by Andrew Kwong
‘When Grandmother comes from Hong Kong, she’ll bring us food,’ Mama said as she tucked me into bed. Every night I rubbed my empty stomach and pretended I was on the Long March, and looked forward to Grandmother Young’s arrival.
Relatives in Hong Kong and Macau began bringing food to Shiqi to help their starving families. Grandmother Young started making a monthly trip, even though adults at home always seemed to fear that she might be detained by the authorities, for whatever reason.
Grandmother’s matrimonial home in Shenmingting was just around the corner from the Young’s ancestral home where Great-Grandfather Fu-chiu had married the maiden who’d fallen out of her bridal sedan. Each time my grandmother visited, we’d go there to get our share of food. It was a good five kilometres west of Shiqi. To save us the long walk, Mama paid ten fen for each bicycle courier who had a seat attached to the back wheel. Ying and Weng would take one bicycle, Mama and I another. With our District Head’s permission we often stayed at Grandmother’s house for a couple of nights and had fun with Aunt Wai-hung’s sons, our cousins Young-young, Young-chit and Young-syn. Though he was just three or four years old, Young-syn insisted on hanging around with us older kids and was determined not to miss any of our games.
Grandmother Young brought the monthly customs quota of ten kilos of food. It usually included two tins of Spam, three cans of Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk, several baguettes that saw us through a day (maybe two), a can of peanut oil, brown sugar in long blocks, and sometimes cooked and salted pork that lasted us a week if we ate small amounts at a time. She also brought us our favourite Arnott’s arrowroot biscuits, Wrigley’s chewing gum, and Adler pencils and erasers. What luxuries in those days. She’d put all these in a big bag made from four layers of tough cloth; it would be unpacked later, then Aunt Wai-hung and my mother shared the fabric to make clothes for us. If Grandmother remembered, there might even be fishing lines and hooks for me, meaning I didn’t have to heat my mother’s needles to bend them into hooks that couldn’t catch fish longer than ten centimetres.
Laughter and excitement reappeared in our lives whenever my grandmother travelled home. She would laugh with us, and her well-powdered face glowed. But soon it would darken. ‘You’re all too thin,’ she’d sigh, frowning at us. Her voice was always loud and clear: my mother said Grandmother had needed to shout so that Great-Grandmother Good Arrival could hear her, and it had become a habit. Now maybe Grandmother was going deaf, because her daughters had to shout back at her to make her hear. But she didn’t seem to want to know exactly what we kids were talking about, so she just said ‘Oh, yes’ to everything and smiled.
When we stayed with Grandmother Young in Shenmingting, I would climb out of bed at five in the morning to watch her light incense sticks and offer prayers to the ancestors for their blessings. I’d sit quietly in the dark corner of the front room and listen to her mumbling, unable to make out what she was saying. Sometimes she half-turned her head and noticed me, before she turned back to her prayers. The aroma of slowly brewing coffee from the kitchen and the sandalwood scent of her incense sticks permeated the cold house, turning it into a warm and welcoming home. The fragrance surrounding her hadn’t changed since I’d lived with her back in the summer of 1955 in Hong Kong.
Memories of that time returned to me. I thought of good Mr and Mrs Ho, and their daughter Je Je, whom I had missed badly, and gentle Grandmother Lee, my grandmother’s room-mate. I wasn’t sure if my grandmother had forgiven me for giving her such a hard time by threatening to kill myself, and I couldn’t remember if I had ever apologised to her for being such a brat. I was full of admiration for her and most thankful for the food she brought to ease our hunger.
After her prayers, I would follow her into the kitchen. She’d pour herself a cup of her favourite dark brew and a small cup for me, just as she’d done in Hong Kong. Mine was diluted with hot water but the fragrance was still strong. I sipped my coffee quietly with Grandmother Young in the front room. Many times I was close to saying, ‘I am sorry, Grandma, for what I did,’ but I never summoned the courage.
