Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (4 page)

How could a worker in China be unhappy? Wasn’t this the dictatorship of the proletariat? I couldn’t exactly say that in Chinese, so I tried to pantomime a happy worker. I pretended to repair a piece of machinery, all the while smiling broadly He thought I was crazy. He pulled a card from his pocket. I studied it carefully. Slowly I understood. Chen could not travel freely in his own country. The pass stated where he was from (Guangxi province) and where he was authorized to travel (Canton). It specified exactly how long he could stay (two weeks) and the purpose of his travel (visiting relatives from overseas).

I told him I was from Canada (
Jia na da
), and he immediately said he wanted to go there. I was shocked. You want to go to a
capitalist
country? I had been in China exactly four days, so I was an expert. I told him, in my fractured Chinese, that China was much better than Canada. Granted, we had more money (I rubbed my fingers together), but look at how
happy
people were here. On cue, a line of singing schoolchildren marched past. He looked dubious.

For three and a half hours we walked around the zoo, gazing at tropical fish, dusky brown elephants and sleepy pandas. We got caught in a tropical downpour and huddled in a bamboo grove until we were driven away by bloodthirsty mosquitoes. Chen asked shyly if I’d like to go rowing the next day. I agreed instantly. What better way to find out about China than to hang out with a gorgeous auto mechanic? He told me ordinary Chinese weren’t allowed in the Overseas Chinese Hotel unless they were visiting relatives, so we agreed to meet on the steps the next morning.

Bai tracked me down at breakfast in the hotel dining room. “You’re going to see Chairman Mao’s school,” she said, beaming. My face fell. I tried to explain I was going rowing, and pulled my arms back and forth, but she couldn’t figure out what I meant. I motioned her to follow me outside. I went over to Chen and asked if he preferred to join the tour of Chairman Mao’s school. By then Bai was at my elbow.

The change in her was startling. The sweetness was gone. Her face hardened. She looked older and meaner. “Who are you?” she demanded roughly, planting herself in front of Chen. His neck flushed in anger, but he said nothing. He slowly pulled out his travel pass. She snatched it from him and frowned. She barked something. I couldn’t understand the words, but the meaning was clear.

I walked through Mao’s school in a daze. (I couldn’t understand a word anyway.) Why couldn’t a Chinese go rowing with a foreigner? Was I the problem, or was it Chen? I scarcely understood what had happened, but I felt like crying, at the ugly change in Bai, at the humiliation Chen had suffered and at my shattered illusions.

Grandmother Fong Shee, First Wife and Grandfather Chong Hooie, in a photo taken just before my grandparents left for Canada, leaving First Wife behind in China
.

Grandmother Ma Shee and Grandfather Ark Wong
.

B
ai decided to do what Chinese authorities had been doing to young people since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution: she sent me to the countryside. “How would you like to visit your ancestral home?” she asked me later that day, all sweetness again. After the ugly episode with Chen, getting away from Bai seemed like a good idea.

Returning to one’s village was a time-honored tradition for Overseas Chinese. Having made good abroad, they swaggered home as big shots. They bowed ritually before ancestors’ graves, threw banquets for all the villagers and handed out red envelopes of cash to the unfortunate ones who had stayed behind. I had no intention of doing anything as uncouth as that; I wanted to be as deprived as they were.

By tradition, I traced my ancestral village through my father’s side to Taishan county in the fertile Pearl River delta. My paternal grandfather, Ark Wong, had left China in 1915, and there was little sentimental draw for me there. But rural China was usually off-limits to foreigners in the early 1970s, and I was anxious to see anything of it that I could. Being a high-fashion radical, I also took to heart Mao’s dictum that physical labor was good for the soul. Of course, my mother told me the same thing, but I never cleaned up my room. I told Bai that I would go to Taishan if I could spend the
time working in a factory or on an agricultural commune. She smiled sweetly.

I was awoken by a Third-World wake-up call — a 4 a.m. knock on my door. It could have been high noon for all I could tell in my windowless room. I stumbled outside into the humid dawn to await the hotel shuttle to the regional bus station. Bai had bought me a first-class bus ticket, which meant I got to squeeze in with caged chickens, sacks of rice and other first-class human beings. Second-class humans — and chickens — rode another bus to preserve the fiction of a classless society When the first-class bus arrived, we surged on in a cacophony of shoving and grunting. Every seat was taken. In fact, every seat was taken one and a half times. Three people squashed into a seat that in North America would hold two. I was beginning to see the advantage of food rationing.

We pulled out of the bus station and tore, horn bleating, through a sea of bicycles. Beyond the city limits, we drove smack down the center of the unpaved road, our wheels sending up clouds of reddish dust. My aisle seat in the front row jutted out so that when the bus veered to the left, my two seatmates lurched right, and I had to brace myself on a hump in the floor next to the driver. The hump, which covered the engine, grew steadily hotter. With each lurch, I had to choose between falling on the chickens or burning my fingers. The ninety-mile, six-hour journey included three ferry rides. At 9 a.m. we stopped at a restaurant, my first experience with ordinary food in China. The only dish on the menu turned out to be boiled noodles in greasy broth. I stuck to tea, or so I thought, and was surprised when only plain hot water came out of the chipped teapot. The peasants called the water “white tea,” I learned later. Decades of poverty and central planning had made tea a luxury in China.

