FAMILY STORIES [7 a 14]

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FAMILY STORIES

That’s the story of how I was born.

Or at least that’s the one my dad told me all my life, anyway.

But inside every story hides another one, and over the years, I found out a little more about our secret history—about what my parents left behind in China when they came to Hong Kong, and the real reason I was too special to give away.

If you were to look at pictures of my father as a young man, your first impression would be that is a man of great strength and enormous pride. And of course, you’d be right. Dad was born in China’s Shandong province, the land of the famous North Clan and the birthplace of many legendary warriors and martial artist. His family was a very respected one, and even as a small child, he was expected to go on to great things.

Now, back then, shanghai was the style capital of Asia. All of the finest things and people in China could be found in this one city, where art, fashion, philosophy, and society reached their height of sophistication. The Chans brought their promising son there at the age of three, grooming him to become one of society’s leaders. When he came into adulthood, he was married to the daughter of another respectable family.

I don’t know if was happy then, but I have to assume he was. My father and his wife lived together, with the approval of their clans. They shared a roof and a household. And they had children.

I found this out just a few years ago. I knew my father always sent money back home to relatives in China—sometimes he’d say it was for his brother, other times, his sister. I’d never met any other member of his family, so I didn’t have any reason to ask him any further questions. And really, I don’t have that much curiosity in my personality.

But then something happened that made me curious in spite of myself. The mail had just arrived, and I was going through it. Nothing interesting: bills, invitations to events… And an unsigned letter from the mainland, addressed to my dad. He wasn’t at home, and suddenly, I realized that I wanted to know more about this mystery—all those unasked, unanswered questions about my family. So I opened the envelope.

“Dearest father…” Dearest father!? I knew I hadn’t sent the letter. I looked at the envelope again; it was sent to my house, in my dad’s name.

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And inside the envelope, something else. A photograph of three old men. “We miss you…” continued the letter.

My brothers. My dad’s sons. And I’d never seen them before in my life. When my father came home, I waved the letter in this face. “What’s this?” I shouted. “Who are these guys?”

His face went stiff. Like stone. “You don’t need to know, Jackie,” he said quietly. “You don’t need to know.” And he took the letter and photograph away.

We never talked about it again.

That’s how I found out about my half-brothers.

The rest of his story isn’t very clear. I know that it involved the Japanese. When the armies invaded China, they turned the nation upside down. Chinese were fighting Chinese, and Shanghai—the city they called the Jewel of the East—became a place of fear. My father’s family had to abandon everything it owned. And even more: my father was forced to leave behind him his sons and his wife. I don’t think she survived the war.

At this time, my mother was also in Shanghai. She was from a very poor background, so she had none of the advantages of my father’s upbringing. Like my father, she was married. And, like my father, in the turmoil of the war, she had to leave her husband and family behind.

She escaped the terror by hiding from Japanese troops, scavenging food, and making a dangerous journey on foot to the coast. It was in Shandong—my ancestral home—that she met my dad. Despite the difference in their backgrounds, the war had turned them into equals: two refugees, still mourning the loss of their loved ones. Somehow, Dad managed to bring her with him on the boat that smuggled him out of the mainland. They got married soon after safely reaching Hong Kong. And not long after that, I was on my way.

All through my childhood, they always told me that I was an only child, their special son. This is part of the reason why I was so shocked to find out about my brothers. But that shock was just the beginning.

My mother is very old now, and even though my wife has always helped to take care of her, some years ago it became clear that she needed someone to be with her all the time, to live with her in my parents’ house in Australia.

One day, when I went visit them, the person who answered the door was a strange older woman. She didn’t introduce herself as she brought me in to see my mother, but somehow, she seemed familiar. “Hey, Mom, who’s the new housekeeper?” I asked. My mother looked at me in silence for a few moments. “She isn’t a housekeeper,” she said finally. “Son, meet your sister.”

Even today, I don’t know everything. I don’t think I want to know. My mother told my manager Willie the whole story once, and he came running

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over to tell me that it would make a fantastic movie. I told him that even if it would, I didn’t want to make it. I don’t want to find out that I have more brothers or sisters, or that my father isn’t my real father, or that my mother isn’t my real mother.

Our secret history belongs where it is now: in the past.

