The Year of Finding Memory Read online

  We walked past many fields, and Michael became fascinated with the water buffalo that were wallowing in nearby mud holes. My brothers watched in amusement whenever he stopped to take pictures. We found the unmarked graves on a small rise overlooking rice fields and groves of trees in the distance. As I gazed at the countryside around me, I wondered how many generations of people had walked on that same beaten path. I was standing in the middle of a landscape that had not changed for hundreds of years.

  The hired men first took the food to her father’s burial plot, then a few feet behind to her grandmother’s. Jen, Shing and their daughter Linda made offerings at each grave by burning incense and spirit money. Once the ceremony was complete, the roast pig, chickens and ducks were chopped into chunks, then portioned and wrapped in newspaper before being put inside red plastic bags for the villagers. A large, steamed cake was also cut into slices and added to the bags. The undisturbed green field that had greeted us upon arrival was now littered with newspaper, plastic water bottles and plastic bags. There was no thought given to tidying the trash, and the villagers were amused when my Canadian niece and nephew collected all the plastic. The newspaper was left to blow away.

  Back in So Gong Sun we convened in the meeting hall, which, like the watch tower, had been built by overseas money. Caterers had already set up banquet tables for the feast. Again, people came up one after another, trying to establish kinship, this time with my sister-in-law. One woman kept returning, telling her that they had been classmates. But Jen insisted that she had no memory of her. She had already distributed a great deal of cash, and I suppose that word of free money had circulated. It seemed that every man, woman and child in the vicinity was at this eleven-course dinner. Jen and her siblings had provided magnificently: bowls of ginseng soup; plates of chicken, duck, whole fish, shrimp, pork; bottles of rice wine. The food seemed endless. People were laughing and talking. Toward the end of the meal, some men hung a string of red firecrackers from the second-floor balcony to the ground below. Within seconds the air was vibrating with deafening explosions. Once the noise ended, Michael noticed a man filling the gas tank for a generator only a foot or so away from the fireworks. Smoke was still rising from their charred paper remnants.

  The energy, almost a collective euphoria, during that banquet was unlike anything I had ever witnessed. My sister-in-law, a local girl, had gone overseas and made good. The village hailed her like a conquering heroine, her beneficence overflowing. Had it been like this each time my father returned to his village?

  My brothers had organized a farewell luncheon for our family from China and Canada. It was held the next day. We sat at three separate tables, each spread with steaming dishes of food. At one table, Jook sat between Shing and Doon. Although ten people were around their table, the three of them might as well have been by themselves. I was sitting at the next table and watched them from the corner of my eye. I listened as Doon regaled the other two with a childhood story. One morning he had gone to the market with our father, and while they were visiting one of the stalls, the elastic in Father’s pants broke. According to Doon, Father had to clasp the top of his pants with one hand to keep them from falling, and he made Doon walk directly in front of him all the way back to the village. Doon gesticulated wildly and demonstrated the way he was made to walk. I was impressed with my brother’s memory, his ability to embellish, his gift as a storyteller. My sister couldn’t stop laughing, and I noticed once again how much she and Doon resembled each other.

  All the years of separation seemed to have vanished, although this sensation would be short-lived. My brothers and their families would be leaving after the luncheon to begin a tour of China that would include Beijing, Shanghai and Guilin. One picture after another was taken. My sister and brothers were no longer young, and it was unlikely that my brothers would ever travel this far again.

  Michael and I had opted not to join my brothers’ tour. We would stay in Kaiping for another several days and explore the area. Jook and her daughter Kim would be our guides. I was eager to spend some extended time with my sister and to get to know Kim, a woman who was my age but whose life could not have been more different from mine.

  EIGHT

  Because the Pearl River Delta region was prone to flooding, many of the watch towers served as lookouts, allowing villagers to watch upstream for a rise in the water or for flooding in surrounding fields. But perhaps more importantly, from the watch tower’s vantage point of often fifty feet or more, the villagers could detect the approach of bandits.

  The Chinese word for bandit is tak. It is an aggressive word, one that is spat out, making a sound like a gunshot. Until the Communist takeover at the end of 1949, banditry in China was a fact of life. When I was a child and my parents talked about their homeland, they spoke frequently about the gangs of thieves that roamed the countryside, preying upon villages. They remembered stories about the savagery and ruthlessness of these outlaws. I can still see my father sitting at the dinner table, deliberately setting down his chopsticks beside his rice bowl. This was his cue, letting me know that what he was about to say was important. “You have no idea how dangerous it was when I was a boy in Ning Kai Lee. Thieves would come to the village and kidnap people, cut off a finger and send it to the family, demanding ransom. They had no mercy. They would burn down houses, murder.” My father would then tell me how safe and blessed I was to be in Canada. But I knew, regardless of the bandits, that if he had had his way, the Communists would never have taken over and we would all be living in China.

