by Jason Wilson
I led them through the intricate maze of narrow streets surrounding my apartment. Michael had visited me before, so the chaos of neighborhood life was a familiar sight, but Dad had only ever seen China from tour buses cruising the main boulevards. We passed cyclo drivers playing cards out of the back of a bicycle cart, laborers jackhammering in the middle of the street, aunties fanning themselves in the afternoon heat. Dad ogled glistening red candied haw strung 10 to a stick. We passed a vendor making Beijing crepes smothered in green onion, egg, sesame seeds, and hot sauce, then folded around a slab of crispy fried dough. “Oh . . . but diarrhea,” Dad mumbled sadly, patting his stomach and looking about hopefully, perhaps wondering how soon the bacteria in his gut would acclimate.
As I watched Dad’s reactions, I realized how much China had become home. Bareheaded construction workers who padded along bamboo scaffolding in canvas shoes seemed normal to me, but Dad kept commenting about the lack of protective headgear; how this soft, pliable, cheap footwear would offer no shield from an errant blade or nail.
We ducked down a side street filled with small stalls. Around the time I left for college, Michael and Dad developed a clowning relationship built on snarky banter, and they always made me laugh, but now I noticed how their presence overtook the entire sidewalk. Their laughter was too loud for China, their speech too forceful. Even their manner of walking seemed overly confident, aggressive even. I wondered if I’d once moved through Beijing like this, and if that’s what natives had reacted to in my early weeks here, when everyone stared at me wherever I went.
Slightly embarrassed at their American way of moving through this Chinese space, I slowly allowed myself to drift behind them.
An auntie in a bright blue polyester vest rushed at Dad. “Hello!” She waved a fake-silver watch. “Very good price!”
They kept moving. When she was out of earshot, Michael turned to me. “How come she didn’t attack you?”
Dad nodded in confusion as he looked me over. I shrugged. “Maybe it’s the haircut and clothing,” I offered as an excuse. It seemed the gentler—perhaps more Chinese—thing to do, provide a half-truth to spare their feelings. Yet it startled me that I could pass for Chinese in ways Dad could not, and that his antennae had not yet picked up on these distinctions. Dad had always been my benchmark for the degree of Chineseness I could hope to attain. He was the one who helped me with my Chinese homework, and he’d always understood the parts of Chinese movies that I did not.
We had almost reached our destination when we stepped into a small store that sold Great Wall replicas and miniature Chairman Mao busts. The vendor swooped over to greet us.
“It’s so hot outside—you really should buy one of these fans.” She prodded Dad toward a row of gaudy accordion fans marketed to tourists.
“Oh, but this one is so much better,” he said as he stationed himself in front of an electric fan that cooled the store, opening his arms wide in exuberant relief.
“But you can’t bring my fan outside!”
“Then I’d better stand here a little bit longer.” And they both laughed.
I had but two responses to pushy vendors, the rude brush-off and the silent treatment; I had none of Dad’s easygoing charm or ready wit. Watching them, I was hit once again with the apprehension that always haunted me growing up, that my lifetime of study would forever pale in comparison to his intuitive understanding of this nation and its people. I knew which hole-in-the-wall restaurants had the best spicy delicacies and could eat anything off their menus. I knew where to find Chinese guidebooks and how to score cheap transportation. But he still had a feel for aspects of the deep culture that I lacked. What else could I do, and would it ever be enough?
Our destination, Yuyao County, was a tiny dot on the map, lodged between two behemoth cities in the northeastern part of Zhejiang Province. Back in my apartment, Michael and I huddled over my worn English-language guidebook and a map.
“Yuyao is between Ningbo and Hangzhou, but Hangzhou is bigger and probably has more rail lines.” I traced my finger along the map. “Maybe we could get an overnight train to Hangzhou.”
“Hm . . . but Ningbo is closer. Shouldn’t we use Ningbo as a base?”
“How will we get to Ningbo? Can you look up if there’s a bus from Shanghai to Ningbo? Maybe we fly to Shanghai?”
