HAINAN DAO BOOK I
CHAPTER 06
Wei began ushering me down the hallway, but I stopped and spun around. I whipped his hand off my arm. I curled my fingers into fists. I glared at him. Digging my hooves into the dirt in front of me, I bent my head and readied my horns for a charge. But he had already tossed his red cape off to the side. While I huffed and puffed and blew steam out of my nostrils, he had dropped his gaze and tucked his hands behind his back.
I clenched my jaw repeatedly.
Flicking his eyes up, Wei sneaked a peek at me. He reached up and scratched the back of his head. “Well, would you like to see your room now?” He grinned.
“You…!”
“We’ve prepared the best room…”
“You knew all along didn’t you?”
“I…”
“No, come on, now! Answer the question. You knew all along.”
He smiled at me. He sighed. Sliding his hands into his pockets, he shrugged his shoulders and turned to the side.
“Now, I did hear him right, didn’t I?”
Wei nodded. “Yes.”
“‘Dai goh’. He is my brother. Isn’t that right? You should know enough Cantonese to know at least that much. ‘Dai goh’ does mean brother?”
“Yes. Older brother.”
I tossed my head back. “Man…!”
Wei waddled up and punched me on the shoulder playfully. “Are you surprised?”
I whirled around. “Surprised?” My hair was standing on end.
“Yes!”
“Surprised?” I jabbed my finger into his chest. “You…!” I swore beneath my breath. “You could have said something.”
He took a step back. “Said something? How?”
“You could have said something when we first met. Or in the car, when you found out where we were going.”
His eyes widened. “How?” He chuckled nervously. “I am only a distant cousin. It would not have been proper…”
“Well, what about him then?” I pointed back at the door. Tangshu was still inside. “He could have said something.”
“Well…I…” Wei grinned and shrugged again.
I turned away from him. Running my hand through my hair, I began pacing back and forth along the hallway.
“You…uh…you look upset.”
I kept pacing.
Wei frowned. “But isn’t it good to know you have family? New family? A bigger one?”
“No.” I stopped short and shook my head. “It is not.” I stared off into the distance. “And how do I even know that this is true? How do I know he is my brother?”
“Oh, it is the truth, all right. He told you himself, right? The man you saw just now is a son of Ying Yixi; everyone know it. He really is your brother.” He coughed into his hand. “Well…half-brother.”
I spun around to face him.
“Your father had been married already, even before he married your mother. Fuhwa had been the first child from that earlier marriage. He is your older brother.”
“Married already…?”
Wei nodded.
“But, how? I…” I frowned and looked away.
Wei sighed. “Your father was an incredible man. He was able to provide for all of you, in your family. But he was able to help all of us here, in this family too. It was not unusual in those days, for a capable man to have two or even more wives…”
I scrunched my eyes tight and then began rubbing them. Leaning against the wall, I slid down its length to sit on the floor with my back propped up against it. “Oh, what the hell. Why don’t you start from the beginning, then? Tell me everything, so I don’t get caught off guard and have another heart attack. Heart problems do run in my family, you know?”
“There is not much to tell.”
I frowned. “Well, what about this earlier marriage? Are there other children? Will you two be taking me to see a whole slew of other people later on, and telling me that they’re my brothers and sisters too?”
“No, no. There are no more. Fuhwa is the only one.” He sighed and crouched down beside me. “When your father left for Hong Kong, he didn’t just leave your mother and sister behind. There was his first wife and her son too. While your family later went out to join him, Fuhwa stayed and grew up here. We all tried to manage the best we could, keeping up the farming and so on, but things were difficult. For a long time. And then your father began making money, and he remembered us. He gave much, so that we could all live better. This building, the one that we are in right now, had been the old house, the same one that the Ying family had lived in for many, many years. Your father gave us money so that it might be built again. He even bought pumps and pipes and equipment, so that water from the well could be brought into the kitchen and washrooms.” He gazed into the distance and smiled. “They say it was always his dream, though no one knows why, to bring water inside the building…”
I glanced around me. “My father did all this?”
“Yes, and much more. He also wrote to the government to bring in electricity to the village. And that’s just what they did, though they took a long time to give approval. It was only last year when we first got it. He also started a trust fund so that the old people in the village began to receive a pension every year.” He smiled and shook his head. “You cannot imagine their faces. This idea was too much. To get money just for being old.”
“Why didn’t Fuhwa go out to Hong Kong when he got older?”
“It was your father’s idea. He needed someone he could trust to manage the work done in the village. To make sure that all the ideas that he had brought in were not used wrong. That nobody ruin it for everybody else. In time, the village made Fuhwa the Elder. He has been looking after us now, for the last twenty years.”
