China of the Heart: Memories of an ATCK
I asked my mom to write a piece based on her experiences as a TCK since she'd had a pretty emotional response to my previous entry. She replied within less than 2 hours, so I think it's a hot topic for both of us. Please welcome my mom to the blogsphere!
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The Communist Party is not China and China is not the Communist Party repeated my father since 1949. Nevertheless, the CPC sat at our family’s dinner table, an uninvited guest. It’s members roamed our house, our heads and our hearts; they were in our conversation, the news and the correspondence. They controlled our lives in absentia: we depended on them to be happy or by turn, they could plunge us into mourning and bitter sadness. There were whispers in hallways accompanied by sighing drawn from a deep well of anxiety. We believed in their pervasiveness and their incredible efficiency. It was rumoured that the communist government arrived in China fully formed, down to the lowly consular officer who noiselessly padded about in his office in black cotton shoes stitched on white fabric. We, of course, could only picture and imagine him in the ubiquitous dark blue Mao suit, unsmiling, stern of mien and manner.
Meanwhile, we were in ‘voluntary exile’ [a term we were tutored to adopt] in India and East Pakistan, Hong Kong and then the United States, we children [seven in all] played at being communist.
In India, every summer, lychee and longan harvests were plentiful beyond dreams of childish avarice. Mother would buy huge baskets of these fruit, which the khansama would then distribute amongst us in equal portions. The boys, faster at peeling, shelling and eating, would suddenly swoop down on the girls, yelling ‘the communists are coming, the communists are coming’, disappropriate us of our property and carry it away in triumph and in greed, their act of subreption. Our father would take a few, just for a taste, but somehow, they never failed to elicit from him a comparison to the lychees and longans that China produced: they were brighter red, smooth and plump not spiky, engorged by sweet juice, the flesh enwrapped the smallest of seeds, chicken heart shaped: guy sam. Those we knew were the ‘bestest’ lychees in the whole wide world. Lychee, longan along with breathless heat arrived with the threat of monsoon weather—thunder, lightning, rain and eagles swirling around and around, up and down the blind currents far above us, a silent aerial choreography. We waited for rain like we waited for China. We were Chinese in waiting—waiting to return from exile to the promised land, held away from us in tempting allure, no matter how heart ready we could be. Mentally, we were always packed, suitcases in the hallway, for that quick getaway, to a home we’d never seen. [‘ki sze chon tongsan’?=Next year, Jerusalem! For the Chinese.]
Tighter than a sardine can, nothing entered China of the 1950s but the postal service was intact and uncensored. Letters arrived in succession from our relations. At the fall of China to the communists, an uncle rushed back to save and secure family lands and property, endured persecution until he committed suicide. Psssst! He knelt on broken glass arranged by his own son. A persecution prosecuted in blood. He was my father’s only surviving brother as others had earlier succumbed to typhoid and cholera during the Sino-Japanese war—intimations of germ warfare. Our home was immediately plunged into silence and untouchable darkness, for my father spoke to no one for at least six months, or so it seemed to my childish consciousness. He wore his silence and his black armband every day. Not only did his last brother die but for him China too died—China was stood on her head: the irredeemable, mortal not venial, sin of parricide, antithetical to filial piety, the bedrock of Chinese familial solidarity. The CPC not only buried my uncle but also decided our mood in the household, dictated its happiness or lack of it. [Ecoute moi, ils ont tué son père, il est mort.]
Dinner was a formal affair at our house: all nine of us sat together at a round table, a typically Chinese piece of furniture. Ritually, number 1 brother held the seat at my father’s right and number 2 brother the left. The girls, five in toto, arranged themselves the best they could. It was also rite that, with our daily rice, each of us brought news of the day, a kind of show and tell, to the family evening meal: what we had learnt at school, the friends we made, the projects we undertook, the books we read, and the thoughts that had provoked remembrance. There was a tacit agreement that mention of the communist regime was verboten but number 2 brother developed a sudden unexplained patriotism for his motherland, to return to China to help its development. The uproar following this announcement frightened our heart into our mouth. Did my father bang the table? Did the soup bowl jump and spill? Time, silent and unseeing, rigidified then shattered into a thousand pieces. ‘How dare you even mention them in my presence? How dare you even think of going back there? Have you gone mad? Have you lost your mind? My own son, my own son. He wants to kill me. China a rotten door. Is that what you think?’ The next day, when my father regained his composure enough to speak, he reverted to his unruffled, methodical and rational self by issuing a challenge: Number 2 was to come up with all the reasons pro China and my father would refute them. If he failed to answer even a single one, he could pack his bags. Family history attests my father’s indubitable and unquestionable victory.