Still, I guess you can see why my parents were reluctant give me up. There might have been other children lost in the branches of the family tree, but who knew at the time if they’d survived the war? And besides, I was the only child they shared: the only son of Charles and Lee-lee Chan.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to have known my half brothers and sisters growing up. But being an only child had its advantages, too—most of which had to do with my mother. Without any competition from siblings, I had all of my mom’s attention—winch of course is exactly what I demanded.

As a toddler, I remember watching my mother do the chores that filled her waking hours. A large part of her day was spent in the laundry room, washing, ironing, and folding, and I would crawl around her feet, pulling down sheets, putting soap chips in my mouth, and nearly tripping her as she carried hot water from the running tap to the scrub basin. Eventually, Mom did what she always did when she needed a little bit of peace: she filled a big tub with warm water and put me inside, letting me splash and play. I wasn’t any easier to take care of when evening arrived, either; restless in my lower bunk, I would scream and cry throughout the night. The noise would not only keep up my hardworking parents, it would sometimes filter upstairs to the ambassador’s bedroom, waking his patient—but light-sleeping—wife. I can only imagine my parents’ embarrassment—when the life of their employer came down in her nightgown and robe to the servants’ quarters, asking them (very politely) to quiet their obnoxious child!

When this happened, my mother would pick me up and bring me outside to the mansion’s back garden, cradling me in her arms and gently shooing the mosquitoes away a straw fan. While she held me, she would hum a soft melody without words, until finally I went to sleep.

Every child thinks his mother is the best in the world, but my mom really is the greatest. She had no education, no opportunities in her life; she’s a very traditional Chinese woman who devoted her entire life to her husband and her son. I never remember her going out, and never saw her in makeup or fancy clothing. I don’t even remember her spending money on herself: everything was for the family. Even now, when I can afford to buy her anything, the things she chooses to wear are things she bought forty years ago. I remember one day, When I was in Australia visiting her, all of a sudden she turned to me and said, “Son, can you give me one hundred twenty dollars?”

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It was strange request. “Why such a weird amount?”

“If you give me one hundred twenty dollars,” she said, “I’ll turn it into one thousand.”

That made me blink. “How?” I asked. My mother is a wonderful woman, but she’s no magician—or financial wizard.

She smiled. “I’ll show you”.

I followed her as she left living room and walked down the corridor to her bedroom. “Reach up and get that bag, Jackie,” she said. I stood on my toes and grunted as I pulled down the suitcase. It was almost brand-new, one of the ones I’d bought her; she never used them when she traveled, preferring the old, battered bags she’d had since my parents lived in Hong Kong. Inside the suitcase were clothes she no longer wore, but couldn’t bear to throw away. Lifting out and setting aside some old sweaters, she pulled out a huge bundle of wrinkled, faded bills. I looked at it in shock. Not a single one of the bills was in a denomination greater than twenty dollars. There were hundreds of ones and fives and tens. And it all added up to $880.

This was the money she’d saved from over twenty years of keeping house: tips from ambassadors and presidents and members of parliament, all of the people she’d cleaned up for and straightened up after.

Mom, give me the money, and I’ll give you ten thousand dollars in Australian cash.”

So we traded. And you know what? We had dinner with friends that night, and we spent her whole stack. Twenty years of my mother’s life, and boom—we ate it in one meal.

 I said before that there are advantages to being an only child. Well, there are also disadvantages—most of which had to do with my father. How much easier would my childhood have been, if only I’d had siblings to share the burden of my father’s expectations?

You see, Dad, like his Shandong ancestors was a warrior at heart—a man of great courage and determination. He was proud that he had managed to overcome everything fate had thrown his way, all the tragedy and suffering and years of backbreaking labor. “The Japanese army conquered China,” he would often boast, “but they could never conquer the Chinese! That is why our civilization has survived for thousands of years. To a Chinese man, suffering is like rice: it only makes us stronger.”

From this followed a scary kind of logic: pain gives you discipline. Discipline is at the root of manhood. And so, to be a real man, one must suffer as much as possible.

Because bringing me into the world was so expensive, Dad was especially adamant about raising me up as a properly disciplined man, even if he had to knock me sideways to do it. Each morning, he’d rise when dawn was just a hair-thin line of light on the horizon, leaving my mother

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still dozing. Leaping to the ground from his bunk as softly as possible, he’d shake me roughly awake. “ Ah Pao, it’s morning. Up, up, up.”

