Going Home

Text written on 11 May 1988

For my father, China had always been home. He never spoke of visiting, but only ‘going home’, to China. This was his first trip to China, in fact his first trip anywhere outside Singapore since he left his poverty stricken village some sixty years ago. Today he is seventy-eight, and had been totally blind for the last thirty years.

My father’s village is Guzhen 古镇 in Zhongshan county 中山县 some eighty kilometres southwest of Guangzhou. The county used to be known as Xiangshan 香山, but had been changed to its present name in honour of Dr Sun Yat Sen, the founder of Republican China. He was born in another village not far from my father’s.

When I first stepped onto Chinese soil I was almost overcome with emotion, something which took me quite by surprise. I was more concerned with putting up with the inconvenience of looking after my father, the standard of hygiene and the acceptability of the food to realise that in a way I have come searching for my deeper roots.

To go to Guzhen we took the hydrofoil from Hong Kong to Zhuhai, one of China’s four Special Economic Zones. This is just next to Macau at the mouth of the Pearl River. From there it was another three-hour jalopy bus ride to our destination. Along the way I saw many signs of economic ‘recovery’. In the little towns we passed, shops were bustling with people and goods, and new factories and roads were being built. Gainful construction-based activity were very much in evidence. I said ‘gainful’ because, according to a relative it had not been like this. During the Great Proletarian Revolution, menial labour was accorded the utmost respect. To accord oneself of this honour one had to do ‘work’ often by transporting, by the ubiquitous bamboo pole, a pile of rocks from one location to another.

My father has an amazing memory. As he could not see, we had to tell him the area we were passing through or in, and he would recall them with crystal clarity. Of course, things don’t change very much in China, rural China at least. And the people – his relatives, neighbours and childhood friends, he remembered them all. My father and I were walking along the street one day when an old man, a year younger than my father I was to find out later, walked up to us and identified himself. Immediately my father was able to place him – they played together as kids.

Being illiterate my father never wrote, and when it was absolutely necessary, through a letter-writer somewhere in Chinatown. When his children grew up they were never quite fluent in Chinese, leave alone writing letters for him to China. It thus seemed all the more amazing to me that he remembered so much.

One burden was to be lifted from his shoulders after all these years. He finally know for sure that his mother did not die of hunger during the Japanese occupation. He had always thought so, and had suffered guilt for it, but according to relatives she died after a bout of fever – malnutrition related, I presumed nevertheless.

Guzhen is not as bad as I had expected. I recalled that during my childhood

days, letters from China invariably include a request for food, money or old clothes, if not all three. Today many consumer goods are readily available. One can go down the street and

buy a can of Coke and a roll of Kodak film. I was warned however not to expect the same in other parts of China.

Because of its proximity to Hong Kong – RTVHK broadcasts can be received clearly twenty-four hours a day – it is in a better position to benefit from its capitalist cousin. Wages are twice the national average, (so is the inflation rate) and menial labour comes from out of state.

We changed our money on the black market. One hundred Singapore dollars fetched two hundred and eighty six yuan renminbi. Official rate was only about half that. A good sumptuous dinner at an upbeat restaurant, with lots of Tsingtao Beer thrown in, cost only S$14 for two – and that too considered expensive by the locals.

During my stay I was shown the river where my father boarded the barge to Macau from whence he transferred onto a steamer to colonial Singapore. The passage cost him a princely 15 Straits Settlement dollars, and since he had no money then, he went on the ‘go first, pay later’ scheme. Perhaps some day I will retrace part of his journey with my wife and daughter.

I also visited some of the most scenic countryside there is. The area is generally low-lying and very prone to floods. Fish-rearing ponds dot the area, and canals are important thoroughfares. Dikes, flanked by swaying palm fronds, doubled as roads.

During my father’s time the principal farming activity was rearing silkworms. Today it is replaced by fish-farming. That’s where the money is. Some of my relatives are involved in it, and they do it now as a private undertaking. Rice fields abound. I was there at the time of spring transplanting and large families were out in full force. Most were bent in knee-deep water but some do it in style – by boat.

On the subject of large families, although the official policy restrict the Chinese to one child per family it is not uncommon to see families with two or more children in Guzhen. Officials are quite forgiving, particularly if the couple have a string of daughters. Quite a few of my relatives have had to flee from the authorities after the birth of their second child, otherwise they would be ‘arrested’ and made to undergo enforced sterilisation. They return only when the heat is off. Many expressed surprise at my stop at one policy – and a daughter at that too!

Greedy relatives are often the bane of many a returning overseas Chinese. I have heard stories of returnees being stripped of everything except the clothes they’re wearing. Fortunately it did not happen to us, partly because the closest relatives we have are my father’s sister’s grandchildren, and they’re doing not too badly.

Two events were to remind me distinctly of my childhood. One morning I was awakened by a very loud ferocious voice. Looking down from my fourth storey hotel window I saw a farmer verbally abusing his ten-year old son in the Guzhen dialect. For a brief moment, I could see myself as a ten-year old standing before my father with his saliva spray all over me, the object of his anger.

The other occasion was when I brought him for his first meeting with our relatives in their home. The environment was so much like thirty years ago when I led him to his friends’ home. There was the inevitable Chinese calendar, the faded photographs of family members which took pride of place, and the family bamboo pipe for smoking. Above all I remembered them conversing in their own dialect which I only half understood.

The most trying time for me had to be mealtimes with my relatives. Although I keep reminding myself that what they had to offer is the best they have, I hardly ate. It is more their table manners, or the lack of it, that puts me off.. Their living room floor deserved a lot more respect. Spitting was commonplace. Chewed bones invariably made their way from mouth to floor. For them it was the most natural thing to do. Honestly, there were times when, heaven forbid if my ancestors were to find out, I actually longed for a hamburger at MacDonald’s!

I was rather relieved when time came for us to leave. I had not eaten nor slept well – the mosquitoes made sure of that. Neither did I exercise my bowels all the five days I was there. The state of the toilets were shocking, even those of the hotel we were in. At the same time I could not help feeling a tinge of sadness in leaving behind relatives who, by our standards, are so deprived of many things. I couldn’t help thinking that I could be one of them if my father hadn’t made the move back then. It involuntarily came forth from my lips when we finally boarded the bus: “Pa, we’re going home!”

Text written on 11 May 1988