I began this book through a mixture of curiosity, suspicion, and concern about issues faced by the rural elderly as a generation and as grandparents of rural families—I was curious about how exactly they experience their life emotionally. I was suspicious about the common narrative among the public and implicit assumptions of some scholars (e.g., Chinese family sociologists and some media scholars) that the rural elderly’s life is less important or simply irrelevant in the modern media system. More importantly, I was concerned about the rural elderly’s deteriorated material and mental states in the power-laden modernization process of China, and I was eager to discover why and how it is the case, and what should be done. On top of this, I wondered why they tended to be so often and so facilely understood as anachronistic and unimportant to modern society.