The Year of Finding Memory (25 page)

Street hawkers, beggars and hustlers pressed in on us and made the congested sidewalks hard to negotiate. Michael was a magnet in Gong Bei, the border town next to Macau. Kung and Lin kept telling us to ignore the entreaties and not to give money to the beggars, otherwise we’d be swarmed. Only a few moments before, we’d been in Macau with its splendid, seventeenth-century Portuguese colonial architecture. Here in this border town, on the Mainland side, everything was filthy, dilapidated and chaotic. The traffic was worse than in Kaiping. Vehicles were making random U-turns and passing each other from either side; 125CC motorbikes wove between the cars and trucks, occasionally driving up onto the sidewalk and bullying pedestrians out of the way. There were few traffic lights, and crossing intersections was an exercise in bluffing and aggression. I felt safe crossing the road only when we were in the middle of a large crowd. When we arrived at the bus station, some of the frenzy was left behind, but the contrast between this town and Macau struck me still. The sidewalks of black-and-white mosaic tiles in Senado Square were already a waning memory.

For most of the two-hour drive from Gong Bei to the village of Sai Woo, located at the edge of Taishan City, our bus travelled on a four-lane toll highway with almost no traffic. My cousin told the driver to stop outside his village, and from there Kung called a taxi on his cell phone. As the only son in the family, my cousin had inherited the family home in Sai Woo. He’d never lived there as a child because his family had lived in Enping County, where his father had been an architect for the city planning department. All the same, he referred to himself as being from Taishan, and a few years back, he’d demolished the house in Sai Woo and built a new one in its place.

The three-storey, four-bedroom home has all the Western amenities, yet it is still in keeping with the surrounding village. It also has metal bars on the outside doors and windows. In some ways my cousin’s house is a modest version of the watch towers built in the 1920s—plain by comparison but nevertheless a proud statement about the prosperity he’d reaped while he was away from home.

Michael realized early on that Kung’s invitation to stay at this village house was an opportunity rarely available to Westerners. I too was enthusiastic, but now had another reason to visit with my cousin. I wanted to find out more about Little Aunt. Kung told us that Michael was probably the first
lo fon
to spend the night in his village and, sure enough, several neighbours dropped by minutes after
our arrival, primarily, I suspected, to have a look at my husband.

Though larger, Sai Woo was much like Ning Kai Lee, with paths between the houses so narrow that Michael could stand in the middle and touch the walls of the houses on either side. There were more newly constructed houses, but the old ones were made of the same grey brick that I had seen the year before in my ancestral village. During one of our walks, Kung pointed to the decorative tiles along the roof ridges of each house. They were beautifully sculpted and detailed, but where they should have jutted beyond the roof into a graceful upward curve, they were jagged and truncated. At one time each ridge had ended with an ornamental dragon, situated to guard the home against evil spirits. But during the Cultural Revolution, the government had deemed these symbols counter-revolutionary and had exhorted the Red Guards to smash these remnants of China’s past superstitious beliefs.

“My family was especially persecuted because of our connection to Big Uncle and because my father had been a civil servant during the Kuomintang era,” said Kung. “Even though he was never a member of the Kuomintang, the Communists still classified him an enemy of the people. During the Cultural Revolution, he was publicly paraded and forced to wear a sandwich board, denouncing himself.” He went on, bitterly: “Our family suffered a lot because of those connections. You’re lucky that your father was able to sponsor you to Canada. Otherwise, you would have been like me, sent into the countryside for re-education. Instead of going to school,
I had to plant rice and look after pigs.” My cousin paused and shook his head. “The one who had the worst time was Big Uncle’s oldest son. He was stuck in Canton, and during the Revolution, he was forced to scrub latrines and was publicly beaten. He survived terrible humiliation. The government let him live in a single room in the mansion where he grew up, but the rest of the house was occupied by strangers. It was a terrible time for all of us.”

My cousin’s words reminded me of my nieces and nephews in Kaiping who had also suffered during the Cultural Revolution. My mother had told stories about people being tortured not long after the Communist takeover. There was an aunt whose husband had been a wealthy landowner. The new regime labelled them as enemies of the people and forced them to kneel for days, from sunrise to sundown. They were not allowed to move and were beaten if they did. At the end of each day, when they were permitted to rise and leave for home, they were soaked in their own waste and barely able to walk.

