Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  At this point, the kelp had begun to boil. It gave off a very particular glue-like fishy aroma. My grandmother chopped some ginger and added it to the soup.

  But I was not satisfied with my grandmother’s story. I had seen a few big weddings in the village when families married off their daughters. Sometimes they even hired a band with drums and trumpets and marched through the streets with the bride sitting in a big bamboo chair carried by four men. Then a huge banquet would be held at their house. Sometimes the banquet spread out onto the street, if the family was rich and had many relatives.

  ‘Did you have a wedding when you arrived? Or a banquet? Were you given a red dress to wear?’

  My grandmother shook her head as she spooned a bowl of kelp soup from the steaming wok. Then she explained.

  ‘On the first day your grandfather did arrange a small banquet for me and my father. But of course he didn’t cook. He was a bachelor and barely knew how. Our next-door neighbour helped to prepare three or four dishes, none of which I had ever tasted before. We had sea-cucumber soup, a plate of steamed razor clams, and a local dish they have always cooked for weddings in Shitang: fried green-bean noodles with shrimp and chopped squid heads, served in a large basin.’

  In those days, sea cucumbers were cheap and the local fisherman caught them wild from the deep sea. These days, they are all farmed near the docks and are tasteless and slimy, just like the rice porridge we ate every morning, which I hated.

  ‘That was the best meal I ever had in your grandfather’s house. Then I discovered he was as poor as my father. The next day, my father left. He was still drunk, but told me when he left that he could finally die knowing both his daughters had found good homes to go to … But what did he really know about such matters?’

  My grandmother sighed. Her sigh was so long and so heavy that I worried the ceiling might fall on our heads. She said no more. By the time she had served up the third bowl of kelp soup, my grandfather had returned home. As usual, he had been out all day by the harbour, scavenging for abandoned items and dead fish. That day, he brought a small bag of clams. He looked weary. He dropped the clams in a bucket by the stove, and glanced towards his bowl – his was bigger and a different colour to ours. He took his soup bowl silently, mounted the wooden staircase and disappeared into his room. After his footsteps settled down, my grandmother and I sat at our table and chewed our kelp quietly. We both felt a little frightened whenever my grandfather was around. My grandmother became especially timid when he was upstairs. He might scream out at any second because the soup was too hot, or too salty, or contained no meat. He was often grumpy about the fact that there was no pork, forgetting that he was the one responsible for bringing it home.

  The Drowning British

  The next time I went to the bus station, I found a brand-new wooden placard hanging on the front gate of the station, with large, freshly written characters on it. They had been painted in red, and looked very important. The stationmaster was standing in front of two buses and supervising passengers as I walked through the gate. His wife was checking tickets and punching holes in them with a rusty pincer. From the shouting and talking, I could make out that one of the buses was supposed to be going towards Ningbo, the other to Zhoushan, big seaport towns and the furthest destinations you could get to from our village by bus. It would take, I was told, at least eight to ten hours non-stop along the bumpy mountain roads to get to either.

  Once the buses had gone, I caught the stationmaster’s attention.

  ‘Stationmaster, what’s written on the new placard on the gate?’

  ‘The official name of the station,’ he answered, slightly impatient at my curiosity. He walked into the ticket office and brought out a half-eaten sugar cane. He bit into it as he stood under the salty noon sun. I could see that he had recently lost some teeth; two or three were missing since I had seen him last.

  ‘So what’s the official name now?’

  ‘Wenling County Shitang Village Model Long-Distance Bus Station,’ he mumbled through a mouthful of sugar-cane pulp.

  I repeated the name. It seemed very long to me. I didn’t know our station was officially a ‘model’ station. But I was not surprised that it had been awarded a prize, considering how much effort and attention the stationmaster and his wife gave it.

  ‘Wenling County? Where’s that?’ I asked. This was the first time I had heard of such a name.

  ‘Wenling is a big inland town with straight, flat roads. Our village, and the other surrounding ones, belongs to Wenling. They’ve got a mayor, who tells us every day what to do.’ He spat out some of the pulp and added: ‘You know what, Xiaolu? That’s where your parents live and work.’