One morning Grandmother Young smiled at me and slipped two biscuits into my hand, and I knew I’d been forgiven. ‘Your favourite, remember?’ She looked at me from across the table as she spoke, then she went on drinking her black coffee mixed with sugar and a raw egg. Her kind face gleamed like her lacquered hair. She was wearing a high-collar traditional-style gown with knotted fabric buttons running in a slant from the neck to under her left armpit, and then straight down the length to the hem.
‘Have some more, Ah-mun,’ she said, just as she had in Hong Kong. But now she followed up with, ‘These arrowroot biscuits are from Sydney in the New Gold Mountain, and you can’t even buy them in Hong Kong. Our old neighbour recently brought them all the way from Australia to Hong Kong when he came looking for a wife. He’d been away since around the time your grandfather went back to Hawaii in 1935.’ She sighed and shifted her gaze to a big photo hanging on the wall; it showed a man in a cowboy hat riding a white horse. ‘That’s your grandfather,’ she said, looking at the husband she hadn’t seen for over twenty years.
I leant closer to her across the rosewood table and held her hand. I felt the soothing coolness of the smooth hardwood. This table and the matrimonial bed were the only pieces of furniture the rampaging mobs hadn’t confiscated during the anti-landlord years.
Grandmother said, ‘We are well off today because we are here together as a family. We owe it to that white horse.’
I already knew the story well, because she and Mama had told it many times, but I was happy to hear it again.
My grandfather had first arrived in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, officially as Gut Young, supposed to be one of the sons of a Mr Ki Young, who was a neighbour from Shenmingting. Years later I found out that Grandfather, like many sojourners in those days, had bought travel documents to enter Hawaii illegally as an indentured labourer.
In the late 1920s, after he had fulfilled his obligation, he left Ah-ki Store, a thriving business next to the Honolulu Market, and he went to work at the Dole Pineapple Cannery in Honolulu Harbor, where he worked long hours to raise money to try to bring his four younger brothers to Honolulu. Unfortunately, constant exposure to chemicals inflicted bad burns and dermatitis on his hands, and for many months he was unable to work. He ended up doing odd jobs to earn his keep at a farm near Waikele, not far from Pearl Harbor, while waiting for his hands to heal properly. There, he became attached to an old white farm horse, and took her out for exercise during the magnificent Hawaiian dawns and sunsets.
He wondered how he could earn enough money to feed his family in China, who were relying on him. He remembered the promises he’d made years earlier to his parents, his brothers and his young wife. His small savings were fast disappearing.
One evening Gut Young was riding the white horse as the sun dallied on the horizon, its warm glow turning pink, scarlet and then purple. Yet another day had gone by, and his hands still cracked and bled easily. The Hawaiian remedy of bathing in a potion made from well-boiled young eucalyptus shoots, native plumeria (frangipani) flowers and other herbs hadn’t worked. His worries were constantly on his mind.
The last light was leaving the shallow valley of Waikele and receding to the mountain ridges, where ocean mist gathered and an evening shower loomed. He hastily turned his mount to head home.
On the way, the horse was startled by something, reared and almost threw him off. The reflected light from the ocean revealed a parcel by the roadside. Gut Young dismounted. He found a canvas bag. When he opened it, bundles of money – American dollars in cash – spilled out. He lost his breath, and his head spun. No one was around, not even the spirit of a local god. The sparkling Hawaiian cosmos had already blurred into another night that guaranteed a promising tomorrow.
Dizzy and scared, Gut Young paced up and down the volcanic road trying to decide what to do. All his worries would be over with such a large sum of mo
ney. Life would be like the glorious sunshine following a Hawaiian shower, with no more hard labour in a foreign land. He could send his family money and bring his brothers to Hawaii. Or, basking in glory, he could go home to Shenmingting and buy up all the available good land, along with any businesses he fancied. He could then employ many servants and have a comfortable life for years to come. He could easily be the richest man around, including in the bigger town of Shiqi.
‘But your grandfather had already made up his mind before the last rainbow retreated to the mountains – he would wait with the money for its rightful owner to return,’ my grandmother said with pride.
