On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family

by Lisa See

  The White Swan Hotel was the first luxury hotel in China to throw open its doors to any and all comers, including the local populace. This being the case, the lobby and public areas teem with both tourists and locals. Workers, peasants, and soldiers come through in familial parties—sometimes to have lunch, sometimes to visit guests in the hotel, but mostly to gawk and have their photographs taken in front of the lobby’s “scenic waterfall.”

  After checking in, I have a bowl of noodles in the coffee shop. The people around me are prosperous—mostly young Chinese—with beepers and cellular phones. I go upstairs, watch “Entertainment Tonight” on cable, and fall asleep by eight-thirty. I wake up at 2:00 A.M. in a panic. What if I’ve come this far and the interpreter can’t find me? I think that if I get everything ready for the big day, I’ll be able to relax. I get out my notebook, the pictures of the family I’ve brought to show that I’m related, the camera, the flash, the extra batteries, and extra pens. The activity, though useful, doesn’t work.

  I’m not the only insomniac. People wander the halls all night. From my balcony, which overlooks the joining of two tributaries of the Pearl River, I can see boats of all sizes and shapes chugging past. Anchored in the center of the channel, a barge loads its cargo under harsh lights. Even in the middle of the night, the odor of coal smoke hangs heavy in the thick air.

  Then next morning I meet Chen Mou, my interpreter, in the waiting room for tour groups. He speaks perfect English, as well as Hakka, Cantonese, Mandarin, and the Foshan dialect, which is very different from the pure Cantonese spoken only twenty-eight miles away. He carries a beeper and gets calls every few minutes, only half of which he answers. He introduces me to our driver, Xuem, a disheveled, quiet man. We have a little yellow van—more like an aluminum can laid on its side than a solid automobile. We honk our way through town and get on the Guong Fo Expressway, the first toll road of its kind in South China. Only a few years ago it took three hours to travel from Guangzhou to Foshan. Now it’s barely a half hour on a highway nearly deserted except for a few vans and trucks.

  Along the way, Chen Mou, who says he wants to be called “Tony,” points out the sights of the countryside. He gestures to the stands of trees that mark the streams, dikes, and small dams that provide water throughout the province. “You see that small tree that looks like a mushroom?” he asks. “That’s a lichee tree.” When we pass a graveyard dotting a hillside, Chen Mou says, “Both businessmen and peasants wish to be buried on a hill to gain the benefits of feng shui in hopes of bringing prosperity to themselves and their families. I am always conscious of feng shui. As a tour guide I hope for smoothness and safety for my guests.”

  Chen Mou is originally from Shenzhen, an economic zone where families are allotted more space than in the southern capital of Guangzhou, where an entire household is lucky to get a bedroom and a sitting room. Although Chen Mou now lives in a dormitory for single men in Guangzhou, he explains that both Shenzhen and Foshan offer more beautiful settings and smaller populations. In Foshan the average family can have a sitting room and two bedrooms. Chen Mou adds that he’s never wanted to leave China, but that many of his friends have escaped. “They walk or take the train to Shenzhen, then float in tubs down the Pearl River to Hong Kong.”

  Off the expressway, we’re in bumper-to-bumper traffic bound for Foshan’s city center. Billboards line the road, advertising countless capitalist products—dinette sets, washing machines, bedroom sets, nuts and bolts, power tools, face cream, portable computers, loudspeakers. Canvas-colored trucks lumber past. Flatbeds weighed down with dirt or gravel grind their gears. Bicyclists pedal through the dust and exhaust, loaded with their own wares—baskets stuffed with fresh produce, cases of Orange Crush, a side of raw meat strapped to a back wheel.

  Along the shoulder lies a dirt area about twenty feet wide, stacked with sheet metal, sewer pipes, tie rods, sacks of cement, piles of gravel. Behind this, a kind of super sidewalk sale is taking place. Those dreams for sale on the billboards are a reality here, and they’re all heavily influenced by western standards: western-style toilets in every conceivable color and shape, overstuffed sofas, sofa beds, pine bureaus, pots, pans, stoves, refrigerators.

