I'm standing on the edge of row after row of green rice paddies, hoping that by staring out here I can somehow communicate with the man that once called this home.
Relatives I haven't met until this day usher me past and down a worn cobblestone path and I imagine my father as a boy running down these stone slabs, barefoot, lost in childhood innocence, before a world war would change his life forever.
What are these villagers thinking as they peer out from their humble stone homes at the strange procession.
The tale is not new. It's long been the stuff of books and movies, but here I was, daughter of US immigrants, seeing the old country. In this case, an enclave of people bearing my last name, Chiu, in Changle village, in Fujian Province in the southeastern part of China.
My father went from relative poverty on the mainland to Taiwan, where he got a degree in civil engineering, to America, where, naturally, he opened a Chinese restaurant. Meanwhile, the relatives that are my guides today stayed behind to experience a different life.
My uncle leads me to the single story wooden and stone shack where my father, six siblings, and grandmother lived.
The door is locked and someone finds a stool so that I can peer inside. Through the rails I stare into the stone floored room, smaller than my Beijing studio apartment. A kitchen adjoins it, clay pots still on the table for a meal that was never cleared away. All this for a family of seven.
My relatives urge me to move on. I've come to pay tribute to my ancestors, to sweep the graves of my grandparents for the Clear Bright Festival, the Chinese holiday for honoring ancestors. But it's hard to pull myself away from the most important thing I've traveled 16,000 kilometers from home.
My father loved to tell stories. As a child-journalist I would pester him with questions he lovingly answered.
There were so many mouths to feed, he said. Since his father died when he was a baby, the family was so poor that he was sold to a wealthy landowner as a servant.. When the head of the family died, he was given the option of staying or returning home. Without a thought, he chose home. I was staring at it.
My father died of a heart attack when I was 18, in Taiwan of all places, the only place he could find a job. The American dream, as it turned out, was only an American nap.
The once successful restaurant had been seized by a landlord and no one wanted to hire a 55-year-old Chinese man with a bad accent. I managed to climb up the hill where the ashes of my grandparents lay. I know them only from the single picture of each that was kept.
Questions still haunt me as I struggle to understand what strange chance occurrence made me an American, while my cousins struggle to find work in Fujian. Answers are hard to come by in these parts, especially truthful ones.
The only history I truly know is far from here. How my father confessed to my mother one night, while the four young girls were asleep, how happy he was to have a home and family. As a child in this village, he never dreamed of that much.
But I think a part of him always remained here. I would watch him sit on our back porch smoking a cigarette after dinner and wonder what he was thinking. Perhaps it wasn't my mother's vegetable garden he saw, but the rice paddies I'm looking at.
I'm only passing by, Fujian is not my home, but it's in my blood. It was this fertile soil that produced a man who would experience so much and show his children, by example, the value of hard work and of understanding history, so that one day his four girls could become an engineer, a lawyer, an architect, and a journalist, finding her way back to China.
Lisa Chiu is a Chinese-American living in Beijing and working at China Daily
(China Daily HK Edition August 21, 2002)
