A Cowherd in Paradise

by May Q. Wong

  At the hamlet, a swarm of smiling, wrinkled, gap-toothed, and sun-browned faces emerged from the houses to greet the family. News of the Canadians’ arrival had travelled via the bamboo telegraph; people had even come from the surrounding villages. The neighbours knew the family had not come empty-handed—there would be gift-giving and feasting over the next few days. Some of the villagers had already brought welcoming gifts of dim sum dumplings, oranges, and sugar cane. The women helped prepare food while the men hauled water from the well for cooking and cleaning and arranged tables and chairs. The children brought kindling for the stove.

  Ah Wei left the house, eager to see everything and to test his childhood memories against the reality. Ah May followed him as he gave her a tour of the building and its surroundings and pointed out his favourite spots. At the back of the house was an old tree, its two main branches dividing to create a comfortable seat for a child. Ah Wei remembered spending countless hours in the leafy perch, but looking at it now, he thought the tree might have been trimmed down over the years. He took a picture of Ah May in his old lookout. Nearby was the bamboo garden, where their elder sister had shredded the flesh on her hands, collecting and shaving bamboo into strips.

  The house was large, much bigger than their Montreal home, yet the living room was used only after dark, when the mosquitoes started biting. During the day, all the feasting took place outside because so many people had come.

  Upstairs, Ah Wei showed Ah May the wooden bed in their parents’ room, where she would sleep with their mother. His sister made a face, showing her disgust, when he told her this was the bed on which he had been born. Most of the beds in the house consisted of wooden planks laid over crossbars on a wooden frame. A light, quilted blanket served as the only mattress. Their parents’ bed was made of woven bamboo strips, set in a wooden frame. It was thought to be superior for comfort and coolness, but when the siblings tested it, they felt the lumps created by the woven bamboo, inadequately padded by the quilts. It was not like their beds at home in Montreal. The next morning, even their mother had found it difficult to get a restful sleep and was out of bed before the cocks crowed. She gave Ah May the excuse of having too much work to do and being excited at seeing her old friends and neighbours.

  Poking through the rooms, Ah Wei and Ah May found some striped Hudson’s Bay blankets their father had brought from Canada, stored in a mothball-filled, metal-sided shipping trunk. Hanging on a wall peg was the long chain of tien, copper coins, which had accompanied their mother on her bridal journey to this hamlet. The coins, with square holes cut out of the middle, were still tied together with faded, fraying red string. Ah Wei cut off some of the discs as keepsakes.

  Beside the stairwell sat the large, colourful family shrine. At the opposite end of the landing were doors that led to the safe room on the deck from which their mother had told them she had shot at bandits. They found a cat there, curled up and sleeping peacefully in the sunshine.

  The next few days were filled with social gatherings and new faces. Every meal was a feast; the people all talked at the same time, exclaiming their surprise at Ah Wei’s height, asking about life in Ga-Na-Aie. It was hard for him to understand them, and he couldn’t remember the appropriate words to answer their questions. He could see the younger village kids snickering behind their hands at his lack of Chinese and he was grateful that his younger sister and their precocious niece were able to attract some of the attention away from him.

  Ah Wei was especially anxious about one event. He was to finally meet Huo Li Sheung, the girl his parents were hoping he would marry. They had been corresponding for the past year, had exchanged photographs, and, through his mother’s letters, had got to know each other a little. The whole family accompanied him to her village, for she was related to his brother-in-law, Ah Haw One. She was already family. After everyone was introduced, Ah Wei and Ah Sheung were left to spend time alone for a few hours.

  Ah Sheung was prettier in person than in her pictures. She did not seem to mind his hesitant Chinese and waited patiently while he spoke. She had a good sense of humour that even he could understand and the afternoon flashed by. He definitely liked her and thought she liked him too. They agreed to keep corresponding. He vowed to learn more Chinese—it had been awkward and embarrassing to have his mother as a go-between. For Ah Wei, the visit ended too soon.

