A Village with My Name

by Scott Tong

  Still, as she and other villagers tell it, this specific cancer strikes here at a suspiciously high rate. There’s a local poem about this part of northern Jiangsu:

  Wash rice and greens in the 1950s.

  Wash clothes and water fields in the 1960s.

  Water goes bad in the 1970s.

  Fish die out in the 1980s, and cancer occurs in the 1990s.

  I already know this will be my last chance to see Tong Daren. He balances on the edge of his bed, short legs dangling over a concrete slab floor full of chips and holes. He looks around at walls with nothing except a dated coat of off-white paint that’s stained and peeling. Several times Tong Daren opens his mouth to begin talking, then closes it instead. I imagine he is budgeting his words and breaths. It dawns on me that I will never get firsthand his version of village history—I’m too late.

  Finally, he speaks.

  “I’ll treat you for dinner at a restaurant in the town, with my family.” Too frail to host me as promised, he is providing an equivalent gesture.

  “No, you’re too weak.” I say. “Stay home and rest.”

  He blinks in a way that tells me I’ve misunderstood. He opens and closes his mouth again. “No, I’m not going to the restaurant,” he says. “I’m just paying.” Only his daughters and their families will be at the dinner with me. Before I can protest, he holds up a stop-sign palm indicating there will be no discussion of this. He and I sit in silence, looking out his window without a window, at vegetable fields that have fed countless generations here. Neither of us needs to mention the critical difference between him and me: my side got out of this place long ago, and his did not.

  If there’s one determinant that separates China’s winners from its losers, it’s whether a person gets off the farm. Staying in the village means working a tiny plot of land for meager revenue. The economics simply don’t work, compared with moving to a town or city, producing more and thus earning more. This is the basic motivation for the largest urban migration in human history, a dynamic not unlike the American farm-to-city movement a century ago. China’s story is just that much bigger, compressed into a single generation. The longer a person like Tong Daren stays back, the further behind he and his family fall.

  There is another striking contrast here: a tale of two cancers. Two decades ago, I was diagnosed with a soft-tissue cancer at Georgetown University Hospital: broken collarbone (basketball collision), angiosarcoma, shoulder replacement. Blue Cross Blue Shield picked up four-fifths of the cost. Tong Daren, like most in the Chinese countryside, has barely any insurance coverage and no money for chemotherapy. So his tumor simply grew and grew, and blocked his esophagus almost entirely. One person in the village told me Tong Daren’s father starved to death during the great famine of 1960. He will go the same way.

  “You’ve had a hard life,” is all I can say. At these moments my Mandarin fails me. It’s hard enough to express survival guilt in your native tongue. I state the obvious, that the historical burdens he had to bear are the result of my side of the family, but quickly he puts up another hand. “Mei banfa,” he says. Nothing you can do.

  A motor scooter appears, screeching to a halt. Tong Daren’s older daughter, Tong Yuqin, swings by to meet me for the first time; she was traveling the first time I came around, with my father. Tong Yuqin and her younger sister grew up in this forlorn house but got married, had kids, and bought townhouses in the closest town, ten minutes away. Now in their thirties, they are finally moving up the ladder to lives with indoor plumbing and washing machines, broadband Internet and children addicted to screens.

  “What should I call you?” Tong Yuhua asks. This is the first order of business, to establish our official relationship with each other. It’s critical to know the status of the person you’re talking to, and address your counterpart accordingly. I happen to be several years older, but in this calculation, age is irrelevant. What matters is whether I am of a higher or lower generation. Someone has to be above or below, and there are no ties. Tong Yuqin tilts her head to ponder this, as I observe how small she is by American standards. She’s maybe a size-4 petite, perhaps a 2, with a round pale face that gives off the impression of innocence. Still, she describes herself as “fatter” than her younger sister.

  “I should call you xiaosu.” She has figured it out. Tong Yuqin’s father Tong Daren and I are on the same generation on the family tree; our great-grandfathers were brothers. So I’m “equal” to Tong Daren, though he’s thirty years older, and thus “above” his daughters. That makes me their uncle. But there’s more: in Chinese there are many words for “uncle”:

  Your mother’s older brother is a jiujiu.

