by Lisa See
The family learned early on that one man’s piece of junk was another’s objet d’art, that yesterday’s curio could become tomorrow’s priceless antique. The Satsuma ware that Fong See bought in Japan in 1919 has evolved from “import curio” to prized antique. The Canton ware that Sissee so disdained as a dowry gift from her father is considered valuable, if merely for the completeness of the set. Over the years there were countless customers who found special items. Bernard Gelbort, who bought a coromandel screen with weeping willows and egrets on layaway for $135 in the late 1940s, sold it recently at Christie’s for $175,000.
Fong See understood that even everyday goods could have “value.” The wife of a famous designer wowed Europe with the simplicity and elegance of Fong See’s everyday clothes, purchased after his death, while Pietro Sandolar made a mini-fortune after casting the stone dogs in front of the store and mass-producing them in plaster. Today they can be spotted guarding banks, restaurants, and mansions. Even those little sewing baskets with the tassels and beads that the See children slaved over as kids, or chairs, chopsticks, and pottery from Dragon’s Den, can be found in homes and antique shops around the city.
It wasn’t always easy when I was growing up. My mother, Carolyn See, remarried, had another daughter, Clara, and got divorced again. We moved around a lot; I had gone to seven schools by the time I reached the third grade. During those early days we were broke a lot of the time, but then my mother’s writing career began to take off. Today she is the author of seven books, a book critic for the Washington Post, a professor at UCLA, and a wonderful mother and grandmother.
My father, Richard See, was out of the picture for many years; he was simply too drunk. He finally got his Ph.D. in comparative anthropology and, in 1965, took a job teaching in Mississippi, where he met and married his second wife, Pat Williams. They moved to Orange County, had my half-sister, Ariana, and got divorced. Soon after, my father, who now teaches at Cal State Fullerton, met the woman of his dreams—Anne Jennings, a fellow anthropologist. One of the best things about Anne is that she got my father to stop drinking. Another is that she has a sense of adventure—what some might call the See wanderlust. My father and Anne have traveled throughout Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. In 1992, after being together (and often apart, owing to Anne’s fieldwork) for eighteen years, they finally got married. Which should in no way imply that my dad is just your average guy with a job, a house, and a wife.
He has always kept his unique style. At the baby shower for my second son, held at a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown, my friends thought he was the waiter—with his mandarin beard, his baggy pants, his collarless shirt, and his—sorry, Dad—attitude. He is probably the only person in the country who was devastated when Russia invaded Afghanistan, not because he felt sorry for the people (although he did), but because he would no longer be able to buy any decent clothes—flowing embroidered cottons—to wear. In my entire life I have only seen him wear shoes once; he rented a pair of patent-leather evening pumps for my wedding. Otherwise, rain or shine, he slips on zoris or kung-fu slippers.
Through it all, my true-heart home was the F. Suie One Company, and my grandparents, Stella and Eddy, were my emotional anchors. Sissee and Gilbert were like fairy godparents. (Because of them, I was the best-dressed child at the Salvation Army Nursery School.) Just as Choey Lon saw China City as a place filled with unique characters, so too was my Chinatown along Ord and Spring streets: Mr. Lee, who served the best custard pie; Margaret, who ran the International Grocery; Albert, called “Blackie,” who eventually took over the Sam Sing Butcher Shop.
I grew up surrounded by wonderful people and hearing the stories that have filled these pages. From my grandmother I learned about her childhood in Waterville. Her stories were so vivid that when I went there, I found the town immediately familiar, for it hadn’t changed much in the last hundred years. (Even the homes of Grandma Huggins and Grandma Copeland still stand.) From Sissee I heard snippets about her mother’s life in Central Point. When I went there, I was lucky enough to meet Carol Harbison of the Southern Oregon Historical Society. In response to an idle question about weather on the Big Sticky, she pulled out the 1877 diary of Reverend Peterson. We both got goosebumps when we turned to the date of my great-great-grandmother’s death and found that he had been present.
But there was a whole part of the story I still needed to learn. Although I knew what had happened to my relatives in the United States, I knew nothing about the family in China. Before I started the book, I didn’t even know there was family in China; I had never heard of Fong See’s first and fourth wives, or even that Uncle had had a concubine and children. I’d never heard the name of Dimtao—except in the form of vague anecdotes about a kidnapping in a village somewhere in China. I knew I would have to go to Dimtao, walk the alleyways, see my greatgrandfather’s mansion and the house where Fong Yun’s children were kidnapped. More important, I knew I had to find the people who would know the stories to go along with those places.
CHAPTER 21
THE HOME VILLAGE II
Spring 1991
MY husband is a lawyer who, in the last few years, has developed an interesting set of clients along the Pacific Rim. From 1986 to 1988 he traveled throughout Asia and Europe to find and retrieve paintings, property, and bank accounts pirated out of the Philippines by Ferdinand Marcos and return them to Corazon Aquino’s new government. In the fall of 1987, on very short notice, I accompanied Dick on one of his quests to Hong Kong. On his one free day, we took a day trip to Guangzhou (the modern name for Canton) for a sightseeing excursion. At the time I had no idea that I would write this book, so we simply saw the sights and went back to Hong Kong.
