Teaching Grandma to Text
by Liao Hsin-yi · Oct 2026
Last winter, my grandma got her first smartphone. It was a gift from my uncle, who lives in Canada. He wanted to video call her every week. There was only one problem: Grandma had no idea how to use it. My parents were busy, so the job was given to me.
At first, I wasn't very patient. I showed her how to open the app, and then I did it again, and again. "Just tap the green button," I said for the tenth time. She looked at the screen with a worried face. "Why are the buttons so small?" she asked. It was so , and I almost gave up.
Then something happened that changed my . One evening, Grandma tried to teach me how to make her famous turnip cake. I mixed the rice flour badly, and I cut the turnip too thick. She didn't laugh at me. She just smiled and showed me again, slowly. Suddenly I thought about the day before. I felt .
The next day, I tried a different . I made the font bigger and wrote the steps on a card in big Chinese words. We practiced for only ten minutes a day, and I praised her every time she got something right.
Two weeks later, Grandma called my uncle by herself. When his face appeared on the screen, she gave a huge smile. Now she sends me photos of her plants and too many funny stickers. Now I know something important: teaching someone is not only about . It is about patience, too.