The Year of Finding Memory Read online

  THREE

  As our large group passed through Chinese immigration into Shenzhen, located on the southern border of Guangdong, my father’s home province, the smooth and efficient train ride from Hong Kong became a distant memory. We found ourselves in the middle of what appeared to be a huge shopping mall, and somewhere in this massive complex, we had to find the station for the bus to Kaiping City, also in Guangdong. My sister-in-law Jen had asked a former schoolmate who now lived in Hong Kong to accompany us to Kaiping. But even Schoolmate was confused by the signs, and so were all the members of our party who could read and write Chinese. We ended up in a garage full of buses being serviced, and Shing, who is asthmatic, started to cough from the fumes.

  Our party of thirteen and thirty-plus suitcases turned back and eventually went up and down one set of escalators at least three times. Simple decisions such as turning left or right became monumental and resulted in mass confusion, with some going in one direction and some going in another. Several times, we were almost run over by buses. My brothers and their wives had travelled very little since their arrival in Canada, leaving them ill equipped to negotiate new surroundings. In exasperation, Michael and I, to Jen’s horror, left the group to search for the ticket booth, although neither of us knew how to speak Cantonese or read Chinese. We came back to find everyone worried that we had got lost, but all were relieved and impressed when we announced that we had found the elusive station.

  The bus vibrated with loud voices, interrupted every so often by a cell phone ringing to the tune of “Happy Birthday,” “Jingle Bells,” “Frére Jacques” or “Für Elise.” Most of the conversation was in Cantonese, but occasionally I would detect my regional dialect. And suddenly, whether I wanted to understand or not, I would know what time one voice would be arriving home, or where another knew to buy cheap underwear.

  It took a long time to leave Shenzhen, a nightmare of random development, with mile after mile of shabby, concrete high rises, factories and highways. Grime coated the buildings, even the newer ones, and looking out the bus window, I saw construction sites, cranes and scaffolding everywhere. The smog blanketing the city was so thick that buildings only a short distance away soon became indistinct. Smoke from factory chimneys hung in the air, and plumes of black cloud tailed many of the vehicles on the road. There was little greenery, and the few trees we saw appeared stunted and scrawny.

  I had read about China’s rapid industrialization, and when I mentioned to a friend that I planned to visit my father’s birth village, she had greeted my enthusiasm with cynicism. I wouldn’t expect much if I were you. That village has probably been flattened and replaced with a factory. I had protested and said that our village was still standing; my friend shook her head, incredulous at my naïveté. But as I gazed out the window at this soul-numbing desolation, the unsettling, orange-coloured sun turning milky and incandescent behind the filthy smog, my spirits sank and I began to question if my friend had indeed been right.

  But gradually we left behind the terrible urban sprawl and entered the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong Province—an emerald landscape of low, rounded hills and wide, flat valleys covered with lush rice paddies and thick groves of sugar cane, bananas and bamboo. Bright, flowering hibiscus bushes grew along the side of the road; clumps of orange and yellow lantana and jumbled vines of blue morning glory pressed against houses. The Pearl had already fanned out into many branches, some of them wide enough for large boats to navigate. Much of the countryside had been turned into large, rectangular fish farms divided from each other by long dikes, and many of the dikes doubled as walking paths dotted with small workers’ huts. Surrounding the dikes were fields full of carefully tended vegetable gardens and plantations.

  But then I began to notice the apartment buildings and factories next to the fields and fish ponds. There seemed to be little concern about zoning; this was indeed a tarnished paradise. And though I couldn’t imagine this place ever being anything but a source of plenty, I knew the region had suffered from both drought and floods, which throughout its history, had ruined crops and left its people starving. I pressed my forehead against the window of the bus and saw water everywhere: fish ponds, lotus ponds, streams and rivers all flowing into the mighty Pearl. Everything was fertile. Even the air seemed fecund, with its sparkling haze and humidity.

  After two and a half hours on the bus, we arrived. From what I’d seen so far, Kaiping City was a scruffy industrial town, roads teeming with motor scooters, some carrying a single passenger, others an entire family, and trucks carting everything from bamboo to cages of live pigs. The curiously named Ever Joint Hotel, where we were to stay, is located on an island in the Tan Jiang River, which along with its tributaries flows through the city. The hotel is a large complex that dwarfs all the buildings in its vicinity. The moment our taxis stopped at the entrance, bell hops rushed over and opened the doors, gathered our luggage and led us through the large, glass front doors.

  Inside the lobby, everyone in our group stood still. For a moment no one uttered a sound. Then there was a collective gasp. Standing in front of us and at strategic spots throughout the lobby were uniformed staff, looking ready to assist at a moment’s notice. The beige marble floors and pillars dazzled our eyes, and the curved central staircase, leading to a second-floor balcony, was wide enough to fit a Cadillac. Jen had told us she’d made reservations for us at the best hotel in the area, and because of her connections via a friend of a friend, she’d been able to arrange a substantial discount. She’d assured us many times that the accommodations would be affordable. I had assumed that even though it was rated a five-star hotel, the Ever Joint would be a pale imitation of Western extravagance. I was wrong. The expressions on my brothers’ faces told me that this hotel was unlike anything they had ever experienced. As we stood gawking, Jen grinned from ear to ear. I noticed a couple of lo fon men in suits talking to a bell hop. Of course, these accommodations were built for foreign business travellers and for people like us, returning to the homeland with dollars to spend.