  Ah May, though, could not wait to get back to the city, where there were toilets and hot running water. She had cried each time she had to use the large, outdoor ceramic pot that served as a communal latrine, afraid of touching it and even more afraid of falling in. She had been plagued by the mosquitoes and her body was covered in itchy, red welts. She was glad she had not been born in the hamlet, and now, more than ever, missed her home in Montreal.

  Ah Lai and her husband had to go back to Wuhan to work, and everyone took leave of Ah Ngange, with prolonged and mournful farewells; the only dry-eyed person was the old lady herself. Before heading north, the six family members travelled back to Guangzhou, to pick up the items from Hong Kong that were stored at Ah Choo’s apartment.

  Three months later, Ah Ngange packed all her worldly possessions into a single suitcase, and with her cat safely enclosed in a metal cage, locked the house for the last time. The two of them made the long journey to Wuhan. Ah Wei rode his bicycle through the pouring rain to the train station to meet Ah Ngange and tied her suitcase and cat cage on to his handlebars. Sitting on a carrier mounted above his back wheel, she clung on to him tightly with both arms. When they finally arrived at Ah Lai’s apartment an hour later, she was soaked and frozen stiff. It was Ah Wei’s turn to pick up his grandmother, and, cradling her tiny, shivering body up the stairs and over the threshold, he welcomed her to her new home.

  The cat, her mouser, was intended as a gift for the family, to be consumed in a prized and nourishing broth.

  • • •

  The Wongs moved into Ah Lai’s small apartment in Donghu, East Lake, near Wuhan. This area in northeast China was famous for its silk, Shaoxing rice wine, and cotton. It was scorching hot in the summer and freezing in the winter, but its homes had neither air conditioning nor central heating.

  Donghu is a man-made lake, surrounded by elegant weeping willows and landscaped into a tranquil garden. The largest lake within a Chinese city, it covers eighty-seven square kilometres and is dotted with pagodas along scenic bays. The part of the park Ah May was most familiar with had mature bamboo forests, stone sculpture gardens, and displays of enormous clay pots filled with exotic goldfish sprouting elaborate fins, tails, and eyes. It was a safe playground, where she rode her brother’s bicycle and where she and Ah Fuy, her niece, climbed the large stone elephants standing throughout the park.

  Watching Ah Fuy ride the elephant at Donghu. Ah Lai is pregnant.

  H.B. GUAN, CHINA

  Although Ah May did not know it then, also on the property was Chairman Mao’s villa, where he spent time during his latter years. However, the main complex within the grounds was a secure, military, convalescent hospital and home for the aged. Survivors of the Long March, considered national heroes, were cared for there. This was the hospital where Ah Lai worked as an internist.

  Ah Lai’s wages included housing and food coupons. Her mother and her two siblings shared her two-bedroom apartment with her daughter, her mother-in-law, and Ah Ngange. Ah Haw One boarded at the university and came home on the weekends. In the main bedroom, Ah May shared one bed with their mother while Ah Lai and Ah Fuy shared another. The mother-in-law and Ah Ngange slept on separate cots in the living room. Until Ah Wei enrolled at the boarding school, he had the smaller bedroom to himself. Afterwards, Ah Ngange was moved in there. Ah Thloo paid an extra stipend for rent and food coupons.

  The two-storey brick building housed members of the hospital’s medical staff and their families. Every household had children, a number of whom were Ah May’s age. Just as she had growing up in Montreal, she learned to speak the common language by playing with t
he neighbours’ children. Here, it was Mandarin Chinese; she even picked up the local Wuhan accent. In a ground-floor apartment lived an elderly woman with bound feet. The mother of one of the nurses, she was a cheerful soul, hobbling gamely after her lively, two-year-old grandson. Ah May remembered the stories her mother told about her own grandmother, and was fascinated by how well the woman could get around.

  Each apartment had a small kitchen with a wood-fired cooking hearth, a sink, and a cold-water tap. In the summer heat, all the doors and windows were left open to catch any possible breeze. Unfortunately, the fans bought in Hong Kong only moved the hot, dry air around in gusts, and did nothing to cool the apartment or its inhabitants. Heat in winter came from a coal-burning stove in the living room. Its efficiency was compromised because a door had to be kept open to prevent suffocation from carbon monoxide fumes; everyone still had to bundle up. On the beds, the cotton quilts were piled three and four layers high; they were so heavy it was hard to roll over. Ah May was glad to have her mother to snuggle up to during the winter.