  In downtown Foshan, camphor trees line the wide boulevards, creating a shady oasis from the heat and humidity of the day. We stop first at the Overseas Chinese Hotel to wait for a cousin to meet us. Guan Yi Nian, my great-uncle’s granddaughter and Choey Ha’s daughter, arrives. Her hair is cropped short, her eyes are wide, her lips full. On this warm day, Yi Nian wears thick wool stockings and a brown wool suit hemmed well above her knees. Her lacy blouse is set off by a brooch, and she walks briskly on high heels. She’s extremely nervous, but she says in English, “Hello, nice to meet you, welcome.” We get in the van and she gives animated instructions to her mother’s house.

  We turn onto Wing On Road, named by my great-grandfather, meaning “Peace Forever.” From 1966 to 1976, during the Cultural Revolution, Yi Nian explains, it was renamed Ming On—“Red Forever.” One hundred years ago this was the new district of Foshan, for the most prosperous of its citizens. Today, although the buildings are old, they’re well cared for and charming. We walk off the main street and down an alley where the high brick walls of the residences are whitewashed. We pass through a carved door and into a first courtyard for storing bicycles, then into a second courtyard with a few potted plants.

  Choey Ha, her husband, her son, and his wife come out to greet us. Everyone has taken the day off from work. We shake hands and smile a lot. Choey Ha pulls me into the living room and orders her daughter-in-law to bring tea. A marble-topped, carved wood table sits in the center of the room. Matching straight-backed chairs are lined up against the walls in much the same way as in Fong See’s home in Los Angeles. On another wall, a built-in cabinet and shelves hold about ten tins of those damned Danish cookies. Choey Ha sits next to me and pats my knee. The others stand and stare. We smile some more. Choey Ha asks through the interpreter if she looks like Choey Lon, her half-sister in Los Angeles. Of course she does, I say.

  I show a photograph I’ve brought of Fong See, Ticie, and the five children. Pa sits in a severe suit; Ma is next to him in an elegant silk suit with ribbon trim, her hair gathered up into a bun. Ming and Ray, about fifteen and thirteen, look disaffected and bored. Bennie and my grandfather are just little kids dressed up in uncomfortable clothes. Sissee sits on her father’s lap, wearing a white organza pinafore; a big white ribbon is pinned in her hair. Her face is slightly out of focus. She was the only one too young to hold still long enough for the photographer to get the shot. My relatives consider. If Fong See is their uncle, the little boy my grandfather, then I am truly a cousin. Strictly speaking, because my grandfather Eddy was Ha’s first cousin, I’m her first cousin twice removed.

  Having already heard Chen Mou’s explanation of local housing, I’m impressed by our tour through the public rooms of Uncle’s three-story town house. Outside, off the central courtyard, is a three-sided kitchen—with no window, no door—tiled in white and pink. Tin cabinets hold dishes. On the counter are two rice steamers, a metal bread box with a roll-away front, and a red thermos for tea. We go back through the main living room and upstairs to an identical sitting room above it, then up more narrow stairs to an empty room, where we pass outside to a balcony and climb another set of stairs to the roof where many years ago Uncle raised pigeons.

  We troop back downstairs, out through the courtyards, and down the alley toward the house of Choey Ha’s brother, Ming Tia. During this walk and others during my stay, Choey Ha either places a hand on my shoulder companionably or takes my elbow with one hand and with the other imperiously moves people out of our way. At Ming Tia’s house, we go through another round of introductions. Everything is happening so fast I can’t process who’s who.

  In some ways Ming Tia’s house is primitive, in others completely modern. The first-floor anteroom is divided by a dilapidated wood-and-glass carved screen. The main room ha
s no windows. In the dim light I see an altar table set with a vase, an artfully stacked plate of tangerines, and a ceramic azalea. Above the table hangs an exquisite mirror with a fuchsia, azure, and red phoenix painted on the glass. Nearby, two calendars dangle from nails. One of the calendars shows a beautiful Chinese girl in an off-the-shoulder sweater, vamping against a bouquet of peonies, roses, and Queen Anne’s lace. The other shows a girl in a short black skirt and sleeveless top, reclining by a garden replete with flamingoes, steppingstones, and delicate bridges.

  Upstairs, the main sitting room combines antiques with contemporary furnishings. The tables and chairs are antiques in the literal sense—they’re very old—but they’re not of the finest quality. Ming Tia and Choey Ha complain, as they will time and again during the next two days, that although they’ve been able to retrieve their property from the government since the end of the Cultural Revolution—“the Cruel Disaster” is how Ha refers to it—the family hasn’t been able to recover its “good” antiques.

