Fragrant Harbour (27 page)

‘A good rabbit has three burrows,’ my father-in-law said. It is one of his favourite sayings. It was 1996, a year before handover. We were visiting a house in the Sydney suburb of Mosman.

‘It is a good neighbourhood,’ my wife said. ‘Five minutes’ walk from the ferry. A view of water. Good feng shui. Plenty of Chinese people in the area so good food shops and restaurants. Good schools. Safe. A subtropical climate not dissimilar to Hong Kong but with more blue-sky days. Also the Australian dollar is very weak and this is an excellent time to make a
purchase
.’

‘Once the property has been bought, however, a significant proportion of our assets will be denominated in this weak
currency
,’ said my mother-in-law. ‘The Hong Kong dollar is tied to the US dollar. It is strong. The Australian dollar is not. It is weak. Their economy is based on commodities. Our capital investment may decline in value,’ she concluded. Before their retirement my wife’s parents were both mathematics teachers.

‘But this is a very attractive city,’ I said. ‘Hong Kong’s future is uncertain; Sydney’s is not. Property here will not decline in value. It is a big house and there is plenty of room for all of us. Think how little we could buy for five million dollars in Hong Kong. Here we will have much more space. Father-in-law will have a garden. He can do his t’ai chi. Mother-in-law will have good opportunities for social activity. Mei-Lin will have excellent schooling. Living costs are lower than in Hong Kong. If we decide after a time that we do not like it, and there has been no
significant
change in Hong Kong – very well. We go back.’

My wife and I had agreed that we would not go back, but that we would present the option to her parents.

‘The air is good here,’ said my father-in-law, sniffing. We both knew that he would be easier to convince.

‘You do not have to surrender the lease in Sha Tin,’ my wife reminded her parents.

‘None of the arguments about leaving Hong Kong has changed,’ I said.

‘Mei-Lin already says she likes it here,’ added my wife. This was true. My daughter already had a small zoo of toy koalas and kangaroos.

‘What is the alternative, other than to stay put in Hong Kong?’ I asked.

‘Your grandfather is staying put,’ my mother-in-law said. When she counter-attacked like that I smiled inside because it meant she was going to agree.

‘It is different for him,’ I said.

My mother-in-law walked over to the porch of the house. Down in the bay, two Australians were studying the mast of a yacht while a third, balancing a long way up, adjusted some ropes. There were no clouds. We could hear children two houses away play a skipping game. My mother, who had come to see the house the first time my wife and I looked at it, had not spoken until now.

She said, ‘It is a long way from China.’

‘A million Australian dollars is a good price,’ my wife said.

‘We’ll be safe here,’ I said.

My father-in-law looked around him and nodded.

‘A good rabbit has three burrows,’ he said.

I was born and grew up until the age of eight in Shen Lo, a village in coastal Fujian. Shen Lo had been my family’s home village. My grandmother had left Fujian as a girl to be educated by
missionaries
. She had gone to live in Hong Kong, where she met my grandfather and fell in love. When the war came, he stayed behind to fight the Japanese and she left for safety in China at his insistence. He gave her a gold necklace to sell if she needed money to keep her safe during the war. Although they did not know it at the time, she was carrying his child. Her son, my father, was born in September 1942. My grandmother died
shortly
after childbirth, although not before knowing that her son was healthy. My father inherited the necklace. There was also a letter my grandmother wrote to give to my grandfather if her son ever met him.

After my grandmother’s death, my father was sent to Shen Lo, where a married couple called Ho brought him up as their own. My father’s adoptive father had been a schoolteacher but times were so hard that he had to work as a fisherman to keep the
family
. Then, after the Communists won the war, things gradually began to improve and he went back to teaching. My father was a clever but sickly child, very gifted at his studies. In time, he went to university in Beijing and studied mathematics. There he met my mother, a local girl whose parents were Party cadres and who was at the university also, studying medicine. They fell in love and were married despite the opposition of her parents. Because of their attitude, my parents left Beijing after my father had
finished
his degree but before my mother had completed her
qualifications
. Although he could have found a job teaching at university level, at this moment in China there was a great emphasis on the value of peasant life, so my parents chose to go to Shen Lo and work as a village schoolteacher and a nurse. The coastal climate was less severe than that of Beijing and it suited my father. My parents were happy in Shen Lo.

I was born in the village in 1966. My first memories are of the communal garden at the back of our house where my father was growing broccoli. Everywhere in the village you could smell the sea. My father was a tall, thin man with glasses who told old Chinese stories and made shadows with his hands and the light from a lantern. People would sometimes give my parents gifts of fish or pig meat in thanks for services they had performed. But when the Cultural Revolution came, my father was
anonymously
denounced to the Red Guards. He was forced to abase himself in front of his pupils and was then sent to a re-education camp in Hunan. The climate there did not suit his lungs and the physical labour was extremely hard. He was bullied and picked on because his physical appearance was not entirely Chinese. He had been away for six months when my mother heard the news that he had died. This was in 1969 when I was three years old. My mother inherited the necklace and the letter.

