A Return to the Frontier

When I got off the plane in Taipei on my way to Hong Kong, I did not expect to see anyone I knew. I had asked the Chus not to meet me, knowing they were busy just then. But it was possible that they would get somebody else to come in their stead, so I was not surprised when an efficient-looking man in neat western clothes approached me. "You are Mrs. Richard Nixon?" He said in English.

I had seen many photographs of the blonde Mrs. Nixon and never imagined I resembled her. Besides, he should be able to tell a fellow Chinese even behind her dark glasses. But with a womans inability to disbelieve a compliment altogether, no matter how flagrantly untrue, I remembered that she was thin, which I undoubtedly was. Then there was those glasses. "No, I am sorry," I said, and he walked away to search among the other passengers.

It struck me as a little odd that Mrs. Nixon should come to Formosa, even if everybody is visiting the Orient just now. Anyhow there must have been some mix-up, as there was only this one embassy employee to greet her.

"Did you know Mrs. Nixon is coming today?" I asked my friends Mr. And Mrs. Chu, who had turned up after all.

"No, we havent heard," Mr. Chu said. I told them about the man who mistook me for her and what a joke that was. "Um," he said unsmiling. Then he said somewhat embarrassedly, "Theres a man who is always hanging around the airport to meet American dignitaries. Hes not quite sane."

I laughed, then went under Formosas huge wave of wistful yearning for the outside world, particularly America, its only friend and therefore in some ways a foe.

"How does it feel to be back?" Mr. Chu asked. Although I had never been there before, they were going along with the official assumption that Formosa is China, the mother country of all Chinese. I looked around the crowded airport and it really was China, not the strange one I left ten years ago under the Communists but the one I knew best and thought had vanished forever. The buzz of Mandarin voices also made it different from Hong Kong. A feeling of chronological confusion came over me.

"It feels like dreaming." And taking in all the familiar faces speaking the tones of homeland, I exclaimed, "But its not possible!" Mr. Chu smiled ruefully as if I had said, "But you are ghosts."

Mrs. Chu told me as we left the airport, "This is an ugly city, but the minute you get out of town it is beautiful."

They lodged me in a mountain inn. I got the Generals Suite, where the generals stay when they come uphill to report to the Generalissimo, who lives a few steps away across the road. The suite was reached through a series of deserted little courtyards, with its own rock garden and lotus pond. In the silence there was just the sound of the evening drizzle on the banana palm and in the bathroom a tap of sulphur water constantly running out of a stone lion mouth and splashing over the rim of the cement tank. There were rattan furniture on the tatami flooring and a wardrobe and bed with stained sheets. I told myself not to be fastidious. But there were bedbugs. Finally I had to get up near dawn to sleep on the ledge of the honor recess, where in Japanese living rooms the best vase and picture scroll are displayed. The maid was frightened when she come in the morning and could not find me.

It was plain that the generals had feminine companionship while spending the night awaiting audience with the Generalissimo. I wondered at the ease of procuring girls almost next door to that Christian and Confucian founder of the New Life Movement. Surely it was unseemly with"Heavens countenance only a foot away," as we used to describe an audience with the emperor. After I left Taipei for the countryside, I realized that prostitution was more open on this land than perhaps anywhere else in the world. In a small-town newspaper five or six advertisements of this type appeared in one day: "Joy and Happiness Prostitutes Domicile, 1st class. 124 Shin Ming Road. Swarms of pretty girls like clouds, offering the best services."

In the countryside Formosa peels back, showing older strata. There were more native Formosans than refugees. The mixed emotions of my homecoming of sorts gave way to pure tourist enthusiasm.

From time to time Mrs. Chu, sitting next to me in the bus, whispering next to me in the bus, whispered urgently, "shandi, shandi!" I just caught a glimpse of a shandi, or mountain dweller, a gray little wraith with whiskers tattooed on her cheeks carrying a baby on her back and loitering outside a shop along the highway. "Shandi, shandi!" Again the breathless little cry and a nudge. I saw gypsylike children in ragged T-shirts and skirts, carrying smaller children. "They all come to town when theres a Japanese picture on," Mrs. Chu said.

"Oh, do they speak Japanese?"

"Very well."

Many of the bus passengers talked Japanese. They were the early Chinese settlers, and a surprising number of their young people still spoke Japanese. The bus stopped at what seemed to be the middle of nowhere and a young man got off. The conductor followed him. Suddenly there was a fight, the two rolling over and over on the wayside. "Chigaru yo! Chigaru yo!" I could make out the one Japanese word the young man kept shouting: "Mistake! Mistake!" The driver got off to help beat him. The passenger learned that this man was always stealing rides. I thought how un-Chinese these people were. In Hong Kong I had seen a streetcar conductor following a free rider to the street and grad hold of his necktie, in place of the pigtail which used to be the first thing reached for in a brawl. But that was just a scuffle and exchange of words. Last year a bus conductor was taken to the police station on the complain of a woman he had hit with his ticket puncher, a murderous tool conductor s were forever rattling to remind people to buy tickets. But there were never any real fights like this.