Dad looked up from the Chinese guidebook. “Did you know Yuyao is known as the ‘land of scholars’?” He grinned. Yuyao received passing mention in most English guidebooks, if it received mention at all, but the Chinese guidebook devoted a narrow chapter to the intellectuals who emerged from the region of our ancestors.
I think this description tickled Dad’s fancy because it reminded him of his father. The founding of the Yen Family Village may have originated from a wealthy merchant, but by the time Grandpa was born in the early twentieth century, his family had fallen on hard times and migrated out of the province in search of better luck. According to Dad, Grandpa had an uncle with no sons, and when Grandpa came of age at 13 his uncle offered him a modest lump sum as seed money to make his way in the world. “You can use it to start a business. Or get some education—I know you like to study. The choice is yours.”
It was enough for three years of education, and Grandpa leveraged those three years to cover all of primary and secondary school. When civil war and the Japanese invasion threw the nation into chaos in the 1920s and 1930s, he tested into university by scoring well on the entrance exam. The upheaval meant many students had no copy of their high school diploma, so Grandpa’s lack of a diploma went unquestioned.
While Michael and I plotted a path toward the Yen Family Village, Dad traced the scholarly lineage of Yuyao, from Han dynasty scholars (circa AD 20) through every subsequent century up to the present. China’s civil exam system dates back to the 600s and expanded under Empress Wu Zetian; for centuries passing this exam was the surest path for social mobility within China. Nearly every region boasts at least one poor scholar who studied their way into the scholar elite, thereby lifting themselves and their families out of poverty. It is China’s rags-to-riches narrative and one Dad could locate Grandpa within.
I believe it is also one reason Chinese immigrants in America place so much emphasis on education, as it transposes well to the American Dream: enter a profession that requires many years of education, and thereby secure prestige, wealth, security, and their many accoutrements. Dad followed this path into medicine, but I was noncommittal. Becoming Chinese “enough” had defined so many years of my life that I needed to keep plunging into my obsession to determine if China was my true dao or ultimately a passing phase.
We flew to Shanghai and then hopped a bus to Ningbo, the behemoth city that neighbors Yuyao. If Beijing and Shanghai were the two pearls of the new Chinese economy—Beijing as the center of political power and Shanghai as the center of commerce—then Ningbo exemplified the crop of up-and-coming cities on the eastern seaboard. When Deng Xiaoping opened China in 1978 and ushered in a series of economic reforms, he famously said, “Let some regions and some people prosper first.” Beijing and Shanghai would receive the country’s initial economic investments so that their experiences might eventually pave the way for everyone else to prosper. In the 1990s, investment widened to include large eastern cities around Shanghai like Ningbo and Hangzhou. Although Ningbo lacked the hypermodern glitz of Shanghai, the avenues were wide and clean, the high-rise apartments were relatively new, and students on mopeds buzzed through the streets. The city had a middle-class feel, whereas Shanghai felt simultaneously ultrarich and extremely poor.
Dad’s eyes shone with excitement as he took in our fellow passengers on the bus to Ningbo, and it occurred to me that this was his first experience riding with the natives. I’d worried how he’d take to this style of travel, but he seemed enthusiastic.
Flooded rice fields whipped by our windows, interspersed with sprawling towns of concrete buildings—spare, one-story, utilitarian. Bursts of purple and aqua and pink and
gold glistened in unexpected clusters along the highway: nouveau riche mansions of multistory concrete structures topped by brightly glazed ceramic roofs, their curved eaves molded in the tradition of Ming dynasty architecture.
Somewhere in here was the Yen Family Village. Michael poked me. “We might be passing it right now and not even know it!”
He raised his eyebrows, the enthusiasm in his voice coasting past excitement and into a parody of nervous anticipation. I laughed. I wondered if he, too, speculated whether our family village was now filled with those hideously ostentatious homes, or if it was still buried in squalor. Michael’s dry humor had emerged when he entered college; a couple of years before that, when I left for college, he blossomed into a social butterfly who rarely stayed home (facilitated by a driver’s license), so that I was continually reacquainting myself with him, this brother who had once been my closest playmate.
Earlier that day at a breakfast joint, Dad had leaned over to kiss me on the cheek, which was normal for our family, if abnormal for stereotypical immigrant ones. I recoiled, alarmed. “People don’t do that here!” I hissed.