  In one corner of the lobby, a large group of Chinese sat on chairs and sofas. Some of them looked anxious, and I wondered if they were waiting for us. Our party of thirteen people was still checking in when two women approached me. One was about my age, and the other was older, with greying hair parted at the side and held in place with a bobby pin. The older one was dressed in a loose, flower-print top and pyjama-style pants. She asked, in the local Four Counties dialect spoken by my family, if I was from Canada. There was something familiar about the rhythm of her speech, an echo from my early past. I knew this strong, throaty voice. Yes, of course. It belonged to my sister, to Jook. “Jook Dei, Jook Dei. My older sister, Jook,” I called. Without hesitation, she took me in her arms.

  My sister loosened her embrace and held me at arm’s length. She smiled, and the lines around her mouth and eyes deepened. I saw the years of sun and wind etched into her face. The last time I’d seen this woman, she was in her early twenties and I was a child of three. Now, more than fifty years later, I was well past middle age, with my hair turned silver, and my sister was seventy-six. This woman was once the beautiful child my father had loved and had given a poetic Chinese name meaning “Jade.” My eyes grew wet with tears.

  My father loved stories and language. While he worked at his hand laundry, he would compose lines of verse inside his head. He kept a book, made by sewing together cut-up sheets of brown wrapping paper, and in it he would write down his compositions, other thoughts and images that he might later use. I knew that when he bestowed this name upon my sister, he must have seen in his newborn daughter the beauty and luminescence of that precious green stone. He might not have guessed that it would be the stone’s other qualities, strength and durability, that would ultimately prove more valuable. Whatever grievances we may have had about our lives in Canada paled beside the existence Jook and the rest of our family had endured under the Communist regime, most harshly during the unrest and violen
ce of the Cultural Revolution.

  My father always claimed that Jook was a great beauty and had been regarded as a prize catch, especially since he was a Gold Mountain guest someone who could provide a good dowry. But if he had been able to predict the Communist Revolution in China, he would never have married her off. If only she had remained his responsibility. For his oldest son, Hing, it was already too late because of his age. But for his daughter … if only he had known. Then only one and not two of his children would have stayed in China, forever trapped by the Communists. Whenever my father told me these things, he would shake his head, his anger with life’s injustices seething underneath his sigh.

  Jook could not stop smiling. And the woman beside her was grinning and nodding. She seemed familiar to me, too—the way her eyes crinkled into the shape of crescent moons, the curve of her mouth when she smiled, her row of stainless-steel-capped teeth notwithstanding. “This is your niece Kim,” my sister said. “You used to play together when you were children. Before you left for Hong Kong, I used to visit your mother at the family store in Cheong Hong See. You and Kim used to hold hands. I had to teach her to call you Yee, little aunt on mother’s side.” My sister explained that although I was younger, I was Kim’s aunt and belonged to an earlier generation. Therefore, I had more status and the right to call her daughter by name.

  I was overwhelmed by this rush of information and said, “I don’t mind if Kim calls me by my name.”

  “No, no,” said Kim, flashing her smile of silvery teeth. “I can’t do that. I must respect the fact that you are of the same generation as my mother and call you by your proper title.” My sister was nodding in agreement, and I saw that I would have to cast aside my Western assumptions. I was in China. Here, everyone had a place within the family and was mindful of that position.

  My sister and her daughter were tall for Chinese women. They were about the same height as my brothers, and I remembered being told that my father’s first wife had been tall. My sister and I smiled at each other again, neither of us believing that we were finally together. Her resemblance to our brother Doon was uncanny. But I also began to see something of our father in her. It was in the rhythm of her speech and in the way she swung one arm as she’d walked up to me. As Jook took both my hands in hers, it occurred to me that in all likelihood, no one in China knew how our father had died. No one in Canada would have written to tell them. It had remained our secret shame.

  When I look at all the photos taken from that first encounter, I am reminded of the number of relatives who were at the hotel to greet us: nieces, nephews, their spouses and children. Yet I have a solid recollection only of my sister and Kim. I have no memory of my sister greeting my brothers, or of meeting Kim’s husband, but the photographs show me that my memory is incomplete. I have seen pictures of all the siblings together—other photos, with various combinations of the many family members, Jook’s other sons and daughter, and the adult children of First Brother Hing. And each time I come to a particular image of Jook holding Doon’s hand, it catches my breath. A big sister after so many years of being apart, once more able to hold her little brother’s hand in hers.