Finally the driver and conductor let the man go. He got on his feet panting and dusting himself. They drove off. He stood at attention in his torn khaki shirt and saluted the bus as it passed. He did not look old enough to have been in the army in Japanese days, but that reverence was distinctly Japanese. Oddly enough, it also reminded me of the Communist Chinese lining up all the porters, sweepers, and peddlers on the railway platform, each presenting his broom, pole, and basket like arms as the train pulled out. Workers have been told to love their machine, but to have them pay their respects to it in this little ritual seemed strange.

From Formosa I went on to Hong Kong, which I had not seen for six years. The city was being torn down and rebuilt into high apartment buildings. Whole streets were dug up, with a postbox buried up to its neck, still functioning. The refugees were settled down, hoping only to live out their lives in Hong Kong. The younger generation speak Cantonese in school and refuse to speak anything else at home, a good excuse not to talk to their parents that other teenagers may envy.

The more or less well-to-do homes I saw were getting increasingly Americanized, with amahs becoming too expensive and washing machines taking their place alone with the lastest-model refrigerators and hi-fi phonographs bought on the installment plan. Christmas had become a great occasion for gifts and parties for non-Christians too. Boys and girls handed each other Christmas cards in school. One girl wrote to a woman columnist: "I am nineteen years old. My father and I escaped from north China a year ago, crossing the country with great difficulty. We made the last stretch to Macao in a small boat which was fired on by the Communists. My father covered me with his body so he got wounded and died in the hospital in Macao. I came to Hong Kong, where a friend of fathers got me a job paying about HK$100 a month [less than twenty American dollars], just enough to keep alive and rent a bunk. I am the only one without Christmas in all Hong Kong. Please tell me if I should go back the mainland."

Side by side with harrowing escapes like this, there is a lot of what seems to be needless and fool-hardy traffic of refugees going back for visits. "Weve grown poor from sending parcels," my landlady told me once with a little laugh. She never could leave off explaining why they had to take in a lodger. She and her husband set both sets of parents and other dependents noodles, pop rice, preserved meats and herbs, sugar, soy, peanut oil, and soap each month and clothing in season. Of one brand of British-made chicken cubes, her mother-in-law had written ecstatically: "These cubes have solved all the problems of our two meals a day." The sugar they dissolved in water and drank as a tonic. Her brother, in a labor camp for harboring a friend accused of being a Nationalist spy, is still able to write her asking for pills for his ailing kidney and swollen legs. Her brother, in a labor camp for harboring a friend accused of being a Nationalist spy, is still able to write her asking for pills for his ailing kidney and swollen legs. Her younger sister is doctor assigned to work in the country. "She has to go out on sick calls at night, where its pitch dark and the ground is uneven and shes afraid of snakes. You know how young girls are," she said, just as she apologized for her daughters monopolizing the bathroom: "You know how young girls are."

I was there to see a great packing. The landlady had a relative going back-a woman in her seventies-who could take things in for them. The landladys husband wrestled with loads and ropes all over the kitchen floor. She baked a cake and made stewed pork.

"They can use the pot too," she said.

"How is one to carry a pot of stewed pork all the way to Shanghai?"

"It will be frozen; the train is a refrigerator."

She got up at dawn to see the old lady off, and she had to go alone to help carry the luggage past the inspections at the Lohu border. The next day she cried out when she came upon me: "Ha-ya, Miss Chang! I almost didnt come back."

"But what happened?"

"Huh-yee-ya! To begin with, there were altogether too many things. The old ladys fault, too -she had so many things of her own. Oil drums, crates of salted fish, whole cartons of cans. Clothes, bedding, pots and pans, enough to furnish a house. The customs man was losing his temper. Then he came upon some change in her purse, twenty, thirty cents of Jen Ming Piao she had with her when she came out last time and forgot to get rid of. Youre not supposed to take Communist money in, so all hell broke loose. Where did this come from? Ha? And What do you mean by this? Ha? Turned on me now: Who are you? AH?" My landlady screwed up her slant-eyed babe face to roar out the "Ahs" and "Has". "Ai-ya-I said I knew nothing about this, I just came to see her off, but all the time I was worried to death." She frowned and clucked with annoyance and dropped her voice to a whisper. "This old lady had dozens of nylon stockings sewn inside her thick padded gown."

"To sell?" I asked.

"No, just to give as presents; women wear them inside their slacks."

"But why? When they cant even be seen?" And with all the hunger we heard was around, I thought.

"Not full-length ones." The landlady gestured toward her calves. "For the wives of officials. She likes to bring everybody something. Very capable old lady. She imports movies made in Hong Kong. What does she want so much money for? Ha? Seventy and no children? Ha?"

I remembered coming out ten years ago, walking the last stretch across the Lohu Bridge with its rough wood floor closed in on both sides by guardhouses and fences. A group of us stood waiting after the Hong Kong police on the other side of the barbed wire had taken our papers away to be studied. They took a long time over it. It was midsummer. The Hong Kong policeman, a lean tall Cantonese with monstrous dark glasses, looked cool and arrogant as he paced around in his uniform and shorts, smartly belted and creased. Beside us stood the Communist sentry, a round-cheeked north country boy in rumpled baggy uniform. After an hour in the hot sun the young soldier muttered angrily, speaking for the first time, "These people! Keep you out here in this heat. Go stand in the shade." He jerked his head at the patch of shade a little distance back. But none of us would look at him. We just smiled slightly, pressing close to the wire fence as if afraid to be left out. Still, for a moment I felt the warmth of race wash over me for the last time.

