Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (5 page)

In 1902, just before my grandfather and grandmother left for Canada, they posed for a photograph with First Wife. At forty-one, Grandfather Chong in his three-piece suit was lean and handsome, like a Chinese Paul Newman. First Wife sat in the middle, her expression morose, wearing a stiff, embroidered silk robe, one hand reaching out so that she was almost touching Grandfather. She clearly out-ranked my grandmother, the second wife, who sat to one side, her face coolly blank, her hands demurely folded in her lap.

Grandfather Chong and my grandmother boarded the ship accompanied by his newly adopted son and his own wife. At sixteen, Number One Son was the same age as my grandmother. Grandfather Chong paid their head taxes, $100 each, and spent the
rest of his savings on equipment from a bankrupt shoe factory. He went into business making leather boots in Victoria for British Columbia’s miners. He invested the profits in real estate, and the family prospered and multiplied. By the time she was thirty-five, Fong Shee had given birth to six boys and five girls. In English, the children called her Mother, but in Chinese they called her Big Sister because their official mother was First Wife back in Kaiping, someone they had never laid eyes on. Each time a son was born, Grandfather Chong sent money back to First Wife to buy another cottage and a plot of land so that each heir would have something to fall back on in China in case of emergency.

As a leader of the fledgling Chinese community, Grandfather Chong headed the Chinese Freemasons Society of Canada, which pragmatically combined anti—Qing dynasty activities with gambling. When a firebrand named Sun Yat-sen came to Victoria to drum up support for his plot to overthrow the Qing, my grandfather was an early sympathizer. He had already boldly cut off his queue, in defiance of a Qing law that was designed to distinguish the subjugated Han Chinese from the ruling Manchus. Now raising funds and hiding dozens of rifles under his front porch. Grandfather Chong also founded the
New People’s National Journal
, a Chinese newspaper in Victoria that backed Sun’s Guomindang Party. In 1911, Dr. Sun succeeded in overthrowing the Qing dynasty and became, briefly, the first president of republican China.

With the outbreak of World War I, Grandfather Chong’s properties in Victoria plummeted in value. Then newfangled rubber galoshes wiped out his leather boot business. In 1923, he moved east, where he organized a self-help credit union for the Chinese community in Hamilton, Ontario. When he knew he was near the end of his life, he wanted to return to China. He got as far as Toronto, where he died of pneumonia on June 2, 1937, at age seventy-six.

Grandmother Fong Shee moved to Woodstock, Ontario, where she opened a restaurant called the Food-Rite, serving roast beef, mashed potatoes and homemade apple pie. I hardly knew her — I was one of more than two dozen grandchildren, and she died when I was seven – but I inherited two things from her. One was her opal earrings. The other was a Chinese robe of fragile, nearly threadbare
rose silk. It was like the one she wore in her photograph with First Wife, with flared sleeves, hand-knotted buttons of silk and a strip of delicate embroidery in cream and blue and black. As a kid, I carelessly wore it as a bathrobe, never understanding why it was so soft and warm. Years later, when I had to weather my first Beijing winter, I realized my grandmothers robe had been padded with the finest silk floss. I bought myself a padded jacket in Beijing, but it wasn’t the same. Grandmother’s had been luxuriously warm and light. This one was chunky, and made me look like turnip.

A century later, those who stayed behind in the Pearl River delta lived off remittances. Why sweat in the fields for socialist work points when a cousin in Toronto or Toledo could send back a few hundred dollars a year to keep you in style? My father, who had been to Taishan county on a visit nine months earlier with my mother, returned to Montreal muttering that nobody there seemed to do an honest day’s work.

Taishan’s other official nickname was the Ancestral Home of Volleyball – there was a big sign on the main road boasting of that — and it was an apt moniker. As the beach bums of south China, the Taishanese dominated China’s national team. But I felt ashamed of my ancestral villagers whiling away the Cultural Revolution by spiking Volleyballs and sipping thimbles of Smoky Black Dragon, the espresso of Chinese tea.

Tan Wei and I spent the next day touring the local dam-building feat. When I asked again about physical labor, he assured me I could work “for a short while” at a factory. The next morning, after a quick tour of a farm machinery workshop, we stopped in front of a woman squatting on the floor in a white cap and blue work jacket. As I watched, she took apart a lump of machinery and reassembled it, smiling at me at each step. Then she dismantled it again, and with another smile, shoved the pieces at me. This was hard labor? This was how I was supposed to reform my bourgeois mind? This was nothing more than Communist Lego. A small crowd had gathered. As everyone stood around giggling and pointing, I sheepishly reassembled the parts.