Each morning we woke to the sound of a rooster crowing and to neighbours chatting in the narrow street below. Being located at the edge of Taishan City and only a couple of hours’ drive from Macau and Hong Kong, Sai Woo village had not escaped the rapid industrialization in this part of southern China. Kung explained that until ten years before, it had still been a farming village, surrounded by vegetable
and rice fields and a large fish pond. The pond had since been filled in and was now grown over with scrub and weeds. The paved village forecourt, which in the past would have been used for drying crops, had been turned into a dumping site for household garbage, construction debris and old chicken coops. Weeds sprouted in the cracks of its broken cement. My cousin complained about the terrible mess that the entrance to his village had become. Most of the land that had been communally farmed by the village was now leased to nearby factories and had been used to build low-rise apartments to house their workers. This ultimately made more money for the villagers than they could earn by raising food. Kung pointed to some deserted plots, which, like the pond, were now thick with weeds and littered with rubble. He said the villagers were still waiting for government permits to allow the construction of even more dormitories.

A few small gardens were growing near the river, and it was apparent that, with these, some villagers were trying to maintain a semblance of their old lifestyle. We’d occasionally see them returning to their homes, carrying empty water buckets dangling from the ends of a yoke after they’d irrigated their plots. Several water buffalo grazed on the river flats, but we saw no trace of the rice fields that at one time would have covered the area. These animals, symbols of China’s ancient rural past, looked incongruous against a background of factories, a shopping mall and nightclubs.

My cousin told me that a ridge had once surrounded the village on three sides. Because of this land formation, the village was nicknamed Crab Village. But a few years ago, the
ridge was flattened to make way for new building developments. I noticed the sandy yellow soil; reshaping this landscape with modern machinery would have been easy, perhaps too easy. I was secretly pleased that my father’s village was far from any large urban area.

Kung was taking us on a tour of Taishan City, once known as Little Canton, where our mothers had lived when they were children. As we walked around its commercial streets, it was evident that Taishan City had once been a prosperous place. The buildings were the same vintage as the watch towers we’d visited the year before, with the same odd mix of foreign architectural influences. We encountered one street that had been completely restored, the buildings painted colourful pastels, allowing tourists like me to get a glimpse of its former glory. Prior to the Japanese invasion in 1937, this town, and in fact, the entire region, had been teeming with commercial activity because of its proximity to Hong Kong and Macau. I could see why my father had thought it would be possible to live out his days in comfort in the Four Counties.

On the way to our mothers’ childhood home, we stopped at a scenic park filled with gardens and a network of springfed ponds connected by canals. While we were walking around the park admiring the grounds, Kung told us that the ponds and canals had been dug by hand. Not long after the Communist takeover, work groups in the area were assigned
sections to excavate with shovels and buckets. It was a massive endeavour, accomplished by forced “volunteer” labour during the workers’ leisure hours.

My grandfather’s house was only a few blocks from this park. The original building had been set back from the road, but as we approached on foot, I saw an ugly one-storey addition, a phone card/photocopy shop, extending out to the sidewalk. My cousin said that if I had come ten years earlier, I would have seen a garden in front of the house, with a path leading up to the front door. He sounded sad but resigned. I stood and looked at the free-standing, two-storey brick dwelling, which had been owned by my grandfather and then inherited by Big Uncle. From the sidewalk I could now see only its top half, but under the gable peak I discerned a faint trace of some characters that had once been affixed to the brick. Kung told me that the characters were Big Uncle’s name. During the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards had knocked the characters off, ridding China of these vestiges of a classed society that believed in property ownership. This was the house where Big Uncle had brought his bride, my mother’s
thoh
, and where they had lived for several years before moving into the five-storey mansion that he would build in Canton.

Big Uncle should have left China earlier, said Kung. Perhaps then he might have been able to move some of his assets. But he had kept praying for a Kuomintang victory, and in the end, he left with only a small fraction of his shrinking wealth. Big Uncle had often talked about his belief in investing in real estate, that property was tangible and
everlasting. His mistake was that he’d invested only in Canton, had too much faith in the Kuomintang and underestimated the Communists. Everyone in my family had been deeply affected by history: the Second World War, the Communist takeover, the Cultural Revolution. Implicit in all the tales they told me was how fortunate I had been to spend my life insulated from China’s political and social upheavals.

We walked around the block to look at the rear of the house, which backed directly onto the road. Across the street, behind my mother’s childhood home, were three- and four-storey apartment buildings that appeared modern, yet neglected, with laundry hanging from bamboo poles on every balcony. My cousin explained that when our mothers were children, the area had been filled with leafy bamboo groves and fields of rice and vegetables—idyllic surroundings. Yet the place was dangerous. He asked me if I knew our grandfather had been murdered. As I nodded, he started to tell me his version of the story. Our grandfather had been called into a local bank for a medical emergency, and when he came out, some marauding soldiers mistook his black medical case for a bag stuffed with money. They dragged him into the bamboo grove near his house and bludgeoned him to death. The story was similar to my mother’s, although some details were different. According to her, he’d been returning home from a house call and had gone into a teahouse to socialize with friends.