by Xiaolu Guo
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. 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. 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 an announcement of ‘shot at dawn’ or ‘life sentence’. 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 had almost nothing, 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 treat – 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 treat. 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 treat 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.
Guanyin: – her name literally means one who listens to the cries of the world. Legend has it that some thousand years ago she was the daughter of a cruel king. One day the king asked her to marry a wealthy but unloving man. She told the king that she would agree to marry, as long as the union would ease the three great misfortunes of mankind; ageing, illness and death. If her marriage could not help with any of these sufferings, she would rather retreat into a life of religion. When the father-king asked who could possibly ease these sufferings, his daughter mentioned a doctor she knew who could cure all of these ills. Her father was furious, as he wanted her to marry a man of power and wealth, not a healer. He punished her, forcing her into a life of hard labour, giving her little to eat and drink. But still she was unyielding. Every day the king’s daughter begged to be allowed to enter the temple and become a nun. Finally her father agreed, but ordered the monks to give her the toughest chores in order to break her spirit. But Guanyin was such a kind-hearted person that even the animals around the temple wanted to help her. Her father, seeing this, became so frustrated that he tried to burn down the temple hoping that she might perish in the fire. Guanyin was trapped, but as she was dying, a white tiger saved her and took her into an underground world. When she woke up she found herself in the land of the dead. Guanyin gazed upon the suffering souls around her and heard their cries. But her gaze soothed the crying children and soon they began to smile and play; the men stopped punishing themselves and started to find peace within; the dried willow trees flushed green again; the dead lotus began to blossom in the stagnant water. While in Hell, Guanyin witnessed the horrors that human beings had to endure and was overwhelmed with grief. Filled with compassion, she released the good karma she had accumulated during her life, and freed all the suffering souls back on Earth. From then on, the world worshipped her, calling Guanyin the Goddess of Mercy.
This was one of the few stories my grandmother told me, and I remember my first reaction was: ‘Grandmother,
why can’t all women stay unmarried like Guanyin?’
My grandmother looked at me and shook her head. Then she sighed. ‘Women have to get married. Otherwise we are punished.’
This seemed like a bad rule for women, I thought. They were punished either way. Just look at my grandmother. I could understand why she prayed to Guanyin every day. Women like my grandmother were not valued for themselves. She was a dutiful daughter, then the dutiful wife, and dutiful mother, until eventually she was abandoned and forgotten.
During the Cultural Revolution, however, the Goddess of Mercy was to be punished yet again. In the early 1960s, Western symbols like the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ were banned and destroyed. But some of the underground Chinese Christian groups venerated the Virgin Mary by disguising her as a statue of Guanyin holding a child; a cross would be hidden in an inconspicuous location on her body. So this half-Chinese Goddess half-Western Madonna survived for a while, until one day Mao announced his ‘anti-feudal’ and ‘anti-superstition’ movement. The government in Beijing declared that anything linked to China’s feudal past (such as images of kings and queens, grassroots religious practices, temples, etc.) should be destroyed. Overnight, anti-feudal public meetings in the village market square were set up and statues of the Goddess of Mercy were smashed, the hidden crosses in Guanyin’s robe cast into oblivion along with the little baby in her arms. My grandmother hid her precious porcelain figure in her wardrobe until the middle of the 1970s, when images of Guanyin were finally allowed again, and my grandmother could regain her faith in an afterlife through prayer – surely the next life would be better than the one she had endured so far.