Her voice softened as she kept her gaze on grandfather’s handsome portrait: a serious young man looking into the distance, his back straight and shoulders squarely in control of a white horse that always turned into a white dragon in my dreams, just as my grandfather became a knight in silver armour.
‘Needless to say, the owner was most grateful,’ said Grandmother. ‘He set your grandfather up with a small business in downtown Honolulu.’
Sam-wo, or Harmonious Three, was the name of the delicatessen in the Honolulu Market that my grandfather came to own. He eventually saved enough money to buy travel documents for his brothers, Dai-ung, Dai-lum and Dai-hin, to join him in Hawaii (but sadly not his other brother, Dai-fook, whose papers were rejected twice at the Chinese border). The three eldest brothers ran the business, which in turn supported their families in Shenmingting for many years, while Dai-hin, the youngest brother, was sent to school. Grandfather also returned to Shenmingting for a year-long vacation in 1934. Denis, my mother’s youngest brother, was born the following year.
‘By returning the money he found to its rightful owner, your grandfather brought great good fortune to the whole family,’ my grandmother added.
But her eyes showed she was recalling what had happened next: her traumatic persecution as a landlord during the land reforms, before she went to Hong Kong. Only by borrowing a large sum of money to compensate the new government as demanded by the local authorities, so the family story goes, did my grandfather manage to avert the threat of imprisonment or even capital punishment. ‘It would’ve been a lot worse if your grandfather had returned home with his riches,’ Grandmother Young would say. ‘The mobs would have executed the whole family.’ She made a sign with her hand swiftly across her throat. I trembled and heard the thud of bullets at Pig Head Hill, before Grandmother Young hastened to end her story the way she had begun. ‘That’s why we’re well off now. We are safe because we have our family together – the best thing in life.’
*
Having been discharged from the provincial swimming squad after failing to gain a position in the national swimming competition, Ying was now living at home full time. Mama was thrilled and Weng and I were super-excited to have our big sister back. Now sixteen, Ying wore her hair short and had the strong physique of an athlete, much to the envy of many of the townspeople. For a while she was the healthiest-looking person in town, with good colour in her face and her body bursting with energy. But that wasn’t to last, as she now had to endure starvation like the rest of us. She enrolled at Shiqi’s Number One High School and settled back into student life.
By then, mid-1960, famine had well and truly set in. The commune kitchens were finding it hard to manage the increasing number of people; complaints proliferated as rations shrank. There were more children and babies than adults as a result of the Party’s successful call, several years earlier, to increase the population. Many parents were working long hours as volunteer labourers building dams and roads away from home, so we were left to fend for ourselves most of the time. Some of my friends had to care for their younger siblings after school, as I did with Weng, so our gang grew even bigger. But that made it harder to manage slightly dangerous activities such as kite-flying; whatever we did, we had to consider the younger ones in our care.
With less food, we exhausted ourselves easily. Hunger pangs lasted all day long, from breakfast to lunch to bedtime. Our skinny legs couldn’t carry on as we wanted, and we ran out of puff so quickly that we simply had to slow down. We sat more often and for longer on the levee wall in Kwong Street, talking and dreaming of food. Eventually we would even tire of talking and sit silently instead, looking towards the motionless horizon and imagining what a feast would be like.
Ah-dong’s father, being a union official in town and a comrade, had larger food rations than other regular civilians. Still, this didn’t sate Ah-dong’s hunger. His potbelly grew bigger. His mother said you could hear the worms from across the room; she said the food he ate fed the worms before him. He carried his stomach around with increasing difficulty, and he puffed more than any of us. Sometimes he seemed dazed, sweat dripping from his face, grey as the old bricks of the Kwong Street houses. When he began to sway, his eyes turned dull like those of a dead fish. We would rush to wet his face with cold water and to squeeze lychee or sugarcane juice into his mouth or give him a bite of a biscuit – anything sweet to revive him enough to take him home to his mother. Sometimes we suspected he just wanted a treat, especially if he knew someone had half a biscuit in their pocket. We’d get our reward when we took him home limp as a wilted lotus leaf: his mother would hand each of us half a biscuit. Then a much-revived Ah-dong would run off with us to celebrate on the levee wall. He was generous that way, and I still can’t help wondering how genuine those fainting attacks were – maybe he just wanted to share his privileges as the son of a Party cadre.
