Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  In those days, no one in a Chinese fishing village would buy dead or even only half-dead fish – it was considered a bad deal. In our kitchen we cooked everything alive – preserving as much of the energy, the chi, from the sea as we could. So as the fishing boats were returning, my grandmother and the other fishermen’s wives would gather on the beach with buckets around their feet and wait. Once their husbands had hauled the boats in, the women would rush to separate the catch immediately. Shrimps went into one bucket, eels into another. Snapper were thrown into a basin of water, clams and crabs together in a large barrel, and so on. Within minutes, the fishmongers from the village markets would arrive to pick the freshest items, peeling greasy notes from their pockets. There was no need for negotiation – the prices of shrimp, crab and snapper were always the same. With eels, a delicacy in the south, prices fluctuated with the season and the difficulty of catching them.

  But those were the good old days, when the villagers were free-for-all sea scavengers. Then, in the 1970s, the Communist government decided to construct the Fish Farming Collective. Individual boats like my grandfather’s were snatched away, to be ‘managed’ by the state. Fishermen were teamed together according to regional population, and then assigned a certain sector of the sea to fish in a big, industrial fishing boat. All catches belonged to the state, who would then distribute the harvest to every family according to a quota system. My grandfather was unhappy that his old way of life had been taken away, that time alone on his boat, away from the day-to-day grind and people he didn’t like. Besides, he would have had to learn industrial fishing techniques with people he had never met before, under state supervision and with everyone reporting on everyone else behind their backs. He didn’t have the character for that sort of life. He was a man born in the Qing Dynasty, the same age as our Last Emperor. For him, his days belonged to the Qing, not some quick-thinking Communist Party. So in the early 1970s, after his own boat was destroyed in a typhoon – one of those deadly storms that sweep up every summer from the South Pacific into the East China Sea – he gave up fishing. He became grumpy, spent his days drinking, and started hitting my grandmother regularly. From the age of three or four, I only really remember seeing him brooding in his room, a bottle glued to his palm.

  Unfortunately, he had no other skills with which to make a living. He was starving and had virtually nothing to feed my grandmother and me. Then, one day, he found a big wooden board on a street corner. He took two benches from the kitchen and constructed a makeshift store outside our house. He would sell anything he could find – vegetables, pickled fish, shrimp paste, soap, nails and cigarettes. His cigarettes were a bit funny-looking, sold as singles, ‘treasures’ he found by the seashore. The cigarettes were originally packed tight in boxes like fancy Western biscuits. But storms and war with the Communists sunk many Taiwanese Nationalist boats and released their goods into the sea. Those ‘treasure chests’ floated ashore along with other flotsam and jetsam. And my grandfather, a proper sea scavenger, spent his days walking along the beach, picking from the goods. Somehow, he always found boxes of cigarettes, soaked through with seawater. Sometimes he would find stylish American cookies in brightly coloured tin boxes. Occasionally he would turn up with tinned food, typically beans. The cigarettes he would unpack and dry under the hot sun. He would then beautify them and sell them at a cheap price. This business worked for a while, but it depended on continued conflict in the Taiwan Strait – there wasn’t exactly a daily supply of shipwrecks in the East China Sea, and currents were also liable to take what had been wrecked further south.

  Still, my grandfather managed to sustain us with these meagre pickings, if only temporarily. Every day we drank watery porridge and ate boiled kelp. Our neighbours – families of the men who had joined the collective fishing boats – would give us some extra rice and noodles every now and then. My grandfather’s scavenging days were numbered, we all knew that.

  Village of Shitang

  Some people said Shitang was an island, others a peninsula. It lay soaking in the salty water between mainland China and Taiwan, three hundred kilometres from the Taiwanese coast, the first place on the mainland to receive the dawn’s rays every morning. In 2000, Shitang was in the news because a ceremonial sun statue had been built on a cliff facing east. The statue didn’t look anything like the sun, but more like a tall, thin monolith out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It turned the village into a tourist attraction. But for the people of Shitang, it was odd. They had always known their village lay furthest to the east. Why, suddenly, was it such a big deal?

