The Year of Finding Memory (13 page)

The energy, almost a collective euphoria, during that banquet was unlike anything I had ever witnessed. My sister-in-law, a local girl, had gone overseas and made good. The village hailed her like a conquering heroine, her beneficence overflowing. Had it been like this each time my father returned to his village?

My brothers had organized a farewell luncheon for our family from China and Canada. It was held the next day. We sat at three separate tables, each spread with steaming dishes of food. At one table, Jook sat between Shing and Doon. Although ten people were around their table, the three of them might as well have been by themselves. I was sitting at the next table and watched them from the corner of my eye. I listened as Doon regaled the other two with a childhood story. One morning he had gone to the market with our father, and while they were visiting one of the stalls, the elastic in
Father’s pants broke. According to Doon, Father had to clasp the top of his pants with one hand to keep them from falling, and he made Doon walk directly in front of him all the way back to the village. Doon gesticulated wildly and demonstrated the way he was made to walk. I was impressed with my brother’s memory, his ability to embellish, his gift as a storyteller. My sister couldn’t stop laughing, and I noticed once again how much she and Doon resembled each other.

All the years of separation seemed to have vanished, although this sensation would be short-lived. My brothers and their families would be leaving after the luncheon to begin a tour of China that would include Beijing, Shanghai and Guilin. One picture after another was taken. My sister and brothers were no longer young, and it was unlikely that my brothers would ever travel this far again.

Michael and I had opted not to join my brothers’ tour. We would stay in Kaiping for another several days and explore the area. Jook and her daughter Kim would be our guides. I was eager to spend some extended time with my sister and to get to know Kim, a woman who was my age but whose life could not have been more different from mine.

EIGHT

B
ecause the Pearl River Delta region was prone to flooding, many of the watch towers served as lookouts, allowing villagers to watch upstream for a rise in the water or for flooding in surrounding fields. But perhaps more importantly, from the watch tower’s vantage point of often fifty feet or more, the villagers could detect the approach of bandits.

The Chinese word for bandit is
tak.
It is an aggressive word, one that is spat out, making a sound like a gunshot. Until the Communist takeover at the end of 1949, banditry in China was a fact of life. When I was a child and my parents talked about their homeland, they spoke frequently about the gangs of thieves that roamed the countryside, preying upon villages. They remembered stories about the savagery and ruthlessness of these outlaws. I can still see my father sitting at the dinner table, deliberately setting down his chopsticks beside his rice bowl. This was his cue, letting me know that what he was about to say was important. “You have no idea
how dangerous it was when I was a boy in Ning Kai Lee. Thieves would come to the village and kidnap people, cut off a finger and send it to the family, demanding ransom. They had no mercy. They would burn down houses, murder.” My father would then tell me how safe and blessed I was to be in Canada. But I knew, regardless of the bandits, that if he had had his way, the Communists would never have taken over and we would all be living in China.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, Chinese peasants sometimes had no alternative, especially if they were young and without family, but to join gangs of outlaws who roamed the hills and preyed on innocent villagers. In spite of my father’s stories, I imagined romantic, delinquent lives led by heroes who railed against social inequalities. After all I was familiar with the characters from the
Water Margin
, whose stories were based on the lives of a group of Robin Hood—like bandits who traipsed about ancient rural China, fighting against injustices imposed on helpless peasants by the rich and the powerful.

Fortunately, my father had not been lured by life as an outlaw, a life that would surely have led to an early death. He would have been ill-suited to such an existence anyway. My father was a law-abiding man, honest to a fault. In Acton, when he found pennies in the pockets of customers’ clothing, he would write down their names and how many cents he had found on a sheet of paper kept inside his cash box, reminding him to return their money. My mother found this honesty excessive, and it made her cross. “The
lo fons
don’t care about a few cents. Why are you wasting
your time?” she demanded as she watched him file another IOU note.

My father shook his head and shot back, “So, you think a few extra cents will make us rich?” He never listened to her, unable to live with the thought that he may have taken something that didn’t belong to him.

I was always confused by my mother’s irritation. Looking back I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t my father’s rigid attitude that got under her skin, how in spite of his poverty, he wore his honesty like a badge, unwilling to compromise when a harmless opportunity surfaced, even while she was caught in a life of toil, indigence and obscurity.

