That’s what it will take to hold this narrative together.

In the nearly two months I’ve been home — I’ve occasionally tried to start piecing together little bits and pieces of my dad’s story.  Details are scant and he’s going off on tangents like any other verbose middle-aged man typically does.

All my life, I’ve had the basics of the story down.  And many of you readers have heard the details from me…  How my dad and other village kids built oars and hid them in the sand, stole a fisherman’s boat, sailed to sea at the perfect time (as a storm rolled in), washed up back on shore, ran then swam for their lives, took shelter in someone’s hut in Portuguese Macaau, etc.

But now that I’m older, and my dad and I should supposedly be able to speak man-to-man, I want more.  The grittier stuff.  The emotional stuff.  But it’s hard for my old man to go there, I think.  Every time a subject goes beyond either his comfort zone or his ability to describe it in English (or at all) — a new tangent sprouts.

When my brother Justin was home for Thanksgiving, I asked dad about the little he knew of his own father.  There was just one meeting, after all.

“How old are me?”

Dad was 13, and seeing his dad appear in his home was not too different from seeing “just another stranger in here.”  A close relationship never formed — and it wouldn’t that day.

Dad said his father was imprisoned in a labor camp — that grandpa had been rounded up in connection with a larger crackdown on village folks who may have been involved in anti-Communist or anti-”Village King” dealings.

Grandpa had been released from the labor camp but still barred from returning home to the village.  But he fell ill (gravely, apparently).  He then petitioned to return home and the authorities granted him permission, though only for a short time.  That was the one time my dad met his dad.  To my dad, his own father is almost like a random, distant uncle who stopped by once.  My dad does not have a dad.  Never has.

The nemesis in many of my dad’s village tales is this so-called “Village King.”  I can’t tell so far whether this is someone who enacted Mao’s grand plan on the local level. (Today, Chinese political structure is built like those stacking dolls with the big outside one the ruling party of  eight, I think, in Beijing.)

In asking about my dad’s dad… the story veered off to a few different things including a mentally ill cousin in Hong Kong, the Village King and his way of dolling out daily slave labor and how my dad admits to being a thief in a gigantic Hong Kong kitchen who avoided firing because he was the best cook there.

See?  It’s going to take some strong adhesive to piece this story together.  Because I need to get back to the part about my grandpa.  Who the hell was this guy?  And why doesn’t my dad know more?  More to come… I hope.

The three-story ascent seemed just about right for a Chinese, village-style new construction. As my brothers and I grasped the bamboo scaffolding (which appeared to be holding the whole joint together during construction) to turn and head up the next flight of stairs, our shoes sounded like sandpaper as they pivoted and pried away bits of the clay steps. It felt more mountainside-trek than new family homestead. While we climbed with a new, quiet appreciation for our Scandinavian, Minnesota-born mom’s accusation of doing something “Chinese-style,” our dad’s cacophonous Cantonese filled the space with a glee that is just so typical of the man. He was happy to be back in Yulong Village on the west side of the Pearl River Delta near Macau that August afternoon in 2007 — happy to show his three sons what had become of the little village he called home up until his 1972 escape from China.

Ben, Justin and Alex Kwan in Yulong Village (SanZhou near Zhuhai, China), August 2007

We emerged from the dim and dirty stairwell atop the roof, one of the tallest in the village (a misnomer, if you will, the place bore zero resemblance to the rice paddy hamlet of our dad’s bedtime stories.) A lush, dense green hillside our dad called his childhood “playground” rose behind us and a distant slate of South China Sea and cloudy sky lay in the distance before us — looking as though it could swallow the equally-gray expanse of similar village buildings.

Tin Tat Kwan explains the dynamics of his old village (which isn't really a village any more), August 2007

And then the tirade began. Our dad unleashed a dissonant duet of Cantonese and English that dabbles in the occasional dirty word as he peered over the edge of the roof, looking down at the alley that snakes up the hillside between addresses that bear names like Kwan, Lo, Wong and Chin. Apparently old Yulong had become a bad neighborhood (or bad nay bo hood as dad relayed with equally stilted gestures.) We all leaned over the bricks to look down to discover how the new building, which sat right where the old, shoddy one did, jutted out into the alley about four or six feet farther than any of the other homes. In such a “bad neighborhood,” as dad told us, one had to fight back against a neighbor’s bad construction and subsequent wayward sewage flow by building out, blocking the filth and perhaps even creating a problem for the next person down the line. Continue Reading…