  Your mother’s younger brother is also jiujiu.

  Your father’s older brother is a bobo.

  Your father’s younger brother is a susu.

  Since I’m younger than Tong Yuqing’s father, I’m a susu. But then—just to add another level of crazy—which susu? I have an older brother in Northern California, so we’re both susus to her. So as a younger brother, I am her “small uncle,” or the xiao susu. Or, for short, xiaosu.

  It’s complicated, but Tong Yuqin does the genealogy math faster than it just took you to read it. Now it’s my turn to call her something appropriate, and she knows I’m still calculating, so she bails me out. “Just call me Tong Yuqin.”

  She explains she has two children, the older one a twelve-year-old girl with braces. That’s it, a girl with braces, compared with her voluminous description of her baby boy: Smart. Talkative. Cute. Fat (which is good in this context). Chinese urbanites often proclaim not to care about the sex of their children, that they’re all the same. But not here. When I ask Tong Yuqin if she prefers boys, she answers without hesitation. “Of course.”

  “But what about the one-child policy?” I ask (this conversation is taking place before the relaxation of the nationwide policy in 2015). Many rural parts have long allowed two children, but Jiangsu province has a reputation for strict enforcement.

  “We know someone,” she says, without giving specifics. Translation: bribe.

  “What is the fine here for a second child?”

  “Fifty thousand renminbi.” In US currency, $7,000—a full year’s income for an unskilled worker in a place like this.

  The key to successful sex selection is having a pregnancy ultrasound test to detect the sex of the fetus. The procedure is nominally illegal, though it’s easy to get around it. “Did you get an ultrasound? How?”

  She shoots me a you-must-be-new-here look. “Zou houmen.” Took the back door. She doesn’t seem so innocent to me now. Another motor scooter pulls up, with two more young women. Tong Daren’s younger daughter, Tong Yuhua, has narrow, angular features and darker skin, and quickly I realize she is the direct one. She does not play the what-do-I-call-you game. And she does not introduce her companion, a teenager in a floral sundress that seems out of place in this dirty village.

  “She just came to look at what you look like,” Tong Yuhua says. Kan ni shen me yang.

  I start telling the daughters about our previous visit to the village, mentioning the tall man in the hat who was our main contact. Tong Yuhua cuts me off: “Everything that man in the hat told you is a lie. He was a party secretary before. We hate him.”

  This takes some time to unwind. But Tong Yuhua is calling into question everything I’d learned here about my great-grandfather: that he returned to the village as an elderly man after the great famine; that villagers took in this successful scholar who ventured out to the big cities of the world and made good; that they stuffed his mattress with hay to keep him warm in the winter; that he was buried in a dignified spot of land nearby.

  She shakes her head, as if to say I have been duped, and begins giving her family’s version of the story. The Tong village has been divided for decades into two competing halves: Tong East and Tong West. Our families—mine and hers—all hail from the west side, the part closer to the canal and the outside world. Histor
ically, Tong West turned out more scholars and government officials, people who made it out. Tong East, though, was a land of peasants.

  “On the other side, they had no culture,” Tong Daren’s sister later told me with a sneer. “They came to our side to work for us.”

  What’s most surprising is that Tong Daren, the frail and tiny old man with cancer, grew up in a well-off family of scholars. But everything flipped when the Communists took power in 1949. Tong East represented the Communist Party’s agrarian power base, so people there who joined the party were quickly catapulted into positions of power. They became party secretaries, with authority to allot food rations and carry out political witch hunts against enemies of the revolution. During the period of “land reform” in the 1950s, they shamed and punished members of Tong West for their connections to landlords, the bourgeoisie, and other “bad elements.” The first became the last and the last became the first.

  Tong Daren’s personal fate changed when a letter arrived in the village in the 1950s. “It was addressed to my father’s great-uncle,” Tong Yuhua says. “But party leaders in Tong East intercepted it.” The writer of the letter was an anti-Communist Tong who had fled in 1949: my grandfather.