That fateful bridge has often been compared to the Naiho Bridge between the realms of the living and the dead. Like most clichés, it is true when you experience it yourself. It makes me impatient to hear westerners quibble about the free world not being really free. Too bad that many of us have to go back over the bridge when we cant make a living outside.

I have an aunt who has stayed in Shanghai because she could not leave her new house. Her son, just out of college, joined his father in Hong Kong but did not like it there. He went back in 1952, just when I was about to leave. His mother took him to have his fortune told one evening and I went along. He would find a job soon, the fortuneteller said. But there might be trouble. He might go to prison. The prediction sounded reasonable at the time, with a movement on against businessmen and many suicides and arrests. The youngish fortuneteller looked like a shop assistant in his gabardine gown. I had no confidence in him and resolutely avoided his eye although I needed badly to have my own fortune told.

My cousin got a small job in Peking as predicted. Life was hard, he wrote his mother. Get married, his mother wrote back. Its the only way to have some happiness. But he was a quiet boy, slow to make up his mind. Ten years later when I saw his father in Hong Kong this time, I heard the son had wanted to get out again. Checking his application for permit to leave, the authorities seized on the fact that he had once joined a Nationalist group in college. He was sentenced to three years house arrest in his mothers modernistic mansion, which they took the opportunity to search, probing the sofas for American dollars. He has all comforts, even servants to stand in line for the daily rations. But three years with Mother is evidently considered enough punishment.

I heard about my mothers family from on of my uncles married daughters, the only one out. The other two stayed in because their husbands, a doctor and the son of a high Nationalist official, chose to stay. One of the sisters had died.

"So did my brothers wife," said my cousin in Hong Kong. "And both men remarried before their wives bones were cold. Father died of cancer after losing everything in the land reform. Mother is wretched living with Brother. He doesnt earn enough and his new wife is a shrew. We Huangs are finished."

Looking back, I saw how my family and relatives had all been taught by our ancestors to hang onto land, the only clean and solid thing, by comparison to which all other possessions are showy, immoral, therefore impermanent. No matter what fools ones children were, as long as they did not slap land deeds on a gambling table they were safe. Despite ancestral admonitions, in time of course all their descendants tried their hands at other investments for better and quicker profits. Many soon found they were not clever enough and resigned themselves to the yearly income from the land-cut down by wars, famines, inflations-and grew poorer and poorer. The Communists merely hastened the end.

No one I know is in a commune or knows anybody who is in one, with the exception of a Cantonese amah who went back to sweep the graves his spring. Her family belongs to the village commune. It is still the farmers, always the worst off, who are getting the worst of it. Having heard of the food shortage, the amah brought in a bit of cooking oil and salted fish of her own use.

When she arrived for a twenty day visit, the commune allowed her to buy a large quantity of rice and small quantities of cooking oil and pork as a special favor. The pork was divided among her family and neighbors because they had not tasted meat all year. So went her salted fish. Her last ten days there she lived on snails that a little girl gathered for her from a pond.

There was no community dining hall. Everybody queued up with cans to get the rice and what went with it, served through two holes dug in the kennel-sized temple of the earth god. When they got home the food was cold, of course.

Everyday at four in the morning a man beat a gong to summon everybody to the fields. Breakfast at nine. Work at ten. Lunch at twelve. Work again at one. Supper at six. Work again at seven. But not in the fields this time-usually it was carrying coal or mud. Quit at ten at night. Sometimes "leap forward" to twelve midnight. No Sundays or holidays, only a few days off at the New Year. This despite the slogan "Let the farmers rest." Wages varied from a dollar something to fifty or sixty cents Jen Ming Piao a month. Medicines had been free but now you buy your own. Herd doctors were available but herbs are scarce.

We Chinese have always been at our best within a rigid frame, even in poetry writing. Its when we are most hemmed in that we seem able to rise above ourselves. After twenty centuries of rule by the family we have been free for perhaps twenty years, and it has not been a pleasant time for many of us, full of conflicts and self-doubts. Now the state has taken the place of the big family, coming into every moment and aspect of life with its familiar persuasive pressure. The sheep has returned to the fold. Even hunger can feel right-up to a point.

Those who live near Macao swim a mile or escape by sampan in bands sometimes as big as a hundred, fighting the machine guns of pursuing motorboats with sharpened bamboo poles. But they will not stay put and fight. The trouble with us Chinese is that we are too sensible. Sixty thousand crashed the land border to Hong Kong last May. The border guards who had shot at smaller numbers evidently held back because the crowds were too big, the government having always avoided massacres if possible. After this the communes were modified but not abandoned. There is already talk now of their being revived in the area around Canton.

Advance two steps, retreats a step-Mao Tse-tung has said this is his way of making progress. Whether dance or march, the people drag on, hoping to outlive their tormentors.

(1963)