108000里
6:00 am
Somnolent Ting Ouyang awoke from her slumber feeling petulant, her mouth still tasting of acid-tinged airplane food. Her mother, Zi Li, was packing up around and over her. Her father, Gu Ouyang, was handing things around and over her to her mother. Unfamiliar sounds filled Ting Ouyang's ears:
“Beeanvenuea Toronto poorvaltreseecuritay a valtreconforrr nuuvuudemandong derestayassee aveckvaltre ceinturedayseecuritay –”
Ting Ouyang understood Toronto out of that long sentence (or part of a sentence, or a number of sentences. She was not sure). Her parents had her memorize this word before they left Ping Ding Shan. Ting Ouyang found it strange how 多伦多 is three words and has three syllables, but it was only a series of letters with no spaces in between when you wrote it out. In her head the English word for Ping Ding Shan looked funny too. Such a long string of wriggly shapes for something so simple as 平顶山. And so uneven – the bigger letters followed by the smaller letters. Ting Ouyang knew the little letters because Pinyin used the same letters. The big letters she did not know, but she would get to them, she knew, in the foreign school that she was going to go to.
“Aren't you excited?” Zi Li asked her child.
“Do you have any more water?” Ting Ouyang was excited, but she wanted water more than she was excited.
“Here, I have some left,” Gu Ouyang passed his bottle to his child.
8:00 am
Ting Ouyang's aunt took her and her mother to the elementary school near her house. At the school an old white lady took down Ting Ouyang's name and date of birth, and a bunch of other things only Ting Ouyang's aunt and mother knew about. Ting Ouyang studied the old white lady as surreptitiously as she could. She did not look like any of the 洋鬼子 Ting Ouyang had seen on TV before. She had wrinkles and crevices on her face like the old ladies back in Ping Ding Shan, but she also had big pores all over her very pale skin. Blue veins stood out on her hands like a network of little blue worms. But most strange of all were her eyes. They were like Ting Ouyang's barbie dolls, an artificial-looking kind of blue, like the blue found on 青花 porcelain.
“Would you like an English name?” Ting Ouyang's aunt asked Ting Ouyang.
Ting Ouyang thought about it, but she rather liked Ting. Even though she's been trying to think of names in the way English people think of them – backwards.
“No thanks, I'm good with Ting.”
9:00 am
In Ting Ouyang's class there was only one other Chinese person. Who then turned out to not actually be Chinese but, Japanese. Ting Ouyang did not like the Japanese 鬼子 because they killed her great-grandmother (on her maternal grandmother's side) when they invaded Nan Jing. Zi Li really didn't like the Japanese people, and Ting Ouyang trusted her mother's opinions.
Yuichiro Takeshita was this Chinese-but-really-Japanese person. He was knocking on Ting Ouyang's apartment door. Ting Ouyang had moved out of her aunt's house with her parents soon after arriving in Toronto. Sooner than she expected, because in her head, people stuck with their relatives in foreign countries. But sometimes she got the feeling perhaps her aunt hadn't wanted Ting Ouyang's family there in her house. Which isn't very family-sentiment of her.
When Yuichiro Takeshita (which looked like 竹下·雄一郎 in Ting Ouyang's head, because that was how Yuichiro Takeshita introduced himself as when he wrote down his name and passed it to her in class, because these characters were Chinese) knocked on Ting Ouyang's door, Ting Ouyang hurried out as quickly as possible so that her mother did not see him. Her mother remained unfond of Japanese 鬼子. Ting Ouyang like Yuichiro Takeshita. She also believed she did not like Japanese 鬼子. But this was fine because Yuichiro Takeshita was not a 鬼子 because he did not feel particularly Japanese to her. They conversed in broken English, though it was inevitable that that often led to moments where they did not understand each other and broke into fits of giggles.
11:00 am
During recess Ting Ouyang used to fold paper cranes with Yuichiro Takeshita, because they other kids did not understand them when they spoke, or understood but pretended not to, or really didn't understand because they were too lazy to wade through their thick accents. Ting Ouyang never knew that Japanese kids folded origami too. Yuichiro Takeshita even knew how to fold dragons, and he taught Ting Ouyang when he found out that she didn't know how to fold them.