I sighed. “He is sick.”
Wei nodded. “He is sick.”
“What do the doctors say?”
“The doctors here say he has the ‘family disease’. And it will come and go until the day he must leave us. The doctors that he has seen in Hong Kong, however, say that he has something called…ar…” He scratched his head. “…ar…array.”
“Array?” I frowned. “You mean…a…RA?”
His eyes brightened. “Yes! That’s it…RA.”
I nodded. “I see…” Rheumatoid Arthritis.
He sighed. “But it doesn’t matter what they call it. No one can do anything. He becomes weaker all the time. No one knows how long he will still be Elder.”
“He must rest.”
“Yes. That is what the doctors say too. They say they have done all they can. It is up to Fuhwa to rest and not do too much work. But how can he? There is much work to do.”
I stared at the floor and shook my head.
I never would have guessed. I always knew my father had business in Hainan. I had only thought he had a factory or two set up to take advantage of the cheap labour.
I never would have guessed.
Picking up a pebble, I whipped it down the hall.
So, why in the hell could the old man not have told me? Didn’t he trust me? Didn’t he think I would have been mature enough to understand? Couldn’t he have at least tried to tell me? I would have understood. Of course I would have understood…
So you see, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, here was yet another way that I was completely unlike my father. Don’t you agree? Unlike my narrow-minded, distrusting, sperm-donating progenitor, I in his place, would have thought my own son, my own flesh and blood, good enough, good and compassionate and caring enough to understand the history behind my other family here in Hainan. So there!
“Furen…?”
I turned and glared at Wei. “You could have said something.”
He shook his head. He looked down. “No, I could not. I wanted to, but I could not. It was not my place.”
“Then Tangshu…”
“I cannot speak for Tangshu.” He sighed. He placed a hand on my shoulder. “Furen, you and I are both young men. You must remember. We are very different.”
I frowned.
“I mean, you and me. We are different from them. We have been overseas. We have seen the world. The people here…” He frowned and shook his head. “…especially the older generation, they don’t think the same. They…”
“But you stayed. When you had a chance to leave. I thought you liked it here.”
“I do! But I am still different…I…” He turned away and said nothing else.
I sighed. “So, everyone knew. The whole Island. Except me.”
“Well, not the whole Island…just the village only. Right here, within the family, where it doesn’t really matter. Back in Canada, back in your family, only Abigail knew.”
“Just Abby?”
“Well…Courtney knew too. She told Courtney.”
“Ah!” I tossed my head back. I groaned. “She told Courtney and she never told me?”
“Or Dylan. Don’t forget Dylan.”
“Dylan doesn’t know?”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Great.” I snorted. “So, of course, that’s supposed to make it all right, then.”
“Right.”
“Because at least there’s Dylan too.”
“Right! So, you’re not alone. Not everyone knew.”
“Not everyone.”
“No, sir. Not everyone.”
I cursed, as I climbed to my feet again. “I can’t believe they never told us. I can’t believe my father never told us.”
Getting up after me, Wei shrugged as he brushed himself off. “Who knows? Maybe that was best too.”
***
I finally got to go to my room after that. I trudged into the washroom and splashed some cold water on my face. Wandering back out into the bedroom, I gave the grounds the once over.
The flat was more spacious than I had expected, certainly bigger than most apartments I’d seen back in Hong Kong. Just the room itself looked to be about two hundred square feet. It even had a balcony. I plodded over to it, sidled up to the edge and rested my elbows on its railing. Leaning over the side, I marvelled at the thickness of the heat that still clung to the ground, spread over it in layers like too much butter. I sucked in a big breath, and peered out over the surrounding countryside for the longest time and forgot myself.
Evening had set in. It was beginning to get dark. Remembering what Wei had told me about the electricity, I waited and saw the streetlights come on, though they weren’t nearly as bright as the thousand-watt kind I was used to back in Canada. And they flickered all the time. The men folk hung around beneath those lights, chatting and laughing at times while children played by their feet. Most of the men smoked as they talked.
At that moment, I tell you, if I had been the smoking kind, I definitely would have lit one up too. I gazed out over the settlement, and all I could see was the face of my father. I nodded and thought to myself, so this was where he had been. Here, in this place. Whenever he was not with us, he was here. Just staring out over the settlement at the men, the children, the smoke, I could see all the years that I had spent without a father by my side. All the parent teacher meetings, all the missed baseball games, school plays, scraped knees and glowing report cards. I could see all of that right then, right there.
