other after the children leave. Meanwhile, as birth rates fall, a generation of only children is confronting the arithmetic of one caregiver per two aging parents, and the state is pushing long-term-care insurance pilots and subsidized nursing beds precisely because family care cannot scale. Liu Xuan's post carries no policy conclusion, only a scene: an old woman calling for her own mother, and a daughter who did not leave the bedside for fourteen years, and her own child wondering aloud whether that devotion is a promise or a trap. The country will be living with that question for some time.