In the fall of 1990 my husband accepted a case in which he was to represent the China National Coal Development Corporation in a dispute with Occidental Petroleum. In March 1991, when the Chinese government asked him to come and deal with a crisis, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to accompany him and do my research. We would both fly to Hong Kong. He would go on to Beijing, while I would go to Guangzhou, Foshan (the new name for Fatsan), and Dimtao. Later we would meet up again in Beijing.
But everyone says it can’t be done, especially with only ten days’ notice. “You can’t go to the village!” Yun Fong, Fong See’s second son from the second marriage, says bluntly. “You’ll never find the village. To get there you have to know the right set of tire tracks through the ricefields.” His brother Chuen shakes his head and warns that it took him three days just to hire a driver who could find Dimtao, and the only way he did it was by asking passing peasants the way to the gway low, house of ghosts. Chuen has had his own disappointments in going back to the village and discovering that the patina of childhood memory has worn away and been replaced by a grayer reality. He had remembered the house in its grandeur. When he visited a few years back, the house was in a shambles and inhabited by several families of squatters. “It was so bad,” he says, “I wouldn’t go inside.” His wife, Teruko, adds, “The Communists have no taste. They took the house and gave it to farmers, who didn’t know how to maintain a house.”
Finding the village is, for now, the least of my worries. My mother frets that I’ll never find a place to pee. (I tell her I’m not going to pee.) My doctor is concerned I’ll wade out into the rice paddies and get a parasite up through the soles of my feet. (I promise to wear boots.) “Don’t put any mousse in your hair, because you don’t want to look too American,” my sister advises. “And don’t go without your Ceclor.” Not one but two well-meaning friends think I should hire a helicopter to airlift me to the village. They see nothing strange in this. “The Japanese do it all the time to get to golf courses,” a friend assures me. People want me loaded down with a camcorder, a camera, a tape recorder, and gifts (from snap bracelets to UCLA sweatshirts).
Chuen suggests I take whiskey and cigarettes for the relatives. Teruko shakes her head and says that those Danish cookies that come in the blue tin w
ould be better. They say I should certainly try the restaurant in Guangzhou that specializes in snake. If I don’t go there, I should try the restaurant that features owl, salamander, turtle, civet cat, and dog. I laugh and smile. I know, and I think they know that I know, that they’ve read the same listings in the guidebooks that I have, and that I don’t plan on going in for any of these delicacies, just as I bet they never did.
Between them, they settle on my gear—a raincoat (“Not a heavy one, but one you can fold up and carry in your bag”), ankle-high boots (to ward off those dreaded parasites), toilet paper, and a phrase book. Chuen promises to write a letter to Choey Ha, Uncle’s daughter from the concubine Lui Ngan Fa. They hope Ha will get the letter before I get there, since what everyone is most concerned about is what the cousins will think when they see me. “I’m going to tell Ha that you are as tall as she is, slim like she is, but that you have yellow hair.” (But of course my hair is red, like my grandmother’s.)
I have my own anxieties. I’ve grown up hearing that the Chinese can’t stand the smell of a lo fan, that they can even tell American-born Chinese by their smell. I stop eating all dairy products and beef, and hope for the best. I worry about not speaking Chinese—either Cantonese or Mandarin. I’d feel better about things if I could say please and thank you, What a beautiful baby, I’m honored to meet you. I find a phrase book and some tapes to listen to in my car. My son listens for about two minutes, shakes his head, and says simply, “No way.” This isn’t a language I’m going to pick up in ten days driving around town doing errands. And the phrase book is in Pinyin…. Let’s just say that cleverer folks than I have been defeated by the intricacies of that Chinese puzzle.
I call Pauline at Lee’s Travel Service in Chinatown, who says, “Oh, yes, we can take care of everything. Tell me the name of your village and we’ll look it up on a map. I’ll call you back this afternoon.” I tell her all I know—that Dimtao has been described to me as being a half-day’s walk from Fatsan. Several hours later, Pauline makes good on her promise, only this time her voice is very serious, very professional. “The proprietor of our establishment, Mr. David Lee, wishes to speak with you.”
“Why do you want to go to Dimtao?” Mr. Lee asks. “Are you related to Fong See?” I’m astounded. “I knew your great-grandfather,” he says.
Diplomacy now rules all travel arrangements. I wonder if, by fax, I should invite the family to dinner. “Only if you want two hundred people to show up,” Mr. Lee snorts. “If you want to have dinner with them, ask them at the last minute.” I’d like the China Travel Service—a mainland organization that makes travel arrangements for Chinese visitors—to call Choey Ha and ask her which day would be most convenient to meet. “You tell her which day you want to see her,” Mr. Lee says. “You tell her she has to take the day off. You’re going a long way, and she should be available when you want her.” Mr. Lee also instructs Pauline to write a description of me in the fax. “They won’t believe you if you show up looking like … looking like … you’re Caucasian.”