Nowadays Ting Ouyang and Yuichiro Takeshita played on the playground with the other kids. They built snow forts and had secret clubs, and everybody took turns sneaking into the forest behind the school where they were not supposed to go. In her head, Ting Ouyang now thinks of herself as Ting, because that was what everybody called her.
The other day, Shawn called her “chink” and sang a song that consisted only of the words "ching chong ling long" while holding the outer corners of his eyes towards his temple. Ting didn't get it and neither did the other kids. But a few of the boys joined in anyways, copying his movements. A few days later they stopped doing it because nobody got the point of it. Ting was never sure how she should react. She had the feeling she was supposed to be angry, but wasn't sure why.
12:30 pm
Sometimes Ting went to her aunt's house for lunch. Her maternal grandmother lived there because Ting's uncle (the one married to her aunt) was her son. When Ting went to her aunt's house for lunch, her grandmother always made Chinese food. Ting preferred the mini pizzas from Costco (which her parents and her grandmother pronounced as “cos-co”, which was wrong) to Chinese food when she brought her lunch to school because Chinese food always tasted funny after stewing in a thermos for hours, but the fresh Chinese food her grandmother cooked definitely trumped the mini pizzas.
After lunch her grandmother always wanted her to take a nap because taking naps fed one's jing and shen and qi. But since Ting always refused, her grandmother left her alone after a while. So Ting read books while her grandmother napped. Back in third grade when she first came, she read English baby books. In fourth grade she read books marked with reading levels 4 or higher. Now that she was in fifth grade, her reading skills were actually better than all her classmates. She had went through the library's collection of all the Tree House series, then moved to Nancy Drew, then Narnia, and now she was beginning Lord of the Rings.
Sometimes she read Chinese books too, because her parents always said that she mustn't lose her roots. Ting loved her roots with all her heart, so she tried to keep up her Chinese. But she was forgetting how to write the characters already. Roman letters were easier to remember, and Bilbo was beginning to feel more familiar than the Monkey King.
3:30 pm
The first time Ting went back to China to visit, her flight was at 3pm. It didn't actually start flying until 3:30pm. She didn't puke the way she did all through the flight to Canada. Ping Ding Shan was different than she remembered. And the sea of black-haired heads everywhere was odd. So many people, and they were all the same race. Various shades of sand for skin, and dark eyes like her own.
Yet they did not see her as their own. Relatives jokingly called her the little foreigner, the little foreign devil. Family friends laughed at the way she held her chopsticks, though she had always held it wrong, even before she left for Toronto. Strangers on the street gave her looks of confusion and suspicion when she smiled at them. Memories of her childhood home became untethered to physicality – the entire neighborhood had been torn up and rebuilt with high-rise condos. Streets she used to know now became only familiar in the sound of their names, but visually unrecognizable.
Her family didn't want Ting out of their sight. The city was filled with dangers – petty thieves, tricksters, rapists, human traffickers... Ting was not deemed experienced enough with the local culture to be let out on her own. Her aunt tsk-tsked for a whole day after when Ting gave money to the crippled beggar at the vegetable market – such an obvious ploy! How could she have fallen for that! But somehow, Ting's mother managed to convince their family to let Ting go visit their home village by herself. To sweep her grandparents' grave, that was the official reason.
5:00 pm
Ting arrived at the village via the slow green train. Hard-seaters, it's called. She remembered these trains from her childhood. Apparently almost nobody but migrant workers and other poor people used them these days. The high speed trains were all the rage now. But the soft-seaters and high speed trains didn't stop at the village, her uncle had explained with an air of regret. Ting didn't mind. This one last remnant of her childhood finally made her feel a bit at easy. One thing she remembered that was still around.