My mother had to work so I spent many days with my
great-aunt
. There was no schooling. The Red Guards had destroyed the education system. My great-aunt taught me to read and write, and one or two of the other village children came to the house also. But she would not teach more than a small number and only the children of people she knew very well, because of the risk of being denounced. The Red Guards often had meetings with all the children of the village. There was much chanting and
shouting
and everyone was encouraged to attack counter-revolutionary elements. When they shouted, their faces seemed to shrink and their eyes to grow bigger. One, called Chen, used to pick on me and stand in front of me as he chanted slogans. He said my father had tried to destroy the revolution and that meant I would try to destroy the revolution also, and that I must make a gesture to show my loyalty. All of the Guards said that the revolution must be permanent, that it must go on without ceasing. People believed them and cooperated at first but gradually lost their faith and stopped joining in. Or they joined in with their bodies but not their hearts. The Red Guards could tell this and it made them more frenzied.

‘What do you want to do when you are a big man?’ my mother asked one day when she came back from visiting patients. She was washing vegetables as we talked. I did not know it, but
several people had died in the previous days, of diphtheria. I was eight years old. I could see she was very tired.

‘A tractor driver or fisherman.’

‘Don’t you want to be a doctor or an engineer?’

‘They are sent to the farms. It is better to be on your own farm.’

She turned away to the sink.

Two or three days later my mother told me to put into her bag one object I wanted to take with me because we were going on a journey to visit relatives in Guangzhou. I said I did not know we had relatives in Guangzhou and she said, there are many things you do not know. I took a laisee packet my father had given me for Chinese New Year. It held in it a red star badge that I had won from a friend in a race. My mother spent all that night packing.

Very early the next morning, before it was light, she shook me awake, dressed me in new clothes that I had not seen before, gave me a bowl of soup, and told me that we must go and that it would be a long day. We walked a great distance out beyond the village, further than I had ever been through the fields, where the first people were starting their day’s work in the paddies, until we reached beside a road and stopped to wait. Just as the day was breaking, a bus came. It was noisy and it rattled so much I thought I could feel my teeth loosening. I was excited but my mother was quiet. She gave some money to the driver and we sat beside an old woman with many gold teeth carrying a chicken on her lap. I sat on my mother’s lap also and the woman asked my mother if she wanted to swap her little chicken for the woman’s little chicken. My mother smiled at her but I was frightened.

We rode on the bus for a long time. Some of the time we
travelled
through fields, and then we were back along the coast. More and more people got on board. It grew hot and I was hungry. My mother gave me some rice wrapped in a leaf. The old woman looked at me and I could tell she wanted me to offer her some rice but I did not. The journey seemed to go on and on. We came to a town bigger than anywhere I had ever been before. In the course of an hour I saw more people than I had in the whole of my life until that day. We walked some distance and then we were in a railway station. There was great noise and confusion, with people running and shouting. I was frightened again, but my mother seemed to know what to do, and that calmed me.

We waited in the big main hall under the roof of the tallest building I had ever seen, and then we got on a train. It was even more crowded than the bus. I sat on my mother’s lap again. But people were more friendly than they had been on the bus,
especially
when the train began to move. When people asked my mother where we were going, she would squeeze my arm and say in a calm voice that we were visiting relatives. She would ask them questions about their own families and they would talk. At one stop, some policemen got on the train and the train did not move. The policemen had Red Guards with them. The Red Guards did not speak. The policemen asked people for their papers and then asked them questions. They did not stop in front of everybody but they stopped in front of my mother.

‘Give me your papers,’ said one of the policemen. He looked at my mother’s documents. Then he bent his head down to me. He was a tall man, a Northerner, and his breath smelled of rice wine.

‘Where are you going, little Emperor?’

‘We have relatives in Guangzhou,’ I said.

‘What do they do?’

‘Nobody told me that.’

He and the other policemen smiled. He straightened up and gave the papers back to my mother, his eyes already looking for the next person to question. My mother squeezed both my arms. I could feel her heart beating. No one spoke until the policemen and the Red Guards left the carriage. Then the train began to make more noise and finally it gave a big jolt and started moving out of the station. My mother gave a long slow breath. People began to talk with each other and to share food. It was becoming dark. I tried to move along the train but it was too crowded. People scowled at me and told me off as I tried to squeeze past. A boy my own age told me that if we were at his village he would fight me. His mother only laughed.