As soon as Mr. Lee is out of earshot, I plead with Pauline to amend these bossy faxes. Yes, we can let dinner drift for a while. Yes, they should know what I look like, but Choey Ha should decide whether Sunday or Monday is better. Pauline is gracious and sweet, but I don’t read Mandarin. Three days before departure, my itinerary is settled. An interpreter from CTS will pick me up at ten on Monday morning, and we’ll drive to Foshan to meet with Choey Ha.
The day before I leave, I visit my grandmother Stella, who gets panicky when I drive across town in the rain, but is thrilled that I’m going to China. “Maybe you’ll get kidnapped by white slavers,” she says hopefully, gleefully. That night—with just hours to go before our departure—we get a fax saying that the coal company has resolved its immediate problem. My husband’s present trip is canceled. He will now go in another two weeks. My plans, on the other hand, would now be hard to change. I decide to go on ahead.
In Hong Kong, at the China Travel Service, I have the option of going either to the CITS side, for international visitors, or to the CTS side, for Chinese travelers. Pauline has said that my train tickets are on the CTS side, but the man whose job it is to point people in the right direction insists that I belong on the CITS side. The walls of the CITS side are plastered with travel posters featuring the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and the mist-covered mountains of Guilin. CITS has no record of me. Against the strenuous objections of the doorman, I cross to the CTS side. No travel posters here, just a glass cabinet running the entire length of the office, chock-full of hair dryers, curling irons, batteries, radios, and ginseng. The officious man behind the counter sends me back to the CITS side, where they still haven’t heard of me. Again I go back to the CTS side. A woman finally recognizes my name. They don’t want to give me the ticket. I’m traveling as an “Overseas Chinese” and they can see with their own eyes that something is very wrong. After a check of my passport, I finally get my round-trip train ticket.
And this has been the easy part.
Aboard the train, the lace curtains and the antimacassars reek of mildew. At the front of the car, a clock advertises Kent cigarettes. Just beneath it, a poster proclaims “Miracle Rub—Your Family Friend.” Dozens of identical fabric suitcases fill the overhead racks, and there’s much bickering and teasing and general chaos about how these should be stacked. This arguing—combined with men hawking sputum in the aisle and the loudspeaker advertising duty-free products—makes for a noisy, if spirited, trip. When the women come through with the dutyfree carts bearing these wares, I buy a bottle of whiskey and a tin of Danish cookies. Chuen and Teruko would be pleased.
We chug past the Hong Kong School of Motoring, Whimpey Asphalt, a soccer field. But mostly the track is edged by giant high-rise apartments looking like prehistoric porcupines. From every window, every balcony, bamboo rods extend straight out, with the week’s laundry flapping in the humid air. A half hour out of Hong Kong, the detritus of the city falls away and the land becomes increasingly rural, with plowed fields and the occasional water buffalo. Along the track, tropical trees and vines are awash in lavender, yellow, pink, and white blooms.
We pass through the town of Lo Wo and cross onto the mainland. On adjacent hills in the distance, two lookout towers keep watch over the border and for a moment I glimpse rolls of razor wire sprawled up a hill. By the time I focus on this obvious barrier, it’s gone. China. This border carries with it the same dramatic change as one experiences when passing from San Diego to Tijuana. We creep past shacks constructed from discarded corrugated tin siding. A rickety-looking web of bamboo scaffolding surrounds the construction of a twenty-story building. Where, in America, the precarious open sides would be fenced in with chain link, here rattan mats protect workers from danger. Workmen, dressed in blue “coolie” trousers and jackets, squat on their haunches and watch the train roll past.
In the countryside again, cultivated tracts of land appear between slight valleys carved from tentative hills. In these small plots, electric green shoots break the soil. Here and there people go about the arduous task of irrigating: A woman carries two five-gallon cans on a pole slung across her shoulders, while two men, each armed with a ladle, scoop water out of the buckets and fling it on the tender stalks. In other fields, farmers suspend primitive watering cans—the same buckets, rigged with spouts—from their bamboo sticks. This way one person can do the job. Soon we’re passing rice paddies. Even on Sunday, people are out planting, sorting, thinning. All of this activity is hard, backbreaking work.
When the train pulls to a stop at the Guangzhou station, people frantically gather their bags, quickly descend the single step to the platform, then break into a run to be the first in line for passport control. Pandemonium rules the day. There are no signs in English, and no one speaks English. Eventually I make my way to the desk set up for guests of the White Swan Hotel.
Just four years before, on my day trip to Guangzhou, I had listened to the soft hum o
f bicycles on the streets, but now the city is one big traffic jam. It takes twenty minutes—and a lot of yelling by the White Swan driver—to exit the train station’s parking lot. More shocking are the beggars. The beggar class that used to mutilate its children is supposed to be long gone. But as the White Swan van edges through this fume-filled lot, a woman knocks repeatedly on my window. Her face is covered with sores, and she holds up a sickly toddler. The mother makes the universal gesture of wanting food—bunching her fingers together and tapping at her mouth. I focus my eyes elsewhere. A man in his twenties strolls from taxi to taxi with his hands tucked up, China-style, in the capacious sleeves of his jacket. At each car he pulls out his two stumps and shoves them in the window to show the passengers.