In the toil and roil of that era, it was not surprising that father turned to the numinal and supernatural. His biography tells us that he grappled and tussled with every religion available in the sub-continent of India and they were legion. He submerged himself in the literature of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity; he visited the churches of every Christian denomination including the Roman Catholic. In the end, he surfaced for conversion, allowing a Christian without a church or denomination to baptise him in the Gulf of Arabia, outside Karachi. In my head lives a photo of my father, fully dressed, dripping wet, smilingly triumphant, his feet still in the sea, taken just after his baptism by total immersion. In the tradition of converts, this neophyte, of course, became more Christian than most by-birth Christians. Mother allowed father to convert her to Christianity. I still remember her baptism vividly. Dr Walter Davis, a Baptist, performed it on Easter Monday 1951 in the pond in front of our house. Ever fearful of water, she would not let him drown her in water. Afterward, father felt she hadn’t been properly baptised and coaxed her into the full bathtub where he tried yet again to dunk her, like a donut, into the water. There was a struggle, thrashing about and loud cries in protest. To this day, I don’t know whether mother was properly baptised but she lived the Christian life to the full, with compassion, charity and forgiveness.
Woe unto me on the day when I brought to the table the short story written by DH Lawrence who, in The man who died, suggested that Jesus had, long before the De Vinci Code, as far back as 1929, before the discovery of the Gnostic gospels, lived beyond the cross to marry and father children in Egypt with an Isis temple priestess. Such was my father’s rage that he lifted his chopsticks to strike me, except my mother blocked him, whilst he thundered, ‘How dare you bring such heresy into this house?’ Later, much later, my mother in clandestine conspiracy sussurates that in his time at Fudan University in Shanghai, my father had written anti-Christian tracts and considered joining the communist party. Thus, the convert and so the rebel on acceptance and taking ‘government’ adopted the purest orthodoxy, forbidding any alternative explanation or possibility. Such is fate, that had my father joined the CPC, would the family now be alive? It was often said how good looking my father was and how extremely intelligent he could be. Nay, they prophesized that had he joined the CPC he would have risen to be China’s minister of foreign affairs, a veritable Chou En Lai. But alas, it was not to be, instead we still live in voluntary exile, a decision of so long ago that we forget how it all began.
My father imbued us with a sense of wonder about China: her history, landscape and culture. Whenever we went on a picnic or an outing, he would sigh with sadness at the beauty surrounding us, comparing it unfavourably with China—a fabled land denied us by our exilic status, political leaning and family background. We saw China filtered through father’s eyes and the paintings on the walls: scraggy pines, lonely peaks in shrouds of mist, wispy waterfalls, and cranes, miniaturised figures in ‘funny’ togas cut-down-to-size humans, in face of vast and indomitable nature. It was he who pointed out to the assembled children that European Impressionism was an offshoot of Chinese painting, which relied on suggestive and representational brush strokes and not painstaking or detailed realism. I entered those paintings and scrolls and lived in them, learnt to take mincing steps, smile whilst hiding my lips behind ornate fans, play the pi-pa, and marry the local landowning bully to be his wife number 1 whom he showered with presents of jewellery before he took his concubines. But, I, as wife number 1, coped by ruling the household and husband-bully with an iron fist: each concubine would kowtow and then serve me tea whilst kneeling, when I condescendingly gave her a present of gold and a new name. In that way and by those means, I also possessed the poor creature. On return from reveries, I realised I was nothing if not a fantasy Chinese.