If I complained too much or rolled away, he’d just grab me by the waist and pull me out of bed in a tangle of sheets and arms. When I was lucky, I’d get my feet under me before the rest of me hit the floor. When I wasn’t, well, at least I learned how to take a fall. A good lesson for the future. 

Once we were both more or less awake, we went to be laundry area and splashed water on our faces and chests. The water always freezing cold, and in the chill of the early morning it raised goose bumps on my skin. But the chill wouldn’t last long. Like any survivor, my father was a jack-of-all-trades, an accomplished amateur carpenter and handyman. Out of stray pieces of wood and recycled rubbish—rice sacks, rope, and large cans that still smelled faintly of cooking oil—he’d made a makeshift gym, and we would greet sunrise with a workout that left me breathless and soaked with perspiration. We would run, lift bags filled with sand, do military-style push-ups—and spend hours practicing martial arts. Though I was just four or five years old, already my father was teaching me the basics of Northern-style kung fu.

It may seem strange that such a young child would be learning how to fight. You have to remember, though, that to us Chinese, kung fu isn’t just a means of self-defense. In some ways, the history of kung fu is the history of China.

Legend says that kung fu was invented by Bodhidharma, the monk who traveled from India to China to spread Buddha’s teachings. When he arrived at the great temple of Shaolin, Bodhidharma was turned away by the skeptical Shaolin brothers. He then took up residence in a small cave near the temple, and meditated there for nearly a decade. Over the years, the Shaolin monks watched in awe as Bodhidharma stared intently, without sleeping or even blinking, at the wall of his cave. After nine years, the power of the stare bore a hole through the e wall into the daylight.

This display of discipline led the monks to embrace Bodhidharma as a great teacher. “How can we learn how to be like?” they asked. And so Bodhidharma taught them about the greater wisdom of Buddhism and the power of meditation, but found that, no matter how the monks tried, they were not strong enough to resist sleep and other temptations. As a result, he wrote a manual called The Classic of Muscle Change, blueprinting a series of exercises to toughen the body and mind.

Over time, the Shaolin monks adapted these exercises into Chinese kung fu.

Kung fu translates loosely into English as “skill,” but by the time of the Tang dynasty, which they call China’s heroic age, kung fu had diverged

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into many different skills: the Southern styles, which emphasize strong defensive postures and powerful fist techniques, and the Northern, which are flowing, acrobatic, and focused on dynamic, spinning kicks. When the Tang emperor Wang Shih-ch’ung faced a revolt in the countryside, it was warrior monks from the Shaolin Temple who defeated the rebels—spreading the legend of their boxing abilities, and turning kung fu into something every gentleman of quality should know.

Although skills with the sword, the spear, and the staff were always an important part of Chinese martial arts, it was the unarmed techniques that were most admired. A master of Chinese boxing was deadly even when alone and armed only with his iron fists and lightning legs. When the Manchu invaders conquered China in the seventeenth century, study of martial arts was outlawed. But the spirit of kung fu could not die. Rebels loyal to the true emperor gathered in underground societies called “Triads,” developing the art of kung fu in secret. 

By the turn of the century, the Triads had turned into an extensive network of revolutions committed to driving out the Manchus and their Western allies, and restoring Chinese rule. The arrival of the year 1900 triggered the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising by Triads convinced that their mysterious skills would protect them from the bullets of the hated foreigners.

Unfortunately, they were wrong.

Thousands of Triad members were killed, and the rest were driven into hiding in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, and even in the West.

In China, kung fu was suppressed for generations, its masters dead or in exile, while the disgraced and broken Triads degenerated into brutal criminal gangs. But the crackdown on kung fu in China only led to its spread throughout the world. Now, the techniques of kung fu are practiced everywhere by those who realize that it builds the character traits that lead to greatness: strength, patience, courage, and subtlety.

My father believe this more than anyone. To him, learning kung fu was the same as learning how to be a man.

And frankly, I was a big disappointment. Lazy and impatient by nature, at first I practiced under his watchful eye only out of the fear that if I didn’t, he’d demonstrate his techniques on me, his useless son. Worse yet, when I finally realized that his training was making me strong, tough, and a fearsome opponent for any kid stupid enough to get in my way, I bought my dad’s worst nightmare to life: I went from being a brat, to being a brawler.

