The Year of Finding Memory (6 page)

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.

At the edge of the village, a watch tower rose above the surrounding houses. I stood back and saw that a corner of the uppermost floor had broken off. Sections of the plaster had separated from the walls, leaving bare patches of concrete. One of the villagers told me that the first floor had been removed to prevent people from climbing to the top. Of all the villages in the area, Ning Kai Lee was the poorest. Compared to the other communities, it had very few sons who’d ventured
to the Gold Mountain and thus had received very little money from abroad. Any money that had been sent from North America would have been meant for personal use—not enough to maintain a watch tower or install indoor plumbing. My father was one of the ones who went, who faithfully sent money back to the village, almost until he died.

When we reached my father’s house, one of the villagers opened the two vertical halves of a weather-worn, wooden door. There were carvings of flowers across the top. Some of the panels were starting to separate, and the wooden hinges seemed loose. Everyone rushed into the first room. Against the wall was a wooden bed with a canopy and mosquito netting. Some clothes were hanging from a suspended rod, and a bicycle was parked in the corner. Someone lived here, yet no one paid any mind. I worried that we were invading this person’s privacy. Then I heard someone say that a squatter lived in my father’s house and that although my family still owned the house, no family member had lived there for thirty, perhaps forty, years.

The villagers funnelled through a smaller door leading deeper into the house and packed themselves into the middle room, good-naturedly pushing up against each other. All the living would have happened here, with sleeping and storage in the loft and the two small rooms on either side. The only source of light was a gap in the roof, designed to allow rain to flow into a square, recessed concrete pit in the floor and then out to the gutters in the street. But Jen noticed daylight coming through another hole in the roof, where tiles had loosened and broken away. She told my
brothers and me that once we were back home, we would have to send money back for its repair. The room smelled damp, and large patches of dark mildew stained its walls. A small hearth in the corner facing us would have been used for cooking and for heat in the cooler months. In the past there would have been a table with chairs, probably in the middle of the room.

My father’s house provided only shelter. There was no evidence of electricity or running water, even now. The thought of having to spend a childhood in this house made me shudder. Michael, however, was intrigued. He examined the fine mortar precisely laid between the narrow bricks and noticed how the wooden beams in the ceiling met in a perfect peak. He pointed to an old wooden washstand and remarked on its elegant proportions. And as he inspected an old ladder leaning against the wall, he said, “Look how the rungs are so perfectly fitted into the uprights.” My husband asked question after question. Where did they get their fuel? Did they collect the rainwater? Where did they wash their clothes? My brothers were only too pleased to answer.

People crowded around my brothers, identifying themselves and trying to establish a past connection. Doon held a hefty roll of red yuan notes and was handing one out to each villager who came up to him. A line had actually formed, and people were waiting their turn. The room hummed with excited voices. News must have travelled that Doon Uncle was passing out money! Was it like this when my father returned each time? Was he surrounded and hailed like a homecoming hero from across the ocean?

A long sturdy beam rested on the floor next to the wall. Tightly wound twine lashed a rock securely underneath one end, and that rock sat inside a stone bowl recessed into the floor. I had never before seen anything like it. Jen must have seen the quizzical look on my face and explained that every house had such a contraption. When she was a child, she’d had to jump up and down at the opposite end of the beam from the stone, but before she was finished her explanation, Michael blurted out that it was a rice pestle. Jen didn’t know those specific English words, but she smiled, delighted that this man from the West should recognize an implement that she had thought was particular to China.

On the wall above the rice pestle was something that resembled a giant fan made from a cluster of dried, broad leaves. I stood in front of it for several minutes, trying to figure out its purpose. My sister was standing behind me. “It’s a cape,” she said. “When we worked in the rice fields, planting and harvesting, we had to wear one just like this when it rained. Plus a wide-brimmed straw hat.” Kim then lifted the cape off the wall, draped it over her back and squatted on the floor, demonstrating the motion for cutting stalks of rice, her arm moving in a fluid sweep. “We worked, just like that,” my sister said, nodding and pointing at her daughter.

My brothers and my sister started to reminisce about fetching water from the stream outside the village, about gathering twigs and stalks for cooking fires, about sleeping high up in the village watch tower on hot summer nights. I listened quietly, voicing the occasional comment that would interrupt
the rhythm of their shared memories. My brothers and sister never seemed to mind my little intrusions and happily answered my queries, but the moment they were finished explaining, they would carry on as if I was not there.

My father grew up with nine, or was it ten, brothers and sisters in this three-room house with two small lofts. Except for Second Uncle, who had gone with him to the Gold Mountain, I had heard very little about his other siblings. My mother had whispered something about an older sister who’d married into a nearby village and who had eventually hanged herself. Long before my father’s death, she had told me in a secretive tone that his mother had also ended her life this way. She added that people in the village had said his first wife had been
ho tsu
, foul tempered, and had made his mother’s life unbearable. What would I have done in such circumstances? Life in these surroundings would have been gruelling enough, never mind being bullied and hectored by a cruel daughter-in-law.

My father had been born in this village over a hundred years before. He’d lived in this house with his first wife and the children from that marriage: First Brother Hing, Shing, Jook and Doon. And almost sixty years after my father’s birth, I too had been born here. The line between my current prosperity and the unrelenting poverty of my past felt tenuous and fragile. I found myself thinking about my mother coming here more than seventy years before, to teach in the local school. If it felt this isolated to me in
2006
, how remote would it have felt in 1930 to a woman who had been living with her brother in the bustling city of Canton, in a mansion
staffed with servants and furnished with modern comforts? My mother would have arrived in a sedan chair, carried over well-worn paths of yellow, sandy soil, not the paved, two-lane road that had brought me here. The villagers would have gathered and gawked at her, just as they had at us—an exotic creature from a distant star. But she was a young woman with a past, and perhaps this tiny, secluded community provided her with the perfect place to hide.