In her flat in Beijing, she writes the first sentence.
This story begins on a bus.
This will be her prologue, set in Chaozhou, the Tide Prefecture, in the Guangdong province. While she is on her writing residency, her father has given her the names of two places to visit: Pulin and Jieyang. He has never been there himself, but he thinks she should go and take a look at the birthplace of his parents. Yet the two names mean as much to her as Tukums or Jékabpils. It is like opening an atlas of the world and pointing to any two towns in the same region. Still, she perseveres:
This story begins on a bus. The bus rolls down dirt roads, and when it stops, she will disembark and scoop up soil and kiss the land of her ancestors and tell the world how good it is to be home at last.
The reader is not there with her; she can say whatever she likes. But the ground, as she can see, is salted with spit and dotted with dog-shit, and it is not even soil. It’s just dust.
‘How do you feel?’ her Guangdong friend Peina asks her. Peina knows she is here to write about her heritage. ‘You must have some special feelings about returning to your ancestral hometown. I can tell by your face.’
In reality, she is only squinting because some dust has blown in her eye.
All the windows of the bus are open, in this bus that is not really a bus. It is more like a minivan, crammed with far too many people. She doesn’t feel anything except squashed. People are packed in like last-minute socks in a heaving suitcase. The lady conductor reminds her of her mother or perhaps one of her aunties. ‘Ay, ay, your stop has arrived!’ she says with a smile that is missing two teeth, and extends an arm to pull her out of the bus and eject her onto the street.
There are half-burnt buildings and dogs running about. Children in their school uniforms – polyester tracksuits of primary colours – are climbing on top of what look to be rubbish mounds. She watches this, surprisingly, without any smear of sadness. She has seen more miserable children howling in toy stores in Australia. These kids in Jieyang probably know the limits of their unfulfilled wants. They can see the corners of their universe, even though they have probably known for a while that the earth is not a flat square block and that heaven is not a circle floating above them.
She sees families pulling children along in wheelbarrows, to the lake. She sees lives of wood and splintery faded plastic, held together by string and nails and glue, like the toys being sold in the small stores in the streets. She sees old ladies telling their grandkids to stop pointing at the foreigners. She realises she can understand almost every word they are saying, but nothing is familiar.
‘Who are they?’ some kids down the street ask each other when they spot her, Peina and her British friend Katie walking through their narrow laneways.
‘Foreign ghosts!’
She smiles. ‘How are you?’ she asks them in Teochew.
They run shrieking with laughter down a narrow alleyway, their schoolbags knocking against their polar-fleeced legs.
Now comes the part where she is supposed to write that she feels home at last, and that seeing these beautiful children in her ancestral hometown, who look so much like her, makes something pop in the centre of her chest.
But she can’t lie.
It doesn’t happen.
Her words can’t bridge the distance between what she sees and what she understands, and the further she travels, the less she feels close to anything. In fact, the more she sees of modern Chaozhou, the more the world her grandmother had told her about recedes. Details are replaced by their newer modern versions: Fergie and Eminem blare from shopfront speakers as she wanders through the streets late at night, looking for the promised river, the radiant river of Jieyang, which is meant to be a short walk away. Yet all she seems to find are stores and more stores: merchants selling fruit in bags and on sticks. Vendors selling bras shaped like soft soup bowls, and people peddling trays of pirated DVDs.
What would life have been like if both sets of her grandparents had never left China, never had their babies in Cambodia? If it were not for the stab of poverty and the blunt force of war, she would probably have been born in this town, pulling along two small cousins in a narrow barrow. She would at least know the limits of her world.