  The children wore cotton-stuffed clothes that made them look like mini-Bonhommes de Neige, the giant snowman mascot of Quebec’s Winter Carnival and Montreal’s Christmas parade. Ah Fuy wore Ah May’s old woollen coat over her quilted jacket, which made the little girl’s bulky arms stick out at ninety degrees from her body.

  The communal wash areas and multi-seat outhouse were in separate wooden buildings, a short distance behind the apartment. The washing room had several sinks along the wall, with only a cold-water tap, but the single shower that sprouted multiple heads, at the centre of the room, was connected to a water heater. Women and men were each allotted a separate evening during the week to enjoy hot showers.

  The daily routine was the same for everyone. Each morning at six, the loudspeakers blasted out “The East Is Red,” a rousing revolutionary song. The patriotic music would continue until it was interrupted by news bulletins and other propaganda. Ah Lai made the twenty-minute return trek to the hospital commissary to buy breakfast foods of jook, rice soup, or man how, freshly steamed bread rolls, which were eaten with a delicious spread of ground sesame paste.

  If it were a “market” day, that is, when the only store in the area had supplies of fresh meat or vegetables, someone from the family had to go to the store before the wake-up call, to wait in line with the food coupons. Ah Thloo took on this chore, as she had extra coupons. She had no trouble arguing with the proprietor about her right to buy extra food. It was a very bourgeois attitude, but she ignored the hostile stares, pointing fingers, and nasty words flung her way. Besides, she was deaf to the Mandarin Chinese dialect they spoke.

  Ah May and her brother were finally enrolled—she in the local elementary school, he in a boarding school a few hours’ bike ride away. They attended classes for only a month, however; as the Cultural Revolution progressed, their schools were closed. Institutions of learning were considered to be repositories of “old thinking.” For Ah May, this attitude was shocking, as her parents had always instilled in her a reverence for learning, but Ah Wei, now eighteen, had heard his Canadian friends talk about the burgeoning anti-establishment movement in Montreal, so he was not totally surprised to hear something similar happening in China.

  Students and teachers were “sent down” to the countryside to be “reeducated” by peasants. When Ah May told Ah Thloo her class of students was going away, her mother did not seem worried, so the girl felt safe and thought of it as a long camp-out, although no one knew the schedule, location, or plan of action beforehand.

  The students walked for a day, in orderly lineups, singing patriotic songs, to reach the cotton fields where they were to work. The cotton bushes were about three feet high, planted in straight rows across a never-ending field. Picking cotton was backbreaking work. Cotton bols sprouted in clusters all over the bush; Ah May had to bend close to the ground and reach through the branches, to pick the bushes clean. The soft white balls, many infested with small, pink worms, were tucked within dried, dark brown husks that curled open like tiger lilies. The hard, sharp points of the shells pricked fingers and scratched any exposed skin. A full basket, the size of a utility pail, was surprisingly heavy. The daily physical exertion kept Ah May from worrying about her surroundings.

  After a long day’s work, with short breaks for tea and meals, there were evening meetings, with lectures based on Quotations of Chairman Mao. In his book, Mao explained his theory of emancipation for the peasants of China. Ah May was excused from the evening lectures; with her limited Mandarin, her teachers knew she would not have understood a thing. It was still early days in the Cultural Revolution, and the zealots had not all emerged.

  The students were housed in a shed that had been converted from a byre; the stalls were filled with fresh straw, on which thin blankets were spread. A huge sow and her litter shared the space with the children, separated from them only by a thin, shaky, wooden wall, which shuddered whenever the pig rolled over. If Ah May had not been so hot, dirty, lonely, and muscle-crampingly tired, she would have worried all night about being squashed to death by that pig. She lost track of time, but after about a week, the group trekked back home. Ah May did not feel any better “educated” than when she had first arrived, but she did not share that thought with her classmates.