By the time I went back in, the sun had already set and all the people beneath me had disappeared. Someone must have noticed me returning once more into the room. There came a knock at the door. I opened it.
“Furen?” It was Wei.
“Yes?”
“Aren’t you hungry? It’s well past dinner time.”
I shook my head.
“Please…won’t you come downstairs?”
“I really don’t…”
“They are waiting for you.”
“Who?”
“Um…all of them.”
Hurrying down the steps, the two of us descended onto a landing filled to capacity with tables and twelve people sitting around each one. Wei rushed me along, herding me back to where we had been earlier in the day. The covered clearing that I had seen before was so packed with men and women that I couldn’t even see the ground. All the food had been ready and everyone had been in their places for I didn’t know how long. As we waded our way toward the head table, everyone in the room gave a loud cheer and they all jumped to their feet and began to applaud.
I turned to Wei. “You could have said something…!”
He shrugged and smiled. “I thought you needed some time.”
We edged ourselves into our places. I noticed that Fuhwa wasn’t there. After we sat down, everyone else did too and began to eat.
Dinner was as noisy and raucous as it should have been. Same old Chinese tradition. Except the smell of roast duck was not in the air. Here, instead, the atmosphere was filled with the aroma of the renowned local delicacy—Hainan chicken on rice. The food was excellent, despite my mood. Though my thoughts struggled to be elsewhere, I found that I couldn’t help but be drawn into the ambience and always having just one more piece of chicken shoved into my bowl.
***
After dinner, Tangshu came and told me that he still had some business in town, so he was going to go and leave me in Wei’s capable hands. I told him thank-you, and wished him a good night.
Wei led me on a stroll around the village. The two of us toured the different buildings, with my usual entourage of children tagging along close behind. Wei started off by showing me the rooms that my mother and father had shared as a newly wed couple. I even got to see the cradle that my mother used to put Abby to sleep in when she was a baby.
We wandered out to the rest of the village after that. People passing by bowed to us. Others came up and shook my hand, while Wei did his best to shoo them away.
As we strolled down another weaving of lanes and alleys, I reviewed in my mind all the words that my father had spoken to me back in the hospital room. I thought then that I could now understand most of what he had been talking about. Except for just one thing.
I turned to Wei, striding along beside me. I frowned. “Before I left, I had spoken to Abby…”
“Your sister is quite a woman.”
“Yes.” I smiled. “But she had mentioned to me that there used to be a village well in the centre of town.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Is it still there, by any chance?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.” He smiled.
I coughed and cleared my throat. We both stopped walking. Absently, I kicked away a pebble from the side of my shoe. “I don’t suppose we might go see it some time?”
“What? The well? Why would you want to go see the old well? There’s nothing to see there.”
“I just thought that…”
“No, no. Nothing interesting there! But if you like interesting, we have something special tonight. In your honour.”
I rolled my eyes. I sighed. “I hope it’s nothing big this time. I would very much like to get some rest tonight. Sleep is what I really need right about now.”
“Oh, come on!” He slapped me on the back. “You are behaving like you’re one hundred years old but you are not. You are still a young man. Like me! We should not waste our time. You know what they say? A string of time is as a string of gold…!”
“Yes, I know, I know.”
***
Wei led me through the streets again. Well, they were hardly streets. They were more like spaces between the buildings, only about four or five feet wide. Many of the houses that I saw were broken down, or had been abandoned altogether. From the few that were still inhabited, children peeped out from beyond the doorways and then swished back inside as soon as we got closer, muttering something and giggling. Along the way, I tried to get a sense of how the units were arranged, and where the centre of the village might be. At one point, I thought I saw a break in the houses on my far left, but we turned at that moment and began heading off in the other direction.
Within a few minutes, Wei had led me past the main housing area and back to where we had originally got out of the car.
As we approached, I saw something that hadn’t been there when I had first arrived. Strung up between two tall coconut trees, each about twenty feet high, was a billowing cloth of canvas, at times waving in the night wind. Patches had been sewn into it in places. Some of them weren’t even off-white in colour, like the rest of the canvas, but dark. People were just now, seating themselves in front of this sail, and I thought for a moment that we were going to shove off and try to put the Island out to sea.
A Jeep truck was parked off well behind the gathered masses. Its engine was still running. A man was busy working under the opened hood of this vehicle, hooking up cables and running them out to a machine set up a hundred feet away from the canvas.
At last, it was ready. The man trotted away from his Jeep. He made his way over to the movie projector on the ground and flicked it on.
Magic exploded onto the screen.