  Shitang literally means stone pond. The word pond in old Chinese was associated with fish. Perhaps thousands of years ago, the area had been a salt-water lagoon next to the sea, before inhabitants built up the land along the seafront, just as Hong Kong or Macau had grown up on reclaimed marsh and swamp. Our family house was a small, green-coloured stone dwelling right on the horn of the peninsula. My grandfather lived upstairs, where he could look straight out to sea through a small window by his bed. In my memory, the sea was always yellow-brown, whether seen from my grandfather’s window or from the beach. This yellow-brownness was to do with the large kelp beds growing in the shallow water by the shore. The kelp – we called it haifa, the hair of the sea – had tough stalks with broad leaf-like palms and long green-brown stripes. A swarm of shapeless sea snakes, they entangled themselves in the space between land and water. Despite its monstrous shape, we loved the taste. We either stewed it in eel soup or fried it with pork. We never tired of it, along with the tiny kelpfish we harvested from among the algae.

  The soil was very salty in Shitang. It was not land suited to agriculture. There were barely any trees growing in the village. But gardenia trees are a determined species. They grew between rocks, their white flowers swirling in the salt-laden wind. It was the only type that could face the sea’s yellow foam. I loved their strongly scented flowers. Women picked the buds to tie in their plaits. One day, thirty-odd years later, I stumbled across a gardenia in northern Europe. I breathed in the familiar scent under a clear European sky and cried. This tree didn’t belong in my Western life. It was a sorrowful smell, if tinged with a warm feel of nostalgia. It took me straight back to my childhood on the typhoon-ridden coast of the East China Sea.

  In that house, only my grandfather had a view over the kelp beds and the foamy sea. My grandmother and I lived downstairs, where the windows on two sides were blocked by our neighbour’s washing lines, dried squid and salted ribbonfish hanging from poles. I couldn’t say then whether I loved or hated that house. I lived there until I was seven and a half. It was simply our house, our village. There was no comparison, no alternative. But years later, after I had left the village, I felt that Shitang had killed all tenderness in my heart. It had become a rock in my chest. Those hard corners, those jagged stone houses had turned me to stone too. The landscape made me merciless and aggressive.

  Our street was originally called Anti-Pirates Passage. In the 1980s, the name was changed to Front Barrier Slope by the local authorities. The original name came from the Ming Dynasty. During that time, the area was under constant attack by pirates from the East Pacific, such that the local militia armed themselves with home-made guns and bombs for protection. Eventually, the village was returned into local hands. But that was four hundred years ago. It felt to me that nothing significant had happened since then, apart from when the local government replaced the Buddha posters in their offices with images of Mao. It had been a backwater, from the days of China’s dynasties until now. The only dramatic stories came from the sea, from being close to Taiwan.

  In the sixties and seventies, some local fishermen and villagers tried to cross the Taiwan Strait in secret, hoping they would be rewarded by the Nationalist government with gold and farmland as promised. Some succeeded, but very often they were recaptured and punished: someone’s uncle and his brother were caught on the edge of international waters and sentenced to death. ‘Shot at dawn’ and
‘life sentence’ came regularly through the village loudspeakers. In the 1970s, no one had private radios or televisions. All news was announced at high volume in the street. Our house directly faced an electricity pole adorned with two loudspeakers. Every so often, in the early morning, we were woken by Communist songs followed by a ‘shot at dawn’ announcement. Even though capital punishment was normal at that time, hearing these statements still horrified me. I had never witnessed anyone be shot, but the village gossip alone was enough to make me shiver.

  Our street doubled as a market, with one end starting in the mountains where a Buddhist temple had been built, and the other end finishing at the beach and the open sea. From our little house we could always hear chatting, crying, arguing, haggling, cockerels crowing, children screaming, pigs oinking from day to night. There was never a moment of peace and quiet. It was simply the sound of China. There were always people everywhere, life everywhere, noise everywhere, for better or for worse.

