Helen Yeung
All That We Take With Us
It was a humid winter’s day in November 2014 when Grandma (婆婆) and I rummaged hurriedly through the crowded local wet market (街市) in Hong Kong. I had just started university that year, and had flown back with my parents to visit my extended family. Grandma was slightly flustered because we spent too much time at yum cha, where she let me order any dim sum I wanted. It was a yearly ritual to make up for our time apart.
Almost carelessly, she wheeled her blue, striped shopping trolley across the tightly packed aisles of the market, running over a few toes, checking frequently that I was still behind her. Carrying a thick Shanghainese accent, she haggled with the butcher in Cantonese, hand-picking the freshest cut of pork shin for soup that night. While waiting for the butcher to cut up the pork, Grandma told him, with a hint of pride, ‘This is my granddaughter (孫女), she’s lived in New Zealand her whole life, it’s very far away. She’s very smart and wins lots of awards in school.’ An awkward teenage me smiled politely, not knowing how to continue the conversation in Cantonese. Despite speaking the language fluently with my parents, I never quite knew how to converse with others outside of home. But although most of the time my grandma and I were disconnected through cultural differences and a language barrier, food and the act of eating always brought us together, serving as a reminder of my roots.
That night she made my favourite dishes. She remembered I liked eating stir-fried winter bamboo (冬筍) and salted mustard leaves (雪菜) each year without fail. Despite living in Hong Kong for nearly seven decades, Grandma never assimilated to cooking Cantonese-style food. She never lost touch with her mother-tongue, speaking a hybrid of Cantonese and Shanghainese to her children.
Yáyà nóng (謝謝儂), thank you, is one of the few phrases I remember in Shanghainese, a dialect similar to what my grandma spoke on a daily basis before migrating to Hong Kong. She was part of the influx of an estimated 1.4 million people from Shanghai that fled to Hong Kong in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.
Her story began in the 1930s. She was born in a district called Liyang (溧陽) in Jiangsu province (江苏), to an upper-class family – her father a doctor, while her mother stayed at home to look after her along with her three brothers and four sisters. Grandma said her house was decorated with the bluest porcelain vases, while the women in her family dressed in long coats, minks, drenched over cheongsam (長衫) made from the finest silk. I often envisioned them as the picturesque heroines in vintage Shanghai posters – modern, stylish, carefree.
The area she lived in was called Peng Jia Yuan (朋家園). It was a traditional Chinese house centred around a large courtyard, where the pillars supporting the roof were wide enough for three people to wrap their arms around. However, the place Grandma called home soon disappeared, burnt down to barren land in the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese invasion turned her life around. They fled to her mother’s home town, seeking refuge there for nearly 10 years. There, she lost her chance of an education, spending the majority of her time in hiding with her siblings and cousins.
Like many Chinese people from older generations, Grandma had a strong resentment towards the Imperial Japanese Army. She said she would never forget three encounters she had with them.
In her first encounter, one of the commanders came up to her and offered her a lolly, but she was too afraid and ran away.
The second time, they invaded the house she lived in. My great-grandmother climbed into a large wooden barrel, and ordered her to sit on it until the soldiers left. The women captured by these soldiers would later become ‘comfort women’, forced into sex slavery for the Japanese militia. At least 200,000 Chinese women were abducted as sex slaves during the invasion.
The third time, the Japanese military dropped bombs on the paddy fields near the house. Grandma and her brother ran for shelter as she witnessed people from her village being struck by the explosions. The Sino-Japanese war ended in 1945, and her family returned to Liyang in the hopes of rebuilding their lives.
In 1949, however, the rising Communist Party defeated the Nationalist government. Shortly after, China became a single-state party, implementing communist and socialist reform on all aspects of life. As her family were considered ‘bourgeois’ and well-educated, my great-grandfather knew the harsh realities this change would bring. When she was 21 years old, my great-grandfather made the decision to send Grandma, his youngest daughter, down to Hong Kong in the hopes that she would be safe.
The journey took six days by train from Shanghai (上海) to Guangzhou (廣州). The train was crammed, stuffy, and over-packed with others also wanting to flee. Grandma lived on baked flatbread (燒餅) and hot water for the entire journey, carrying only ¥10 in her pocket. Tired and anxious, she waited for days at the border of Shenzen (深圳), in the hopes they would let her through the giant metal gate to what many considered freedom.
Upon crossing the border, my great-grandfather had arranged for my grandma to marry a man she had only seen through a black-and-white photograph, my grandpa (公公). He was in his twenties, and had also been sent to Hong Kong by his older sister. They built a new life together in a rented room, a bunk bed shared between them and, later, their four children.
In order to survive, Grandma became a jack of all trades. She was a seamstress, an artificial-flower assembler, a textile factory worker, a button sewer for doll clothes. Her main job involved carrying giant mattress springs home from a factory across the mountains, and sewing them into car seats. This damaged her back at a young age, and to this day her back continues to ache during the cold seasons.
My grandpa was mostly absent during these times – it was difficult then to make money in Hong Kong as a migrant. He was contracted to Africa as a factory worker, where he spent 10 years making enamel bowls, plates and cutlery, only coming back to visit his family every few years.
On a recent visit to Hong Kong, Grandma and I were sitting on the couch watching the news, when she suddenly asked me, ‘Do you remember grandpa?’ I nodded. ‘When he was gone, I was alone and those were the most difficult times of my life.’ Grandma used the words 'very bitter’ (好苦), a common Chinese term to describe the hardships, struggles and pain endured in life.