  ‘Oh …’ I didn’t know they were so close. The idea of my parents was still so abstract and not as appealing as the sound of this inland town called Wenling. I was curious that this place should have power over us, that they could control our lives here in the village.

  ‘Have you ever been there?’ I asked.

  ‘No. But I have been to the places near Wenling. Like the islands around Zhoushan, for example,’ the stationmaster said proudly. ‘The population is at least ten times more than here. The fishermen are professional and have lots of fishing festivals all year round.’

  ‘Islands?’

  ‘Yes, you can’t miss them. Your grandfather used to live on one of them, before he settled here.’

  Once again, I was taken aback by this information. Why was it that no one in my family had told me anything about their lives? I would have done better being the stationmaster’s daughter. At least I would know where I came from and who my parents were.

  ‘So my grandfather lived in Zhoushan on an island? Did he have a boat?’

  ‘Yes, he was very brave and went everywhere, looking for sea eels and having adventures.’

  ‘What kinds of adventures?’

  ‘Lots. He even fought in the war against the Japanese, when he was young.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Once, during the war, he and other fishermen saved hundreds of foreign soldiers from drowning and being eaten by sharks!’

  ‘What foreign soldiers?’ I had no idea what the stationmaster meant.

  ‘That was a long, long time ago. Thirty years before you were born, Xiaolu.’ The stationmaster’s eyes moved to his wife, who was sweeping with a broom. She was cleaning up the sugar-cane pulp he had spat out on the floor.

  ‘You are too young to understand this, but Zhoushan was a very important place for foreigners. As important as Hong Kong back then. The foreigners were called the British. They came from a tiny place on the other side of the world. They had big noses, yellow hair and hairy bodies. They had been causing trouble for us Chinese for a long time. They forced us to buy bad things, like something called opium. They liked to live by the port because the seafood was the best and the beaches were very beautiful!’

  ‘Wow.’ I was a bit scared, but I would have loved to have met the yellow-haired foreigners. ‘Were the Big-noses angry with the Japanese?’

  ‘Yes, they were fighting them too. In 1942 the Japanese came and attacked the locals. The fishermen of Zhoushan preferred the Big-noses to the Japanese dwarves. The Japanese had captured many Big-noses in a big battle. And they were taking them in ships across the sea to Japan, passing Zhoushan en route. It was a massive boat, but it sank after being hit by some other Big-noses, called Americans, near your grandfather’s island.’

  ‘Why did they do that?’

  ‘The Americans were fighting the dwarves too. The British Big-noses on the Japanese boat were drowning, so your grandfather and some of the other fishermen seeing this all unfolding from the beach felt pity for the Big-noses and wanted to help, because they hated the Japanese. No one in this world is as cruel as the Japanese! Your grandfather and his friends pushed out their fishing boats and rescued the Westerners with their nets and oars. Because of this brave act, the fishermen were honoured by the government. The Big-nose Chief of Hon
g Kong wanted to thank the fishermen, your grandfather included, who was among the bravest. They promised them a brand-new shiny boat with a motor, not just sails. But the boat never arrived. Some people must have stolen it on the way. Bastards!’

  The stationmaster paused, and knitted his brow.

  ‘Motherfuckers! The British Big-noses should have learned their lesson that we Chinese are kind people because we have forgiven them for what they did to us during the Opium Wars. I hope they will always remember that!’

  I felt completely overwhelmed by this war story. I couldn’t understand why all these foreign Big-noses were fighting on our Chinese coastline. Why a Japanese boat was carrying Big-nose prisoners from the other side of the world. And why the American Big-noses bombed them. My head was exploding. I certainly didn’t want to live through war, but I was happy to hear that my mute and bad-tempered grandfather had once been a hero, and kind-hearted, a man of mercy, a man who helped others. Even foreigners.