And the crowd cheered. Sounds and colours glowed before them, taking them away, so at least for a time they could leave the Island, and dream of a life not surrounded by water, by heat, by poverty.
Wei turned his smiling face to me. “Not bad, eh?”
I nodded.
***
As we watched the movie, a man came over and sat down next to us. Wei tried to tell him to go away, but I told him no. My new guest introduced himself as Fuguang. He looked about my age, or maybe just a little older. Fuguang did his best to converse with me in Cantonese, and he wasn’t bad. I had discovered that many people on Hainan tended to learn this Chinese dialect when they could, because of the number of people from Hong Kong that were bringing their businesses over here.
“So, what do you do?” I asked him, smiling.
My new friend smiled back at me. “Well, I had been going to the University for a while.”
I nodded. “That’s good. What did you study there?”
“I studied some medicine…” He plucked a blade of grass from the ground by his feet and stuck it in his mouth.
“Medicine? That’s wonderful!”
“…but I never got to finish.”
“Oh?”
“The situation here got much worse. Very quickly. There was a flood. They needed me.”
“I see.” I plucked a piece of grass from the ground and tried it out for myself. I remembered doing that in my childhood too, but that had been a million miles away in Toronto, back in a neighbourhood called North York by the bank of the Don River. “Is the flooding bad here?”
He shook his head. “Not very bad anymore. It used to be awful, until they did some dike work further upstream. Before that, the river used to overflow every year when it came to the rain season.”
“When is the rain season?”
“Just about now. But it hardly happens anymore, and when it does happen, the water that gets through is not so bad. It doesn’t get as far out. Our houses here in the village don’t get much damage, thanks again to lord Yixi.” He smiled at me.
I nodded.
As we talked more, I got to know him better. I was surprised to find that in fact, our backgrounds and what we had experienced so far in life, was not all that different after all, even though we had been on opposite ends of the Earth. It made me think. I mean, here we were, the two of us, similar in age, background, lineage, but for a chance occurrence, a single chance, things might have been very different. Who then would have known between the two of us, if a stranger had passed us by on the street? After all, we both liked reading, studying. We both liked movies. And we both liked grass. Well, chewing it, anyway.
We chatted about everything—our work, our families. He asked me what I liked to eat, where I liked to go, what I’d like to do when I had the time. We talked about books, hobbies, women.
“So, the women in Canada must be very different,” Fuguang said.
I nodded and smiled. “In some ways. Culture can make them a little different.”
“Are you married?”
I showed him the empty finger on my left hand.
“Why not?” asked Wei, turning toward us and joining in the conversation. “I know your father would have wanted to see…”
“Yes, yes, I know.”
“But why not?” asked Wei again.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Just haven’t met the right one, I guess.”
Wei shook his head. “Ah, but how are you supposed to know? How do you know when she is the right one?”
***
How do you know when she is the right one? Good question.
Ever since I was a young boy, even before the idea of race had become an issue for me, I had found the process of marriage both mystifying and fascinating. All my life, I’ve dreamed about what it would be like to fall in love. What is love, anyway? What is it supposed to feel like? And how do you know when you are really in it?
I had consulted with almost all of my friends on this matter, especially the ones who had married, because I had supposed, by that very fact, they should have known something about it.
“How did you know you were in love? How did you know she was the One?”
The answer I received the most often was, “Um…”
The second most common response was, “Well, you’ll know it when it happens to you.”
So what was that supposed to mean? Did it mean that it had to do with knowledge? Like in your head? But if it did, how did that relate to what was in your heart? Like your emotions? Having exhausted my friends, literally, I turned instead to that one true companion that never tired of my curiosity or attention. I flicked on my television and watched film after film after film. On love, on passion, on romance.
Although I have had several hundreds of these productions flashed across my eyes by now, I still found that one of the most romantic moments I have ever come across on film has been a scene from a movie called, ‘Somewhere in Time’. In it, Christopher Reeves played a man who went back in time in search of a woman he had fallen in love with in a photograph. The woman was played by Jane Seymour. When they finally met, it was along the beach by the sea and the first thing that she said to him was, “Is it you?” You see, Jane Seymour’s character was a celebrated actress whose coach had once warned her that one day, a man would come, sweep her off her feet and thereby end her illustrious acting career. And so, when she first saw him, her first thought had been to ask whether or not he was to be the One, the one man that she had been waiting for all of her life. Naturally, Christopher Reeves didn’t know what she was talking about, but when he finally did find out, was suitably bowled over. As was I.
The more I thought about it, the more it would seem to me that all of my life, I have been waiting for the day when a woman would come up to me, and ask me, “Is it you?”