  “When the letter came, people knew my father had relatives in Taiwan,” she says. “My father was scared to open the letter. He didn’t want to accept it.” Instead, party leaders from Tong East took the letter and held it as incriminating evidence. Years later, during the famine of the late 1950s, Tong Daren’s family received fewer grain rations than others in the village, far below subsistence level.

  “Is that how his father died?” I ask.

  She nods. “He was fifty-eight.”

  Cadres confiscated Tong Daren’s family land and gave it to poor peasants, who also swiped anything of value in his house: furniture, utensils, farm equipment. During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s—and China’s McCarthyite hunt for real and imagined enemies within—party leaders marched Tong Daren into public “struggle sessions” in nearby villages with a metal sign around his neck. It read: haiwai guanxi. Overseas relations. He was beaten and forced to kowtow.

  And he was never given opportunities to succeed. “My father is good at math and the abacus,” Tong Yuqing, the older daughter, says. But when businessmen came to hire villagers for accounting or construction work, he never got an offer. “He suffered his whole life,” her sister chimes in. “I don’t think he’ll make it to Chinese New Year. I look at him and cry.”

  As for the tall man with the hat, his name is Tong Guangde, and he hails from the rival territory of Tong East. “He was party secretary before and punished my father the most,” Tong Yuhua says. “That’s why we hate him.” I was told the Hat Man gave Tong Daren a small plot of bumpy, low-quality land (perhaps this occurred during the distribution period in the 1980s). As the village man in charge, Hat Man barred Tong Daren from burying his parents in caskets and forced their cremation, an act of filial disgrace. Also in the early ’80s, when Tong Daren’s wife was pregnant with her second child and at home on bedrest, Tong Yuhua says Hat Man “grabbed her out of the house and pulled her by her hair to the family planning enforcement official.” The plan was to force her to undergo an abortion, but she was deemed too weak for the procedure. “Otherwise,” Tong Yuhua says, “I wouldn’t have been born.” Still, Tong Guangde extracted a fine and pocketed a portion of it, she suspects. “He’s more capitalist than a capitalist.”

  She goes on: about five years before my father and I found the village in 2009, one of my aunts from Taiwan came, and the man in the hat hosted her for a meal just as he’d hosted us. “He never told us she came,” Tong Yuhua says. Here, sophisticated visitors from far away aren’t treated as relatives returning home, but rather as financial opportunities. They may bring business deals, investments, or donations. “They treated her like a bag of money.

  “The good news is, my father will die with his children and grandchildren next to him. Tong Guangde—his children never come to see him. He deserves to die alone.”

  ***

  That night at dinner, eight people—five grownups, three kids—gather around a large round table at a restaurant described as the best in town. To my eye, it seems the only one in town.

  “Students today, they’re much dumber than before,” says Tong Yuhua, the feisty younger daughter who is a grade school teacher nearby. “In the classroom, I explain an idea to them, I write it on the board, and they just sit there.” She shovels in a clump of rice. “Like vegetables.” I tell myself this place might be freshened up with more snarky younger sisters like her. But younger sisters are rare in villages like this. Even in places that allow two children, a woman pregnant with a second girl often terminates the pregnancy. Tong Yuhua’s class of fifty-six children is made up of thirty-eight boys and eighteen girls.

  As a teenager, Tong Yuhua ventured out of the village to work in textile mills in the Yangtze River delta cities of Suzhou and Shanghai. She saved enough money in two years to afford university. And upon graduation she returned home to marry a man from a nearby village. “I could have taken a job in Huai’an city,” she says. “Would have doubled my salary. But it’s too black,” by which she means corrupt. In Huai’an city, as she tells the story, too many parents show up in school to give teachers red envelopes—bribes to ensure their children get the right attention and the right grades. And for now, Huai’an city is too far from her ailing father. “Maybe after he dies we’ll move to the city.”