I first wrote about my grandma’s migration story when I was 13 years old. It was a family history project for English where we had to research and rewrite the story of a loved one. My pākehā peers had stories on their war veteran grandfathers, Rosie the Riveter-esque grandmothers, and ‘exotic’ travellers in their family. Being the only Asian person in the class, my story was made fun of, because it was alien, incomprehensible, about a ‘dirty’ working-class family from ‘ching chong’ China-land.
I remember reading novels like Chinese Cinderella, Mao’s Last Dancer and Wild Swans when I was in high school, imagining the world my grandma lived in in her youth. When I was older, I wondered if the cinematic dreamscape in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love resembled her life in Hong Kong. The film, set in British-occupied Hong Kong, is centred around a community densely populated by Shanghainese migrants. The Shanghainese women in the film were loud, unafraid, smoked cigarettes, dressed in cheongsam, listening to Zhou Xuan’s ‘Blooming Flowers and the Full Moon’ (花好月圓) on the radio. Grandma also wore cheongsams when she lived in Hong Kong, but as she grew older the clothes no longer fit her, finding a permanent home at the back of her closet.
It took 25 years for Grandma to see her family again. She and my mother, then a teenager, took a 36-hour train back to Liyang in 1979. Upon arriving, there was a sea of people dressed in standardised navy-blue uniforms, as designated by the Communist Party. Grandma did not recognize anyone in the crowd, only to be reunited with her siblings when they called out her name. Grandma’s eyes filled with tears as she saw her older brother, his face old and frail from being exiled to rural areas to perform hard labour.
My mother told me many stories of her visit to Liyang that winter – she said it was cold and different to city life. I often wondered if she felt similar feelings in Liyang to those I did when my parents took me to Hong Kong as a child. Did she feel at home? Was she frustrated by the language barrier between her and her family? Was Grandma excited to show her all the places she grew up in?
Grandma had a stroke three years ago, and her health has deteriorated since. She’s no longer able to take me to the wet markets, or has the energy to make stir-fried winter bamboo with salted mustard leaves. I started rewriting her story last year with the hopes of finishing it, but found myself stuck between long-distance phone calls, deleting draft after draft, and worrying I would fail to do justice to a story from a foreign (yet familiar) land my parents referred to as my home.
This process made me constantly question whether I was merely an outsider, if there was any authenticity in my attempt to reconstruct Grandma’s story. Perhaps this is the reality for those of us living in diaspora, the struggle and inability to capture the full experience which connects us to the roots of our identities. The disjuncture we have to our ancestors’ culture, knowledge and histories, gaps in our understanding that Google and Wikipedia cannot answer.
In 2013, my grandma, my mother and I were sitting around the table eating wontons for dinner. They were both laughing at the way I held my chopsticks. ‘Your chopstick holding technique was never this bad as a kid, must be from being too close to gwai lou,’ my mother sighed as my fingers overlapped each other each time I attempted to pick up a wonton.
Grandma then abruptly said something that still lingers in my head today. ‘Don’t hold your chopsticks so high! One day when you get married you’ll move very far away from home.’ Deep down my heart sunk a little. Even till today, I struggle to put these feelings into words.
Thinking back, perhaps this was a reflection of her own anxieties surrounding her journey – the struggles of navigating cultural differences, the lost connections and longing for loved ones in a foreign land. Perhaps this expressed the flurry of unspoken emotions she had towards my mother’s migration to Aotearoa 24 years ago. Or it was an act of unspoken love, to protect my mother from encountering the same sense of loss and heartbreak from the departure of a loved one.
My mother and I were flying back to Aotearoa the next day, and I would only see Grandma again the following year. From as early as I could remember, our goodbyes would be a ritual of her walking me to the local grocers. She lives by the seaside, and we could catch glimpses of the departing ferries and fishing boats on the way, between the cracks of the tightly packed apartment complexes. Grandma would tell me to pick out all the snacks and lollies I wanted, to take home in my luggage. She would say ‘Grandma knows you don’t have these back home, take care and remember to eat more.’
The departure from Grandma would always bring a sense of dread, it was a push and pull of me holding back my tears, her telling me to leave quickly, but not letting go of my hand. ‘We’ll see each other soon,’ I would say, but we both knew that ‘soon’ would actually be another 365 days. Each time I left, all I could take home were pieces of her, stories of her past, the life she built in Hong Kong, that she eats strawberry jam on toast every day for breakfast, her recent love for Swedish meatballs from IKEA – and the undefinable emotions we had from being disconnected from each other again until my next visit.
I look at our yearly yum cha rituals, our visits to the wet market, and how these have become mementos and memories, like the ones Grandma has passed on to me from her migration story. I recently told her how much my friends enjoyed hearing and reading her experiences through my zines. She was taken aback, ‘I’m not important, Grandma is just a normal person, no one wants to hear what I have to say.’ However, to me, and many of us in diaspora, these stories are sometimes all that we can take with us from our home away from home.
Helen Yeung is a writer, zine-maker and creative, currently completing a Master of Communication Studies at Auckland University of Technology. In 2017, she founded Migrant Zine Collective, an activist-based zine collective aiming to amplify the voices of migrants of colour in Aotearoa. More of her work can be found in The Spinoff, Hainamana, The Speakeasy, April Magazine and Interesting Journal.