“How do you say it?” I asked Dad over and over, making him repeat the name. We were both leaned over the kitchen table, peering at my laptop.
The first character in the name of the village wasn’t a common Chinese word, and as such didn’t have an obviously romanized spelling. For several minutes, I guessed, googling variations that made sense.
J-i-a-n-g
Z-e-n-g
Z-h-e-n-g
When that yielded no results, we decided to just try to find it on the map. He stood over my shoulder while I studied a map of southern China, telling me to move my cursor up or down, zoom in and out.
He read out the names of cities and regions as we scrolled past them. “Zhongshan, Jiangmen—a little bit more,” he said.
“Toisan!” he called out triumphantly. The county he was from. “Okay, almost.”
I zoomed in on an area labelled “Shuibuzhen” on the map. Dozens of little villages appeared on my screen, with two main highways cutting through them.
“Jingweicun! There!” He was excited now, pointing at the screen.
He couldn’t believe his tiny village was on this map. He called out to Mom in the next room. “Frances! Hey Frances! Look, you can see Jingweicun on this!”
I zoomed in farther and farther, as close as I could get, and switched the map to satellite view.
The village was in fact just a few clusters of homes, spread out over large swaths of rural land parcels. He asked me to zoom in on each cluster, but furrowed his brow at each one.
“This could be it—no. Maybe this one—no.”
He was trying to find his old house but couldn’t. He’d been back to Guangdong and Jingweicun many times in recent years. He had seen firsthand much of the change that had happened in his old village—new developments filled with brand-new houses just down the street from the old dirt houses where he’d grown up.
He kept searching, mumbling under his breath, and I took in the image in front of me. It was fuzzy, just a haze of grainy greens and greys. There wasn’t much there other than farmland, a few shacks and dirt roads.
“This is where you lived?” I asked my dad.
He nodded.
“This is where Ye Ye lived?”
He nodded again.
“And this is where his dad lived too?”
“They all lived there,” he said. “As far as I know, all of our ancestors lived in Jingweicun.”
I turned the image over and over in my head. It was just a tiny speck on the map, a few dirt roads, a jumble of ramshackle homes built of mud, all of it surrounded by rice paddies. This was where we were from. So how had we wound up here?
For the first two decades of Ye Ye’s life, Jingweicun was his entire world, Dad told me.
Like most of the kids growing up in the village, Ye Ye was allowed a few years of schooling. But by about age ten, he was expected to work just like everyone else. And like everyone else in the village, and every one of his relatives before him, that work meant farming.
His first job was watching the pigs. Near the house was a rickety hut in which one of the neighbours kept his pigs. It was Ye Ye’s job to care for them. From morning to night, he’d haul water back and forth, with the buckets propped up on his shoulders. At night, he and Bak Bak, his mother, would eat alone in their hut.
Much of the time, Ah Gong, Ye Ye’s father, was gone. “Away” was all Ye Ye knew about where his dad had gone. One neighbour told him Ah Gong was working in Singapore. Another said Indonesia. Yet another said Holland. To Ye Ye, it hardly mattered. Away was away. Every few years, Ah Gong would resurface. He’d stay awhile with Ye Ye and Bak Bak and tell stories of his time abroad working as a carpenter—the buildings he’d built, and the entryways he’d carved out of wood. He’d talk about the friends he’d made and the sights he’d seen.
Once in a while, Ye Ye would hear the words “Gold Mountain.” That’s where Ah Gong had gone. It was what the neighbours told him too: “He’s gone to Gum San.”
Gum San. Gold Mountain. Ye Ye tried to imagine this place, a land paved with gold.
Other villagers had sons, nephews and other relatives who had also gone to Gold Mountain. The men in neighbouring villages had gone to Gold Mountain too. Over the course of decades, tens of thousands of young men had left this tiny part of China for Gold Mountain. These four siyup counties were so poor that the villages could only feed their sons by sending them away. Some villages were so poor they sent away all their young men. Gum San wasn’t just one place. It could be Canada, or the United States, or Australia, or Holland. It just meant “away.”
The few who returned to their villages came back with unimaginable luxuries, like Singer sewing machines, jackets and brand-new clothing. They brought back money to build houses and schools and parks. Those are the ones people called “Gold Mountain men.” The young men in the villages would eye these men with envy. They wanted one day to be Gold Mountain men too.
But how could Ah Gong be a Gold Mountain man, Ye Ye wondered. He would leave for years at a time, each time coming back with just a few coins in his pocket. The other Gold Mountain men sent money back to their families. They sent letters with enough money in them to support their wives and children in Jingweicun. But the envelopes from Ah Gong contained nothing but letters. Each time he returned to Jingweicun, he came back with less than when he’d left.
“Ah-peen,” other relatives would later tell me, in a lowered voice. Opium. That was the reason Ah Gong never had anything to send back. He’d spent all his money on drugs.
So Bak Bak and Ye Ye were on their own. It was up to Ye Ye to support the family. They worked each day on their farms. Most days, they had enough to eat.
One day in 1949, when Ye Ye was twenty-five, Bak Bak went to meet with the village matchmaker. It was time for Ye Ye to marry. The matchmaker suggested a young woman from a neighbouring village. Her parents were farmers too.
At the matchmaker’s house, Ye Ye saw her for the first time. She was eighteen, with straight black hair and a wide face. Ah Ngeen. They shared a pot of tea, sitting awkwardly on each side of a table while the relatives watched. Soon after, they were married. And less than a year later, in 1951, Dad was born.
That’s when the letter arrived.
It was from Ye Ye’s “great aunt.” Whether she was really an aunt, or any kind of blood relation, no one seems to be sure, but she was from Jingweicun so it was all the same anyhow. She had left many years earlier and now owned her own farm in Canada.
She was looking for another worker on her farm, she wrote. Ye Ye could go work for her if he wanted. She was offering him the chance to go to Gold Mountain.
It was around here where Dad’s retelling began to grow fuzzy. There were gaps he was missing. Questions he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer.
“What exactly was the offer?” I asked.
“Why him?”
“Did he understand what he was getting into?”
“Why would he leave then, when his son had only just been born?”
But Dad only shrugged. “It was a long time ago,” he said.
I couldn’t tell if he genuinely didn’t know or if he was being intentionally vague. Either way, it seemed there was much more to the story.
He didn’t tell me what else was in that letter. All he told me was this: Ye Ye’s answer to the great aunt’s letter was yes.
Soon after, he boarded an airplane and left Jingweicun for Canada.
He went alone.