I’m in the backseat, riding through the winding countryside of northern Hubei, pressing my forehead up against the cold, tinted window. The sun glimmers in its mid-summer perch. Browned peaches from crooked trees nearby squelch beneath our tires. Beyond the gravelly half-paved road, out in the rolling fields, bamboo culms crowd around sesame sprouts. Grapevines creep over melon patches. This doesn’t look like farmland.
There are no clean lines or straight paths, no phalanxes of uniform crops or tracks of heavy machinery; the land here is vast and lush but pre-industrial, remote in distance and decades. And unlike the last few weeks of our jaunt through the Middle Kingdom, there are no tourists in these parts. There are no storefronts, no traffic signs. The only visitors here are family.
For years, my mother would tell my sister and me about how she lived out in the country; how she would wake up before dawn and walk three hours to school; how she used to read and do her homework by candlelight. The peasant girl she paints is a far cry from the woman I know now—a pathologist and bible study leader who lounges in a leather recliner by the fireplace, scrolling on her iPad. Now though, she is in my uncle’s scraggly van ahead of us, sputtering through hills that she hasn’t stalked in a long time.
My wife, car sick from the sinuous drive, and my sister, with earbuds in, sit quietly beside me in the back of a wide Hyundai sedan that is only sold in Asia. My two cousins in the front seats speak a Mandarin colored by the local Suizhou dialect and, since I haven’t spoken Chinese regularly since middle school, my ear for it slips by the day. Listening in on my cousin’s conversation is like catching sand in a sieve; my retention, like an hourglass, a minute glass, a second glass. So, I look out the window.
Our caravan pulls up a small hill, under the shade of ash trees which flutter in a light wind, toward a squat single-story home. Its bricks are sun-lashed and rust-colored and the roof is a collage of weathered, gray adobe tiles. Out front, skinny yellow chickens kick up yellow dust and peck at yellow earth.
A jabbering circus streams out of my uncle’s rickety van: my mom, then an uncle, then two aunts, then a cousin and her five-year old daughter (who now has vomit on her shirt), then another uncle. The Hyundai slows to a park and we get out too.
My great aunt, guga, whom I’ve never met and who’s just getting home from the fields, ambles up the hill to greet us. A long bamboo yoke arches over the back of a lithe yet sturdy five-foot frame. Baskets of fresh peaches slouch on each end. By the time guga sets her haul down, the family—especially the ones who only live three hours away from here—has swarmed her and begun talking her ear off.
My mother, the oldest of her five siblings and the only one to live outside the province (let alone leave the country entirely), is no less excited to tell her the latest from across the (other) pond. She breaks out the suitcases of gifts—vitamins, candy, shampoo—that we’ve brought from Costco, the one in Nashua on my mother’s way home from the hospital.
The three of us foreigners eventually get over our timidity and join the ruckus. Though my sister and I are easily dismissed as waiguoren because of our distinctly non-Asian fashion choices and general Western manner of holding our bodies, we still bear familiar features—black hair, dark brown eyes, round faces.
My wife, on the other hand, tall, blond, and blue-green eyed, spent the last week brushing off strangers who gawked openly at her. I, lacking the vocabulary and awareness of local protocol, glared at one kid who kept taking pictures of her with his phone, like he’d never seen a white person before. She was gracious and unfazed but I think these people are tactless, shameless, uncouth. The last time I was here, the Chinese wouldn’t even stand in lines to board the bus, preferring to shove all the way to their seat like hockey players playing musical chairs.
So, when we join the group, my chest swells. I worry that my great aunt and the people out here might stoop to that level, to say or do something crass. My wife wouldn’t understand it though. Neither would I for that matter. But I might be able to divine it, picking from the sparse words I understand or in inferring her tone or roughly interpreting her gestures. When my mom introduces the three of us, my great aunt beams and lavishes us with the freshly-picked peaches in her basket. It’s fine. I greet her with my rudimentary Chinese. She is lovely.
We don’t stay long. After our elders chit-chat for a while, we say our goodbyes to my great aunt and thank her for her hospitality and head out.
While we drive, I pray that my bladder and colon can make it a few more hours. I’ve seen the outhouses in this part of the world before. They make me miss the dingy squat toilets in seedy restaurants where I have to bring my own toilet paper.
Eventually, we arrive next to a languishing brick hut with a tin roof, beside which lays a path barely wide enough for a pulled cart. There is an old man with an old dog, watching from the other side of the road as we get out.
