Where I Am from
It was Oak Street in Aberdeen, then it wasn’t. It was Twelfth Avenue in Seattle, then it wasn’t. It was Ferry Street in Eugene, Oregon, then it wasn’t, etc. All of these places and more where I had lived, they were not my neighborhood, my home, I was less than a guest.
In Toishan the sun was brighter, the rain wetter, and the breeze more welcome. I was born there in a village in the southern part of Guangdong Province in China. Big Brother Mao was Chairman. He oversaw 600 million people, most of them like me and Grandma, my uncles, aunts, and cousins. We were peasants.
My home was an abode of red brick in the village we called Nanon, meaning South Peace. The house was fairly dark inside without electricity and plumbing, where my Grandma called me “Koonie” affectionally. She tells me that my father was very tall and had to lower his head when entering a room. It was a code. It meant that when others see him, they have to bow their head slightly to acknowledge that he was their leader, a village leader. My Grandma told me that he has gone “on the road.” It meant that he had immigrated to Gimshan or what we called “Gold Mountain,” a name for America.
We had no machinery that made noise. We had no radio and such so that we could even hear the mouse trap snap. We had no vehicles and no bridal sedan. We had simple garden tools such as a shovel and a rake.
Our only colors were black or blue in cloth or silk. The cloth was rationed, and the silk was our family keepsake, and silk was nice and cool in the summer. The price of a sweater was prohibitive for us peasants. And so, they were all hand me downs like other clothes.
Our furniture was spare and sparse, but we had a teakwood table with inlaid marble, a family treasure from more prosperous times. My sister would put fresh pussywillows in the Ming vase. That was about all the decorations in the house. Everything else was functional.
We had no alarm clocks but we had a rooster in the utility room, and we had three hens that laid warm fresh eggs and in the morning Granma would pick one up, poke a hole in it with a chopstick and pour some sugar inside and that was part of my breakfast. I sucked the content of the egg into my mouth.
I had no books but only a slate. I learned how to write “water-buffalo” before I could write my name. My Grandma had traced the characters “water-buffalo” on my back with her index finger to designate the ox and said that I was that strong. My grandmother has died four decades ago but her spirit remains and so, I am strong because she wrote the characters “water-buffalo” on my spine.