For a Chinese to lay claim to education, he must be artist, philosopher, poet, calligrapher, historian, musician, litterateur and….gourmet. Some western wag opined that China had only one unifying religion: food. It is true that Chinese live to eat and not eat to live. My Swedish sister-in-law exclaimed that my brother thought food solved all problems. She said, ‘he eats when he is hungry or full, when he is happy or sad, in richness and in health, when at ease or in trouble. Food is his universal panacea.’ Not just food but Chinese food was of great importance. Members o f the clergy, the diplomatic corps, the judiciary, and, of course, his academic colleagues sought my father’s invitations to dinner. So famous was my mother’s cooking that I remember a bishop asking, ‘Mr Liu, when is it my turn to have dinner with you again?’ Mother slaughtered chickens by the dozen, enough to deep fry the livers as its own stand-alone dish. In a tempura batter, these golden morsels when dipped in [believe it or not], Worcestershire sauce with its sweet-sour piquancy, sent us to epicurean Elysium. None of this was accomplished without a large KP: kitchen party. There was a head cook and a khansama, a kitchen devil whose duty was to wash, peel and chop all the ingredients in readiness for the wok or pan, a human dishwasher and a fire stoker.
Eating was not a casual affair. We soon learnt the best parts of animal, vegetable and comestible. For premium results, fish were to be old and large but pigs were to be suckling and small. Chicken breast best avoided if the chef knew not how to handle its cooking: too soon overcooked, tasteless, and without good texture, unless done as the French say, cuite à point, requiring the chef to snatch it off the fire sooner than later. Fish not only tested the palate it also betrayed a person’s class. It is rumoured that pirates set their ransom according to their kidnapee’s choice of fish part. Bad luck if he decides to take the eyes, the belly or the cheek but if he served himself from the thick of the back, there was not much for his family to pay to retrieve him. To stop having to feed him for so little return, they might, in irony, serve him to the fish, by tipping him overboard. As I said, eating is no casual affair because even life depended on it. Knowing how to eat included a display of ‘cognisance’ which forbade anyone to praise a preparation unworthy of it, for fear others might sneer at a display of ignorance.
Despite living in an expatriate community of Chinese people surrounded by a sea of Indians, we maintained our Chineseness without apology. On first meeting the greeting was as all westerners know by now was ‘have you eaten rice yet’ which was almost seamlessly followed by ‘ki sze chon tongsan’? When are you returning to the hills of Tang? We are Hakka, as most overseas Chinese are Hakka or other littoral Chinese provincials. We claimed the Tang dynasty for its glory days when China was at the apogee of her culture and civilisation. It was a sub-Han peculiarity. For lack of family, everyone with the same surname became relations. All older people were aunts and uncles and younger people were cousins. We banded together as kith and kin, behaved like them as well. When number 1 brother received a scholarship to study in the US, he lacked the airfare. Then my father called together the Chinese elders, all of them men, explained the situation and received contributions, or subscriptions the name by which they were known, for number 1 brother’s tickets. There was no mention of repayment and no one asked for his money back.
Come Chinese New Year, it was obligatory for the Chinese community to slaughter its quota of pigs in celebration as the Chinese consider pork their ‘meat’ and unthinkable to go without during these festivities. For fear of the Muslims, we sent all the servants on holiday, away from our custom and practice, then with doors, windows shut tight, and like clandestine refugees, we consumed the pig’s meat with the delight of the forbidden. It was our fruit of discernment: each mouthful said ‘Chinese, Chinese, Chinese’ and we were glad. The Indians and Pakistanis, bless them, possessed the same prejudices that the world is in the habit of nurturing. We not only reminded ourselves we were Chinese, others helped us in this task. Children trailed us chanting, ‘Cheena, cheena, cho cho, bakadari nocho.’ Those who could boast English followed us with a chorus:
Ching-chong Chinaman
Sitting on a fence,
Selling for a dollar,
Buying ninety cents.
I think that was my first lesson in ethnicity, politics and economics: be Chinese, maintain neutrality and amass wealth: buy low, sell high and don’t be too greedy—a ten percent margin is good enough. You see the Chinese worked out a long time ago that there are far more poor people in the world than there are rich, besides the rich were usually too mean to part with their money as they were proven to be bad and late payers.
China left this yearning in our hearts with dreams of home from far off. China, China of the heart because:They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well..
Long, long shall I rue thee
Too deeply to tell.