The day after my brothers’ farewell luncheon, we decided to explore Zili village, home to the most famous collection of watch towers in Kaiping County. The van we travelled in felt nearly empty. Kim, Jook and I sat in a back seat actually intended for three. My sister and niece still giggled when Michael sat down in the front, next to the driver, and buckled his seatbelt.

Some of the watch towers we saw were as high as nine storeys. My sister said that at one time they had been very common throughout the Four Counties. Many had been torn down, though, to make way for redevelopment, and a few others had collapsed from neglect. I had read that Kaiping County, nonetheless, had over eighteen hundred still standing. Kim flashed a grin of silvery teeth. “Yes, Kaiping
has the most,” she said, then looked at Michael and added, “A lot of
lo fons
like to visit them.”

The Chinese word for watch tower is
diaolou
, an intriguing word, the literal translation being “throwing tower.” Once, many years ago, Kim explained, a young woman was trapped in her village watch tower by bandits who wanted to know the whereabouts of her husband and son. Fearing that she might disclose this information under torture, she threw herself from the top floor. Kim loved this story. Her voice rose and fell dramatically, and she marvelled at the depth of the woman’s love for her family. I was reminded of Bess, the landlord’s daughter in the poem “The Highwayman” by the English poet Alfred Noyes. The authorities had bound her to a chair with ropes and taunted her by tying down a musket so the barrel aimed at her breast. Then they left her alone to await the arrival of the Highwayman. If she dared to pull the trigger to warn her beloved of the Redcoats’ presence, she would also end her own life. But pull the trigger she did. I smiled to myself at this cross-cultural preoccupation with the ultimate sacrifice made in the name of love.

The road entering Zili village passed a large duck and goose pond on one side and women in makeshift stalls, selling bowls of noodles and rice soup, on the other. When Michael showed interest in the snacks, the women beckoned us over, but Jook and Kim hurried us away. My sister wagged her finger at me and said, “Don’t buy from them. People like that always charge too much. We know where to get food.”

Inside the village there were government signs that read “Major National Cultural Heritage.” For the first time I saw
baskets for garbage and recycling. The main part of the village consisted of houses, arranged in a familiar tidy grid, with pathways in between. These houses were constructed with the same grey brick as the ones in Ning Kai Lee, but they were larger and more elaborate, with more decorative details. Unlike the broken concrete paths in Ning Kai Lee, the ones inside this village and leading to the watch towers at the edge of the compound were made of large, dark slabs of stone, most likely slate. Just the same, the village shared traits with my father’s. Here too chickens roamed outside the houses. Yet the place felt different. It smelled of money.

Most of the towers, which were built at the perimeter of the village, were closed, but we found one that was open to visitors. I noticed the windows in its lower storeys were secured with iron shutters and bars, evidence of the dangerous past and the fear that must have been in the very air the tower’s inhabitants breathed. But as I climbed higher, the evidence of danger fell away, and the windows became large and unobstructed, allowing for breathtaking views into the distance. When we reached the open balcony on the top floor, we could see the village’s other watch towers standing against the hazy blue sky. Once again, I was struck by the presence of water all around us: in rice fields, in lotus ponds, fish ponds, canals and streams. And the lushness of the terrain was astonishing. The bamboo grew more densely, the banana fronds wider and shinier than any I had seen before. From this perspective I could see how closely the villages were situated to each other, some only a few hundred yards apart. In the distance low, rounded mountains met the horizon.

The watch towers of Kaiping were constructed as early as the sixteenth century, though most were built in the 1920s and 1930s. These newer structures served as much more than lookout stations. Using reinforced concrete coated with a veneer of plaster, overseas Chinese erected extravagant residences. As I gazed around at the towers in Zili, I could see that at one time nearly a century ago there must have been great contests between men who’d returned home, keen to spend their new fortunes.

The owners brought back architectural influences from their sojourns abroad, and by incorporating them into the towers for all to see, they boasted about their travels to exotic places. From where we stood on the balcony, Michael pointed out Corinthian columns, Romanesque arches, cupolas shaped like minarets. The result was like something lifted from a Venetian fantasy. The interiors of these
buildings were spacious and luxurious in a way that would have been inconceivable to those who dwelled below in simple homes made from narrow, grey bricks. When these towers were being built, what did the villagers think of their presence in their ancient countryside? I could imagine the awe and respect on their faces and hear the strains of envy in their gossip as they watched these ostentatious displays of wealth rise from the ground. The streets in Gam Sun must truly have been paved with gold for men to return with such riches.