I repeated to Tan Wei that I wanted to do
physical
labor. He
nodded again, smiling. The next day, at a small porcelain factory, after another ritual walk through the workshop, we stopped before a young woman waiting patiently with several unfired clay teapots. She showed me how to dip them into a vat of vanilla-colored glaze.
A piece of cake
, I thought, having taken one pottery course at my local YMCA. I donned an apron, sat down and picked up my first teapot. As I plunged it into the liquid, it cracked. Embarrassed, I looked up just as someone snapped a picture. The smiling young woman motioned for me to try again. I did, more cautiously this time. Again it cracked. On my third attempt I managed to dunk one without destroying it. Everyone applauded with relief. A few days later, the factory delivered a souvenir to my hotel. It was two tiny cups and a teapot, trimmed in gold and inscribed in Chinese and English: “Jan Wong learns from the workers of the Taishan Porcelain Factory.”

I
had
learned my lesson. I quit visiting factories. I caught up with my diary or spent the morning in the lobby with the hotel staff, eating bags of luscious lichees. Whenever I went out for a stroll, my guides insisted on accompanying me. At the time I was paranoid that it had something to do with the incident involving the hapless mechanic, but I guess they thought that anyone crazy enough to volunteer for physical labor needed close watching.

During our walks around the lake, dug by corvée, or unpaid labor, during the Great Leap Forward, my guides kept bumping into people they knew. “Have you eaten?” they asked one another, in the standard rural greeting. I finally understood my own preoccupation with food. I was born with Chinese starvation genes. When I first arrived, the question always stopped me in my tracks. I had to think twice. Was I just about to eat, so the answer was no? Or had I recently finished a meal? What about snacks? Did a chocolate bar count? By the time I opened my mouth to answer, the other person was halfway down the street. Eventually I learned no one actually cared. The polite response was always to say, “Yes, I’ve eaten,” to avoid the appearance of angling for a dinner invitation.

For some reason — perhaps I shocked everyone by not knowing the Chinese names of my brothers (to me, they were just Earl and Ernie) – the hotel segregated me from other Overseas Chinese.
While they ate in the dining room, I dined alone at a table set up in the hall. Which was just as well, since I wasn’t yet acclimatized. Until I lived in China a long time, and learned to eat (but not love) white worms, pig esophagus, scorpions and donkey penis, I was as squeamish as the next Canadian. Or maybe worse. I used to recoil when I had to reach inside the cavity of a supermarket chicken to remove the paper bag of gizzards. One lunch in Taishan, as I picked my way through a platter of wok-fried chicken, one lump seemed particularly bony. I worked it around in my mouth for a while, then spat it out on my plate for a better look. It was the chicken’s
head
, complete with dead eyes, a rippling cock’s comb and a sharp beak. For a long time after that, I stuck to scrambled eggs.

The guides could not believe I didn’t know the name of my ancestral village, either. All I knew was that it was in Taishan, which was a bit like saying you were from New York without knowing if you were from the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens or Brooklyn. Because my parents had been there so recently, someone remembered it was Xinzhangli, or New Jade Tablet, a short drive from the county town. That Sunday, we set out in an ancient British car. The road was narrow, and at times non-existent except for a squiggly bicycle path of rust-colored earth, bordered by fields of green rice seedlings, squat peanut plants and skinny corn stalks. At last we came to a few stone cottages in a bamboo grove beside a brook.

My father’s cousin’s wife, the only relative I had left, had been alerted in advance and came running out at the sound of our car. Smiling nervously, she grasped me by the hand and led me into her stone cottage. Several villagers followed us inside. Ren Mekong, fifty, with blunt-cut hair, was wearing a blue print cotton suit buttoned, Chinese-style, down one side. I looked around the two-room cottage, which had once belonged to my grandparents. It looked even more primitive than the eighteenth-century pioneer homes I had seen on school outings in Montreal. There were a few wooden stools, a table and a plain bed. The floor was stone. In the blackened roof was a hole so the smoke from the kitchen fire could escape. I was surprised to see a Buddhist shrine with fresh sticks of incense on one wall. I thought religion was banned, and was chagrined my relatives were so backward.

