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…