A painful memory of a childhood trauma in story set in China

Yu Lang story Silver Tiger seems an odd choice to lead the New Yorker summer fiction issue - author  (writing in Chinese) unknown to most of the readership and a story that's not immediately engaging as a narrative tho it does fit in w the theme of the issue, parenting, in this case bad parenting. The story is the recollections a pun adult man seeming to be successful (in academic life?) recalling his boyhood in China date uncertain. He was as he says raided by his deaf grandmother (I think more accurately she had hearing difficulty - he does not seem to communicate w her via sign) who believes the child will live under a curse till age 9 and her charge in life's is to bring him alive to that point of safety. He nearly drowns in a pond innermost backyard - die in part to her neglect - and has a vision of the eponymous tiger - and I'm not sure what that means at all. The central dramatic point of the story occurs when the boy's father appears on scene to take the child to a hospital for treatment of a urinary blockage - a scene that is extraordinarily gruesome. Overall the point of the story seems to be either that life's in rural China was a trial of endurance for children or else that even w horrible supervision children will manage to endure.  The great unspoken question is : Why did the parents entrust son to elderly grandmother? I suspect it could have been because they Igor have been assigned to a remote workplace or conversely maybe they went to a city to seek their fortune - but no answer to this riddle is given, unfortunately, as the answer could place this story in a social context (rather than just a semi-exotic childhood memoir).