At first opium had been actually smoked like tobacco . . . the smoke was about 0.2 percent morphine, quite mild. But in the late eighteenth century smokers began to put a little globule or bolus of pure opium extract in a pipe over a flame and inhale the heated water-and-opium vapor, which was about 9 or 10 percent morphine, a powerful narcotic . . . The Anglo-American shippers brought opium legally by their own laws to the China Coast, whence Chinese smugglers took it illegally by Chinese law into the country.
ONE
Father Reclaimed
AH DANG: CHINA, 1908–1921
“Ah Doy, Boy, you have been chosen,” his father said, roughly pushing the six-year-old out the door of the hovel.
The young boy struggled to understand what he had heard. His father had hardly ever spoken directly to him before. Why had he been singled out? What did his father mean by “chosen,” and for what? While he wanted to know the answers, it was not his place to ask. He didn’t say anything, only hung his head and listened. The rest of the family—his mother, his older brothers and sisters—were listening too. The hut they all lived in was too small to keep secrets. The wattle walls had so many chunks broken out of them that sounds were heard as if through a honeycomb.
“You are lucky,” his father said. “Your new family will take good care of you, and you will have rice to eat every day.”
At that, the child looked up briefly at his father. Daily meals were an unheard-of luxury. Just thinking about the possibility made his distended but empty stomach grumble loudly and his mouth water. What did his father mean about a new family? Seeking clarification, he stole another glance upward, but the man was no longer paying him any attention. Instead, he was staring at a small red envelope clutched tightly in his trembling hands and bowing obsequiously to a well-dressed stranger.
He had been sold. He had known other children in their neighbourhood who had suddenly left home, never to be seen again, and his siblings told him they had been sold. Suddenly understanding his fate, the boy felt discarded. His mouth immediately turned dry when just a second ago he had been almost drooling. His heart started to pound, making it hard to breathe, his ears rang, and his face and scalp were hot and had turned red. He felt ashamed, not knowing what he had unwittingly done to deserve this punishment, and he was suddenly afraid—of what, he did not know. He had no name for the fear; he just felt his skin go clammy and cold.
He didn’t hear his new father being introduced to him. Neither was he aware of his own father’s last instructions to obey and follow in the man’s footsteps. Blindly responding to a gentle push on his bony back by the stranger’s hand, he started to walk, dragging his bare feet forward. He left the village forever. He didn’t notice until the end of the trip that he had ridden in a rickshaw for the first time in his short life. When he became aware of his new surroundings, he found that everything had changed.
Until then, the boy had been the youngest child of the Liang family, with many brothers and sisters. His parents, landless peasant farmers, had long depended more on their children’s wiles than their own labours to bring food into the house. Floods and pestilence had ravaged the country, and the tiny plot of land the family leased to raise food had not been spared. The soil was as barren and dry as a piece of chewed-up sugar cane. The children lived through cunning—begging, scrounging, and even stealing anything edible. They scraped the hillocks and fields clean of twigs and grasses for chai, kindling, and sold the small bundles on market days for rare copper coins, which they turned over to their father. What little money their father could hoard, he wasted mostly on gambling, praying to the gods for luck. It seemed the gods were too busy dispensing luck elsewhere.
Their father had another escape; he always kept enough coins for a few plugs of opium. Although the Imperial government had banned the use and sale of opium in 1796, China had been forced to allow the British to trade in the drug after the country was defeated in the Opium Wars of 1842 and 1860. In 1908, the year the youngest Liang boy was sold, it was still readily available. For many peasants, opium was the only relief they had from the torturously slow deaths they knew as their lives.
For the boy’s father, smoking the sweet pipe into a dream-filled sleep was a vain attempt to forget his bitter failures. There were too many mouths to feed and not enough of anything, and the pressures of hunger, poverty, and hopelessness were too much to bear unaided. His solution was to offer his youngest son for sale to a man of means.
Thus, the boy became the only son of two strangers of the Wong clan. The relatively prosperous couple had sought a boy to bring home and raise as their own, a replacement for their own dead infant son.
In Confucian China, a male child carried the hopes and dreams of a family. More importantly, a son projected the historical significance of the family into the future and ensured that ancestors would be remembered and cared for. Family shrines in the home and at gravesites needed regular tending. Daily offerings were made at the shrine, and in most households, these would be paper offerings, respectful sentiments written on red streamers. Incense would be lit, lifting the family’s prayers on fragrant spirals to heaven. Richer families added presents of small cups filled with wine, bowls of fruit, and platters of cooked meats.