Overseas Chinese returning in the early 1970s usually brought gifts of color televisions or at least a nice Swiss watch. Unlike me, they didn’t believe the propaganda about how happy everyone was. I assumed no one would want anything so bourgeois as a watch. On my mother’s advice, I had brought a few packets of bobby pins as emergency gifts. Cousin Ren thanked me profusely. Everyone else tittered in embarrassment.

We sat awkwardly. She knew nothing about my grandfather, who had left years before she was born, or maybe she was miffed at not getting a watch. But an old peasant dressed in rags, one of a dozen who crowded into the cottage, told me my grandfather’s nickname had been Half-Belly. “His stomach was always empty,” he said. A wave of relief flooded over me. Hooray! Grandfather Wong suffered!

For me, it was merely a sick case of trying to be politically correct. But my feelings were not much different from those of many Chinese at the time. During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese lived and died by their class backgrounds. They boasted about ancestors who had starved to death. But if a banker or landowner lurked in their background, they dropped their voices low and disclosed the shameful fact as if they came from a long line of pedophiles. Those with “bad” pedigrees were barred from university or sensitive government jobs. In extreme cases, they were beaten, jailed or even killed. During the Cultural Revolution, having
any
relatives overseas was suspicious. My aunt’s sister-in-law, too frightened to communicate with her Chinese brother in Canada, yet worried she would lose contact with him, wrote his address inside a chemistry textbook and memorized the page number.

The harsh story of the first generation of Chinese immigrants to Canada is almost impossible for someone in the third generation like me to understand. While Grandfather Chong endured twenty years of enforced bachelorhood in Canada, and eventually left his first wife in China to marry my maternal grandmother, my paternal grandparents endured a bleak separation that lasted all but the first few years of their marriage.

The youngest of seven sons, Ark Wong knew he would inherit very little and so decided to seek his fortune in Canada. Before he
left in 1915, he married, intending to take his wife with him. But they lost all their savings when the bank collapsed. After they bought the two-room cottage in New Jade Tablet (where Cousin Ren now lived), there was only enough money for one steamship ticket and one head tax. Grandfather Wong was twenty when he boarded a Canadian Pacific steamship for Vancouver. He paid the head tax, which by then was $500, the equivalent of several years’ earnings. In Montreal, he found a job with a fellow villager who owned a grocery store in Chinatown.

By saving every penny he could, he was able to send money back for my grandmother’s passage and head tax. She joined him a few years later, squeaking in just before the 1923 Exclusion Act, a discriminatory law that barred Chinese immigration and virtually ensured that the Chinese already in Canada – almost all men — would remain bachelors. (Inter-racial mariage was extremely rare, and was considered by the Chinese community a betrayal of the motherland.) Like Grandmother Fong Shee, my paternal grandmother had no personal name. Even her gravestone in Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery lists her as Ma Shee, or
née
Ma. Like most Chinese women her age, she had bound feet, a process that broke her toes and arch so the resulting stump was a few inches long. Although she later undid the bandages, she remained half-crippled. During Montreal’s brutal winters, she tottered on the icy sidewalks in Chinese black cloth shoes – the only kind that didn’t hurt her feet.

As a result of the Exclusion Act, Ma Shee and Ark Wong were a rarity, one of only about ten Chinese couples in Montreal. They had a daughter, who died in infancy, and three sons. The family was prosperous enough to hire a maid to help look after the children, but everything collapsed in the Great Depression. In 1929, Ark Wong took his young family back to Taishan.

“It was cheaper to starve in China than in Canada,” my father recalled. “We had a little bit of land. We could grow our own sweet potatoes and vegetables. We didn’t have to pay rent, and we didn’t have to pay for heat.” Ark Wong stayed a month to settle his wife and sons in Taishan, then took a ship back to Canada.

As the oldest male, my nine-year-old father, who until then had
known only the streets of Montreal, suddenly had to learn how to farm. His most vivid childhood memory was of hunger; war, revolution and invasion had made rice a luxury in the Chinese rice belt. At Taishan Middle School, he learned he could earn a few squares of fried beancurd by doing the homework assignments of his better-off classmates. For years, the family survived on yams. To this day, my father refuses to eat sweet potatoes, even at Thanksgiving.