by Kat Chow
16.
My father, his mother, and his grandmother left Hoiping under the cover of day. It was 1953. The trees and greenery were verdant and approached overgrown. The watchtowers, grayed fortresses five stories tall that had sat for centuries in the distance guarding the village, were especially domineering that afternoon.
To avoid suspicion, Kiu Kwan kept their chickens outside so it would appear as though the family would return by nightfall to shuffle the birds back into their coop. She did not tell her elderly mother-in-law or her four-year-old son, Wing Shek—my father—her plan. They were visiting relatives in a neighboring village, she insisted. She led them from their home past the canals. Her other son, Wing Chong, was grown and had a family of his own. He had left months earlier for Guangzhou, which was a few hours away. Kiu Kwan did not have time to pack their valuables, and even if she did, would not have dared, could not have done so discreetly enough, what with everyone in this village watching.
They walked by the farmlands her family had worked for years, and around the homes of the neighbors who shared their last name, and who had begun to turn on them in recent months.
Before my father was born, when the Kuomintang fought the Communists, Kiu Kwan hid her family in the mountains and villages. She told my father stories about how cruel the Kuomintang were—how they shit on the villagers’ rice supplies, forcing them to scrub away excrement in order to survive. But the Communists, as Kiu Kwan said, were at least polite during their occupation. They returned the pots and pans to their rightful places. When my father relays this story to me, he makes it seem as though his mother believed that public opinion—over the Communists’ supposed good manners—led them to victory. She did not realize that once they were in power, her family would be in jeopardy.
My father’s grandmother was stubborn and proud. My father says she was boastful—she had a sharp tongue, he says—about what her family had and what the neighbors did not. She could not restrain her chatter about what her son, Hoy Kit—my father’s father—sent the family from Havana. He had lived in Cuba for the past two decades, working in restaurants there and sending part of his paycheck home, and these remittances allowed Hoy Kit’s family to purchase a simple house in Hoiping. They also bought a few other buildings in neighboring cities, including Guangzhou. But while owning these buildings lifted my father’s family to the middle class, it also made them targets of the Communist government.
The neighbors resented my father’s family for this, and they threatened Kiu Kwan. They wanted to redistribute their family’s money and to take over her mother-in-law’s house. They were going to force Kiu Kwan to kneel on broken glass in front of the entire village to shame her for hoarding resources. And if still she didn’t comply, they would take what was her family’s—what they saw as theirs—anyway.
I can imagine my grandmother from the single photo we have of her: her high, appled cheekbones; her thin lips and deep-set eyes. I bet she jutted her jaw and gnashed her teeth the same way my father does, brimming with prickly resolve, as she reasoned: Why should I have to give up what my family has?
Understanding the choices before her, Kiu Kwan gathered her family and fled.
* * *
In Guangzhou, my father’s family shared a couple of apartment units with extended relatives on a narrow street across from a school. Each morning, Wing Shek woke to the sound of someone pushing a cart down the road to collect excrement from the toilets. He watched this process with fascination, soon discovering other new rhythms of their neighborhood. Store owners rolling up the metal doors to their shops; the same man who stood in the schoolyard stretching his arms and legs, completing his exercises; neighbors walking along the road to complete errands. As a small child only starting kindergarten, my father, who would grow up to be a man of routines, found comfort in this consistency.
All of this—their escape, the housing—would not be possible without the money Hoy Kit sent from Havana.
My father does not have much information about his father. My father left for Cuba before I was born. The 1920s? 1930s? Maybe. When? My mother had wanted to go, but my father say, ‘Oh, you have to stay and take care of my mother.’
I can only infer from my own research that my grandfather was one of thousands of wa kiu who traveled from the Pearl River Delta to Cuba by steamship for work. It was an arduous journey that took months. He may have traveled around the Indian Ocean and through the Cape of Good Hope, and he likely witnessed other men on the boat fall ill and die. This route was similar to the one nearly half a century before, when thousands of men from China had been coerced into leaving their homes to work the sugarcane fields in Cuba. Plantation owners who feared the revolts of enslaved men and women from African countries—and saw the rumblings of abolition due, in part, to the British blockade of slave ships—considered Chinese coolies an alternative source of labor. Between 1847 and 1874, 125,000 men arrived in Cuba from China, and 92,000 arrived in Peru during a similar time period.
I find it a strange coincidence that the Chinese government dispatched Yung Wing—whose final resting place was so near to my brother Jonathan’s—to investigate the treatment of these men who were coolies. His counterpart at the Chinese Educational Mission was sent to Cuba, and Yung to Peru. Documenting the abuses there, Yung wrote in his memoir that “the country people were inveigled and kidnapped, put into barracoons and kept there by force till they were shipped on board, where they were made to sign labor contracts either for Cuba or Peru.”
These men worked on sugar plantations, in mines, or as butlers or cooks, sometimes alongside enslaved men and women, though at the end of their contracts—if they managed to emerge from them—they at least owned their bodies.
Shortly after Yung and his colleague’s investigations, China ended its coolie trade to Peru and Cuba.