  FOUR

  When I returned to China, I had few facts in my possession about my Chinese history. I knew we were from Kaiping County, and I knew that Sze Yup, the Four Counties dialect I spoke with my parents, was distinct from the Cantonese that is spoken in most of the province. When my mother and I first arrived in Canada, Sze Yup was commonly spoken in Toronto’s Chinatown, but as immigration patterns changed after the early 1970s, Mandarin and Cantonese began to dominate—both deemed far more urban and sophisticated. In Chinese restaurants I became reluctant to use the Sze Yup spoken in my childhood home, since I knew it would only earn me the scorn of waiters. But here in Kaiping, the dialect of my parents was everywhere, spoken by the hotel staff, the taxi drivers, the shop keepers. For the first time in my life, I felt bilingual and no longer embarrassed by my parents’ language.

  Beyond knowing that it was in the south of China somewhere and in Guangdong Province specifically, my understanding of Kaiping’s exact location had always been fuzzy. But as soon as I unfolded a map of the Four Counties on a coffee table in the lobby of the Ever Joint Hotel, I saw how close the area was to the ocean. And that explained why this region was home to most of the Chinese who went to the Gold Mountain in the early part of the twentieth century. Just beyond the sea lay that mythical kingdom where fortunes sat waiting to be made.

  I asked Kim, who was sitting beside me, to locate Ning Kai Lee, our ancestral village. She said it was too small to appear on the map. Then she picked up a pen and made a small dot south of Kaiping City. I looked for a long time at that tiny dot, the place where I was born.

  Over thirty people squeezed into three large vans. There was our contingent from overseas and an even larger one from China: my sister; many nieces and nephews, grown and married with children of their own; their friends; and people who happened to be going to our village and needed a ride.

  On the day of our homecoming, the entire village of Ning Kai Lee was waiting for us on a paved area about the size of a tennis court. A fish pond was on one side, and the village houses were on the other. On the pavement stood wooden drying racks draped with limp, leafy green vegetables and wide, shallow baskets containing different coloured beans. The moment we arrived, one string after another of firecrackers began to explode. The villagers cheered and waved as they rushed forward and greeted my brothers and me by name. Basking in the glow of her siblings’ celebrity status, Jook held my hand and announced to everyone that I was her little sister. My brothers and I had returned home from the land of milk and honey, plump with prosperity, dressed in fine clothes, sunglasses perched on our noses.

  Even though it was early October, the air was hot and sticky. A constant haze seemed to magnify the sun. One of the village women stepped forward and held an open umbrella over me, concerned about the sun’s rays darkening my skin. I then remembered how upset my mother became during the summer months when her complexion deepened in colour with each day of hanging laundry outside. I noticed several people staring at my Caucasian husband, who, at more than six feet, towered above everyone. Unable to contain his laughter, my brother Doon later told me that someone from the village had asked him if the lo fon had lost his way! It struck me that Michael was possibly the first Westerner to walk into this village, that its inhabitants had seen lo fons on television and in newspapers but never before in the flesh.

  Many of the villagers were old, mostly women in their seventies and eighties, dressed like my sister, in variations of loose-fitting, printed cotton tops that buttoned down the front and pyjama-style pants. They were tanned and healthy, with faces and hands that revealed many years spent working in fields. All of them seemed to know the reason for our visit, and they hurried off in the same direction—toward my father’s house, everyone talking at once.

  A warren of tight alleyways about four or five feet wide, with an open gutter running along one side, connected the houses. The cement paths were cracked and broken along their edges. They were no longer paved with cobblestones as they were when my brothers had lived here in the thirties and forties. The older houses were made of narrow, grey bricks and fine mortar, with stone floors and clay tile roofs. Many of them were decorated with a geometric frieze of white plaster under the roof line. Although the buildings appeared weathered, it was obvious that at one time they had been beautiful in their simplicity. We walked past several vacant homes, and when I pointed them out, someone replied that all the young people had left for jobs in the city. Another voice added that it was not possible to stay and make money; it was easier to just abandon everything and go. No one wanted to live in the country when you could live in the city. Shing said that just after the war more than four hundred people lived in this village. Now there were only a hundred.

  When he was a child, Doon told me, the village had no electricity. He giggled and said it wasn’
t like Canada. Turn on a tap and water flows. When he was a child, he went to the pond every day to fetch water, which had to be boiled before drinking. The water was unsafe, he said. You never knew what might be floating in the stream. Once, somebody had found a dead baby. I remembered how my mother would never drink water from a tap, how all her life she kept a Thermos of boiled water for drinking. Now there was a communal tap in the village, and most of the houses had at least a single light bulb attached to an electric cord dangling from the ceiling. In some homes, though, people still cooked on a hearth, using dried grass, leaves and sticks for fuel.

  As I looked around, I thought about the friend who’d assumed I’d find my father’s village devoured by modernization and turned into a factory or a parking lot. I smiled to myself. Not here. Not in Ning Kai Lee. I had wandered into a time capsule, a place largely untouched by modern life. Chickens scratched aimlessly along the paths, deserted lots had been turned into gardens and laundry hung randomly on poles between wooden supports or on string stretched between trees. The only sounds came from animals, people, the wind. After seeing the rampant industrial growth of Shenzhen, this plain village set in the midst of green, fertile fields, in spite of its poverty, felt like an Eden.