homecoming: guangzhou/ sak tou

08-31-10

1:30 AM

People asked me in Beijing if I had relatives in China and I always said no, not really, only very distant cousins and people "from the same village." I've never been so happy to be proved wrong. I've met dozens of aunts, uncles, cousins, and nieces and nephews just today, and in a brief family tree I wrote on some scrap paper, calculate I have well over 45 relatives I never knew about until today. But that's news for another day, so just check out some quick photographs of my family I snapped. We drove to the village where my father grew up until at age 9 he moved to Hawaii due to a lot of political unrest and the death of my grandfather. He hadn’t been back since, and obviously I’d never been. It’s been 54 years.

The two women are two of the three wives of my grandfather, at the far right (good looking guy, hm?). My grandmother is not pictured, because they were not yet married when these photographs were taken. The other man is the oldest son of I believe the first wife (1^st is on the left, 2^nd is in the middle).

Dad hadn’t been back in what, 54 years? It’s a very different China he’s coming back to, although it’s not like he ever had been to Beijing before or anything. See, we were country mice, living in absolutely rural Guangzhou. The outdoor toilet was a good 200 foot walk from the house, and the nearest neighbors were rice fields and a huge fish pond. My dad told us several stories about growing up here:

“All those buildings here weren’t there, it was just rice paddies. That was a huge fish pond. Someone from the village told me if I ate an egg raw I would grow to have a beautiful singing voice, that it would help my voice grow strong. So I did it and of course I was as sick as a dog. So I went to that rice paddy over there and puked my guts up.”

“I broke my arm twice riding a water buffalo. Oh! That’s why my arm is crooked funny.” On repeated retellings, the story expanded: “I broke my arm twice when I was a little boy riding the water buffalo in the rice fields. Man! And one time, the bone came out from my arm and I’m lucky I didn’t die of infection, because the gods saved me or else you kids wouldn’t have been born. Come to think of it, it was an act of god that I ever met your mother in the first place… “(and we digress to a story of how they met in an elevator, 30-some years ago). (My dad has the unfortunate tendency to exaggerate, which is not to say that I doubt the veracity of this bone claim, only I do).

This second-story room is where my dad was born.

This young whippersnapper was instructed to call me ‘aunty grandma’ (goo po). I’ve never felt so old before in my life.
We are all of the same generation, all half-cousins from my grandfather’s three different wives. The guy in the striped yellow shirt is my oldest cousin. His grandson is the one above who called me grandma (sigh). The one in red is my brother Jason. The one in grey is my middle cousin, father of the two most adorable daughters I’ve ever seen (yes, violation of the 1-child rule; he had to pay a steep fine, but really wanted another kid.)

A fraction of the family I met today. My oldest cousin drove us from house to house, collecting various relatives and cars as we went. I even got my middle brother Andrew on Google Video so they could meet them.

See, the most adorable, good-tempered baby ever. She looked all cute and happy in my brother Jason’s arms in the previous picture, didn’t she? Go figure that the second I started to hold her, she started bawling and even my hasty palmoff back to mom didn’t do the trick. Kids like Jason as reliably as they like abusing Andrew (every one of my cousins’ kids has learned the game of “poke Andrew” within minutes of meeting him, followed by “prod Andrew,” and my personal favorite, “tickle Andrew”).

This was our last stop, and this is probably the photograph I’m proudest of. It’s the youngest of the generation at age 63, my father, with the oldest of the generation at age 94, my half-aunt. She lives alone, cooks for herself, and has an outdoor bathroom she walks to on her own: “I cook a lot of haum nee (salt fish)”.

Her full sisters are my aunt Lan Ying who lives with us in Milpitas when I’m home and who is largely responsible for my retention of Cantonese beyond the rudimentary, and her youngest sister, both of whom were at this gathering. These sisters are made of steel. See my Goo Ma Lan Ying (the one who lives with us, and sometimes in San Francisco)? Guess how old she is. Really, guess, think of a number in your head.

She’s 74. I swear to god. She doesn’t dye her hair, either. You can see a little bit of grey if you’re close. I can only hope to look like her when I’m her age.

I am half Cantonese, and there is a saying that the Cantonese eat everything with four legs except the table, so I will close with a photograph of some of the dim sum we chose from for lunch. Note the tentacles. It was delicious.