After my grandfather arrived in Havana, he slowly repaid the people who had arranged for his travel and sent any remaining money to his wife and mother in China.
He returned at least once to Hoiping. He traveled by steamboat and made the months-long journey for my uncle’s wedding. There are no records of this journey. But my best guess is that he made plans for the visit after 1945, when the Japanese military surrendered in China after occupying the country for eight years. He would not have been able to contact his family that entire time.
Toward the end of Hoy Kit’s visit to China, which lasted a couple of years, my father was conceived.
He was born a few months after his father returned to Cuba—and just five years before his father’s death.
* * *
When Kiu Kwan received a letter from Cuba that informed her that her husband had died, she took her son to the street. Hoy Kit was supposed to purchase vegetables and meat at the market for one of the restaurants where he was a partner, the story goes. When he didn’t show up to work, his co-worker went to his apartment and found him on the floor. A heart attack.
Outside, standing by his mother, my father was too young to understand what was happening. Just that he should stay silent and watch. His mother struck a match and held the flame to the incense. She set the sticks in a little holder. Together, they watched the smoke rise between buildings. When his mother bowed, my father lowered his head and stooped his shoulders as well. He was only five. He did not know what it meant for his father, whom he had never met, to be dead. He just saw his mother crying. I can imagine my father unable to tell the difference between my grandfather, away, and my grandfather, dead. He was a child, and it would take him decades to consider the grief inherent in being unable to mourn a body; how leaving for another country was to risk saying goodbye to one’s family for the last time. For all his kid-self knew, absence and longing were the same.
What can you do? his mother might have told him, equipping him with a sentiment he will carry for decades. There’s nothing you can do now.
When my father speaks of my grandmother now, he almost always brings up something she had frequently told h
im: Though they were married for much longer, she was only with my father for two years, eight months.
This was a legend I knew my way around as a kid, just as it was for my father. There is a yearning here that I don’t know how to access. I can’t understand its shape. My grandmother missed her husband and felt bitter over the expectation and burden of having to take care of her mother-in-law and sons without the marriage she had been promised. She understood that this was a duty of hers and that many women then were in similar situations. But nobody had warned her about this pining. My father can only relay these ideas through this sentiment: She was only with my father for two years, eight months. So ingrained into his head that it is now in mine, that I have layered it on top of what little I know about my grandmother.
In the time they were in Guangzhou, my father’s family quickly realized that moving to a larger city still could not protect them from the growing power of the Communists. Together, Kiu Kwan and her oldest son devised another plan to figure out how they could flee to Hong Kong with the proper paperwork. If they had been unable to do so, it is unclear if they would have tried to cross the water from China to Hong Kong on their own—if they thought their family, which included a seventy-something grandmother and a young boy, could survive the swim.
My father occasionally talks about a man he knew—a colleague at Lotus Garden—who trained for months to swim to Hong Kong. This man flung himself into the water during typhoons. He wanted to become strong, risking drowning during practice long before attempting the trek. Eventually, this man swam to Hong Kong with a watermelon, which served as a buoy when he became tired. After he made it safely to shore, he cracked open the watermelon and devoured it for sustenance. At this point in the story, my father seems more impressed with the watermelon’s dual purpose rather than the feat of escaping China itself.
My father, still thinking about people swimming across that water so desperate to flee to Hong Kong, says: Like what’s happening at the border.
I pause, surprised that he’s drawing the comparison to Mexico himself. I say, slowly, Yes. I do not understand why he is not more sympathetic to what has happened, is happening, with our country’s immigration system, why he does not believe that immigration laws should be more welcoming to refugees and immigrants. I tell him this.
I’m confused, I say, though we have had this exact conversation many times before.
Confused about what? he says.
Confused about why you aren’t more sympathetic toward refugees and immigrants. Your family did whatever you needed to in order to get out of China.
Aiya, he says. Only if it’s legal. I have heard him talk before about immigrants from Mexico and refugees from Syria, and how they need to immigrate the right way. When I ask him to explain, he keeps repeating that phrase, the right way, as an answer.
But policies around immigration in general are so arbitrary! I cite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The reason why your father had to go to Cuba instead of the United States was because people like him weren’t allowed in the U.S.
Again, I hear the shrug in his voice.
Maybe so, he says.
Maybe so what?
I don’t know, he says. Maybe that’s how it is.
It is how it is. My voice is sharp.
But my father and his family don’t have to test the waters, so to speak, in order to leave China. Through creative gaming, they claim to officials that they must head to Cuba to retrieve my grandfather’s valuables, and that the only way they can get there is via a port in Hong Kong.
I have so many questions when my father tells me this. Your family wanted to get your father’s valuables, but not his remains? I ask. Did they have a funeral for him in China? Did they ever intend to go to Cuba?
My father says: We needed his money. Maybe we did some things for him in China. Probably.
And then: Maybe my brother did try to go to Cuba when we got to Hong Kong. I don’t know.
