I spent the weekend visiting the respective villages where my father and mother were born, transversing the county of Toishan for two days. Though I had the opportunity to travel to various part of China in the early 1990s, this was my first time in Toishan. According to a 2010 census, the entire county had a population of roughly 1 million which reflected the relatively low population density of the area that I experienced by Chinese standards. Even though I saw areas of urban development, Toishan seemed overwhelmingly agrarian.
My parents’ villages were an hour’s drive from each other. One village was much larger than the other, and one was in the southern part of the county while the other was in the north. In one village, transcontinental connections were decades in the making while in the other village, connections were in the process of being made; yet I found evidence of my direct lineage in both villages.
As a child I had always heard stories of my family villages as places of hardship. These stories formed an impression in my mind of the poor family village, rife with destitution. It wasn’t until I stood in the village entrances that veil of my flawed biases was lifted. Subconsciously, I was expecting to find the homes partly abandoned and falling apart, but the houses were not in squalor. Instead, extended family had cared for the homes in both villages, well situated within the lush greenery of the Toishan countryside.
I was grateful to trade in my initial perceptions of the villages for what they actually were: thriving traditional rural communities with long legacies.
The conversations at the Cangdong Village Education Center prepared me for aspects of these visits. In my ancestral home, I identified things I would have easily overlooked—the altar dedicated to the heavens embedded on the wall and the large stone mortar on the floor for pounding rice, among other things. I now understood the significance of the watchtowers (diaolous) in my dad’s village.
It is hard for me to fully describe what it felt like being in places were everyone sounded like my grandparents—including the young people—and spoke the language closet to my earliest childhood memories. It is a language that I’ve associated with elders rather than with peers. Even though I am not fluent in Toishan language, the sounds were familiar and comforting; it felt like being wrapped in a warm blanket on a cold night. ■