An old man sat across from her. In Chinese she would have described him as an old farmer. He had that rustic look about him – cheap blue Zhongshan suit, black Mao shoes, rough hands he kept rubbing together, filling the seats around him with a dry rustling sound like crickets in a wheat field. He had a red and yellow striped plastic bag of five-spice watermelon seeds with him. The bag was thin and soft, a different kind of plastic than the crispier ones from Wal-Mart, back in Toronto. A pile of broken shells were building up around his feet. He never bothered to reach for the silver trash tray on the table. Ting surmised all this surreptitiously, not making eye contact. Last week in Ping Ding Shan she had gradually got used to avoiding eye contact with strangers.
“Little Sister, where you from?”
Ting started. She was dozing off as the train began its clunky eastward movement out of the city. She looked up and saw that the old farmer was grinning at her.
“I'm from Canada,” too late did Ting remember her family's repeated warning about not letting others know she was not from China. It made her vulnerable, will make people think she's gullible – which, the family agreed, she was.
“Wow, little foreign devil!” the old farmer slapped his knee with delight and spit out some more pieces of shells, “so is the moon outside the country rounder than here? Hahaha!”
Ting laughed along a little uncertainly, unsure how to reply: “It's about the same, I think. The moon looks quite similar in shape from any point on Earth, I think.”
“Wow, foreign education is good. Look at you, so knowledgeable,” the old farmer guffawed some more, “Want some watermelon seeds?”
Ting looked at the proffered bag and shook her head: “No thanks.”
“What, you think it's dirty? Don't look down on us now!” the old farmer frowned and pushed the bag towards Ting.
She had forgotten about the whole 客气 etiquette. Ting laughed a little as she took some of the seeds and pushed the bag back: “Okay okay, thank you Uncle!”
The old farmer's mouth once again split open in a big grin, “So where is this Nacanda? How's the weather there?”
7:00 pm
At the village people spoke the Henan dialect so thickly Ting could not understand what they were saying most of the time. The place itself seemed about to wash away with the next rainfall, consisting of yellow chunks of mud houses amidst a stretch of dusty yellow ground. Sparse patches of scraggly trees hugged low hills in the background.
The sun was setting and after dinner Ting's cousins said Ting was tired and should go to bed. Ting protested that it was much too early. But they insisted it was a good time to go to bed, and gave her the best 炕 in the house.
Lying on the brick-bed Ting found it hard to sleep. Her bones jutted against the bed. Wind howled outside. This was where she had come from, decades ago she was part of a cell within her grandmother who had lived in this very house. But this did not feel like home. This was all very foreign. The smell of yellow dust and coal permeated the room, a combination of smell entirely alien to her nose.
6:00 am
Somnolent Ting Ouyang awoke from her sleep with her body sore, her mouth dry like the way it is when it's winter and her room is over-heated. But why was her body sore? Ting opened her eyes and remembered that she had come back to China, and was visiting her home village. Strange how home felt so strange.
The sky was the colour of fish belly. Ting pulled her windbreaker closer and shivered a little. She knew the family grave was somewhere on the hill behind the village. Everyone was up already. Village people got up early. But nobody noticed as Ting slipped quietly away to the hill.
The ground felt chalky, slipping away a little each time she lifted her foot. It didn't want to catch her and hold her, it wanted to leave. Tiny clods of yellow dirt rolled away from her as she moved upwards. Mounds began appearing soon, with little slabs of rock stuck into their centres.
Ting wandered from one to the next. There were no descriptions, just names. There were many of them, generations of the dead from the village below, and people that demanded their bodies be brought back here from all over China before they died. Some had thick tufts of grass growing over them, others were dappled green and yellow
Ting was hungry after half an hour of searching, and still wasn't able to find the ones belonging to her grandparents. Her cousins down the hill were probably worried by now, probably have discovered her absence by now. But Ting was so tired, itis from a week of foreign sights and sounds and tastes and smells. Her jet lag was still not entirely gone. She sat down beside a mound, and leaned against it.
It was quiet here. Wind whistled a little, but it spoke neither Chinese nor English. All the mounds had the same last name as her, Ting thought, and she nodded off to sleep again, on a bit of dirt to the east of where she came from.