Each spring, during the national festival called Qing Ming, meaning “Clear and Bright,” families visited their ancestral gravesites, identified by colourful markers, and the men of the family would sweep and tidy the small mounds where their ancestors’ bones were buried. They led the family in paying their respects with kowtows, low bows, arranged food offerings, and reminisced about the deceased. All those present shared the picnic fare with the dead.
Families without children but with financial means could buy or “adopt” a son to carry on the family line and traditions. Girls were also adopted. In less wealthy families, this was an inexpensive way to groom a future daughter-in-law, but most often, the girls became, at best, household servants.
Until the day the boy was sold, he had answered to the listless, absent-minded call of Ah Doy, Boy. All the boys in his family were addressed similarly, just as all the girls were called Ah Nui, Girl. It was as if his parents had never bothered to name their children or, from hopeless weariness, could no longer recall their identities. At his new home, he was told his ancestral or family name would be Wong and his given names Guey Dang, which he later learned meant “Great Praise.” His adoptive parents called him Ah Dang.
Before the move, the boy had lived in the village of Nam Hange in the county of Yin Pange, in the southern province of Guangdong. His home had been built of woven bamboo stalks, plugged irregularly with daubs of dried cow dung. A lotus leaf would have provided better shelter from the elements, but it had been the place where he had slept among his siblings, crammed together like pups in a litter.
Ah Dang had no recollection of the trip to his new house, still in Guangdong Province, but in a village seemingly far away from his former home. His new village was called Wong Nai Woo, in the county of Hoyping. The couple who adopted him owned a large house of yellow clay with thick walls. It was so well built that, though it was set on fire by roving bandits not long after Ah Dang had arrived, only the wooden roof beams burned and the house could be rebuilt. However, his mother thought their house had already been targeted, and while the family had been physically unharmed, it would surely tempt the gods to remain in the village. Feeling vulnerable, they abandoned the house and left Wong Nai Woo.
Auspiciously, they were invited to build a house in a newly established hamlet called Longe Gonge Lay by another Wong family, consisting of several brothers and their families. One of the elders, Ah Ngay Gonge, Second Elder Uncle, knew Ah Dang’s father. This elder would later play a crucial role in Ah Dang’s own life. In Longe Gonge Lay, Ah Dang’s family lived for years in a small, one-room house hastily built by his father.
The boy had always known hunger; a dizzying, gut-cramping, growling hunger, and he was emaciated. The only thlonge, any accompaniment for rice, he had ever known was a watery, salty sauce to help relieve the boring, bland taste of coarse brown rice.
Upon his arrival at his new home, the woman who told him to call her Ah Ma, Mother, gave him a whole bowl of faan, cooked rice, for himself. Even more incredibly, it was topped with small, tender pieces of meat. He had seen and smelled braised meats for sale at the market, and had once managed to taste a scrap, carelessly discarded by the meat seller. Now, the tantalizing aroma made him salivate. He had never had so much to eat before, and did not stop shovelling the meal down his throat until he saw the bottom of the bowl. Almost immediately afterwards, he was sick with cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea. His new mother cleaned him up. Later, she gave him smaller portions, gradually allowing him to build up tolerance and stamina, and she cooked special soups to nourish and heal his damaged young body.
“Ah Doy,” Ah Ma said, her voice giving an affectionate tone to the term, “slowly, slowly, eat.” Being resilient, he soon ate as much as the grown-ups and he started to fill out and grow.
His adoptive mother was named Tew May and she had been born of the Lee family. She was a small, wiry woman. Her hands, unusually large for her size, had thick, strong, blunt fingers, used to doing manual labour in and outside of the house. She worked tirelessly in the fields. She had a long, narrow face, with dark, deep-set, hard-looking eyes, and creases, like crevices on the face of a stone statue, bracketed her mouth. Together, her features looked as though they had been dug in and dragged down by a hard and unfulfilling life.
Ah Tew May had longed for a child, but her husband worked and lived in Canada for extended periods, and his homecomings were rare and unpredictable in time and duration. After a number of miscarriages, she had finally borne a son; his recent death had added a crushing blow. Ah Dang was to be the dead child’s replacement and would be known as “Second Son.”
At his former home, the boy had worn faded and ill-patched hand-me-downs from his brothers. His feet had never known shoes. The kind-faced man who had brought him to this place, who told the boy to call him Ah Yea, Father, gave him a pair of short pants, a shirt, and a pair of straw sandals, none of which had ever been worn by anyone else. The stiff cotton of the shirt scratched his neck and armpits; the sandals chafed his flat feet and gave him blisters.
“Don’t worry,” Ah Yea said. “The sandals will eventually break in with wearing.”
It turned out they never did, as Ah Dang hardly ever wore them before his feet grew out of them. He preferred to walk in his bare feet, which were leathery and calloused; he was never comfortable in shoes of any kind.
