Scattered Sand by Hsiao-Hung Pai

Author:Hsiao-Hung Pai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-07-10T04:00:00+00:00

My mother seemed a little apprehensive about our next visit, to Red River village, where Grandmother came from. Grandmother’s marriage to Grandfather had been arranged through a matchmaker, the normal practice in those days. There had never been ‘romance’ between them; in fact, that idea was alien to them. When asked by his children whether he thought Grandmother was pretty in her youth, Grandfather always replied, ‘She’s all right!’ Grandma was a traditional woman who always seemed to be in the background of her husband’s dramatic tales. She never talked much, but she was very skilled at household tasks: cooking, confectionery, and weaving – she had made all of her children’s clothes, from winter jackets, gloves and scarves to summer wear. She’d been good at these things since she was a teenager.

My mother’s cousin and Grandmother’s younger brother were still living in Red River village. There had been little contact between them and the relations in Taipei, but I had heard that they were the poorest of the family in Shandong.

The family in Taipei had set up a joint fund for the relatives in China, and my mother had prepared a gift of 5,000 yuan (£423.7), on their behalf for her cousin in Red River village. ‘This will keep him going for a year,’ she told me. She had no idea what he did for a living. Both my grandparents had visited Red River village in the late 1990s, not many years before they passed away and they must have known something about his life, but they had not disclosed it.

Mr Lin offered us a lift to the village, only five miles from Rizhao’s town centre. We drove through thick bamboo forest with deserted farmhouses scattered between. Suddenly Mr Lin stopped the car. We had come to a broken bridge along the shallow river that separated us from Red River. I could still see the cracks that showed where the bridge had broken in two.

‘What a nuisance!’ Mr Lin clearly hadn’t expected this, but he hadn’t been this way for years. ‘This must be the result of the flood a few years ago. They [the local authorities] didn’t even bother to repair it.’

We were forced to change our route. Mr Lin drove for quite a while through some more wild bamboo on a bumpy country lane. Finally a few huts came into view and we knew we’d come to the edge of the village. First we passed pile after pile of bricks, lining the muddy road, waiting to be laid. Then many tiny, single-storey brick houses appeared. There were dozens of piles of peanuts on the ground, and a few middle-aged women were kneeling to sort them. Mr Lin said the peanuts had just been harvested – they were the main crop of the village, which had a population of just a few thousand. As we got closer to the village centre, which consisted of one major lane, we saw more and more heaps of peanuts, blocking both sides of the road.

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