Somnolent Ting Ouyang awoke from her slumber feeling petulant, her mouth still tasting of acid-tinged airplane food. Her mother, Zi Li, was packing up around and over her. Her father, Gu Ouyang, was handing things around and over her to her mother. Unfamiliar sounds filled Ting Ouyang's ears:
“Beeanvenuea Toronto poorvaltreseecuritay a valtreconforrr nuuvuudemandong derestayassee aveckvaltre ceinturedayseecuritay –”
Ting Ouyang understood Toronto out of that long sentence (or part of a sentence, or a number of sentences. She was not sure). Her parents had her memorize this word before they left Ping Ding Shan. Ting Ouyang found it strange how 多伦多 is three words and has three syllables, but it was only a series of letters with no spaces in between when you wrote it out. In her head the English word for Ping Ding Shan looked funny too. Such a long string of wriggly shapes for something so simple as 平顶山. And so uneven – the bigger letters followed by the smaller letters. Ting Ouyang knew the little letters because Pinyin used the same letters. The big letters she did not know, but she would get to them, she knew, in the foreign school that she was going to go to.
“Aren't you excited?” Zi Li asked her child.
“Do you have any more water?” Ting Ouyang was excited, but she wanted water more than she was excited.
“Here, I have some left,” Gu Ouyang passed his bottle to his child.
8:00 am
Ting Ouyang's aunt took her and her mother to the elementary school near her house. At the school an old white lady took down Ting Ouyang's name and date of birth, and a bunch of other things only Ting Ouyang's aunt and mother knew about. Ting Ouyang studied the old white lady as surreptitiously as she could. She did not look like any of the 洋鬼子 Ting Ouyang had seen on TV before. She had wrinkles and crevices on her face like the old ladies back in Ping Ding Shan, but she also had big pores all over her very pale skin. Blue veins stood out on her hands like a network of little blue worms. But most strange of all were her eyes. They were like Ting Ouyang's barbie dolls, an artificial-looking kind of blue, like the blue found on 青花 porcelain.
“Would you like an English name?” Ting Ouyang's aunt asked Ting Ouyang.
Ting Ouyang thought about it, but she rather liked Ting. Even though she's been trying to think of names in the way English people think of them – backwards.
“No thanks, I'm good with Ting.”
9:00 am
In Ting Ouyang's class there was only one other Chinese person. Who then turned out to not actually be Chinese but, Japanese. Ting Ouyang did not like the Japanese 鬼子 because they killed her great-grandmother (on her maternal grandmother's side) when they invaded Nan Jing. Zi Li really didn't like the Japanese people, and Ting Ouyang trusted her mother's opinions.
Yuichiro Takeshita was this Chinese-but-really-Japanese person. He was knocking on Ting Ouyang's apartment door. Ting Ouyang had moved out of her aunt's house with her parents soon after arriving in Toronto. Sooner than she expected, because in her head, people stuck with their relatives in foreign countries. But sometimes she got the feeling perhaps her aunt hadn't wanted Ting Ouyang's family there in her house. Which isn't very family-sentiment of her.
When Yuichiro Takeshita (which looked like 竹下·雄一郎 in Ting Ouyang's head, because that was how Yuichiro Takeshita introduced himself as when he wrote down his name and passed it to her in class, because these characters were Chinese) knocked on Ting Ouyang's door, Ting Ouyang hurried out as quickly as possible so that her mother did not see him. Her mother remained unfond of Japanese 鬼子. Ting Ouyang like Yuichiro Takeshita. She also believed she did not like Japanese 鬼子. But this was fine because Yuichiro Takeshita was not a 鬼子 because he did not feel particularly Japanese to her. They conversed in broken English, though it was inevitable that that often led to moments where they did not understand each other and broke into fits of giggles.
11:00 am
During recess Ting Ouyang used to fold paper cranes with Yuichiro Takeshita, because they other kids did not understand them when they spoke, or understood but pretended not to, or really didn't understand because they were too lazy to wade through their thick accents. Ting Ouyang never knew that Japanese kids folded origami too. Yuichiro Takeshita even knew how to fold dragons, and he taught Ting Ouyang when he found out that she didn't know how to fold them.