  Until the middle of the twentieth century, Chinese peasants sometimes had no alternative, especially if they were young and without family, but to join gangs of outlaws who roamed the hills and preyed on innocent villagers. In spite of my father’s stories, I imagined romantic, delinquent lives led by heroes who railed against social inequalities. After all I was familiar with the characters from the Water Margin, whose stories were based on the lives of a group of Robin Hood—like bandits who traipsed about ancient rural China, fighting against injustices imposed on helpless peasants by the rich and the powerful.

  Fortunately, my father had not been lured by life as an outlaw, a life that would surely have led to an early death. He would have been ill-suited to such an existence anyway. My father was a law-abiding man, honest to a fault. In Acton, when he found pennies in the pockets of customers’ clothing, he would write down their names and how many cents he had found on a sheet of paper kept inside his cash box, reminding him to return their money. My mother found this honesty excessive, and it made her cross. “The lo fons don’t care about a few cents. Why are you wasting your time?” she demanded as she watched him file another IOU note.

  My father shook his head and shot back, “So, you think a few extra cents will make us rich?” He never listened to her, unable to live with the thought that he may have taken something that didn’t belong to him.

  I was always confused by my mother’s irritation. Looking back I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t my father’s rigid attitude that got under her skin, how in spite of his poverty, he wore his honesty like a badge, unwilling to compromise when a harmless opportunity surfaced, even while she was caught in a life of toil, indigence and obscurity.

  The day after my brothers’ farewell luncheon, we decided to explore Zili village, home to the most famous collection of watch towers in Kaiping County. The van we travelled in felt nearly empty. Kim, Jook and I sat in a back seat actually intended for three. My sister and niece still giggled when Michael sat down in the front, next to the driver, and buckled his seatbelt.

  Some of the watch towers we saw were as high as nine storeys. My sister said that at one time they had been very common throughout the Four Counties. Many had been torn down, though, to make way for redevelopment, and a few others had collapsed from neglect. I had read that Kaiping County, nonetheless, had over eighteen hundred still standing. Kim flashed a grin of silvery teeth. “Yes, Kaiping has the most,” she said, then
looked at Michael and added, “A lot of lo fons like to visit them.”

  The Chinese word for watch tower is diaolou, an intriguing word, the literal translation being “throwing tower.” Once, many years ago, Kim explained, a young woman was trapped in her village watch tower by bandits who wanted to know the whereabouts of her husband and son. Fearing that she might disclose this information under torture, she threw herself from the top floor. Kim loved this story. Her voice rose and fell dramatically, and she marvelled at the depth of the woman’s love for her family. I was reminded of Bess, the landlord’s daughter in the poem “The Highwayman” by the English poet Alfred Noyes. The authorities had bound her to a chair with ropes and taunted her by tying down a musket so the barrel aimed at her breast. Then they left her alone to await the arrival of the Highwayman. If she dared to pull the trigger to warn her beloved of the Redcoats’ presence, she would also end her own life. But pull the trigger she did. I smiled to myself at this cross-cultural preoccupation with the ultimate sacrifice made in the name of love.

  The road entering Zili village passed a large duck and goose pond on one side and women in makeshift stalls, selling bowls of noodles and rice soup, on the other. When Michael showed interest in the snacks, the women beckoned us over, but Jook and Kim hurried us away. My sister wagged her finger at me and said, “Don’t buy from them. People like that always charge too much. We know where to get food.”

  Inside the village there were government signs that read “Major National Cultural Heritage.” For the first time I saw baskets for garbage and recycling. The main part of the village consisted of houses, arranged in a familiar tidy grid, with pathways in between. These houses were constructed with the same grey brick as the ones in Ning Kai Lee, but they were larger and more elaborate, with more decorative details. Unlike the broken concrete paths in Ning Kai Lee, the ones inside this village and leading to the watch towers at the edge of the compound were made of large, dark slabs of stone, most likely slate. Just the same, the village shared traits with my father’s. Here too chickens roamed outside the houses. Yet the place felt different. It smelled of money.

  Most of the towers, which were built at the perimeter of the village, were closed, but we found one that was open to visitors. I noticed the windows in its lower storeys were secured with iron shutters and bars, evidence of the dangerous past and the fear that must have been in the very air the tower’s inhabitants breathed. But as I climbed higher, the evidence of danger fell away, and the windows became large and unobstructed, allowing for breathtaking views into the distance. When we reached the open balcony on the top floor, we could see the village’s other watch towers standing against the hazy blue sky. Once again, I was struck by the presence of water all around us: in rice fields, in lotus ponds, fish ponds, canals and streams. And the lushness of the terrain was astonishing. The bamboo grew more densely, the banana fronds wider and shinier than any I had seen before. From this perspective I could see how closely the villages were situated to each other, some only a few hundred yards apart. In the distance low, rounded mountains met the horizon.

  The watch towers of Kaiping were constructed as early as the sixteenth century, though most were built in the 1920s and 1930s. These newer structures served as much more than lookout stations. Using reinforced concrete coated with a veneer of plaster, overseas Chinese erected extravagant residences. As I gazed around at the towers in Zili, I could see that at one time nearly a century ago there must have been great contests between men who’d returned home, keen to spend their new fortunes.

