China/Hong Kong: Taishan, China
With the tour concluded, we spend the day taking care of family business, meeting with cousins on both mom and dad's side as well as a great-aunt. We'd previously met them a day or two before, but Gina, Kristen, and I spent time hiding in the hotel gym (at RMB50/person... ouch) or otherwise excluded from the conversation.
Today, we got up early, piled into a rented van and driver that my dad's cousin arranged-- along with great-auntie, my dad's cousin, and one of mom's cousins, and went to Taishan to visit the family and the home villages. On the way there, we stopped by the old house in Guangzhou where my dad was born. Quite an amazing bit of family history, simple that it is, and it felt important that we'd been there to see it before it was torn down. (something about widening the road in a few years...)
Taishan is much bigger than I thought it would be, but at the same time it was also smaller. Big enough to get lost in, that's for sure. *grins* The built-up structures in the central district give a much larger appearance than an American city of equivalent size, which would be flatter and more spread out low-rise buildings, while the villages surrounding the city were very extensive. Things quickly turned into old cement buildings and dirt roads, progressing quickly further into old brick buildings, most of which still had wood-burning stoves, tile floors and tile roofs with very basic electrical service and simple plate-glass windows. Coal is evidently still a luxury item, and even the brand-new multipurpose building in the Won village, complete with fancy carved plates for the family tree, was still done in tile and for open air circulation. My dad's cousin's restaurant in Taishan itself was set into an old concrete building, burning coals underneath soup pots, and the doong (sp?) (sticky rice) they served us was indeed both for the taste (YUMMY!) and for preservation, since refrigeration is not common.
The old house still stands; it seems like it's been maintained that way for reasons I'm unsure of, although the roof partially caved in at some point in the past... The sliding wooden-beam doors are still everywhere, too. Being right off one of the main roads in the villages surrounding Taishan, I'm not quite sure what I was expecting: this felt about right, but actually experiencing it always helps to crystalize reality.
The Fong village was a bit different; while the whole area is relatively modern for small city surrounded by a cluster of villages, MOm and Grandma's village felt way out in the sticks, as we drove down a bumpy dirt road, then walked through very, very narrow corridors between houses into what is Grandma's old house. MOst of Grandma's contemporaries have passed on; Grandma said that of the people living in her old house, she knew of them by name but had never met any of them. While my dad prefers to ignore the fanfare, Grandma revels in it, so it seemed like the whole village came out to see us.
(I wish I had more to say, but not actually knowing anyone in these places, the language barrier, and the fact that aside from some of my dad's cousins in Taishan itself we really didn't talk to anyone... I'm sort of at a loss here. It was a lot of people to meet and places in our family's past to see. It was also more seeing than sharing. Relating to our experiences in the cities felt very connected compared the villages.)
We drove back to Guangzhou and had dinner with more family currently living in Guangzhou itself. The parents, aunts,and uncles shared quite a bit; Grandma and her sister spent better than 12 hours yapping away. By this point my extremely thin (read: essentially non-existent) Cantonese had just about had it. Quite a bit was discussed over the next two hours, but I caught almost nothing. :-/ The details of university/college/trade schools and the cost, some information some cousins who were offered jobs away from Taishan and promised to be able to come back (but never did!), some other tidbits... sadly, that was about it.