Dad jerked upright, looking guilty. An awkward silence fell between us.
“He’s just happy to see you,” Michael said, his eyes simultaneously reproachful and sympathetic. I looked away, awash with shame but too irritated and proud to apologize. For the rest of the day I sought to make it up to Dad by joking and laughing with him, and when Michael’s ribbing became too incessant and Dad’s frustration started showing through, I diverted their conversation, again and again, to safer ground.
Our second bus from Ningbo to Yuyao was smaller and dirtier and lacked air-conditioning, for Yuyao was poorer and smaller than Ningbo. The land was just as densely settled but had fewer ostentatious homes, and then the mansions disappeared entirely. The bus bumped and jostled. It creaked to a stop to let a peasant off at the side of the road. Occasionally we passed a small group of women sitting together by a roadside stall, gossiping as they fanned themselves with folded accordions of paper. An old woman wearing flowered pajamas eased herself over the metal divide to cross the road.
Yuyao was a nondescript city, the same endless miles of dingy concrete buildings, the same four-lane thoroughfare cutting through its heart. China had hundreds of cities like this, places that housed over a million people and that yet felt oddly reminiscent of old-time small-town America, forgotten by the rest of the world as the standard of living slowly improved and life churned along at its slow but satisfactory pace. The city lacked the hustle of Shanghai, but there was the sense it had done well for itself, likely pulling itself up from dirt roads not 10 years earlier.
Finally, we reached the end of the line. We were the last passengers to exit the bus, and emerged to find a cluster of small red cabs quivering in an impatient line. We looked around. Our fellow passengers had already dispersed into the surrounding streets. So this was Yuyao.
Michael and I shifted uncomfortably in the heat. We’d figured out how to get us this far, but neither of us had thought beyond finding our way to Yuyao. Unsure what to do next, I shaded my eyes and looked toward the bus depot, as though deep in thought.
“Isn’t this fun?” Dad asked, looking at nobody in particular. Michael and I avoided looking at one another. Neither of us looked at him.
“Well! I’m having fun!” Dad disappeared into the bus depot.
My backpack, loaded with three water bottles and a guidebook, pulled at my shoulders. Michael’s forehead beaded with sweat. An old man ambled across the empty station with a bamboo stick slung over his shoulder, a bundle balanced from each end of the stick. His silhouette evoked bucolic images of the Chinese peasantry, except that his bags were jammed with dirty plastic bottles intended for the recycling center, a man in retirement earning a few extra kuai by poking about trash cans.
Dad reappeared. He’d asked the station attendants about the neighboring villages: Was there one named Yen, and which bus could take us there? They shook their heads and laughed, asking for additional details. He had none. He led us toward the cabbies and made inquiries, but they, too, had never heard of a village named Yen. There was nothing to do but kick at the curb and wait for the next bus back.
We were a family of dreamers on a journey born of dreams. Michael dreaming of the triumphant return to the family village; Dad dreaming of the modernization of our ancestral shrine. I dreamt of adventures in a land of 1.3 billion, as though by scouring the countryside I might discover the place, deep within myself, where I could latch onto the certainty that I was Chinese enough. That I was enough. But the real dreamer, the one most responsible for this journey, was Grandpa. It was of his home village that we dreamt, and it was his dream of a PhD that had brought the family to the “land of opportunity” in 1963, where we would eventually prosper enough for a return visit to the motherland.
My memories of him are vague. He passed away from Alzheimer’s when I was 12. I remember a quiet man of slight build with kind eyes, gentle with children but shy. Grandpa never finished his PhD; he left with a master’s degree to support Grandma and their seven children, eventually landing in Lockheed Martin’s engineering department. Dad had once been a faculty member at two different medical schools, and he hoped my fellowship research would eventually lead to a professorship, where I would be the one to finally live out Grandpa’s dreams.
When I entered Michael and Dad’s hotel room later that night, they were seated across from each other on a bed, a large map of Yuyao County spread between them. Dad scratched his calf. “I don’t know what it is, but I’m itching all over.”