  The owners brought back architectural influences from their sojourns abroad, and by incorporating them into the towers for all to see, they boasted about their travels to exotic places. From where we stood on the balcony, Michael pointed out Corinthian columns, Romanesque arches, cupolas shaped like minarets. The result was like something lifted from a Venetian fantasy. The interiors of these buildings were spacious and luxurious in a way that would have been inconceivable to those who dwelled below in simple homes made from narrow, grey bricks. When these towers were being built, what did the villagers think of their presence in their ancient countryside? I could imagine the awe and respect on their faces and hear the strains of envy in their gossip as they watched these ostentatious displays of wealth rise from the ground. The streets in Gam Sun must truly have been paved with gold for men to return with such riches.

  Time and weather have bestowed upon these towers a certain patina and faded elegance. And in spite of their apparently strange architectural mix, they now possess an eerie beauty that feels distinctively Chinese. But as I took in the sight of these towers, I realized that they must also have been embodiments of hope. I gazed at the green paradise in the distance. My father did not share the success of the men who had left this display, though his dreams had been the same as theirs.

  Doon, a self-made man with numerous properties in Canada and now comfortably retired, had once mused out loud about why our father persisted in the hand laundry, why he never modernized or opened a more lucrative business, such as a restaurant. Most of the Chinese were going to large centres such as Vancouver and Toronto. Before moving to Allandale, my father had operated laundries in impossibly isolated communities like Timmins, Pembroke and Trois-Rivières, places where the winters were long and hard, lumber and mining towns with sizable populations of single men who needed to have their clothes washed. A task normally relegated to women, laundry was emasculating work that ensured these men from the other side of the world faded into the social background, never threatening the status quo. With Chinese restaurants still relatively uncommon, my father was often the only Chinaman in town. When I think about his choices after he arrived in Canada, it becomes evident that getting rich was never a real possibility for him. He had no talent for making money. He only understood hard and gruelling work. Whatever “riches” he might have taken back to China were the result of savings squeezed from a life stripped to the bone. One light bulb on at a time; a steady diet of fermented black beans, pickled greens and rice; lighting the coal stove only when the temperature went below freezing; never a penny spent on personal pleasure.

  As I stood on this opulent balcony above Zili village, I thought about the crumbling watch tower in Ning Kai Lee. I had walked around it several times, then stood back and taken it in. It had no ornamentation, nothing that manifested a foreign influence. That tower in my father’s village was so small, so insignificant. If these watch towers in fact represented the goals of those who had travelled overseas, I couldn’t help but think that the meagre tower symbolized my father’s ambitions in Gam Sun. All those years depriving himself, those long, laborious hours, faithfully sending money back to China, never taking a holiday. It was as if my father was some kind of anachronism, belonging to the group of Chinese who had built the railway across Canada, not someone who had lived into the late twentieth century. Sadness gripped my heart. Could it be that for our father, the inspiration to be bold and to dream big was never there in the first place?

  In the teahouse where he had worked as a boy, my father must have overheard patrons tell enticing stories of riches waiting to be made in that land across the sea. He would also surely have heard about the destitution, the harsh climate and the callous lo fons. But what could be more difficult than the life he was already suffering in China? My grandfather had been a poorly paid schoolteacher and could not support his large family. The stories of want from my father’s childhood became mantras in mine: his first pair of shoes at age nine, his first taste of sausage at age fourteen, always dressed in rags. The village had no running water or electricity. At age five his older sister took him into the fields to gather dried cow patties for fuel.

  He started work in that teahouse when he was twelve years old. His days there were an endless round of scraping ashes from the hearth, scrubbing floors, dumping slop. A particularly vicious head cook scolded and often struck him without cause. Several times a day he walked back and forth from the well,
balancing a yoke so heavy from the weight of the water buckets that blisters and weeping sores erupted on his shoulders. He felt fortunate if he managed four hours of sleep at night, before one of the cooks kicked him awake while it was still dark. If he stayed in China he would face only misery. The Gold Mountain might at least provide him with a fighting chance for a better life.

  When I was growing up, my parents frequently talked about the fact that my father had returned to China so many times. Because I heard the tale so often, it became one of those family facts that grew tedious and failed to have any real significance for me. “Your father poured a lot of money into fares going back and forth. All that money would have made him rich, even if he never made another cent over here,” my mother used to remind me.

  Whenever I asked my parents why he returned so many times, the answer was always the same: the most important thing in life is family, the most important thing is to goo gah, to protect your family. That refrain was drilled into me almost every day of my childhood. I can still hear my father’s voice. You must be frugal with yourself, so you can be generous with family and friends.

  It wasn’t until I became an adult that I began to appreciate the magnitude of his actions, the fact that he chose to return so often when many of his peers remained overseas. Most of the lo wah kew, the old timers, made the journey home only once. They lingered a few years, got married and fathered a couple of children before taking a ship back to North America, separated from their families until the immigration laws relaxed after the war. Many of these men lived in Chinatowns in large cities. In spite of the racism around them, their community provided support and a sense of belonging. But my father didn’t live in a city until he was an old man.