Nowadays Ting Ouyang and Yuichiro Takeshita played on the playground with the other kids. They built snow forts and had secret clubs, and everybody took turns sneaking into the forest behind the school where they were not supposed to go. In her head, Ting Ouyang now thinks of herself as Ting, because that was what everybody called her.
The other day, Shawn called her “chink” and sang a song that consisted only of the words "ching chong ling long" while holding the outer corners of his eyes towards his temple. Ting didn't get it and neither did the other kids. But a few of the boys joined in anyways, copying his movements. A few days later they stopped doing it because nobody got the point of it. Ting was never sure how she should react. She had the feeling she was supposed to be angry, but wasn't sure why.
12:30 pm
Sometimes Ting went to her aunt's house for lunch. Her maternal grandmother lived there because Ting's uncle (the one married to her aunt) was her son. When Ting went to her aunt's house for lunch, her grandmother always made Chinese food. Ting preferred the mini pizzas from Costco (which her parents and her grandmother pronounced as “cos-co”, which was wrong) to Chinese food when she brought her lunch to school because Chinese food always tasted funny after stewing in a thermos for hours, but the fresh Chinese food her grandmother cooked definitely trumped the mini pizzas.
After lunch her grandmother always wanted her to take a nap because taking naps fed one's jing and shen and qi. But since Ting always refused, her grandmother left her alone after a while. So Ting read books while her grandmother napped. Back in third grade when she first came, she read English baby books. In fourth grade she read books marked with reading levels 4 or higher. Now that she was in fifth grade, her reading skills were actually better than all her classmates. She had went through the library's collection of all the Tree House series, then moved to Nancy Drew, then Narnia, and now she was beginning Lord of the Rings.
Sometimes she read Chinese books too, because her parents always said that she mustn't lose her roots. Ting loved her roots with all her heart, so she tried to keep up her Chinese. But she was forgetting how to write the characters already. Roman letters were easier to remember, and Bilbo was beginning to feel more familiar than the Monkey King.
3:30 pm
The first time Ting went back to China to visit, her flight was at 3pm. It didn't actually start flying until 3:30pm. She didn't puke the way she did all through the flight to Canada. Ping Ding Shan was different than she remembered. And the sea of black-haired heads everywhere was odd. So many people, and they were all the same race. Various shades of sand for skin, and dark eyes like her own.
Yet they did not see her as their own. Relatives jokingly called her the little foreigner, the little foreign devil. Family friends laughed at the way she held her chopsticks, though she had always held it wrong, even before she left for Toronto. Strangers on the street gave her looks of confusion and suspicion when she smiled at them. Memories of her childhood home became untethered to physicality – the entire neighborhood had been torn up and rebuilt with high-rise condos. Streets she used to know now became only familiar in the sound of their names, but visually unrecognizable.
Her family didn't want Ting out of their sight. The city was filled with dangers – petty thieves, tricksters, rapists, human traffickers... Ting was not deemed experienced enough with the local culture to be let out on her own. Her aunt tsk-tsked for a whole day after when Ting gave money to the crippled beggar at the vegetable market – such an obvious ploy! How could she have fallen for that! But somehow, Ting's mother managed to convince their family to let Ting go visit their home village by herself. To sweep her grandparents' grave, that was the official reason.
5:00 pm
Ting arrived at the village via the slow green train. Hard-seaters, it's called. She remembered these trains from her childhood. Apparently almost nobody but migrant workers and other poor people used them these days. The high speed trains were all the rage now. But the soft-seaters and high speed trains didn't stop at the village, her uncle had explained with an air of regret. Ting didn't mind. This one last remnant of her childhood finally made her feel a bit at easy. One thing she remembered that was still around.
