Chapter 26 The Chins #2
It was her homeland, and yet much of it was new to her.
She’d never been to Beijing. The city’s subways were much cleaner than New York’s, its highways wide and faultless.
She and the other expatriates on the trip stayed in a fancy hotel with bidets and faucets that turned on with a wave of the hand.
Residents still hung their laundry on the balconies, but she could see through the windows that many households now owned color TVs.
The travel package came with a tour of the China World Shopping Arcade, a day of sailing on the translucent lake at the Summer Palace, and a bus trip to the Great Wall.
Foon Wah finally saw with her own eyes all the gilded, pretty objects that she had once read about as a schoolgirl.
She especially liked the old hutong villages with their stone houses and cobbled roofs, where the people still traveled by rickshaw and where old ladies shucked corn in the doorways of their homes.
She was perplexed by the tour guide, a young man who spoke both Mandarin and Cantonese fluently, and who had been born to a Cantonese mother but had grown up in Beijing.
Each day, he extolled the many great things that the Communist Party had done.
The Communists had built factories, roads, bridges, and dams. They had practically eliminated illiteracy, had vastly reduced poverty, had doubled life expectancy.
She wondered if all this was true, and how much of the progress had taken place before trade resumed with America.
Their next stop was Canton City. Skyscrapers had replaced the old bricks, there was electricity and running water, and her people dressed like Westerners, in pants and T-shirts.
They took a bus to Gui Lin, to the mountains where she’d hid with her siblings from the bombs.
The government had designated the caves a national jewel, and signs along the paths reminded tourists not to spit or throw their trash in the lake.
The village where they’d taken refuge and where her mother had died was no longer there; the Party had razed the homes, and in its place, there was a travel resort, offering tourists access to hot springs and massage.
She could not find the graveyard with her mother’s tombstone, but she hadn’t really expected to.
From the window of her taxi to Toisan, she beheld the peasant huts, the vegetable patches, the rice fields, and the children running in the dirt.
Yet still, something was different: the people looked better fed and their skin clearer.
She learned from the taxi driver that, along with a new and bigger school, the government had built a hospital with thirty cots.
As they passed it, she marveled at its three stories, and at the mini ambulances lined up outside.
When they reached her father’s village, two women dashed out to the gate to receive her. They so much resembled Foon Wah’s cousins Di Di and Moi Moi that it was only when they called out, “Gu Po!” that she realized they were Di Di’s and Moi Moi’s children.
In the hovel, her cousins greeted her in the doorway.
They had transformed into toothless old ladies with white hair.
Were it not for her hair dye, wrinkle cream, and regular dentist appointments, Foon Wah would have looked much the same.
They took Foon Wah’s arms while their daughters pushed sandals onto her feet and a cup of dandelion tea into her palms. There was another woman there, struggling to break through the crowd of cousins, and with one glance at the bushy-browed face, Foon Wah knew who it was.
“Aiya—Mee Lai?”
She and Mee Lai grabbed each other like they would otherwise fall down, then held each other at arm’s length, both trembling, gasping, exclaiming with glee.
“You came all the way from Lew village?”
“Lew village? Ay, no! I was only there two years!”
“He died?”
“I threw him away, the drunk!”
Foon Wah laughed. They all did.
“Ni to! Ni to!” the daughters cooed, leading Foon Wah to the couch.
The daughters brought the older women four bowls of mushroom chestnut soup. Staring at one another through the steam, incredulous that they were all still alive, and overwhelmed by what time had given and taken from each, the older women sat in a circle.
“But you have been alone all this time? No children?”
“I remarried,” said Mee Lai between slurps. “My second husband died two years ago. We have three kids—they’re in the city.” Grasping Foon Wah’s wrist, she bent forward to explain.
“After the Communists took over, you could get a divorce. The Communists got rid of many of the old practices!” she exclaimed.
“The Women’s Federation told me about the new marriage law.
They took me to a class so I could teach others.
I used to travel around, teaching women about the marriage law.
I went to see an eye doctor, and he gave me some glasses.
And then I married the eye doctor! Chor Jung—a year younger than me!
A very good man. But he had liver problems, died two years ago. ”
For almost fifty years, Foon Wah had believed her friend trapped in an unhappy marriage with that fat man in Lew village. She had imagined Mee Lai suffering to remind herself that she was the lucky one. Yet in all that time, Mee Lai had been free.
Foon Wah was glad for this, of course.
“And you!” cried Mee Lai, nudging Foon Wah. “You with that handsome American brother. I still remember his name—Chin Dun Ho!”
Foon Wah nodded, looking down at her feet.
“With a husband so pretty,” Mee Lai laughed, “you wish you are the first to die!”
One thing hadn’t changed: the respect accorded to those who had gone to America.
Her cousins’ children followed her around, anticipating her every need.
When she slipped them heng bou, they pressed their hands together, bowing and murmuring with gratitude.
A ten-dollar bill was worth fifty yuan, and Foon Wah knew they probably imagined she was a wealthy woman.
She considered trying to dissuade them of this notion but realized her attempts would be futile.
Never in a million years could they dream of buying a travel package to fly across the world.
And her body was weak, pampered—she had been sitting on porcelain toilets for so long that she found it near impossible to squat over the trench in the woods.
It moved her to watch the women in the kitchen debone a fish just the way she liked to, to hear them hum their approval the way she did, and to see the old women’s feet, in their open sandals, curling toe over toe, just like hers.
Many of the men and children had left for America, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Sydney, and her cousins complained that hardly anyone lived in Ng village anymore. Only ghosts.
She thought endlessly about her ghosts. Her ghosts in China, her ghosts in Brooklyn.
On the third day, she asked a relative to take her on the back of his motorbike to Chin village.
When they arrived, the Chin villagers poured forward to greet her.
She wanted to cry; everyone’s country lilt was so exactly like Koon Lai’s.
Those who still remained in Chin village were Koon Lai’s distant kin, second and third cousins, their bloodlines untouched by the blessing and the curse of America.
In the house where Richard had been raised, Foon Wah burned incense and bowed at the altar.
She then asked to be taken to the area where Koon Lai’s prized new house had stood.
But there was nothing there, not even the structure’s remains: the Communists had instructed the villagers to dismantle the ruins and plant a pumpkin patch in its place.
“But the canal,” the cousin added when he perceived her disappointment. “Your father-in-law built the canal. They still use it. You want us to take you to it?”
She smiled, declining with a quick shake of her head.
At the end of her journey, she felt it a great privilege to be old and to have caught a glimpse of how the world continues after one has left it. To realize that life is like the best of Chinese movies: a series of sweet heartbreaks that move in no particular direction.
Still, she began to miss a bowl of cornflakes, and to tire of squatting in trenches. At the end of those four weeks, she was ready to go home.