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Reader question: Please explain “sandwich generation”, as in “a member of China’s sandwich generation”. My comments: You’ll understand if I tell you who they are, that is, what China’s sandwich generation are consisted of. Members of China’s sandwich generation, like sandwich generations elsewhere, share one thing in common. They have to care for their aging ma and pa while at the same time feeding and fending for their own child, or increasingly children. And hence as a result, they feel squeezed, like the fillings are squeezed in a sandwich. A sandwich, of course, is made of two pieces of bread with fillings of meat, cheese, vegetables SANDWICHED in beween. Ergo the analogy. Typically, the “sandwich” people, pardon my grammar, are in their 30s, 40s or increasingly 50s and even 60s as people live longer and longer. One of my older friends, Wang by surname, is in his early 60s and calls himself a member of the newly coined “sandwich” generation after having learned about the word and understood its figurative meaning, keeps saying he feels like “a sandwich twice over”, pardon his grammar, because he has to care not only for his own parents and in-laws who are in their late 80s but also his own daughter and her new-born baby. Overwhelmed with sympathy, I never tell him that there’s something called a double-decker sandwich, but anyways, he says the only thing he doesn’t regret in life is that he does not have a second child. Otherwise things would be, in his words, “quite unthinkable”. | 