  My grandparents knew everyone in the village. They could spot an outsider instantly. My grandfather was always grumpy, so even though he knew everyone he never greeted anyone in the street. People would greet him and ask: ‘How is your boat, Old Guo?’ or ‘Have you eaten today?’ Local longhand for hello. But he never bothered to answer. He would just grunt, or pass them without even raising his eyebrows. My grandmother was the opposite, and greeted everyone she passed. But she also knew that her friendliness could not stop the village gossip about her relationship with her husband. No wonder, as gossip was the only form of entertainment available.

  Grandmother

  My grandmother was a kind, sometimes fearful woman. She barely had a penny in her pocket, but she would still manage to scrape together small presents for the children who played out in the street: sweets, leftover rice, or some colourful seashells. So kind and voiceless, she was the most humble person I have ever known. I always thought that it was her decency that made her hunchbacked. It slowed her down, stopped her from walking even at a normal speed. Obviously, her tiny bound feet were a factor, but she never complained about them. Her back had been bent ever since I could remember, long before she had become an old woman. The nasty kids often laughed at me, taunting me with things like: ‘Your grandmother is a big shrimp, she can only see her toes!’ or ‘Here comes the turtle on her hind legs!’ Her thin, grey-white hair was always bound into a chignon behind her head, as her diseased and twisted spine made it difficult to wash her hair. She also slept poorly. Her long sighs and the creaking of her bamboo bed as she moved her twisted body would wake me up at night.

  No one in remote Chinese villages had photos taken in those days. I have no way of knowing what she looked like when she was young. Perhaps she was a decent-looking girl, but surely always small and very skinny. Her parents arranged her marriage when she was still a child and at the age of twelve she was sent (or more correctly, she was sold) to my grandfather as a child bride for a bag of rice and eight kilos of yams. Her new home was not close; it took two days for her and her father to walk from their village to Shitang. But really, she came to fill her hungry stomach, without knowing that her old husband didn’t have much rice in his rice jar either. This was the 1930s, when China was ravaged by civil war, when the Chinese Communists were fighting the Nationalist government. The Japanese invasion followed soon after, and their armies committed atrocities all over the country until 1945. My grandmother had a vague memory of the Japanese soldiers looting their house while they were hiding in a temple in the mountains. When they returned some weeks later, there was almost nothing valuable left, apart from a covered wok still sitting on the stove. She lifted the lid and found a big brown shit inside. She told me this story when I was about six and knew almost nothing about the world outside Shitang, which made me think that the whole Sino-Japanese War was to do with shitting in woks. She never said anything more about that time, despite having been witness to every war that had raged in China since the early twentieth century.

  In the 1970s, people like us who lived in small villages were still chained to a feudal system, and women continued to be treated like cheap goods. My grandmother was still an outsider in this fishing community, even after living here for her entire adult life. Having grown up in an inland farming village, she didn’t understand the sea and the lives of the fishermen. Just like all the other women in the area, she never set foot on her husband’s boat, or on any other boat. To have a woman in your boat brought bad luck.

  I often saw her crying alone. She would weep silently in the back of the kitchen or in front of a white porcelain statue of Guanyin she had hung on the kitchen wall. Her eyes were almost always clouded. Every day she prayed to Guanyin – the Goddess of Mercy – the most popular goddess in our region. When I was about five or six, and beginning to know a little of the world, she would tell me: ‘Xiaolu, I have the life of a dog, it’s hardly worth living. But I pray for you, and for your mother and father.’ At that age, I had no idea what my parents were like and my grandmother was so reticent about our family background.