An old man sat across from her. In Chinese she would have described him as an old farmer. He had that rustic look about him – cheap blue Zhongshan suit, black Mao shoes, rough hands he kept rubbing together, filling the seats around him with a dry rustling sound like crickets in a wheat field. He had a red and yellow striped plastic bag of five-spice watermelon seeds with him. The bag was thin and soft, a different kind of plastic than the crispier ones from Wal-Mart, back in Toronto. A pile of broken shells were building up around his feet. He never bothered to reach for the silver trash tray on the table. Ting surmised all this surreptitiously, not making eye contact. Last week in Ping Ding Shan she had gradually got used to avoiding eye contact with strangers.
“Little Sister, where you from?”
Ting started. She was dozing off as the train began its clunky eastward movement out of the city. She looked up and saw that the old farmer was grinning at her.
“I'm from Canada,” too late did Ting remember her family's repeated warning about not letting others know she was not from China. It made her vulnerable, will make people think she's gullible – which, the family agreed, she was.
“Wow, little foreign devil!” the old farmer slapped his knee with delight and spit out some more pieces of shells, “so is the moon outside the country rounder than here? Hahaha!”
Ting laughed along a little uncertainly, unsure how to reply: “It's about the same, I think. The moon looks quite similar in shape from any point on Earth, I think.”
“Wow, foreign education is good. Look at you, so knowledgeable,” the old farmer guffawed some more, “Want some watermelon seeds?”
Ting looked at the proffered bag and shook her head: “No thanks.”
“What, you think it's dirty? Don't look down on us now!” the old farmer frowned and pushed the bag towards Ting.
She had forgotten about the whole 客气 etiquette. Ting laughed a little as she took some of the seeds and pushed the bag back: “Okay okay, thank you Uncle!”
The old farmer's mouth once again split open in a big grin, “So where is this Nacanda? How's the weather there?”
7:00 pm
At the village people spoke the Henan dialect so thickly Ting could not understand what they were saying most of the time. The place itself seemed about to wash away with the next rainfall, consisting of yellow chunks of mud houses amidst a stretch of dusty yellow ground. Sparse patches of scraggly trees hugged low hills in the background.
The sun was setting and after dinner Ting's cousins said Ting was tired and should go to bed. Ting protested that it was much too early. But they insisted it was a good time to go to bed, and gave her the best 炕 in the house.
Lying on the brick-bed Ting found it hard to sleep. Her bones jutted against the bed. Wind howled outside. This was where she had come from, decades ago she was part of a cell within her grandmother who had lived in this very house. But this did not feel like home. This was all very foreign. The smell of yellow dust and coal permeated the room, a combination of smell entirely alien to her nose.
6:00 am
Somnolent Ting Ouyang awoke from her sleep with her body sore, her mouth dry like the way it is when it's winter and her room is over-heated. But why was her body sore? Ting opened her eyes and remembered that she had come back to China, and was visiting her home village. Strange how home felt so strange.
The sky was the colour of fish belly. Ting pulled her windbreaker closer and shivered a little. She knew the family grave was somewhere on the hill behind the village. Everyone was up already. Village people got up early. But nobody noticed as Ting slipped quietly away to the hill.
The ground felt chalky, slipping away a little each time she lifted her foot. It didn't want to catch her and hold her, it wanted to leave. Tiny clods of yellow dirt rolled away from her as she moved upwards. Mounds began appearing soon, with little slabs of rock stuck into their centres.
Ting wandered from one to the next. There were no descriptions, just names. There were many of them, generations of the dead from the village below, and people that demanded their bodies be brought back here from all over China before they died. Some had thick tufts of grass growing over them, others were dappled green and yellow
Ting was hungry after half an hour of searching, and still wasn't able to find the ones belonging to her grandparents. Her cousins down the hill were probably worried by now, probably have discovered her absence by now. But Ting was so tired, itis from a week of foreign sights and sounds and tastes and smells. Her jet lag was still not entirely gone. She sat down beside a mound, and leaned against it.
It was quiet here. Wind whistled a little, but it spoke neither Chinese nor English. All the mounds had the same last name as her, Ting thought, and she nodded off to sleep again, on a bit of dirt to the east of where she came from.