  Out in the alley again, we briefly meet up with Uncle’s surviving concubine. Lui Ngan Fa, an old woman in a padded jacket, with only a few teeth left, still suffers from headaches caused by her beating at the hands of the cadres during the Cultural Revolution. I am told she maintained a “good relationship” with Fong See’s fourth wife, Si Ping, who died only a few years ago. But Ngan Fa is too old to have a conversation with a foreigner and a stranger, and I am still too ignorant to realize who she is.

  It begins to rain, and I’m hustled off by Ha and Chen Mou. As we huddle three to an umbrella, Chen Mou comments, “Whenever you have a VIP guest, it is sure to rain. That is a saying we have in China.” In a pig’s eye.

  We dash for the two vans that will be chauffeuring the extended family today. First stop, the ancestral temple. As we drive past the Fan River, a meandering tributary of the Pearl River, the van fills with good-natured arguing. Everyone has an opinion about the best way to get to the ancestral temple. Interspersed with this bantering, the passengers in our van—Choey Ha, her husband, and their daughter—take up a kind of chant, which Chen Mou continually translates. “You are very smart. You must be very well educated. You are very pretty. You must be very rich because you’re a writer.”

  At the Temple of Ancestors, we pose for pictures. Guan Yi Nian stands to my right. On my left are Choey Ha, her husband, Ming Tia, his wife, “John,” and his wife, “Joanie.” This excursion feels like what you do when the relatives come in from out of town. We all have to go through a fair amount of oohing and ahing, as they point out the 108 ancient weapons, as I comment on the bronze tripod incense burners, as Chen Mou explains the importance of the statue of the mythical Black Emperor, which was carved during the Ming Dynasty. We linger before the Ten Thousand Happiness Stage, but we pass on the hall of national treasures, the gallery of paintings and photographs of old China seen through the eyes of westerners, and the exhibit on birth control.

  We gather around a low pool where people throw coins for good luck either to a statue of Kuan Yin rising out of a lotus blossom (to symbolize Buddhism), or to a statue of a turtle and a snake (the symbols of Taoism). If your coin lands on the turtle’s back, Chen Mou says, you will get your wish. If your coin comes close to the turtle or the snake, then you will get something close to your wish. If you miss entirely, there goes your one desire. Chen Mou tells me that he believes in the luck brought by this wishing pond. “I came here with three friends. We didn’t want to go into the army or be sent far away to work as peasants. We each threw in our coins. Mine landed on the turtle’s back, and here I am. My friend’s passed very near to the snake’s head. He went to the countryside for two years, but is now a worker in Guangzhou.” When I ask about the other friend, Chen Mou shrugs and says simply, “He missed.”

  We go to lunch at the Fatsan Hotel. The restaurant is so large and in so many sections of the hotel that it’s more like five restaurants. As the older men scurry to different parts of the restaurant to find us a table, Choey Ha once again takes up her litany. She’s been holding onto my upper arm, guiding me through this maze. Now she squeezes it, pinches it, and rattles off something to Chen Mou. “Your cousin wants you to know that you are very …” Here he hesitates. “You are very well kept.” Then from Ha’s son and daughter-in-law comes a correction. “No, slim.” “She is slim.” Soon all of them are saying, “Slim, slim, slim.” I find myself beaming, not because they’ve said I’m slim, but because they’re beginning to treat me like family.

  We end up in the section of the restaurant that specializes in Mongolian fire pot. As we walk into a private room, the waitress turns on the television to CNN, then checks on the pot of broth in the center of the table. “Do you like this kind of food?” Chen Mou asks. “Of course,” I say, but I must admit that when the waitress lifts the cover off the broth and I see how congealed and scummy it is, I have second thoughts. How many other people—complete strangers—have cooked their food in this same broth in this same container? When the pot comes to a rolling boil I’m somewhat mollified, but there’s more to come.

  Once we’re served our drinks—either Orange Crush or the brown tea of the region—I finally have a chance to sort out who everyone is. Choey Ha is dressed today in a well-tailored off-white wool blazer, a turtleneck, and gray wool trousers. She works as a cashier at the Nam Hoi Technical School, and has an open, kind face; as Chen Mou might say, she is “very well kept” for someone who is fifty-seven. The more I look at her, the less I think she looks like her half-sister, Choey Lon, than like Sumoy—my great-half-aunt and my father’s high-school flame.

