The Family In Hong Kong

I can still see my sister running toward me from the far end of an empty street. She was so excited, and I had never seen her as happy. “Look, look...” she was shouting even before reaching me, “we have been approved, we have been approved...” She was flashing something in my face. Then she unfolded the little piece of paper on which I saw a small photo of us, with an embossed seal on top, red and blue ink stamps, and printed and written characters thoroughly filling the page. “This is our passport to Hong Kong,” my sister said as she caught her breath. “We are going to Hong Kong! It has taken a couple of years for us to get approved for the passport, you know. We even had to declare you older in the application to get approved.” So that was it. We were going to Hong Kong. But I didn't quite understand her excitement over the passport. Although I had heard of the starvation that had driven an endless mass exodus to the city of plenty, many people were arrested, imprisoned, or drowned in the Shenzhen River by the border. “Are we going to drown in the river?” I asked. Then my sister broke out in laughter. “No, we are going to take the train!”

We left China in the early 1960’s. Those impetuous Socialist songs that filled the air in the train station stuck like bubbles somewhere inside my brain ever since. Once in a while, they burst out onto my lips like a cold sore, and I would start to sing the praise for Chairman Mao and Socialism; along with the sound of hissing steam and steel wheels rolling on the train track, these were the theme songs and overtures of my voyage to the world unknown. I remember that there was so much excitement in the train station, in and outside of the train compartment. Everyone was smiling and greeting one another with good wishes and enthusiasm. In my eyes I can still see how as the train rambled onward, the scenery of famine-stricken Guangzhou gradually changed into the land of plenty: Hong Kong, a city where all mainland Chinese dreamed of going. As the train crossed the Shenzhen River, at each station outside of the window I saw more and more vendors laying out their produce by the train track, with mountains of apples, oranges, and other goods bathing in the golden, shining sunbeams. Many vendors came up to the train windows, eagerly offering their goods to the passengers. The sight was perhaps the most amazing thing I had seen after years of deprivation on the mainland. Somehow, I was a foreigner to this new world; this land of plenty was beyond the reality of a boy from China. Although I was excited, I didn’t believe that they were really for me, and I was somewhat at odds for not quite knowing what to make of all these commotions.

My experience in Hong Kong was altogether different from its promises. Despite all of the poverty in famine-struck Communist China, it was a far more protective environment for a child than the one with the family I soon joined. After I reunited with the people I knew briefly as my family in China, my new life might have appeared nice at first, especially when compared to the hundred years old crumble and damp small quarters I lived in before; the apartment in Hong Kong had electricity, running water, and a flushing toilet. Since we were living above the street market where produce and goods were sold, I was convinced that there was no shortage of clothes or food. The small preschool and new friends I made helped me feel at home at once. Quickly I learned to enjoy the regularity of the daily routine, and I was diligent with my schoolwork. Eventually, I graduated with honors, and the principal gave me the first toy I ever received: a metal airplane that I slept with and carried around wherever I went.

It seemed that the good life lasted no longer than half of a night of sweet dreams. Then the nightmare started, and the monsters and hungry ghosts began to manifest into reality. As I remember, the horror started when the domestic quarreling between my parents became increasingly frequent. At first, there was an air of antagonistic hatred whenever I saw them together, and it didn't take long before the arguments escalated into full-blown violent confrontations. There were many nights during which I awoke to their screams and shouts, big banging noises of things thrown across the room, bodies thrown against the walls, and fists exchanged as they wrestled on the floor like two lunatics. In witnessing their brawls, I always got so frightened that I hid motionlessly under my blanket.

Then somehow, after a year or so, their violent ordeals went under the current. The taller and stronger husband in the duo was finally subdued. I suppose that was the beginning of when her monstrous hostility turned against me. She reserved all her humanity for her precious daughter, and not once did I ever see her shout at or hit my sister. As for me, this so-called mother was a frightful woman. She was thick and short, often with colorful plastic hair curls dangling around her face. She appeared to be nice to everyone, speaking in a loud voice with an air of assertion, but that was really a cover for her mean spirit, which only became obvious at home and whenever she spoke to me or to her husband. In fact, the woman was most gifted in foul and degrading vocabulary. She seemed to have an invisible library of curses and demeaning language in her head, which I often heard shooting out like poison from her cobra tongue. I endured much of her verbal abuse, along with ferocious beatings. Many times, she returned home and just exploded and started hitting me with a broom or bamboo canes until they shattered or until she finally got exhausted and released her anger with total satisfaction. Then I would be left there in tears, blood, and torn flesh until I managed to crawl off into a hideaway to lick my wounds. In addition to this physical abuse, she routinely refused to let me join the dinner table or let me eat anything at all.