  Ah Wei’s school had also gone on a work outing for an extended period. Curiously, Ah Thloo, who had worried when Ah May attended a birthday party at a schoolmate’s house a block down the street in Montreal, never worried about the whereabouts of either of her younger children while they were in China. She retained her memories of being rescued from oppression by the Communists, led by Mao. Having idealized and romanticized the recent past, she dismissed the incidents with the Red Guards in Guangzhou as being unusual. She might have been trying to protect Ah Wei and Ah May, to shield them from fear, but even talking about it decades later, she insisted she had never fretted about their safety.

  When the students returned to Donghu, it was clear that none of the schools would be reopened, so Ah Thloo took Ah Wei and Ah May on another kind of educational tour—it was time to see their nation’s capital. They joined a group of Chinese tourists, all returned from foreign lands. The tour was led by a small, kindly, neatly dressed man who spoke a number of Chinese dialects and foreign languages, including English. His name, coincidentally, was Mr. Wong.

  In Beijing, the group took in the usual sights—the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Great Hall of the People, the Ming Tombs, and a performance of the Beijing Opera. They stayed at the Overseas Chinese Hotel and shopped at the exclusive International Service Department Store for souvenirs; neither of these places allowed comrade-citizens to stay or shop.

  In 1966, the rooms and many of the artifacts in the Forbidden City were much more accessible than they are today, and there were no foreign-owned, profit-making concessions. At the opera, instead of an imperial play featuring emperors such as Ah Thloo used to watch on film in Montreal, there was a performance of The White Haired Girl. It was a revolutionary opera about a peasant girl whose hair turns white after she is raped and forced to watch the brutal killing of her family by an evil landlord. She becomes his slave, but is set free by gentle, revolutionary soldiers and ends up a war heroine.

  In addition to the usual tourist stops, the group was also taken to places that highlighted China’s growing industrial sectors. In a steel-making plant, the tourists wended their way along overhead catwalks, and felt the heat emanating from red-hot molten metal being poured into moulds, while they were lectured about production capacity and safety records. The pig-slaughtering factory was extolled as a model of efficiency and for Ah May became fodder for years of bloody nightmares.

  During this time, the family was protected from the dangers that came later, as the Cultural Revolution progressed and anarchy reigned among the undisciplined students. Perhaps the officials recognized their country of origin as that of the revered Dr. Norman Bethune, a
Canadian doctor who gave his life during the revolution. His likeness, and those of other heroes such as Lenin, was prominently displayed everywhere on giant posters, sculptures, and reliefs. Looking back, Ah May could only conjecture that the tourists in their group were treated royally and fêted as first-hand witnesses to the greatness that had again blossomed in China so that when they returned to their respective homelands, they could be unofficial ambassadors.

  • • •

  “Aiya ! I never dreamed that one day I would be eating a banquet in the Great Hall of the People! There I was, a child of poor farmers, living in a foreign country, sitting with Premier Zhou Enlai!” said Ah Thloo.

  Ah Thloo’s eyes never failed to light up, nor did her sense of awe and wonder ever diminish when she reminisced about this event. To her friends at church back in Montreal, she always recounted the experiences of her first trip back to China with excitement, but as she spoke about one particular night, her face beamed with delight that lasted long past the telling.

  Crowds cheering for Mao Zedong at Tiananmen Gate on National Day, 1966.

  ROBERT WONG, CHINA

  The occasion was the anniversary of the creation of the People’s Republic of China: October 1, a national holiday. Earlier that day, Ah Thloo, Ah Wei, and Ah May had been in the crush of the hundreds of thousands of Red Guards and comrades lining Tiananmen Square to watch the grand parade. It was claustrophobic, noisy, and frightening, but also exhilarating.

  They had witnessed the might of the Communist regime, as a miles-long wall of armoured cars, tanks, and other machinery of war drove slowly through the huge square, followed by troops marching with precision. The music from the speakers ricocheted off the large, squat buildings surrounding the square, adding to the overall commotion.