  ‘But why did my grandfather move here?’ I asked. The islands of Zhoushan sounded a better place to be. In my eyes the beach in Shitang was always smelly, and the village festivals only ever celebrated dead people.

  ‘I don’t really know. But usually fishermen moved around with their boats, especially when they were still single. They would sail from coast to coast and settle only when they got married.’

  My grandfather had the reputation of being a man of no words and no particular stories to tell. Perhaps he had lost his memory from all the drinking? Had he been numbed by a hard life? Did he feel proud of having saved those foreigners from drowning? Would he have been happier if he had stayed in Zhoushan rather than moving here, to this small, rotten peninsula? In Zhoushan he could have entertained his granddaughter with tales of the past, but here in Shitang he was mute, nothing but a failed fisherman who had lost his boat and hated his hunchbacked wife.

  DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane)

  My grandfather, the professional sea scavenger, was now seventy-three years old. He staggered along the shore with a large, empty sack slung on his back, his steps heavy and his breath short. He was looking for anything valuable by the water: driftwood, containers, dead crabs, or even dead bodies. If he could find a dead body he could at least harvest the man’s clothes and shoes and sell them. It was 1978, and I was five years old. I remember one evening, going out with my grandmother to look for him when he didn’t return. He had been coughing hard for days and she made for the shore, expecting to find his dead body lying in the sand. When we returned to the pitch-black house, he was already upstairs, sound asleep in his room.

  Then, one day, my grandfather was too tired for his walks along the beach. He woke up and started coughing up blood as he ate his morning bowl of unsweetened rice porridge. He was sick, but we didn’t know from what. There was only one traditional herbal medicine shop in the village, which had a simple clinic attached. He was not treated with modern scientific knowledge. He was too sick to continue his little business. His son, my father, wasn’t very filial in the traditional Chinese sense. He didn’t send much money home to his parents. Nor did my parents come to visit. For days, my grandfather limped around inside our house, coughing and wheezing heavily. Occasionally he went outside, but only got as far as leaning against his empty grocery table. His eyes were like two empty holes, his face grey and lifeless. Acquaintances who passed on the street gave him one or two cigarettes, but he smoked bitterly. Before long the seasonal typhoons arrived, and the violent storms and cold rain shut him back inside the house again.

  One morning, my grandfather didn’t come down for breakfast or lunch. Grandmother hobbled up the stairs to his room on her tiny, bound feet. I was in the kitchen carving a little boat out of a big cuttlefish bone, the sort of thing I always did with fish skeletons. Then I heard my grandmother scream. She clambered down the stairs.

  ‘Go get Da Bo! Or find someone, anyone!’

  I ran round to Da Bo’s house and pushed open their door.

  ‘Come quick!’ I screamed. ‘Grandmother is crying! Come!’

  I ran back upstairs, and saw my grandfather lying on the floor. Beside him, empty cartons had been tossed on the ground, along with a half-drunk bottle of Bai Jiu – a very strong local liquor the fishermen drank in the cold weather. My grandfather’s eyes were wide open, but not moving. They looked like the eyes of a dead fish. I fell on my knees and shook my grandfather’s arms. But they were limp. Then my grandmother reappeared, sobbing and hysterical. Da Bo pushed past her, followed by his wife.

  ‘I should have called you last night!’ my grandmother was wailing. ‘Why have you done this to me? What did I do to deserve this?’

  ‘Terrible! He must have poisoned himself by mixing DDT with the alcohol.’

  My grandmother knelt down, touched my grandfather’s body and started up her crazed screaming again.

  At that time every household was given bottles of DDT and other fertilisers for free by the government, even though Shitang was not best suited to cultivating crops.

  Unable to understand what was happening, I squatted down on the floor, and watched in silence, utterly bewildered.

  Half an hour later, crowds of people had gathered in front of our house. My grandfather’s body was being carried down to the kitchen by a few men. One of them tried to close my grandfather’s eyes, but they refused, they were stuck as if locked open. Suddenly, a cry:

  ‘A warm towel, quick!’

