Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now by Jan Wong Read Free Book Online

Canada alone. His younger brother Gordon had died several years earlier of dropsy at age eight. Ma Shee, who couldn’t obtain a visa, stayed behind with John, the youngest, who was twelve. When the Canadian Pacific steamship from Hong Kong to Vancouver docked in Yokohama, a Japanese doctor boarded the ship. “You,” he barked at my father, the only young Chinese male on board. “You’re sick. You get off the ship here.” With Japan and China at war, the order meant certain prison camp, and probable death. The Canadian ship doctor intervened. “He’s not sick, just malnourished. He stays.” My father sailed on.
    After eight years in Taishan, my father had forgotten all his English. In Vancouver, he flubbed a question about his birthdate, but was able to produce his Canadian birth certificate. He found his father still working in a grocery store in Montreal, still unable to support his family. In 1945, Ark Wong died of a heart attack in the hallway of an illegal Chinatown gambling parlor where he was moonlighting as a guard. He had not seen his wife or youngest son in the sixteen years since he had left them in Taishan.
    “My big regret was that my father did not see me graduate,” said my father, who put himself through engineering at McGill. “I was the first person in my village to graduate from university.” In Montreal, my father toyed with the idea of returning to help rebuild China, but changed his mind after the Communists won. Instead, he guessed that Canadians would like fried rice and egg rolls, opened the first Chinese restaurant outside Montreal’s Chinatown and made his first million by the time he was forty.
    My sister, my two brothers and I grew up speaking English and learning French. My tenuous links with the old country consisted of the Taishan chefs my father hired in his restaurants and Chineseclassical dance, where I learned to whip silk ribbons in the air and jingle tea cups while taking mincing “cloud steps.” My mother provided the only other exotic touch; when we misbehaved, she whacked us with chopsticks.
    Our quiet street, Rosedale Avenue, was otherwise entirely Jewish. We lived between the Gersovitches and the Shaare Zedek Synagogue. Impressed with the synagogue school’s rigorous academic standards, my father tried to enroll us there – until the principal politely informed him you had to be Jewish. Instead, my siblings went to elite private schools, my sister to Miss Edgar’s & Miss Cramp’s, my brothers to Lower Canada College. I alone opted for public school. I had no desire, I told my father, to hang out with rich kids.
    While my playmates on Rosedale Avenue learned Hebrew, I suffered through weekly lessons in Cantonese, the dialect of the Pearl River delta. In 1950, two years before I was born, my father brought Ma Shee back to Montreal. We saw her on weekends, but I never learned enough Cantonese to speak to her. All I remember was a silent old woman with gold earrings and gray hair knotted in a bun. Every Christmas, she bought two toy guns for my brothers and two dolls for my sister and me, even when I was too old to play with them. Ma Shee died in 1963, when I was eleven.
    After two weeks in Taishan, I returned to Canton. Bai had decided the deaf-and-dumb approach to revolutionary tourism wasn’t working and had signed us both up with a group of ten American students. They were mostly from Berkeley and, like me, were budding ethnic Chinese Maoists in search of their roots. They also spoke no Mandarin but, unlike me, they had been allocated an interpreter who wasn’t seventy years old.
    We hit all the revolutionary hot spots. In Shaoshan, China’s Graceland, we gazed reverently at Mao’s scarred kitchen table, the tiny vegetable patch he once weeded and the trapdoor to the attic where he conducted subversive meetings. In Dazhai, the Disneyland of Maoist agriculture, we spent three days peering into cooking pots, trampling the maize crop and attending
yi ku si tian
,