We travelled all that night and some of the next day and by the time we arrived in Guangzhou we had eaten all our food. My mother had never been to Guangzhou before and even I could tell she was not confident. We tried to find a map of the city but there was no map in the station. Eventually we approached a woman who had put her heavy bags down for a rest. My
mother
showed her an address on a scrap of paper. She spoke to my
mother in a dialect that I did not recognise while pointing and talking. We set off on foot. All I remember of the walk was how much I wanted to be able to fly. I imagined taking off into the air and shooting to anywhere we wanted to go, carrying my mother with me. At last we came to a set of buildings which looked like some of the new developments in our village, only a hundred times bigger. They were all very ugly. My mother took out the address and made me sit on a bench where she could see me while she looked around the buildings. A man spat and just missed us. The building was the furthest one away. She
beckoned
me over and we went up the stairs. The cooking smells made me very hungry. I had never climbed so many stairs. Then my mother knocked on the door. She seemed shy. A woman opened the door and looked at my mother. She looked as if she was about to laugh but sad as well.

‘It’s you, Ah Chan,’ she said.

‘It’s me,’ said my mother. ‘This is Ah Man,’ she said, holding up my hand. The woman crouched down.

‘I’m your new Aunt Wen,’ she said. ‘Your mother and I used to be closer than sisters.’ Then she looked at my mother. ‘Come in,’ she said.

Aunt Wen lived in a room with her husband and her baby who was nine months old. Sometimes her mother stayed with them but at the moment she was not there and her husband was out also. I sat and drank sugared water while the two women talked in quiet voices beside the sink. The baby was fat and smiled at me. The women’s eyes shone. My mother looked younger. When there were footsteps outside Aunt Wen got up and went to the door and slipped through it. Then a few minutes later she came back in with a man who was her husband. He was wearing a cap with a red star on the front. It was the last thing I remember before I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was morning and he had already gone back to work. The baby was sitting on the floor and Aunt Wen was cooking rice.

‘We didn’t think you’d ever wake,’ she said. ‘Your mother went out to see someone, she’ll be back soon.’

‘Are you from Beijing?’ I asked. I knew that my mother was from Beijing. She smiled.

‘No, I’m from here, but I went to university in Beijing. I met your mother and father there.’

‘My father is dead now.’

‘He was a good man. If you are like him when you grow up, you will be a good man too.’

‘Yes, I know.’

I tried to teach the baby some fishing songs from Fujian but he was too small so I just sang to him. My mother came back in the afternoon. She looked at me and said:

‘I hope you haven’t eaten all of your poor Aunt’s rice.’

‘He needed it,’ said Aunt Wen. I had had six bowls of rice and some vegetables. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

My mother said, ‘I think so.’

We stayed in Guangzhou for two more days. I did not go out very much because we did not want to make the neighbours
curious
. On the third night we said goodbye to Aunt Wen and her baby. I could tell that her husband was pleased to see us leave. We went downstairs and met a man I had not seen before. He had only three or four teeth, all black. I did not like him. He led us on a walk of about an hour to a garage where there were lorries parked. There was a padlock on the gate but it had not been clicked shut and the man opened it with a piece of metal. We went in. He lifted up a flap of tarpaulin at the back of a lorry and gestured for me to climb in. I did not want to but my mother said it was all right so I went up. It was very dark under the tarpaulin but I could tell there was some sort of machinery in boxes. Then my mother climbed up and then the man. My mother asked him how long it would be and he said, we go when we go. It was the most he had spoken and to my surprise he had a Fujianese accent. I thought it would be a long wait but in a short time we heard someone walk along past the side of the lorry and hawk and spit and then get into the cab. The engine turned on and the lorry shook loudly and we moved off.

At first it was noisy and cramped but also more comfortable than the train. That was when we were near Guangzhou and the roads were better. As we drove further the roads became more bumpy and difficult and the boxes began to move about. My mother braced a leg against the boards at the end of the vehicle and pressed her back to the nearest boxes, holding them in place
so they did not slip on top of us. She and Aunt Wen had made some food for the journey and after a time she took out some rice parcels and a leg of chicken and gave them to me. The man drank spirit from a bottle he carried on a pouch over his shoulder.

The journey went on for several hours. My mother smiled at me and I saw her teeth in the dark. Then the lorry stopped. I heard the door open and the driver get out and walk away. The man with us moved to the flap at the back and crouched beside the tarpaulin. After a minute he pulled up the cloth and looked out. He got down and gestured for us to follow. When I tried to move I could not. My legs had gone dead. The man swore and got back into the lorry and lifted me onto my feet until the blood was moving again. It hurt. Then we got out. We were in the middle of paddy fields with a little shack like a bus shelter about fifty metres away. That must have been where the driver went. The man bent over and set off on a raised track across the fields, half running. I went behind him and my mother after me. The fields were on slightly different levels with earth walls between them and once we had got two fields away we were no longer in sight of the lorry. The man slowed down and caught his breath. He was gasping. Then we set off across more fields. There was a quarter moon so it was not pitch-black except when clouds
covered
it. Once or twice we had to stop because of the darkness. We went along like this for some time. Then the man stopped so
suddenly
that I bumped into him.