Comrade Bai had betrayed me. How was I supposed to remold my thinking here? My hotel room in Taishan was huge, with seven big windows, a patterned blue tiled floor and a balcony overlooking a pretty lake. My bed was equipped with a clean mosquito net and a woven bamboo sleeping mat. On the desk was an old-fashioned brown radio the size of a hotel minibar. I even had my own bathroom toilet and sink.

I seemed to be the first “returning” Taishanese who didn’t know a word of the local dialect. My three guides promised me that an interpreter would arrive that evening. Taishan, unfortunately, had no interpreters. After dinner that night, the seventy-year-old vice-chairman of the District Revolutionary Committee knocked on my door. Tan Wei looked like a Chinese Colonel Sanders, except he didn’t have a bucket of fried chicken under his arm. He had golden brown skin and thick white hair and was wearing a shiny black silk shirt and heavy cream-colored pants. He settled into one of the old-fashioned armchairs in my room and, in perfect English, announced he would interpret for me — when he felt up to it. He had learned English in New York in the 1930s as a member of the American Communist Party, and had returned to China because he was afraid he would be arrested. I had heard of Chinese trying to escape to Hong Kong, but I had never thought of anyone seeking political asylum in
China
.

“You are an Overseas Chinese,” he said. “You have come such a long way. We welcome you back to the motherland. Besides, your parents must really love Chairman Mao and have faith in China to let you come all alone.” I managed not to roll my eyes.
I came because my parents wanted me to come?
How retrograde. I told Tan that my chief purpose in coming to Taishan was to do manual labor to reform my thinking. His smile remained unchanged, and so did my itinerary.

The Taishanese thought I was nuts. Avoiding hard labor was precisely why everyone left in the first place; hence it was dubbed the Ancestral Home of Overseas Chinese. People whose roots were in Taishan and its three neighboring counties, Kaiping, Enping and Xinhui, dominated the Chinatowns in North America. The exodus began in the 1860s, when American labor contractors anchored off the South China coast to recruit peasants to build the great transcontinental railways across Canada and the U.S.

My maternal grandfather, Chong Hooie, was one of those coolies. He was born in Kaiping, the county next to Taishan, on December 18, 1860, “an auspicious day in an auspicious month,” according to the Chinese characters carved on his gravestone in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Before he left home, his family married him off.
He arrived in British Columbia in 1880 when he was nineteen, the same age I was when I headed in the other direction nearly a hundred years later. I wondered if he had had any last-minute fears. Did
he
wonder what Canadians did at night?

Grandfather Chong joined a construction gang blasting tunnels through the Rockies, at less than half the pay of white workers. As the Canadian Pacific Railway neared completion in 1884, the contractors reneged on their pledge to provide passage home for the Chinese workers. Chong Hooie faced the choice of spending all his savings on a boat ticket back to Kaiping or paying a $10 “unemployment tax.” He paid, and stayed. In Esquimalt, British Columbia, he found work as a houseboy at a dollar a month for Col. Josiah Greenwood Holmes, the deputy adjutant-general of the Pacific Station, the Canadian west coast military base then under British command. With Colonel Holmes’s blessing, my grandfather boosted his meager salary by providing a laundry service to the fort’s soldiers, and eventually to civilians in nearby Victoria.

Family lore has it that Grandfather Chong became the tenth Chinese in Canada to take out citizenship, a fact now hard to check because Ottawa’s extant records date back only to 1917. But the national census of 1901 shows that he became a Canadian citizen in 1899. Under race, it described him as “y” for yellow, under religion a “Confucian” and under “trade” a “laundryman.” The census showed he was forty years old and, rare among Chinese at the time, able to read, write and speak English. Under marital status, it listed him as “m” for married.

Perhaps Grandfather Chong took out citizenship so he could return to Canada without hassles. Soon after the census, he sold his laundry business and booked passage back to China. He had been away for two decades. Back in Kaiping, his wife was considered past child-bearing age. They adopted a teenaged boy, who was already married, to ensure continuation of the family name. Then, because his wife didn’t want to leave China, he bought her ten
mu
(one and a half acres) of land – so much that the Communists later charged her with being a rich peasant. Leaving his wife in charge of the family holdings, Grandfather Chong began looking for a concubine to take back to Canada to have his children. Second (and third and
fourth wives) were common among the well-to-do at the time. Grandfather was now a good catch, a Canadian citizen and a prosperous Overseas Chinese, and his wardrobe included a silk top hat and tuxedo. A matchmaker introduced him to a sixteen-year-old girl from Canton.

Like most Chinese females of her generation, the girl had no name of her own. She was called Fong Shee, or
née
Fong. When she was a baby, her father had walked into Canton carrying her and her infant sister in two wicker baskets suspended from a shoulder pole. Standing on a street corner, he offered them to passersby. He couldn’t afford to feed them, he said. A housekeeper took pity on the tiny sisters and brought them home, where her master, a judicial official surnamed Yin, agreed to raise them. Yin must have been an enlightened man because he refused to bind their feet and saw to it that they were each given a year’s education. From that base, Fong Shee eventually learned to read and write, and even compose poetry.

As an abandoned girl, she had few prospects. But she had smooth black hair, large eyes and clear skin, and spoke elegant Cantonese, a more refined dialect than the Kaiping patois my grandfather spoke. Westernized by his long sojourn in Canada, Grandfather Chong was undeterred by my grandmother’s big feet. He gave her several pieces of jewelry as a dowry — a bracelet of gold threads twisted into a thick rope, a solid-gold brooch fashioned into the characters for wealth and good fortune and a pair of gold hoop earrings studded with iridescent opals.