  My grandmother stood up and grabbed a towel hanging by the washbasin, then poured some hot water from a bottle onto it. The old man took it and covered my grandfather’s eyes. A few seconds later, he removed it and everyone could see that my grandfather’s eyes were shut. Satisfied, the man handed the towel back to my grandmother and began giving orders. I looked again at my grandfather’s corpse in his black cotton clothes, stiff and motionless. His skinny feet were naked save for a pair of broken grass shoes. His mouth was grey and dry like the lips of a dead shark. Now I began to feel frightened. The villagers whispered to each other at first, but soon their chatter grew louder and almost excited. ‘He drank DDT, did you hear?’ or ‘He didn’t get on well with his wife and children, no wonder he took action!’ or ‘He must have felt desperate!’

  I was only five and a half. I didn’t understand death. But somehow the scene tormented me, and I felt a deep sense of shame in front of all those people. My grandmother had told me that dead people became ghosts. But I didn’t see any ghosts dressed in black flying around the room. All I felt was a searing anger, and an icy-cold loneliness somehow emanating towards me from the shrivelled body. No one talked to me. No one explained the situation. I am sure, even today, that I was enraged by that scene. Our house had become a place for public gossip over a corpse and its poison. I hated the feeling of indignity and shame as it lingered that afternoon and for long afterwards.

  I don’t remember much of what happened during the days that followed my grandfather’s death. All I can remember is that we barely went upstairs after that. I was too frightened to enter the room by myself. I thought his ghost might be living up there, and might visit us. I was terrified by noises at night. Since I had always slept in the same bed as my grandmother, I would wake her and ask her to listen. But she would merely open her rheumy eyes and sigh in the dark.

  My grandmother wept for days, and wore black for the rest of her life. But I soon felt numb. Sometimes, as my grandmother and I ate our porridge in the kitchen, I felt his presence, as if he was upstairs in his room, slurping the same porridge and cursing under his breath. He was the same shadow in death as he had been in life, and I accepted his continued presence without much thought. The room upstairs was the driest in the house. Sometimes my grandmother climbed up there to drape ribbonfish from a pole under the ceiling. When the wind came and blew through the windows, the long and pale-coloured ribbonfish were like a row of hanging men, swinging weightlessly in the stale air.

  The Medicine Master

  One summe
r morning, after a week of unrelenting typhoons, the sun returned to the sky and began slowly heating up our rain-drenched village. Water was everywhere. People came out of their houses, either to fix broken windows or clean up ravaged front yards. Out on the beach, I was playing with Da Bo’s children. Then we saw Da Bo swimming under a cliff where the rugged edge always trapped drifters. He was trying to secure a large box against the constant onslaught of the waves. Eventually he managed to grab hold of the big metal box, and climbed up to where we were playing.

  ‘What’s inside?’

  ‘Don’t touch it! Move back, it might explode!’

  A local fisherman was once injured opening a box of bombs he found among drifting debris. Not that he had known there would be bombs inside. Damned Taiwan Nationalist pigs! he cursed miserably when one of his toes was blown clean off. After that, the people of Shitang were more careful with mysteriously packed foreign objects that came adrift on the shore.

  We retreated a bit, but soon returned, impatient to see what it was. It was sealed perfectly.

  ‘The foreigners sent it!’ one of the kids screamed upon seeing the strange letters that adorned the surface of the package.

  ‘They must be American cookies!’ I said. I really hoped it contained some exotic foreign sweets, the kind once found by one of the fishermen.

  Da Bo dragged us away again. He told us to watch it from a distance, but not to let anyone take it. He then went to borrow an axe from some guys on the docks. Minutes later, he returned along with two more men. Excitement rose when they caught sight of the metal box.

  ‘It can’t be a bomb,’ one man exclaimed. ‘They wouldn’t put writing on it if it was.’

  ‘It must be supplies sent by the Westerners to the Taiwan navy!’ the other said.

  ‘Unless the American imperialist pigs want to kill us all and that’s why they used such a big box. It might still contain a bomb!’ Da Bo reasoned fearfully.