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. My father frequently deploys these words when confronted with facts or questions that he doesn’t want to acknowledge; they are his defense and armor. He doesn’t know, or he doesn’t want to know—I can never tell. This is another line that my sisters and I mimic with one another. It is a little mean, a little tender, as we shape our voices like his. Sometimes we do this laughing, our voices rising and belligerent, channeling our father’s normal speaking voice.
17.
I did not mention to my father that it was my fifteenth birthday. For much of the evening, I thought he’d forgotten.
He and I sat beneath the fluorescent kitchen light slurping a broth he’d made by simmering pork bones and mustard greens. We ate char siu he reheated in the toaster oven, and we spooned steamed eggs with scallions and white pepper onto our bowls of rice.
After dinner, I turned the channel from the financial news to The Simpsons. My father pushed aside envelopes to make room on the table.
He pulled an ice cream cake from the freezer.
At Steph and Caroline’s encouragement—we made ice cream cake last year, Mommy did it the years before—he spent hours making this cake. While I was at school, he bought a dozen eggs and a couple of cartons of blackberry and rocky road ice cream, and he set to work steaming sheets of ma lai go. This sponge cake was one of his favorite treats to get from Chinese bakeries, and in the absence of any near our home, he sated his cravings by spending the occasional afternoon at the stove with his industrial steamers from Lotus Garden, recreating his childhood snack.
Happy birthday, he said. He set it in front of me, candles glowing, the cake still warm and the ice cream still melted. It was a pile of mauve that oozed like a blister, something about the sponge’s springiness possibly making it difficult for the ice cream to adhere. A chunk of melted purple slid onto the plate. He paused, uncertain if he should fix it or sing me happy birthday.
* * *
Years before, whenever my family drove the two hours to Boston to drop Steph off at college, we stopped in Chinatown for dinner.
As my father navigated us through the neighborhood’s narrow streets, he knocked on the van’s window with his knuckles to point out the bakery he frequented when he lived here. It sold char siu baos that were stuffed generously with meat, my father recalled, along with egg custard tarts and slices of sponge cake that weren’t too sweet.
This same Chinatown had been a reprieve for him when he was homesick in graduate school, and decades later, accompanied by his wife and daughters, the same few blocks provided a similar respite.
My family hardly ate out and this was one of the rare Cantonese restaurants in driving distance of our house, so my parents ordered generously, as if in celebration. They read the menu as a perfunctory measure before they asked the waiter to bring us their favorites: steamed bass slathered with julienned ginger and scallions, pea shoots stir fried with garlic, a roast chicken to be dipped in salt, crispy pork chops, and toward the end of the meal, a platter of lightly fried rice.
After dinner, we stopped at a shop and watched a woman pull gooey dough into strands. She coated them with powdered sugar, wrapping them around chopped peanuts to make dragon’s beard candy. My parents bought a few pieces, and we let the threads melt in our mouths while we crossed the street to the bakery. We left with a couple of trays of gai mei bao, the stripes of coconut piped neatly across the tops of the buns. On our walk back to the van, we paused at another vendor for a paper bag of miniature egg waffles. We tore off sheets and popped them into our mouths in the car as we watched Boston’s Chinatown give way to highway. I will forget about this memory until I am an adult, living in this city to work briefly at a public radio station. I catch myself affectionately muttering the street names in my father’s voice whenever I visit the neighborhood, the vendors of my childhood gone, not realizing I’d missed those past visits with my family.
After Steph finished college, there were no more excuses to trek to Boston. And after my mother died,
the thought of my father and me driving hours just for Cantonese food seemed wildly extravagant. Instead, my father began to clip recipes from old cookbooks and he learned to navigate YouTube for instructions.
On the couch some mornings, my father studied videos of Martin Yan or home cooks from Hong Kong as they kneaded dumpling dough or steamed zong. He flipped through his copies of Pei Mei’s cookbooks, taking off his glasses to squint at the recipes in Chinese. He took notes on the back of envelopes, which I found days later when I tidied the kitchen, his handwriting scraggly and familiar.
My father rarely followed these recipes and preferred to improvise. It was better for him to read a few and then make his own way regardless of what others had tested and proven themselves. He eliminated ingredients he found unhealthy—salt, sugar, eggs—not caring if they helped the dough rise or provided structure to whatever he was making. There was a scrappiness here that I admired, despite the results.
He made his recipe for sponge cake this way, too, though his simplifications were successful.
When I was little, I leaned over the red Formica counter and helped my father crack eggs for the sponge cake. I fished shell shards from the bowl and whisked the yolks and sugar with a fork until they were fluffy. And then came the flour, which my father helped me fold into the batter. Some instructions that I’ve found say to add vanilla extract or baking powder, but all that isn’t necessary.
I watched as my father stood on his toes to lower the pans into the steamer. The stove light illuminated him from above as though he were on a stage. The house was never quite bright enough because he insisted that we only turn on lights if we were sitting directly next to or beneath them, which left us in the shadows of our belongings. He was usually inscrutable and infrequently drew attention to himself, but in the kitchen, I could see his expressions clearly, his mouth open while he peered into the steamer.