All that time, the man I called Dad would seriously study his newspaper; no matter the violence and screaming in front of his face, he always remained deaf, blind, and indifferent to any abuse. In time, I grew incredibly fearful of her. My daily chores became a constant search for brooms, feather dusters, or any other objects with which she might hit me. I did my best to keep them out of sight. To avoid being noticed in our small apartment, I would only engage in silent activities, often engrossing myself in books. To escape my reality, I would read from day into night or draw and copy warrior heroes from picture books like Romance of Three Kingdoms and Warring States of Spring and Autumn. Nonetheless, my drawings did not go unnoticed. When they were found, she would rip them to pieces and yell at me for not spending more time doing schoolwork, or accuse me of not fulfilling the household chores. Again and again, she assured me that I was a worth-nothing sick kid and a drain of her resources; despite that I was healthy as a bull and hardly ever got ill. Then one day, she decided that I had no need of school, and she found me an apprentice position in an electronics store. The boss was a decent person, and I actually enjoyed living and eating with his family more than my own. After a year of apprenticeship, I learned to appreciate music in HiFi stereo, fix TVs and radios, and build antennas from raw materials. By then my sister was married and living in the United States. Because of my sister’s insistence on paying for my school tuition and related expenses, my mother was thrilled with the monthly checks in American dollars, and she returned me to school a few months later.

I cannot recall much about my father, other than that he was a passive figure of limited influence in my early life. He was dull and gloomy and a most unhappy man of few spoken words. In addition to a life-long series of failed business ventures that crippled his self-esteem, he was caught in a marriage with a woman who despised him with a vengeance. He seldom socialized and was equally distant as a father to both my sister and me. In fact, I can't remember if he ever had a friend in all those years. Since he never laid a hand on me, I believed he was a decent man. However, one time he threatened to cut my shoulder-length hair in my sleep, but he never actually did so. I had no resentment for him other than a sense of pity for his silent desperation, and I always maintained a respectful distance from the man and his newspaper, as he intended for our relationship.

Regrettably, I never forgot the event that consequently eroded much of my remaining respect for my father. This happened at a time when he owned a small store away from home. One day, he found an emaciated dog with severe skin disease, wagging its tail and begging for food in front of his shop. The dog was friendly, and my father took him in. He patiently spent months carefully applying ointments and herbal medicines on the creature daily. Gradually, the dog was cured from the skin disease, and fully recovered with a shiny coat of golden fur. My father was proud of his efforts, and treated the dog kindly. So, for a couple of years, the dog guarded the store at night, and during the day I loved to play with him because he was docile and eager to please. Like many of my father’s businesses, the store eventually failed. A week after its closure, I returned home from school and found that my father was sitting in a dark room by himself, quietly enjoying a meal. He gestured for me to come into the room, and insisted that I must share the delicacy with him. And so he handed me a piece of meat with his chopsticks and intently watched me swallow the meat. “What is it?” I asked. “It was our dog,” he answered in his usual phlegmatic tone. Since he never made a joke, what he said was like a strike to my ear. At once, I felt sick from my throat to my stomach. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. Both my body and soul refused to accept that I ate the flesh of my dog. As if I had been poisoned, I stomped out of the dark room without a word. Saddened by my father's cruelty, I lost most of my trust and respect for him thereafter.

He was a man who ate his only friend (under the pressure from his wife, I am sure, for she was never fond of dogs). Besides, it was the evil queen's duty to punish him for losing the business, and it was her mission to devour his soul with endless hostility and a series of blatant extramarital affairs. Clearly, she had her justifications for all these furors. After all, they grew up in wartime, and she may have lost a few screws from witnessing the brutality of the Cheng Kai-shek Army, including an uncountable number of monstrous atrocities committed by the Japanese. I heard many stories from my grandmother of how the Japanese raped women of any age, cut up babies in midair with their katanas, and rounded up hundreds of men by the Pearl River, then shot them into the sea to bypass the inconvenience of burying the bodies. My mother never said a thing about the wars. Nonetheless, in an argument she had with her mother in front of the seemingly clueless child, I heard that she bitterly lamented how in spite of the man she intended to marry, she had relinquished to her mother’s pressure and married my father instead, for he was the son of a rich rice merchant. However, within a few years, the communist government confiscated his wealth. On and on she complained about how her life was wasted with a man who had failed in everything he put his hand on, how she lost her stillborn child, and everything else that went wrong.

Running Man, Self Portrait, oil on Canvas, 18x40 in

1-- I Remember China >>

2-- The Family In Hong Kong >>

3-- The Street of Hong Kong >>

4-- Monsters Among Us >>

5-- The Wind of Change >>