“Itchy . . .” Michael mused. “Like when the body rejects a transplant—”
“Your province is rejecting you!” I said. Dad shook his fist, first at me and then at Michael, before laughing.
We hovered over the map. Yuyao County held no village named Yen, only a constellation of unmarked towns that must have been too small to warrant detailed census. There was also no river named Xia, although it could have dried up in the intervening years.
“I don’t know!” Dad’s voice was tight with frustration. “I just remember being a kid in Taiwan and reciting, Woshi Zhejiangsheng, Yuyaoxian ren.” Dad looked off into space. “Maybe Grandpa got it wrong. But how could he?”
He bent over the map again. “He couldn’t have given us another clue?”
When we met for breakfast the following morning, Dad calmly announced, “I’m no longer allergic to my province. It’s bug bites.” Over steaming bowls of rice porridge with pickled vegetables and preserved egg, he recounted the tiny village Michael had spotted on the map, buried deep in the heart of the province. It was not in Yuyao County nor was it near the faintest trickle of water, but it was named Yen Family Village and it was in Zhejiang.
“Are you sure?” I asked. The thread seemed tenuous at best; I was ready to abandon the effort and settle into sightseeing.
“You never know.” Michael picked carefully at a plate of tiny pickled fish.
Dad shot me a warning glance. “I think we should do it. We’re here anyways.”
I shrugged and slouched in my chair. My skin felt grimy from the southern humidity, and I missed the spontaneity of my solo travels, where I could wander down alleyways or befriend children as I journaled. Dad and Michael, much as I loved them, reminded me of the person I’d been before China. Traveling solo was simpler, freer.
Michael unfolded the map and peered at it again. Silence blanketed our table.
“I’d hate to come all this way and miss it,” said Dad. “What if that’s it?”
So we headed for Jinhua, the largest city within striking distance of our new target. As with the rest of the province, this no-name city of 4 million was booming. This entire time Dad had been voraciously reading guidebooks and newspapers, and he told us that because Beijing and Shanghai had succeeded in establishing themselves, the Communist Party was now starting the second half of Deng Xiaoping’s vision, which was to let the pro
sperity of those “first cities and people” trickle down. The plan was to shift development funds away from the largest cities and instead invest in each province’s second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-, etc., largest cities. Jinhua did not make the top five in Zhejiang Province, but even here we could see that the ripple effects of development had begun to alter the landscape.
As Dad acclimated to traveling without a tour guide, he took on more and more of the travel arrangements, flipping through guidebooks to find hotels and map public-transportation options. I hated myself for ceding responsibility for logistics and slipping back into child mode, but it was so easy to be lazy in these small ways.
He booked us into a three-star hotel that stood beyond the edge of town in anticipation of the future growth of the city limits. It was so far out that we had to try several cabbies before one agreed to take us. The hotel was staffed by an army of interns, and when we presented our blue passports for identification verification, we caused a minor uproar. “Americans!” they whispered. “Come look!” Our bedsheets were such a crisp white, I suspected we were the first to use them. We were their only guests that evening.
The hotel connected us with a cabbie who agreed to drive us the 100 miles or so to the Yen Family Village. When he quoted the equivalent of a week’s earnings, Dad tried halfheartedly to talk him down. I never had the willingness to raise my voice, insult the product, walk away at least twice, or enter into heated argument, just to reach a price that locals would pay, and Dad was equally soft. I realize now we should have let Michael bargain for us. He would have gotten us to within 10 percent of the local price. Whereas Dad and I rationalized that between the standard-of-living differential and the favorable exchange rate it was not worth the trouble, Michael was driven by the principle of the matter.
The next morning, our cabbie plunged us deep into the heart of Zhejiang. We entered a region so remote it was likely that just one or two buses plied this route each day, the type of place where a regular might ask the driver to deliver a cardboard box of baby chicks to a friend. We climbed into the mountains, the car skating wildly across the narrow highway. Rectangular fields of green, yellow, and brown flashed by our window. Intermittent heaps of trash glistened in the sun. In the passenger seat Dad fell silent, fighting motion sickness. Michael slumped. I closed my eyes, hoping to ignore my stomach’s strong protests.