  The main dishes begin to arrive, including local delicacies that I’d feared. Small rivers surround the Tong village, so it’s a sure thing underwater creatures will be on offer. “Lobsters!” A waitress dumps a giant plate of small, red, steamed river “lobsters,” which are actually spicy crayfish. I’ve eaten these in Shanghai before: pluck off the tail, suck out the meat, and toss aside the remaining carcass before grabbing another.

  Then the snakes come.

  “These are not real snakes, just river snakes,” says Tong Yuqin’s husband, a friendly man with a crew cut. The other spouse, Tong Yuhua’s husband, does not engage me at all. The only thing he says to me during this meal is “Eat more rice.” Perhaps to him I’m a rich outsider who has come to look down on the people still here. Before I can say anything, three specimens land on my plate, at which point all activity at the table stops. Everyone is watching the xiaosu from America.

  “How do I eat this?” I ask.

  “There’s a bone in the middle, the spine,” Tong Yuqin’s husband instructs. “Take a bite, eat the meat, and spit out the bone.” I do as instructed, partly expecting the flavor of unagi, the Japanese eel. But Jiangsu river snake is less meaty and more mushy. I force down a few bites, spin the round lazy Susan to try to divert attention somewhere else, and lift my glass for a toast to wash it down. We are drinking the Chinese brand Great Wall red wine, mixed with Sprite. “That’s how we drink wine here,” Tong Yuqin’s husband explains.

  I raise my glass to him, and he nods before we drink. The women do not drink. Silently, I toast my ill cousin Tong Daren and then nudge the river snakes to the edge of my plate.

  Tong Yuqin’s husband drives me to my hotel in a neighboring town, in a Chinese-brand mini pickup truck. The roads are narrow, and it’s very dark out, without street lights. But he turns his head directly at me as he drives. Like many in the countryside, he quit school as a young teen and went out for work. He’s done construction jobs across China and the world: in Datong in northern Shanxi province (“too cold”), rural Japan (“they treat us well there,”) a building construction project in Saudi Arabia (“no beer”), housing construction in West Africa (“they’re lazy”). A modern-day “coolie,” one might say in an unguarded moment. Domestic jobs pay the equivalent of $700 US a month—far less than most overseas gigs. Like most blue-collar couples in China, he and his wife go where the work is, separating them for months or years at a time. She’s been a garment factory worker in central Asia and a nanny in southern Ch
ina, hundreds of miles away. For now, he’s returned home in between gigs, to help raise the family’s baby boy and to be close to his dying father-in-law. But expenses are piling up. One more family member means more food, more pricey infant formula. “My daughter’s braces, they cost three thousand renminbi,” he says—around $400.

  “I thought about going to South Sudan next to drive a construction truck,” he says, still looking at me as he turns right. But the shady middleman asked workers to surrender their passports for the duration of the job. “I didn’t trust them. Too risky.” Then he peppers me with money questions about America. Can you find me a dishwashing job at a Chinese restaurant there? Is it true they subsidize second children in America? How much is a plane ticket to China? A bottle of beer? A pack of Marlboro smokes, the non-knockoff ones? Does your house look like ours? Do you eat steak for dinner every night? Does the US government fight foreign wars to stoke the American economy? Do you own a car? How much?

  I need a brief break, and look around. More than a century ago, my great-grandfather Tong likely traveled these same roads, perhaps asking these same kinds of questions about the outside world. But then, as now, this much was clear: staying behind in the village was a guaranteed way to be left behind.

  Chapter Three

  FOREIGN EXCHANGE

  Student Life, Tokyo Wife

  Don’t urinate in public. Speak quietly at night. Swap your shoes for slippers indoors. Don’t ask people their ages.

  From our home in Virginia outside Washington, I occasionally ride my bike into work if the conditions are right: there has to be enough time, and the temperature must exceed 40 degrees Fahrenheit. It is a glorious ride to start the day, along a bike path that that is tree lined and quiet. The other morning my lone companion in the first fifteen minutes was a male deer. Sometimes, though, the whole experience backfires. Those are the days I get passed by the wrong people—people who should be going slower than I.