We kids noticed that adults had lost their smiles. Their faces turned dark yellow, and some of their swollen legs oozed odorous liquid. They grumbled and complained that we children had no idea of the dire situation we were in. They no longer worried about informants lurking in the crowd; some even started to complain on the streets in loud whispers. A few bold ones swore and cursed to release their frustration. All were overcome by lethargy and starvation.
One day the authorities introduced a bright new idea to make us feel like we were getting more food: twice-cooked rice. After rice was cooked, it was stirred while more water was added, and then cooked a second time. This resulted in puffed-up rice that took up more space in our bowls. That meant the same quantity of uncooked rice could now feed more people. (Or so it seemed. In fact, we were all getting less rice than before.) It was an exciting concept, and for a short time our spirits were buoyed again, and we believed we could conquer anything, even hunger. But the puffed-up rice failed to satisfy hungry stomachs and revitalise depleted bodies, which led to more grumbling. One heroic comrade introduced thrice-cooked rice, promising an even bigger serving for each person. But that didn’t work either. More people complained. We were all rickety and thin.
My grandmother’s regular visits did little to relieve our increasing hunger, due to the strict monthly quota of ten kilograms of food for each visitor from the colonies. Baba said this was to discourage the now-thriving black market. I overheard Mama wishing my sister Ping could visit too. Given the family’s unfavourable classification, Mama feared they would detain my sister on her return, as had happened to a few unlucky people in town. Mama agonised for weeks. I heard her talking about it with Ah-dong’s mother, who always had a sympathetic ear for her.
One day Mama gathered enough courage to seek assurance from the District Head. She took me to keep her company. The District Head, once a strutting fellow, now appeared like one of us. His head hung low; he looked increasingly sallow, thin and tired. I hadn’t heard him hum ‘The East Is Red’ in months. He told Mama that the country was in a dire situation because of the drought in the north, floods in the south, and the outstanding Korean War debts. ‘Ping would be doing a patriotic job if she could bring food home to help the revolution,’ he said to Mama, who bowed her head. ‘The Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk is the best. Our children love it. And the American Camel cigarettes are the richest tobacco, with a smooth, lingering aftertaste.’ He gave Mama a faint smile. Mama nodded.
My sister then began to make regular trips with food, just as many other relatives were doing for their families in Shiqi. Whenever Ping came home, Mama would register her arrival with the District Security Officer. That evening the District Head would pay us a visit, and Mama would offer him a tin of condensed milk, a toy or two for his children, and a packet of imported cigarettes.
I remember watching him place the goods inside his old army uniform, a feeble smile rising to the corners of his mouth. Then he nodded to Mama, and left without looking at us.
‘We must share in these bad times,’ Mama said without malice. ‘A bright moon will shine again one day, after the clouds disperse.’
*
To impress the District Head, Baba had volunteered to work on the construction of a hydroelectric dam when the call for labour arrived.
The small coal-fired generator not far from our home had long been struggling to provide households in town with their one-per-family fifteen-watt lighting. Blackouts were common and kerosene lamps were essential backups. The light inside our room quivered most of the time.
In the hills many kilometres from our town, outcasts from the new society gathered to build the Changjiang Dam to generate more electricity for Shiqi. Some were, like Baba, unsuitable, unwanted or unqualified for any jobs in the new nation. Huts sprang up on the hillside to accommodate these otherwise unemployable people who received no remuneration apart from three modest meals a day. Baba’s food ration was transferred to the dam site, where extra food in the form of sweet potatoes for the labourers served as an incentive. Political education was to continue for Baba and his fellow labourers in the evenings.