He never got used to his new mother either. Their relationship was complicated and Ah Dang had a mind of his own from the start. Later, it would be said of him, “Since childhood, he has had no training,” meaning either that no one had taught him or he was too stubborn to listen and learn.
It took some time for him to forget his other family, but eventually even random thoughts of playing with his siblings no longer entered his mind. He continued to be lonely, but not for them. When Ah Dang was in his teens, Ah Tew May brought home a little girl, who was called Ah Moydoy. He never thought of her as his sister, only as his adoptive mother’s daughter.
Ah Dang reasoned that if his birth family could abandon him, he must become self-sufficient and contained. Yearning for the familiar company of his brothers and sisters had not filled the gap in his life or erased the pain in his heart. He apparently no longer had to prove his worth by being obedient or contributing to the new family. If these people kept feeding and clothing him, despite what he did or said, it was their choice. If they sold him to someone else, it was their choice. If they brought in other children, it was also their choice. He could not let himself feel love, only to risk being discarded again. So he tested them by disobeying the woman who insisted he call her Ah Ma and spurning any overt signs of affection from her.
Ah Tew May reacted to his wilfulness quickly and with raw anger. She had a fiery disposition and a sharp tongue; she became a stern disciplinarian. If kind words and caring did not make Ah Dang an obedient son, she would beat him into submitting to her will. She immediately transferred her tender care and affection to Ah Moydoy.
One incident remained clearly etched in Ah Dang’s mind, and whenever he told his children, in his pidgin English, he would laugh and shake his head. His mother was chasing him, wielding her sharp cleaver above her head in one large hand and shouting angrily at him. “She so mat at me, she chase me all deway to pon, she want cut off my het! She stap only when I jum in wada!”
Ah Dang had a very different relationship with his father, Wong Gay Sieng. A handsome man, he had a calm face, with a high, smooth forehead, intelligent eyes, and a full, sensuous mouth. Although unsmiling in his photographs, he managed to convey a sense of kindness and openness, and Ah Dang responded to his quiet demeanour and undemanding ways.
Ah Gay Sieng was a Gim San law, a Gold Mountain Man, a man who had gone to America. He spent much of his life in Canada, which was also called Gim San. Although the Canadian Gold Rush was long over when he arrived, the name stuck, and dreams of walking on streets paved with gold bricks lingered in the minds of hopeful immigrants. It is unclear when Ah Gay Sieng first went to Canada or how many times he was able to return to China to visit his wife, but he had initially been sponsored by his brother-in-law. No one now knows about the work he did while he was in the new country.
Most Chinese immigrants at that time were peasant farmers or unskilled labourers, working at physically demanding jobs. Asking only the lowest wages, they did laundry, washed dishes, cooked at logging camps, and cleaned and canned fish. Some added to their income by growing vegetables and selling their produce door to door.
A very few were businessmen, diplomats, or students. Ah Gay Sieng seems to have had business acumen, as his photographs invariably show him in Western business garb—a suit, tie, and leather brogues—rather than labourers’ clothing. A clue to the authenticity of the clothes is that they fit him, making it unlikely he had borrowed or rented them just for posing in pictures.
He also had kinship ties that provided access to financial resources. In China, he could afford to abandon the family house that had been burned by bandits to start over with a large lot in a new hamlet. To ensure family continuity, he was able to buy a son. He did not go into debt to pay the Canadian head tax required of Chinese immigrants.
Ah Dang was respectful with Ah Gay Sieng. Here was a man on whom he could rely: someone who was self-sufficient and successful, who didn’t need opium to forget his failures, who made his own luck. He seemed to epitomize his name, Gay Sieng, which meant “Remembering Constancy.”
While Ah Gay Sieng spent much of Ah Dang’s growing-up years away, working in Canada, the boy did not feel deserted. His father faithfully supported the family, sending remittance cheques back regularly, although many other Gim San law abandoned their families after they left China. He insisted the boy attend school. He wrote letters to his son, telling him stories of the wonders of the distant land as an incentive for him to continue his studies and to prepare him for a life away from the hamlet.
In 1921, when Ah Dang was eighteen years old, he too left for Canada. He finally had the chance to observe his father closely and learn how to be an honourable man, but the time they spent together was cut cruelly short. Just a few years after welcoming his son to Canada, Ah Gay Sieng took his final trip back to China. Only in his fourth decade of life, he had been diagnosed with throat cancer. Back home, sensing he had little time left, he wrote to his son, requesting him to return to China to choose a bride. Sadly, Ah Gay Sieng did not live to see this final wish fulfilled. Ah Dang was now the keeper of the family line.
