My grandmother was a great questioner. Because of that, she understood a lot of things. She would always read the newspaper, especially the financial section, not necessarily to glean specific advice on specific stocks and companies, but to get a sense of how the experts thought about things. She was good at understanding the big picture and all of the moving parts.
I remember when she told me that my money wasn’t in the bank, because the bank was loaning it out to other people and earning interest on it. If I went to the bank, I could get my money, but if everyone went there and asked to withdraw all of their money all at once, then the bank wouldn’t be able to handle all the requests because the money’s not there. I had never thought about that before then.
She didn’t always trust everyone who was supposed to be an expert, like her doctors, because she was pre-med in college and she knew some of the people who became her doctors, and she knew that some of them weren’t very good students in college.
I wondered why the same Chinese last name is spelled ‘Lee’ in America but ‘Ly’ in Vietnam and she said, “It’s because Vietnam was colonized by the French and that’s how the French spell that sound.”
I remember thinking that I might be missing a button on my shirt at the bottom because there was some extra space at the bottom but I couldn’t tell and she said, “Well, is there a buttonhole on the other side?”