I found out quickly that fighting was gun—when you won, anyway—and it soon became one of my favorite hobbies, next to eating. (Well, nothing really compared to eating. Even now, I guess I’d have to say that nothing comes close to the pleasure of a good, hearty meal.)

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But, in my own defense, I never got fights without good reason. Or at least a reason that seemed good at the time. I mentioned that the ambassador’s family was always very nice to us, but you couldn’t say the same for some of our neighbors. We were poor Chinese, living as servants in the home of a rich and important Westerner. The other Western kids thought it a shame that the ambassador’s wife encouraged her children to play with me. These bullies made it their hobby to pick on me, which was okay, and on my friend…which was not.

Don’t mess with my friends. Ever. That’s a lesson I’m always willing to teach with my fists. My closet companion in the world at the time was the ambassador’s youngest daughter, a beautiful little girl who called me her boyfriend. I accepted the role with pride, and anyone who dared to make her cry would soon find himself on the ground, with me and all my chubby weight on top.

Unfortunately, my dad didn’t care about my chivalrous efforts to defend my young friend’s honor. The first time he found me seated on the screaming body of one of the neighboring boys, bruised but crowing victory, he grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and pulled me into the house.

“Dad, I won!” I shouted, causing my mother to peek her head out of the laundry room in alarm. “Daaaaaad, ow!”

I was more scared of my father when he was silent than when he was shouting. When he yelled at me, I knew I’d get a spanking at the very worst. Pain never bothered me much. After all, it went away eventually, and at least after a spanking I’d be free to do whatever I wanted. But when my dad was quiet, I had no idea what he would do next.

Except that I wouldn’t enjoy it.

My mother watched as my father pulled me down the corridor, past our room, where spanking usually took place, and into the alcove where trash was stored.

“What’s wrong, Dad? I won!” I said, my voice trembling. His eyes flashed, and I flinched away from him.

“I did not teach you kung fu so you could beat up your friends,” he said, ice dripping from his words. “I am teaching you how to fight so that you will never have to fight at all.”

“Well, he wasn’t my friend,” I countered.

My dad turned bright red. Without another word, he pushed me into the alcove, which was full and stinking with the day’s garbage. I stumbled to my knees, and heard the door being slammed and locked behind me. In the corridor, my mother said something to my father, who barked back a response, before both voices disappeared into the distance.

I looked around at my surroundings. The alcove was tiny and crowded. I could reach out with both of my arms and touch both walls, or

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at least I could have if walls hadn’t been lined with bins and bags of trash. There was no roof to the alcove, allowing the dimming light of the sun to trickle into the space. I suspected that I would be there long after the moon took over. Gingerly sitting down on the floor and resting my back against the locked door, I made myself as comfortable as possible, and tried to take a nap.

I didn’t care what my dad said. When I jumped on that bully, my little friend had looked at me like I was a hero. If a hero’s place was out with the trash, well, I’d take it as an honor. Too bad I was going to miss dinner.

A faint tapping roused me from my dozing. I realized that my stomach was rumbling with hunger—even as boy, my body always demanded food on a regular and sizable basis.

“Pao-pao?” said my mother in a whisper from behind the door. “Look up.”

The doorway to the alcove had a narrow space above for ventilation. My mom is a small woman, but by reaching up with both arms and standing on her tiptoes she could just place her fingertips into the crack. As I raised my head, a crisp white paper package fell from the ventilation space into my lap, pushed through by my loving mother’s hands. Inside the wrapping was a sandwich, made of warm, soft bread and roast meat.

Without even thanking my mom, I began gobbling the food, only half listening to the padding sound of my mother’s feet walking back down the corridor to our family’s bedroom.

As I said, my mom is the best mom in the whole wide world.

The next morning, I was rudely awakened by the opening of the door against which I was leaning. I fell backward into the corridor, blinking up at the expressionless face of my father.

“ Ah Pao, it’s morning.” Time to get up,” he said, and instructed me to help him move the heavy bins of trash out for collection. By the time that was done, dawn had arrived, and it was time to greet the sun with our morning workout.