  Nor did my grandmother ever talk about my grandfather, at least not in front of me. She was frightened of him. I saw how her limbs became stiff and she sometimes trembled when he came near. I never saw them lie on the same bed together, or even stay in the same room for more than half an hour. My grandfather barely ever ate in the kitchen with us. If he did, my grandmother would retreat, sitting in the corner, usually by the stove – a place that belonged to the woman in Chinese tradition. And she would eat only the leftovers. Grandfather preferred to take his rice bowl upstairs to his own room, where he could drink liquor by himself and chew on his own unhappiness. I think he despised her deeply, partly because of tradition, partly because she came from an inland family and didn’t know how to be a fisherman’s wife. I was told that he had already decided on this hate the first year they were married, her crime not knowing things like how to eat a fish properly in a fisherman’s house. In Shitang, we would always start from the tail, never from the head. Eating the head of the fish straight away was considered bad luck for a fisherman. But my grandmother, who didn’t know this and was concerned only to show her modesty, would pick at the part my grandfather was not eating. Furious, he left the table. My grandmother tried to learn the local customs, but it was too late. She never gained his heart.

  It was an awful partnership – he beat her almost every day, for small things like not fetching a matchbox quickly enough when he wanted to smoke, or for not cooking to his taste, or for not being there in the kitchen when he was hungry. Or he beat her for no reason at all. He kicked at her short, skinny legs, and pushed and punched her to the floor. That was a normal sight in our house. She wept only after he had left. And then she wouldn’t even get up from the cold stone floor. Despite my young age, I was already numb from having witnessed this sort of scene too often. Usually I would just hide. Who, in 1970s rural China, had not encountered such scenes on a daily basis? I didn’t feel close to my grandfather as he never showed any affection or warmth to me, but I didn’t think he was in any way a monster, because where I grew up, every man beat his wife and children. In the morning, in the evening, at night, I heard our neighbours’ sobs. First a male voice shouting, the sounds of furniture being thrown, and then the weeping of a mother or a daughter. That was village life. It was normal. As long as I remain unmarried, I will be more or less all right, I said to my young self then.

  I remember how my old hunchbacked grandmother used her meagre savings to buy me an ice lolly – the cheapest sort, made from only water and sugar. She would wrap it in a used handkerchief onto which she had coughed up her lungs and then come looking for me in the scorching summer afternoon, to give me that little morsel of sweet ice. But by the time she found me, rolling around in the dirt or play-fighting with a bunch of kids in an alleyway, she would unpack her snot-ridden handkerchief to recover what was left of the lolly. The ice would have already melted, of course, and I would be left with only a thin little
stick with an ice clot attached. ‘Suck it quickly!’ she would cry, out of breath from her search. I would suck it out of thirst, like a street dog. That was how my grandmother loved me, although I didn’t know what ‘love’ meant then. No one had ever taught me that concept in the village, at least not verbally. Later, once I had grown up, I came to realise how much she loved me. She really cared for me. An ice lolly cost five cents, the same price as a vegetable bun. A luxurious love by our standards and for that I should have stood by her, especially when my grandfather lost his temper and threw his fists at her. But I was too small and too scared. I would hide wherever I could. Tears fell down my cheeks too, but not for my grandmother. I cried out of anger, a rage, that I had been born into such a shithole and out of an overwhelming sense of desolation.

  The Goddess of Mercy

  The small white statue of Guanyin above our kitchen table had been there as long as I could remember, and she was there until the day I left Shitang. She was always covered in dust, but my grandmother’s cataracts prevented her from seeing how dirty the statue was. Guanyin stared out into the dimly lit kitchen, her expression devoid of meaning or feeling, alongside the old bench and its flaky paint, the broken umbrellas, and my grandmother’s comb that lay silently on the windowsill, missing its teeth.

  Guanyin has often been compared to the Virgin Mary, maybe because some representations show her carrying a willow branch in one hand and a baby in the other. But the story of our Goddess of Mercy is not about raising a future god. My grandmother, who preferred to pray to Guanyin rather than Buddha, identified with her, woman to woman. Guanyin bestowed her compassion on all those grief-stricken wives and unlucky daughters.