Chapter 4: China 1996

We almost missed our flight to China that summer. Apparently a gate was changed, and my mom didn’t understand the announcement. I remember the bewildered look on her face as I looked up at her from the child seat on the baggage cart and I started crying too because I thought we weren’t going on our trip after all. A kind lady who could speak mandarin told her what to do and she pushed the cart and hurried as we made our way to the correct gate. The floor tiles underneath the wheels went clack as she pushed, and I laughed because it felt funny and the white lady walking next to us smiled too. We sat in two window seats on the right of the plane and I was fascinated by the seats, the seatbelts, the foldable footrest, and the way the tray table came down from the back of the seat in front of us. The plane felt so futuristic and I thought the stewardesses were pretty.

My mom’s older brother, Jiujiu, picked us up from the Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai with several of his cousins. He called us from the balcony above baggage claim. He was a thin man who wore glasses and had kind of a mischievous sideways smirk, and wore a suede blazer with those pads sewn to the elbows, looking stereotypical as the school administrator he was. We drove for hours to Taizhou, my mom’s hometown in the Jiangsu Province, in a little white Suzuki van, one of those lightweight kinds that was taller than it was wide that looked as if it might tip over all the time. The road was dark and even without street lights for much of the trip. It was probably sometime in the middle of the night that we arrived at my maternal grandparent’s home. Waigong came out and opened the iron gate wearing an old white tshirt, boxer shorts, and a pair of slippers. Waigong used to work as a caretaker of what is now called the “old” stadium. At night the building had a strange yellow and blue glow from the sodium lamps and the air was humid and heavy.

It was a very old stadium indeed, and I later learned that it was built in 1917. By 1996 it was already well worn, somewhat dilapidated and caked with age, a once white facade yellowing and the concrete pockmarked in places. Taizhou was a world of dust and ash. The very air smelled like pollution. The San Gabriel Valley wasn’t exactly the nicest area back then but to my 5 year old self, in comparison Taizhou felt almost dystopian, like hell with the lid off. Waipo and Waigong’s neighborhood was the HaiLing district, the old historic part of town. In the daytime I thought I saw people burning garbage. Most things looked like they were burning. There was the smell of coal everywhere and in one of our walks we passed by a funeral where a family was burning incense and paper. The air was constantly filled with smoke. As an adult looking back with more context, I understood now that this was China in the post-Deng era of rapid construction and smaller places like Taizhou had not yet built most of its modern infrastructure. I also learned later that same summer, in August, Taizhou became a prefecture level city. It was the very first, and also the very last time that I would see this version of China.

On my second night there, Waipo gave me a warm bath in a plastic tub, pouring water over my head with a bucket, as they had not yet installed a modern shower. The four of us, Waipo, Waigong, my mom and me, stayed in their apartment which had a bedroom with two hard bamboo mattress beds and a single bamboo and bean filled pillow that I fought my cousin Sunjian for during naptimes. Over the course of that summer I learned for the first time that my family was not only me and my parents, but all of these new faces I would come to see over the weeks. I also learned that they loved pinching my cheeks, which I didn’t like at all. My relatives liked me but jokingly told my mom that I was a fussy kid. It also did not help that I spent my time jumping from the chair to the bed without touching the floor. In hindsight, Waipo’s apartment was probably much cleaner than our apartment back in Alhambra, but after seeing the dust and smoke and being told I had to wear slippers indoors instead of walking barefoot, my 5 year old self became paranoid and germophobic. 

I spent much of my time reciting multiplication tables out loud as I sat with Waigong outside while he attended to his pet birds, or watching tv on an old television set that still had antennas and a tight, hard to turn dial. One show that left an impression was a live action Tarzan tv show from the 60s that was dubbed in Chinese. I think I was less interested in Tarzan and more interested in the dialogue, as I didn’t understand that it had been dubbed and stared, transfixed, at the screen in disbelief and amazement, having never seen white people speak Chinese before. Waipo must have noticed my interest because a week later she took me and my mom to the nearby zoo, the three of us riding the short distance in a rickshaw pulled by a man wearing a straw hat riding a bicycle. At the zoo I felt a sadness watching a lone monkey scratching itself sitting in a tree with its back toward us. 