It’s hot and there is no cover. The smog curtain lifts this far from the city. The soil beneath our feet is scorched, stiff, and cracked. On each side of our path, the leafy hues of lettuces, sweet potato greens, and sesame sprouts ripple in a hissing breeze. The only other sounds come from my relatives who lead the way, hollering in what I can only discern as Chinese. The path we take curls gradually uphill toward a shaded grove.
As the thicket packs around us, my relatives bushwhack through branches and wild rose brambles with umbrellas that double as parasols. My mom, my sister, my wife, and I trail closely behind, stepping through the weeds and tall grass that itch at my ankles. Gnats swarm my arms and legs. We didn’t bring bug spray and I could have used more sunscreen.
We arrive at a small, treeless clearing and my family stops. In front of us looms a large mound of earth about six-feet high with a grassy crown as wide as a dining room table. It’s the reason we’re all here. This is my waipo, my mother’s mother, the once family matriarch.
My grandmother’s resting place, in contrast with some ornate Chinese graves, is a tombstone embedded into the side of this grassy mound. There is no mantel to lay gifts upon and there are no colors painted into the stone. The only decor are plastic daisies of cotton-candy pink that jut out of the mound like fishing rods. Some of my relatives lay wildflowers that they picked earlier in the dirt in front. Others bow in ancestral veneration. Within a few minutes, they all sob.
I recognize the plainly-chiseled characters of the inscription, characters which feel familiar and still draw from some well inside me. But I see them and hear no sounds, they register no meaning. I can’t pick out the poetic from the mundane. I can’t find my grandmother’s name because I don’t know her name. The uncles and aunts around me weeping—I don’t know any of their names. I just know them as “aunt” and “uncle” suffixed with their number in the birth order. My mother is dajie, the big sister. I know her name but only in its romanized form, the pinyin.
As I stand next to my mother who’s poring over the grave’s inscription, I hear her sniffle. She hasn’t been to the gravesite before. I put my arm around her because we’ve come a long way together. She brings her hand to her mouth, turns toward the three of us Americans. In English, she says, “I want to pray,” so we bow our heads.
I don’t know much about my mother’s mother. I know that she got sick and, when a dispute between my grandfather and his children (my aunts and uncles) about when to take her to the hospital dragged on for too long, it was too late. Since we lived in western Illinois back then, I know that my mother, who was around the age I am now, wasn’t there when her mother died. I remember her weeping when she heard the news.
After we say “Amen,” we wait for my aunts and uncles to finish paying their own respects. I keep my head down and watch my tears speckle and stain the ground. Spindly weeds bristle at my ankles. Sweat steams off my hair. Once everyone is finished and brushing the dirt off their knees, my mother wipes her eyes and adjusts her glasses. “Okay,” she says with the authority of dajie, “Okay.”
My chest swells again as I clutch my wife’s hand, her fair skin in mine, on the walk back to the car. I think of the soil beneath my feet and wonder if these are the last steps I’ll take in these hills, the last imprints I leave among my ancestors. I wonder if I let myself walk too far away and if God can forgive me for what I leave behind.
My footprints, light as they are in this parched earth, will wash away in the next rain or passing gust. I know it.
As time passes, my recollection of this place will fade. The sun won’t set over Suizhou anymore; it will set over our apartment on Connecticut Avenue NW. The flora here will blend in with the myriad plants I see nearly everyday in Rock Creek Park. The descendants of my grandmother—my children—will be even less Chinese than I am. All I take back home, all I can pass on, are English words of a Mandarin memory. For whatever that’s worth.
On the drive back to Xiangyang, a city which is almost 30,000 times the population of my mother’s village and the location of our hotel (a Crowne Plaza recommended by one of my cousins), we take a different road from the way that we came. My cousin driving fiddles with the radio while my sister stares out the window with her earbuds in again. I’m taking deep breaths and still praying for bladder and colon strength for just a few more hours. My wife’s eyes are closed. She’s car sick still, what with the swerving, swinging turns along these farm-hills. I’m getting dizzy myself. Nothing is straight or easy out here. And the road is too narrow and this car is too wide to do anything but move forward.
The verdure sweeps by and behind us. Its present is my past. Out there, through these tinted windows, this land hosts an indiscernible greenery scattered among the hills. Scattered too are its people, around these fields and in this caravan, who are still mine and I theirs. I only hope I’ll belong to them for at least a little longer.
“When your parents are alive, do not travel far. If you do have to travel, be sure to have a specific destination.”
--The Analects