On Qingming and Family

I am the son of a Malaysian Hakka metallurgist who stepped through the cracks of a bipolar world, from the humble poverty of his kampong home and into the opportunity and upward mobility afforded by the progressive politics and anti-colonial sentiment of 1970s Australasia. In turn, he is the son of a fatherless farmer, who escaped the abject poverty of early 20th Century China and—as a teenager—entered into a binding three-year term as an indentured laborer for the British, tapping rubber at a plantation in North Borneo in exchange for a boat ride to a better life.

I knew this man as “Gong-gong,” or grandfather, in my occasional face-to-face encounters with him as a child. Taking month-long breaks from the school holiday centres my working parents would drop me off at during those dry, hot Australian summers, my brother and I would whinge and whine our way through the grime and humidity of the Third World, my parents winning brief respite by shoving KFC or Cornetto ice creams into our ever-insolent mouths. Being ignorantly assimilationist, “White-culture-is-better” children, we made no effort to learn either Mandarin or the local Hakka dialect, thus leaving our myriad cousins the privilege of attempting to communicate with we high-and-mighty Australians in the 4th language English they learnt in grade school.

I never exchanged a single sentence of conversation with my grandfather, who was illiterate and did not acquire Malay, let alone the tongue of his white colonial masters. He did, however, willfully weather my then five-year-old brother’s gleeful assault by water pistol, much to my parents’ chagrin. And once, when he was already into the 10th decade of his life, I recall him slowly climbing the steep set of stairs in the creaky two-story home that he built with his own hands in order to call me to dinner. My most vivid memories of Gong-Gong involve him rocking in his chair, contentedly watching as his thirteen children and dozens of grandchildren puttered by as he rolled tobacco, crossed legs swaying gently.

These are the bridges I attempt to cross in returning to Borneo and its dilapidated, stagnant ways for Qingming. Utterly crippled by my inability to comprehend nor articulate, I sit at the table as my father and his siblings play catch up, exchanging gossip and stories of the West over Chinese tea and cans of Tiger beer. Hakka, which passes unruffled through my monolingual brain, sounds like a courser, more rural Mandarin (Sentences ring with suffixes like “num,” “phat,” and “sit”) and has a surprisingly potent hypnosis effect. I find myself zoning out, before subsequently passing out (work colleagues, Nikki, may not find this surprising!), before being tapped back to consciousness when it is time to leave. At once frustrating and boredom-inducing, my linguistic incompetence makes the process of reconnecting with my roots—those curious, meta-historical pieces of immigrant make-up which hover in the sub-conscious, always resisting one’s subjugating tendencies—an exercise comprised largely of inferrence and abstraction.

A few days ago, we journeyed to my grandparents’ grave in a humble Chinese cemetery a few miles from the Hiew clan estate. It is built straight into the steep hillside for feng shui, the tombs surrounded dramatically by the voracious, tropical Borneo jungle which often seems to swallow up its inhabitants’ clearings. After greeting the caretakers and praying to the Protector God who oversees the dead, we walked around the hill to my grandparents’ graves. They lie side by side, their tombstones reading “Chinese Public Cemetery: Guanxi, Hiew Nee” and “Bao On, Kwangtung, Nyam Choi Yu” respectively, providing only place of birth and name for identification purposes. Each of us symbolically swept clean both cement graves with the palm leaves my cousin had cut down from our back yard earlier, then laid down food and drink as offerings. Oranges and apples, a couple of whole boiled chickens, peanuts and biscuits, rice wine and soy milk – a glance around the cemetery proffered similar scenes as numerous other Chinese families went about their business. Aunt Moi-Yun handed me a bundle of joss sticks as my father provided guidance: “Bow three times to Gong-Gong and place three sticks in the dirt in front of him. Do the same thing for Po-Po.”

After the burning of incense came the offering of money and possessions for the underworld. Though few of my family members are practicing Buddhists, they made sure to bring a bountiful amount of goods. At first, I was surprised to see they were burning actual shoes and actual shirts. “They sure take this offering business seriously,” I thought, before sheepishly realizing that they were made of cardboard, designed expressly for Qingming. My cousins spread out fake paper money, some of which looked like Taoist scrolls, others like bills and still others like silver coins. Each bill had a numerical amount of 1,000,000,000 UWC (Underworld currency) listed upon it.

“Unfortunately, the exchange rate is very low,” my father joked.

As the wealth of paper and cardboard burned away before the tomb of my grandparents, I looked around me at my fellow Hiews, of whom I spend such little actual time with. They chatted light-heartedly, dressed casually in the rag-tag t-shirts and shorts Western fashion has conferred upon us. One cousin, a gentle eighteen-year-old named Ming Jai, asked me how Christians worship their ancestors. Black ashes rose and fluttered through the air, wafting slowly upwards, perhaps towards my grandparents. I tried to imagine the life experiences that Hiew Nee took to his grave and of all the quiet drama and scrappy tribulations of rural Sabahnese life: arriving with little but the clothing upon his back, being abandoned by his first wife (a half-Jamaican), losing two children during infancy, surviving Japanese occupation and then watching his family prosper until passing, just two years short of a century.

I looked for the parallels in our subsequent generations. Where the British shipped him to North Borneo from China in servitude, my Uncle Fook Choi and the New Zealand government flew my father to the University of Otago, following which a multi-national chemical producer expatriated my own family from Southwestern Australia to Maryland. In all honesty, it’s a hard act to follow. Unless I “go corporate” (a most sinful deed indeed in the eyes of my liberal, activist mates) and settle into a vacation house in Martha’s Vineyard, Miami beach or the Greek isles, our exponential rise in standard of living appears destined to plateau. I think of all the nouveau riche Indians I met in London, of the warm gaze of the Salvadorean woman who served me pupusas in West Los Angeles, of the fiery Palestinian neurologist PhD student I ate with in the student union and of the West Bengali paralegal I recently started dating. There are millions of stories such as my family’s, ones which anti-immigrant legislators and their economic data will never encapsulate, and an enduring supply of long-distance love that remittances only hint at.

As the fires burned, a warm rain began to fall and we hastily farewelled my grandparents before rushing for cover. A feral dog skipped past with a chicken offering in its mouth, welcoming our annual ritual as a free feast in its immoral mind. We drove off to my recently deceased Uncle’s grave at a nearby cemetery, leaving Hiew Nee and his wife to rest peacefully.