  To her right sits Le Chu-wa, Ha’s daughter-in-law, who wants to be called “Joanie.” Her hair is cropped short and she’s not nearly as stylish as her sister-in-law, Yi Nian. But Joanie understands English and is generous of spirit and delightfully shy. Whenever she smiles or laughs, she covers her mouth to hide slightly crooked teeth. She would never go so far as to correct what the interpreter says, but every once in a while she’ll add a few words in English to give a more subtle flavor to what’s been said. She wears a white cotton blazer, a red T-shirt, a straight gray wool skirt, stockings, and heels. She works as a secretary at an import-export company, where she practices her English.

  To her right is the lovely Guan Yi Nian, who works as a cashier for a construction company. When Chen Mou, unbidden, asks about her marital status, everyone teases this single man mercilessly. He has a good job. He should be able to find a wife. “Ah, but none as beautiful as your daughter,” he replies. More laughter, more joshing. Yi Nian’s husband works for the government and is currently stationed in Macao, where he is expected to stay for several years. It’s very lonely for her. (I have already heard from Chuen about this alliance. The groom’s family hosted a banquet for thirty tables—three hundred people—extravagant in any country, but astounding here. “He must be a very high official,” Chuen has speculated.)

  Then comes Zhumei-ying, the wife of Uncle’s son Ming Tia. She is in her fifties, has the coarse features of a peasant, and works at a printing press. Her outfit is baggy, ill-fitting. Her hair style isn’t as sophisticated as those of the other women in the family. Her cheeks are rosy, her hands rough and slightly swollen from her labors.

  Ming Tia, Ha’s younger brother, teaches electronics. His features are sharp and angular. He has high cheekbones and shrunken cheeks. His hair is receding, and little wispy tendrils curl up around his ears. He wears a starched white shirt and a gray western-style suit. Next to him sits his brother-in-law, Ha’s husband, Guan Gin Hong, who has an expression of nonchalance frozen on his face. His hair is long, disheveled. He has a rumpled look about him. He chain-smokes like mad. Chen Mou explains that Guan Gin Hong is a teacher, but of what I never find out.

  I don’t have a clue about who the next person is. Everyone laughs because it’s my driver, Xuem, whom I’ve only seen from the back.

  Finally we come to “John,” Choey Ha’s son. He’s the tallest in the group by
several inches. He’s sweet, young, earnest. He designs machines.

  Everyone is more interested in asking questions than in answering them. Do I see Kuen often? When will Chuen come again? Am I sure that Choey Ha looks like Choey Lon? How am I related to them again? Even though they’re all my cousins removed to various degrees, shouldn’t I call Choey Ha “Auntie”? Shouldn’t I call all of them either “Auntie” or “Uncle”?

  All of this transpires as the waitress brings out dishes of raw vegetables, meat, seafood, tofu, and something resembling black tofu. The waitress drops much of this into the boiling broth, and soon we’re using our individual wire baskets to scoop out what we want to eat. By tradition, it’s proper for the host to fill the guest’s dish with choice morsels. Fulfilling this function, Choey Ha drops tofu, the “black tofu,” and squid into my bowl. As I chew the squid, Chen Mou turns to me and says, “Oh, so you like ox stomach.” I stop in mid-chew, with the first piece of ox stomach still in my mouth. Well, I think to myself, I thought it was squid and it didn’t bother me. It shouldn’t bother me now. The waitress brings out a platter of river shrimp impaled on skewers and still twitching from their sudden death. We drop the bamboo sticks into the broth for a moment or two, burn our fingers peeling the shrimp, and manage to devour several dozen among us.

  I eat my tofu and move on to the soy-bean greens and fish, but am reluctant to try the black stuff that lies reproachfully in my bowl. Finally I break off an edge with my chopsticks. It’s awful. This time I ask Chen Mou what it is. “Pig’s blood,” he answers. The cube of coagulated pig’s blood stays at the bottom of my bowl until Ha finally reaches in with her chopsticks, removes it, and places it in a soy-sauce dish. No words are spoken about this, but Ha continues to fill my bowl without dropping in another cube of the pig’s blood. No matter how many times I say I can’t eat another bite, she refills my bowl. She’s a good auntie.