As a child I was fascinated to see my mom become like a child again in the presence of her parents as we watched the opening ceremony of the Olympics huddled around the old tv. The climate was humid that summer and I always sat close to an old combination electric fan and lamp, often falling asleep staring at its soft green plastic casing. While watching the swimming event while the rain poured outside one night, the thunder cracked and the power went out. We gathered around the small rosewood dining table as Waipo lit a candle and told stories instead. I saw Waipo crying when I looked out the window as we sat on a bus departing for Nanjing a few weeks later. 

Watching the green fields pass by out the window on the way to Nanjing I saw the countryside for the first time, my eyes mesmerized by the way neat rows of crops and water ditches whipped and jumped in perspective. As I gazed out into the sea of grass, I thought of farming stories my mom and my dad would often tell. As a 5 year old, I thought my parents used to be farmers, and wondered if my mom knew these random people working in the fields we were passing by. I only understood as an adult that my parents were never farmers and it was just Maoism that sent them up the mountains and down the countryside.

In Nanjing, my dad’s older brother Dabaibai picked us up with my aunt Dabaima to stay at my paternal grandmother’s old apartment on the university campus. Nanjing scared me because it felt much bigger than Taizhou. There were more open spaces, and felt much wider than even back home in Alhambra. It was also very green, I noticed as I watched my cousin Xuechen play with cousin Mimi in a field on campus against the backdrop of a bell tower covered with thick vines and ivy. I didn’t get along with cousin Xuechen at first as she felt frustrated tutoring me at math, complaining out of the corner of her mouth that I was slow. But we made up, watching the Hulu Brothers cartoon on tv together. She eventually took me with her to an indoor playpark that had a soft inflated obstacle course we climbed together and a colorful ball pit we dove into as the music from My Neighbor Totoro played overhead. She also took me to the indoor ice sculpture festival that was in town that summer. We put on very large, thick maroon colored robes as we looked at beautiful carved frozen sculptures in the shape of swans, bears, and dragons lit up with various color lights. I jumped up and down excitedly as I saw my own breath form in the frigid air. Later that night, as Dabaibai and Dabaima took us walking at Lake Xuanwu, the air hung humid and cicadas sang in the trees in tune with Jacky Cheung and Teresa Teng songs blaring over the PA. I argued with Dabaibai whether to take the taxi home or the bus home. “Taxi taxi taxi taxi!” I yelled. “Bus bus bus bus”, he argued back, adding “I can talk faster, I win!”

Pretty soon we traveled to Shanghai to stay a few days before leaving for home. To me, Shanghai seemed like a universe of rain and lights. Everything looked foggy but was also full of blurry color. My mom took me to a museum the first day, and I marveled at the dinosaurs. She bought me a little green plastic glow in the dark model of a T rex at the gift shop before taking me fabric shopping with her. For what felt like an eternity we weaved through a labyrinth of small shops for different materials to be made into clothes and blankets, before she brought me to a tailor who measured and quickly put together a pair of pajamas for me. Apparently back then it was more affordable than buying ready made clothes. Before the day’s end, we took stairs down to the subway where my mom spent quite a bit of time explaining at the counter that I just wanted to ride around for fun and they could really just write any stop on the ticket it wouldn’t matter. 

On the morning of our last day, Dabaima bought me McDonalds. Despite living in America, this morning in Shanghai would be the first time I try fast food. I played with my meal, curious about the wrapper and the sandwich it held, delighted by the orange juice in a paper cup with a straw lid. My mom rolled two giant suitcases into the airport that she pulled with her entire body. The attendant seemed very annoyed at us, berating us for not knowing where to go but carrying the bags for my mom anyway as he walked us to the counter and loaded the luggage onto the conveyor belt. We boarded our flight without much more difficulty and as the plane slowly rolled onto the tarmac I saw my mom shed tears and realized with a painful tug that my mom didn’t really like living in America.